The Ivy: Scandal (4 page)

“Doing
what
wrong?”

Callie, Vanessa, and Matt all froze, their heads swiveling in the direction of the speaker, whose impeccable British accent made him instantly identifiable. OK Zeyna, ebony skinned and taller even than Matt, stood visible through the crack in Callie’s door.

“Nothing!” Callie cried, recovering first and leaping off the bed.

“What is going on in there?” OK called, starting toward her bedroom.

“NOTHING!” Matt and Vanessa chorused, sitting up and slowly relinquishing the bulletin board.

“Why won’t anybody tell me anything anymore?” OK demanded. “First my top mate disappears in the middle of the night”—Callie winced—“and won’t return any of my phone calls, and then you all keep having these secret meetings—”

“It’s, uh, just—a school project,” Callie yelled, reaching down to scoop up the papers jammed under the door. “For…uh…linear multivariable algebraic derivative calculus.”

OK, who had been steadily advancing, stopped in his tracks. “Ah,” he said. “Say no more. I won’t be a bother. I just stopped by to see if—”

“Mimi’s not here!” Vanessa yelled wickedly.

Whirling around, Callie silenced her with a glare. Then she shoved the papers into Vanessa’s arms, miming that Vanessa and
Matt ought to start clearing all the Insider materials off the floor. Not that she didn’t trust OK—he had always been a solid friend; she just couldn’t afford to trust anyone else right now.

Poking her head back out into the common room, Callie forced a smile. “Would you like me to give Mimi a message?”

“Actually, for everyone’s
information
,” OK boomed, “I came here looking for
Dana
—”

“What?” Dana called from her bedroom.

“Dana! You’re here!” OK cried as Dana appeared in her doorway.

“Correct,” she said shortly, eyeing him suspiciously. “Well, then—what is it?”

“Dana…Dana…” he began, furrowing his brow. “I’ve come to ask you…if…say!” His face lit up. “You don’t happen to know why Adam is cross with me?” Adam, the fourth inhabitant of the suite directly across the hall, was Dana’s boyfriend.

Dana’s eyebrows knit together. “Just replace the toothbrush and all will be forgiven.”

“Excellent,” said OK. “Right. Maybe a color less similar this time or—”

“That should be fine.” Turning, Dana looked at Callie. “Shouldn’t you have left by now?”

“Huh?” said Callie. “Left for what?”

“Don’t you have Literary Theory from two to four in the Barker Center on Thursdays?”

Callie’s eyes went wide. “Shit!” she cried, grabbing her phone. It was 3:45. She’d missed almost the entire lecture. Maybe if she ran she could catch Professor Raja right after class.

“Shoot,” Dana corrected.

“You memorized all of our class schedules?” Vanessa yelled through the wall.

“Someone had to do it,” Dana called back.

“Dammit!” Callie cursed. “Sorry,” she added, darting around Matt and Vanessa in search of her book bag.

“Darn it,” Dana urged patiently.

“You couldn’t have said anything earlier?” Callie cried, locating her bag under her bed.

“You seemed pretty busy…with
math
,” Dana retorted primly. Dana felt the same way about lying as Mimi did about going to bed before midnight: it was something that ought to be avoided at all costs.

“Crap,” Callie muttered.

Vanessa paused midway through piling papers atop Callie’s desk, her head cocked toward the wall. “Poop?” she ventured.

Matt guffawed.

Shaking her head, Callie lowered her voice to a whisper. “Would you two mind…?”

“Of course not,” Vanessa reassured her.

Callie gazed at the bulletin board, still resting on her bed. “Shouldn’t I—?”

“No,” said Matt. “
Go
,” he added. “Seriously. We’ve got this.”

Reluctantly Callie backed out of her bedroom, dragging the door shut behind her. Trying not to think about what messes might await her when she returned if Matt and Vanessa got into another argument, Callie hurried across the common area. “Bye!”
she called to Dana, and to OK, who had settled onto the couch to ostensibly
not
wait for Mimi.

“Bye!” they replied.

Out in the hall she found herself face to face with the gold letters
C 23
that marked the entry to the opposite suite. Home to OK, Matt, Adam, and…
him
.

