Tap & Gown (37 page)

“Dean Ryan?” Becky P asked.

The Strathmore College dean sitting next to Blake shrugged. “Since the moment Miss Whitmore has returned to campus, she has repeatedly approached me about some incident she claims happened last year. However, there are no records in the files of the previous Strathmore dean, she can provide no evidence or witnesses, and from what I know of Blake after working together with him so closely on the Strathmore College Council, I simply cannot give credence to any of these stories.”

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Michelle dropped her head against the back of the chair. “Ugh, what’s the point?”

“That’s pretty appalling,” I said. “A student comes to you for help not once, but several times, and you rebuff her? Is it just you, or are all deans so incompetent?” I turned to Dean De La Roche. “What would you do if I kept coming back to you, over and over, saying that my ex-boyfriend was threatening me?

Would I need to have actual bruises before you took action?”

Dean De La Roche was silent.

I gaped at both of them, then turned to the Dean of Student Affairs. “Good system you’ve got here, Becky.”

“There are countless cases of lovers’ quarrels on this campus,” said Dean De La Roche. “Every semester, we get complaints about someone’s ex stalking them or threatening them or behaving erratically. You Eli students are intense and passionate, and sometimes this spills over from your studies into your personal lives. But yes, we take real threats very seriously.”

“No you don’t,” said Michelle. “You cover your own asses just the same as you claim Rose & Grave is doing. You don’t want the scandal, so you pretend it isn’t happening.”

“Shelly,” Blake said, speaking for the first time. His voice was hoarse, and thick with false innocence. “I don’t know why you don’t just drop it. We broke up. It was over a year ago. I got over it. I don’t know why you can’t do the same.”

“Perhaps,” Michelle said, “it would help if you stopped breaking and entering places like my apartment or society tomb and trying to force me to give you blow jobs.”

Even my mouth dropped open. Becky P looked ready to explode.

Blake just shook his head at her, his eyes wide. “You really are a nutcase.” He turned to Becky P. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. What if—” his expression turned to one of revelation

“—what if they are telling the truth that they wanted to tap Michelle? What if I was some sort of initiation rite for her benefit? Destroy her enemy or something. Do societies do things like that?”

We destroyed enemies, sure. But not with knives. And Blake knew it.

“What if I only thought I was being initiated, and they were planning to hurt me all along?” He threw in a coughing fit for good measure. I wanted to deck him, stitches or no.

But Becky P’s face remained thoughtful. “I think we’ve brought this situation as far as we can with this preliminary meeting,” she said. “I’m going to need to see the documentation of the tap lists, and I’m going to need to speak privately to each of the society members, as well as Mr. Varnham and Miss Whitmore.

I would also like to hear from Mr. Prescott, whenever he can be bothered to answer his phone.”

“George Prescott broke an arm and a collarbone last night,” I said to the dean. “He’s on a lot of pain medication and it’s possible—”

“
I was stabbed in the back last night
,” said Blake. “And I’m here, trying to make sure the truth is heard. All you people try to do is conceal it.”

Also true. Hoisted by our own petards. How about that? Blake and Darren could laugh about this in
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hell.

“Enough,” said Becky P. “This is more than we can resolve today. I am calling a meeting of the Executive Committee for a formal hearing.”

“Dean Pasternak—” Josh began, beginning to look far more frightened than I’d ever seen him.

“This is an unusual case. Final exams are almost upon us, almost every student involved is on the cusp of graduation—”

Oh my God. She couldn’t be considering expelling us. Suspending us? We had to take our finals. We had to graduate! I had to be able to turn in my thesis!

“But pass this along to your cronies, Mr. Silver and Miss Haskel. Until this matter is resolved, every person in Rose & Grave is on probation.”

The fun thing about being on probation is—No, wait. There’s no fun thing. The week passed in agony and anticipation. I completed and turned in a thesis I wasn’t sure would be graded, I attended classes I might not receive credit for, I studied for exams I didn’t know if I’d be able to take, and I booked a flight to England for a colloquium whose invitation might be rescinded any moment.

Oh, and I talked to lawyers. Lots of them. Who knew that so many Diggers went on to pass the bar? All the law-and-order folks were incredibly optimistic. Blake’s story stood not a ghost of a chance; there were too many witnesses that claimed the exact opposite—so what if they were all members of the same secret society? So what if the societies that may have had access to our shared tap lists were part of the same corrupt culture? So what if there wasn’t any evidence at all that Michelle had been subject to a history of abuse at Blake’s hands? The truth would rule the day.

I sure hoped so. My parents already had their flights and their hotel room for Commencement Weekend. How could I call them up and tell them that I might get expelled, weeks before graduation, for hazing someone as part of an initiation ceremony for a secret society they didn’t even know I was in?

