Tap & Gown (7 page)

“It’s British,” he’d responded. “Be satisfied she knows about the Pulitzer.”

So Arielle it was, and if I noticed any decline in the quality of the magazine since her name had started appearing at the top of the masthead, I’d never mentioned it to anyone. And I had put her on my short list for Rose & Grave, if only to make it look a tad less skimpy. After all, Arielle and I were more simpatico than Topher Cox and I would ever be.

Perhaps I had never given her an adequate chance before. She clearly
valued
literature, even if she wasn’t a writer herself. That she worked so hard for the Lit Mag without any outward show of literary leanings was a sign of … something, right? Maybe this would be my opportunity to discover what it was.

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If Rose & Grave could make me friends with Clarissa Cuthbert and James Orcutt, maybe it could do the same with Arielle Hallet and me.

We chatted the whole way up Science Hill, and sat together in the back of the Geology department’s enormous lecture hall (dubbed “the Bat Cave” by Geology majors who clearly spent more time with rocks than people). Afterward, she insisted on grabbing a late lunch with me at Commons, and then I had to run to Nabokov, so we parted ways.

Or so I thought. When class ended, I went to the bathroom. As I trailed out of the engineering department annex room where the seminar was held, well behind my classmates, I caught sight of Arielle trudging back toward the main part of campus, head down, iPod earbuds in place, scuffling a bit as she walked.

At lunch, she’d told me she had an afternoon Art History lecture all the way across campus. So what was she doing outside the engineering building?

Had she been waiting for me?

1*Who does the confessor think she’s kidding? It’s George. Of course he’s doing what she thinks he is.

2*The confessor is sad to report that this generated a good fifteen minutes of discussion, during which Juno postulated that perhaps they’d be more likely to convince a female singer to ditch her slot in the senior class women’s group, which was significantly less prestigious. Then Thorndike wondered—aloud—what it said about heteronormativity and the devaluation of anything classified primarily feminine. And Graverobber said that singing was girly from any perspective. And Soze called for order before all hell broke loose.

Over the next few days, I noticed Arielle a lot. She was in the coffee shop I frequented, on my walks to and from classes, and she always had a seat saved for me in Atmospheric Change. Not that there weren’t plenty of empty ones in the humongous auditorium. I saw more of Arielle that week than I had when we’d worked together in the Lit Mag office.

If she was following me, there was only one reason why. Tap. Like Jamie had warned me, the people on
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my short list would be thinking about the fact that they were. Arielle must have—rightly—assumed she had a shot. Was this sudden friendship with me her attempt to cement the situation? Or remind me that she was out there, just waiting to be tapped? I thought we were the ones who were supposed to suddenly start showing up in
their
lives.

I hoped she understood that I was in Rose & Grave. If she was chasing me around campus for a slot in Quill & Ink, she was bound to be disappointed.

Saturday morning, Arielle sidled up to me in line at the Prescott College Dining Hall. “Hi there, Amy,”

she said brightly, and served herself a scoop of scrambled eggs.

“Hi.” I ladled syrup over my pancakes and lifted my tray, ready to move on to the drinks station and dessert cart. Arielle was not in Prescott herself, she wasn’t in stayed-over-with-a-boy oversized sweatshirt and wet-hair wear, and the chances she was meeting a friend at 8 A.M. were pretty slim.

Sure enough, I’d hardly started my meal when I saw her emerge from the food line, her gaze surveying the dining room before landing on me, visibly brightening, and coming my way.

“Mind if I sit here?” she asked, wedging her tray in between Josh’s and Lydia’s (the lovebirds were currently cuddling by the coffee cart). This would go over great. They were practically joined at the hip.

“Um, I think those two trays are together …” I began, as she sat down. More Arielle? Nice girl and all, but I was beginning to doubt that proximity would make my heart grow any fonder. She was losing points to Topher Cox, of all people! At this point, Kalani Leto-Taube might win purely by default. I didn’t really know anything about her.

Yet. Still on my To Do list, though, if I managed to shake my shadow.

Lydia and Josh returned with their coffee mugs and I did the introductions.

“Nice to meet you,” Josh said, sliding his tray across the table and sitting down next to me.

Arielle ignored him (bad move, Hallet) and started in on what I have discovered is her favorite topic: I So Wish My Senior Year Could Go As Great As Yours Seems to Be Going.

Hilarious, right? Perhaps I should tell her about the harassment, the heartbreak, the kidnapping. Heck, even drop some hints about the incident with the projectile vomiting. That would cure her of the Rose & Grave jones right quick.

“If I were you,” Lydia said at last, unsuccessfully trying to hide her snicker behind her mug, “I’d do whatever it takes to avoid having a Spring Break like Amy’s.”

“Did you go on the Habitat trip?” she gushed at Lydia. “Didn’t you like it?”