She knew she should be sprinting to make the final few minutes of Literary Theory. After all, the last thing she needed while facing impending expulsion was a sudden dip in GPA. And yet something behind that door seemed to be beckoning her, a clue to the other mystery that kept her up at night; distracting her when she should have been single-mindedly obsessed with discovering the identity of the Insider…

Gregory’s disappearance.

It had been three days, and as far she could gather, no one had heard a word from him. Newspapers and gossip columns, however, could seem to speculate about nothing else apart from the scandal surrounding his father’s declaration of personal bankruptcy.

However, while each new article offered another set of explanations, none could give Callie the answers that she wanted. When would he return to school? Or, at the very least, decide to break the silence?

(After going straight to voice mail for two days, his phone line had been disconnected. His Facebook and Twitter accounts: deactivated. And e-mails bounced back from his Harvard address with an automated reply about his inability to communicate with anyone from school at the moment, particularly via e-mail or cell,
signed by the family’s attorney. Callie knew all of this because she had exhausted every possible avenue of contact. She didn’t even care about their “relationship status”—Friends? It’s Complicated? In a Relationship?—anymore. Okay, fine, she cared a little; but mostly she just wanted to know that he was all right.)

Slowly she poked her head inside C 23. “Hellooo…Anybody home?”

Silence.

Every single door off the common space stood open, and every adjoining area empty, save for the door to Gregory’s bedroom, which was closed.

Callie’s heart thrummed in her chest. Was it possible that he’d returned? That he was inside, unpacking, after a brief trip home to Manhattan? Or had he gone somewhere else entirely? He could be anywhere right now, it occurred to her—though without any working credit cards his options were probably, for the first time in his life, rather limited.

The doorknob felt cool in her hand. Hesitating, she looked over her shoulder. Then she pushed open his bedroom door.

She’d been inside, briefly, only three days ago, struggling to process what OK meant by “gone” while Alessandra Constantine, her face stained with tears, explained that Gregory had left school.

He was supposed to leave
you
, Callie thought, catching sight of a small framed photo of Alessandra on one corner of his desk. The frustratingly gorgeous sophomore who’d transferred to Harvard at the beginning of the semester had been involved with Gregory since New Year’s.

Callie smiled suddenly, noticing two ticket stubs for a Puerto Rican ferry ride also resting on his desk. They were dated for the final day of spring break: when Gregory and Callie had gotten stranded on the tiny coastal island of Vieques, forced to wash dishes at a local restaurant until they’d scraped together just enough for two ferry tickets back to the mainland.

The water had seemed so blue that afternoon, and the air so fresh, that even though it had only happened a few days ago, it was starting to feel like part of a distant dream. Had Callie only imagined the moment when he’d finally confessed his feelings for her? And when their lips had come so close to touching that her entire body had ached with agony when he insisted they wait until after he ended things with Alessandra?

No, she decided, shaking her head. As her mother and father frequently liked to remind her, she had an extremely active imagination, but even she was not creative enough, she decided, to invent the way his eyes had looked that day, the same color as the ocean, or how his dark brown hair had ruffled in the wind, or—

Dammit
.

Spinning around in her reverie, she had spotted a tube of red lipstick on his dresser. It had to belong to Alessandra. Who, as far as everyone else seemed to be concerned, was still Gregory’s girlfriend.

Callie heaved a sigh, turning back slowly even though she had no idea what she was looking for. On Monday his room had borne all the signs of his hurried departure. But someone had shut the dresser drawers and otherwise tidied up since then—probably OK, judging from the way the bed had been made (as
if by someone who’d only ever had a manservant make it for him).

Today the room still appeared inhabited. There were dirty T-shirts in his laundry basket, the perforated metal trash can was full to the brim, and even an unfinished economics assignment was spread across the desk. Sinking into the desk chair, Callie touched the spot where he had scrawled his name onto the upper right-hand corner of the problem set, probably long since overdue. On his nightstand he’d left a nearly empty pack of cigarettes and a crimson-colored sweatband imprinted with a large white H, which he wore during squash games. She breathed in deeply, certain now that she
was
imagining the faintest scents of smoke and sweat and that other indescribable smell that seemed to materialize whenever he was near.

She could barely stand the sight of the bookshelf, its contents overlapping so much with her own, so instead she found her eyes falling back toward the trash can. Some tissues that seemed to have been used to blot red lipstick partially obscured several old copies of the
Crimson
and what looked like might be, at the very bottom of all the debris, a printout of an old Ivy Insider installment.