The administration had temporarily closed the tomb on High Street, “pending investigation.” Since we couldn’t get inside, we were forced to suspend the rest of the initiation, as no one really wanted to induct
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new members into our order in Clarissa’s apartment. Nikolos suggested we sneak in the back way, through the barrel-vaulted basement room that emptied out into the Eli Sculpture Garden, but we voted against the measure, since being discovered breaking into our tomb after the administration had forbidden it would hardly help our precarious positions.

Naturally, our closed tomb was cause of much speculation on campus, in the media, and most of all, on the Internet (where such things usually popped up). What had happened to the beleaguered society of Rose & Grave
now?
What unspeakable line had we crossed during this year’s initiation? Was there something to all those rumors of sacrificing virgins? Had we killed someone?

There was even a story about the tomb’s closure in the
Eli Daily News
—though we’d all been hoping that Topher could squash anything like that before it went to press.

“On the contrary,” Topher had written in his brand-new phimalarico account, “keeping our name in the news at this juncture only further emphasizes the mystique surrounding our order. Besides, five inches on page 7 is nothing. It would have caused more attention if I’d killed it.”

I had to admit it: My tap had a point. Maybe he wasn’t a complete screwup. Also, he’d been trying so hard to make up for his part in the fiasco.

But the most interesting article in the paper that day was an op-ed on a most unexpected topic.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE PROBLEM IS

ADMINISTRATION’S FIRST STEP

By Kalani Leto-Taube,

Editor-in-Chief

When a student comes to Eli, she and her parents are putting their faith in the university to keep her safe.

Is there a dedicated campus police force? Are there emergency phones dotted about the campus? What is the school’s policy on drugs, weapons, violence, and hazing? What preventative measures have been taken by the university? Are there dedicated hate speech and tolerance workshops as well as rape, suicide, or general crisis hotlines? If the unthinkable happens, can a student turn to the university for help?

It is in this capacity that the administration is failing the students of Eli. While the university celebrates decreased crime and improved campus safety initiatives, representatives at the Eli Women’s Center as well as the GLBT co-op are reporting increasing number of students who are falling through the cracks of these stopgaps. They may be getting advice on the crisis hotlines, but the university itself is turning a blind eye to situations that are occurring in their very buildings.

According to the recent, mandatory annual reports from school special interest groups, there is a growing trend among university administrators to encourage students to take non-official measures to remedy their problems. While occasionally such strategies work to reduce rancor and resolve issues amiably, in other cases, all they do is keep the problem under wraps. After all, if you never file a report about the man beating you up, then the university can retain its plausible deniability when it comes to statistics on campus domestic abuse.

Perhaps the university administrators believe that cooking the books will help avoid a scandal—no, we have no problems with racism, with violence against women, homosexuals, minorities. But what happens when an even bigger scandal comes along and it’s revealed that the university could have stopped it, yet
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chose instead to bury its head in the sand?

Here’s another question, readers of the
Daily
. What were the chances that Kalani spontaneously chose to write about this issue, today of all days?

In the absence of the usual tomb socializing, the new club had opted for a far more pedestrian format of getting-to-know-you: the group lunch. So it was in Commons that Demetria, Clarissa, and I found them, commandeering one of the large tables near the back, where they could chat freely without fear of being overheard.

But when we arrived, they seemed to be discussing only barbarian matters: internships, classes, coming exams. Michelle was calmly explaining to Clarissa’s tap, Meredith Van Zandt, how the pork supply is actually comprised of psychopathic pigs driven crazy by awful farm conditions.

“You’re eating the equivalent of a porcine Norman Bates,” she said. Meredith eyed her BLT warily.

Beside her, Demetria’s tap, Tamar, laughed and took another spoonful of lentil soup.

“Tamar,” Demetria said, and slid in at the end of the row. “How’s things down at the Women’s Center?”

The junior shrugged and bowed her shaved head over her bowl. “The usual.”

“Really?” Demetria asked. “Then what is this nonsense about mandatory annual reports?”

“It’s the complete truth,” she said. “Every year we have to reapply for our student organization fund grant, and as part of the process, we have to explain what we do. Ergo, mandatory annual report.”

“It’s not a grant study, Tamar,” said Demetria. “It’s a questionnaire.”

“In which I specifically stated that we had been receiving reports of students urged by their deans not to press formal charges against other students harassing them or in cases of what I’ll charitably term

‘domestic disputes.’” She returned to her soup.

“And when did you receive these reports?” Demetria asked.

Tamar consulted her watch. “Um … Friday?”

“Initiation Night?” I said.

“Huh.” Tamar pretended surprise. “How odd.”

Michelle giggled. At the other end of the table, Topher watched the exchange and said nothing.