“No, I’m not part of that group,” Lydia responded evenly, and took another sip.

Josh rustled his newspaper. “Amy,” he said. “Have you seen Topher Cox’s new op-ed?”

Arielle shot him eye-daggers. “I didn’t care for it,” she said quickly. “That guy can’t string a sentence together, even in defense of his sexist trash. How he ever scammed his way into the managing editor job I’ll never know.”

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So at least she knew who her competition was.

“Maybe it was pesk—er, persistence?” I suggested. Over Arielle’s head, I saw George at the salad bar, and excused myself.

“Hey,” I said, meeting him by the dressings. “See that girl at my table?”

He looked. “Yeah. Cute.” He went back to spooning out blue cheese.

“I’m not setting you up on a date, George! That’s Arielle Hallet.”

“Oh.” He looked again. “Still cute.”

“Well, she’s starting to piss me off. Always popping up whenever I think I’m going to get a moment to myself.”

George grinned. “So it begins. I had to put up with that from the opposite direction all last spring.”

“With Jamie?” I asked, my tone dry.

He made a show of flinching. “Yeah, well … Hey, at least it’s not Topher Cox. That guy’s a douche.”

“Arielle’s been telling us so as well.”

“Really?” George looked up from the bacon bits. “Give her credit for doing her research as to who else you’d be likely to tap. Very Digger-esque of her. What does she say about the Kalani chick? Because if you ask me, that’s her real competition. She’s the hottest girl in the junior—” George clammed up as a group of underclassmen jostled around the other side of the bar.

“We don’t tap on the basis of hotness, George.”

“Speak for yourself,” he joked.

I rolled my eyes. “Are you coming over?”

“With that promise of scintillating table talk? Hmmm …”

Back at the table, Josh’s frustration at Arielle’s ignorance of his own Digger status was beginning to show, and Lydia, amused by the proceedings, was holding up her end of the conversation with comments designed to make the red around his ears grow darker.

This was the inherent design flaw of a secret society. Societies tapped ambitious, brilliant, successful young people with no lack of pride and a more-than-occasional touch of hubris. Their induction was a moment of triumph in their lives—proof that they were, in fact, one of the elect.

Then they weren’t allowed to tell anyone.

So Arielle’s fawning around me and my best friend only aggravated poor Josh, who should have been a prime candidate for fawning himself. Of course, as soon as I returned, all attention was back onto me, rather than Arielle just asking questions
about
me to Lydia. Josh’s mood did not improve.

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I listened with half of my attention, and kept my eyes on George. He was spending an awfully long time constructing that salad, wandering over to the other side of the salad bar and insinuating himself into the crowd there. I watched as he exchanged pleasantries with a brunette in a Prescott College T-shirt and denim skirt. Casual enough. They might be arguing over who got the last spoonful of garlic croutons.

Then he reached over and flicked her pigtail.

She giggled—who wouldn’t, when George Harrison Prescott flicks your pigtail?—and then hip-checked him.

I paused, fork halfway to my mouth. George flirted as a matter of course, but a hip check was a little more intimate than I expected from a salad bar encounter. I looked more closely at the scene:
1)
Body Language: check. Tops of torsos angled away, but groins definitely pointed in each other’s direction. Casual, yet secretly sexy.

2)
Teasing Touches: check. Innocent with an underlying sense of familiarity.

3)
And now he was following her to her table filled with—wait for it—sophomores.

I had discovered the identity of George’s secret rendezvous. Apparently, secrecy was no longer an issue. He was having brunch with her. In his own college. In her own college. In front of all of us.

Had the world gone mad?

“What do you think, Amy?” Arielle was asking me, about heaven-knew-what.

I thought that perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. After all, George and I had had brunch together plenty of times during our affair. But then, we’d known each other for years, even before we were in the same secret society. We’d shared plenty of meals, merely by belonging to the same class and college. He was not friends with this sophomore, and due to her youth, he certainly wasn’t courting her for Rose & Grave.

And not once during the times that George and I had been both sleeping together and having brunch together in front of our friends had I ever once thrown my arm around his shoulder and pressed a kiss to his cheek. As Little Miss Sophomore was doing now.

My mouth went dry. George and I were over, but that didn’t make it the slightest bit easier to watch him canoodle with another woman. Was this even remotely how he’d felt when he’d seen Jamie and me making out on Cavador Key? Did George—could George?—have this same lump in his throat when he’d approached me in Louisiana and told me how Jamie had tried to rescue me?

“I gotta go,” I mumbled, grabbing my tray. I had to … what?

Check out Facebook, for starters. Who was this girl?

“Where?” Arielle asked. “I’ll walk with you.”

“Room … study … thesis …” I faltered with a hand wave as I headed toward the back of the hall to bus my dinnerware.

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