Recoiling in the chair, Callie closed her eyes.

But there was no escaping it: what was the use in obsessing about Gregory and wondering when—or if—he would return, when she might not even be there after her hearing in May?

She knew she should feel grateful that the Ad Board had granted her almost a month to build her case while they assembled a special Student-Faculty Judicial Board to thoroughly review the “facts,” but part of her just wanted to hurry up and get it over with—

“What,” a low alto said sharply from the doorway, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Alessandra!” Callie cried, springing from Gregory’s chair. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“What are you doing in here?” the older girl demanded. Alessandra Constantine: rumored, and justifiably so, to have turned down a modeling contract back in LA before she transferred from USC.

“Just…um…” Callie faltered. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Picking up a few of my things,” Alessandra explained icily, walking into the room.

Because…you broke up? But wait—wouldn’t that mean—that of all the people he could have contacted first—he chose Alessandra? Callie clamped her lips together, feeling her mind whir into high-danger-of-accidentally-blurting-things-out-loud overdrive.

Alessandra bent down near Gregory’s bed, giving Callie a front row seat to her irritatingly traffic-stopping cleavage. “And you are in here why, exactly?” Alessandra repeated for the third time, reaching under the bed.

“Oh,” Callie mumbled. “I—um—also needed—for the—picking up—of some things….”

“
What
things?” Alessandra straightened, holding a pair of red panties and looking murderous.

“Wha—ah—no!” Callie cried. Her cheeks burned. According to Gregory, Alessandra had learned the truth about what had happened between him and Callie last November: how they had spent the night together after the Harvard-Yale football game.
A few months ago Callie had allowed Alessandra to believe, by omission, that the “hookup” had occurred at the very beginning of freshman year. No wonder the older girl didn’t trust her.

“I just came to pick up…a book! That I lent him…a long time ago,” Callie declared, her eyes darting to the lowest shelf where her borrowed
Justice Reader
from last semester might still be lurking among his other textbooks. “But, um, I don’t really need it right now, anyway, so I should probably—” Callie stammered, watching Alessandra yank open one of Gregory’s dresser drawers and pull out some highly complex-looking, fire engine red lingerie to match the panties. Callie gulped. “Go.”

Alessandra smirked. “Yes,” she said, “I think it is best that you leave now and that in the future you stay away from my
boyfriend’s
bedroom.”

“Boyfriend?” Callie blurted before she could stop herself. “Um…still?”

“Why—did he say something to you?”

“I—haven’t heard from him since he left,” Callie said carefully. “Have you?”

Alessandra frowned. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

Callie stared at the wall. Regardless of whether it was her
business
, it certainly wasn’t her place to break up with Alessandra on Gregory’s behalf based on his confession on the boat. Besides, what if, given everything going on with his dad, he had suddenly changed his mind?

“You’re right,” Callie conceded finally. “It isn’t any of my business.”

“Good,” said Alessandra. “Then we agree.” Smiling, she removed
the lingerie from where she had tucked it in her bag. “You know on second thought,” she said, reopening Gregory’s dresser drawer, “I think I’ll leave this here. And I would ask you,” she went on, turning to Callie, “to leave my boyfriend alone.”

“Uh…” Callie faltered. Did she have a choice, given that he currently appeared cut off from all modes of communication?

“I’d hate to find out that it’s true what some of the other Pudding girls say,” Alessandra pressed on, “about how you’re a serial boyfriend stealer who slept her way into the club.”

Callie flinched. Since when had the sultry but sweet sex bomb formerly known as Alessandra turned into such a, well—pardon the French—
Thorndike
?

“Sorry,” Alessandra muttered, seeing the look on Callie’s face.

“No,” said Callie. “
I’m
sorry. I’m sorry that you heard a nasty rumor about me, and I’m sorry that you chose to repeat it. But that’s not the only thing I’m sorry about.” Swallowing, she took another step toward Alessandra. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t completely honest with you when you asked me directly about my history with Gregory. You haven’t treated me like anything other than a friend since you got here—well, minus the past few weeks—and I have not done the same for you. So I apologize. Especially because I can’t change the fact…that we both have feelings for the same guy.”