Under the Rose (25 page)

“I haven’t yet whittled down my main texts,” I said. “There are so many options.”

“Indeed.”

“I’m not sure whether to discuss the ramifications in English literature or maybe study some turn-of-the-century American choices. Or perhaps even focus strictly on texts from the period of the rise of feminism.”

Professor Burak nodded, slowly. “Sounds good. Well, Miss Haskel,” he said, standing, “it looks like you’re off to a good start. I’ll meet you in a month and see how you’ve progressed.”

I also stood. That was it? He reached across the desk to shake my hand, but when I took it, he folded his fingers in an all-too-familiar way and, before I could stop myself, I was doing the countersign. The, um, Rose & Grave countersign.

I couldn’t stifle the shock that registered on my face, which no doubt dug my—no pun intended—grave a little deeper. Dr. Burak was not a patriarch.

He’d been testing me, and I’d failed. Oops.

“Thought as much.” He returned to his seat, and leaned back. “Shall we start again?”

Deny, deny, deny. “Sir?”

“Come now, Miss Haskel. Do you think you’re the first student to come in here mysteriously itching to write a paper on Persephone?” He snorted, rolled over to his bookshelf, and pulled down a stack of bound manuscripts. “Let’s see here. What have we got? ‘Persephone and Demeter in the work of D. H. Lawrence’”—the paper plopped onto the desk—“‘An American Goddess: Pre-Feminist Persephones in
My Ántonia
and minor works of Willa Cather’”—
plop
—“‘Don’t Eat the Pomegranate: Rape and Rejuvenation in Harlem Renaissance Poetry’”—
plop
—“and, lest we forget, no fewer than
seven
senior projects on the Persephone motifs in Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
”
Plop, plop, kathunk
.

Busted.

“It’s not that I don’t think it’s a valid field of study, you see,” he said as I stood there, staring stricken at the pile before him. I even recognized some of the writers as patriarchs. “But the field’s a little crowded at the moment. At least, at
this
particular temple of learning.”

I remained speechless.

“And of course,” he added, “there’s the ongoing issue with not being able to access and vet some of your sources, seeing as they are part of a very,
very
private collection.”

I regained my tongue and remembered my oaths. “Professor Burak, I don’t know what impression I may have given you earlier, but I assure you I—”

He raised his hand. “Look, I’m in favor of students exploring the traditions that speak most strongly to them. Passion is always a positive when it comes to charting courses of study. But it’s time to start getting creative. It’s been, what, two hundred years?”

One hundred and seventy-seven. But that was none of his business.

“And I know you guys must have many rules and rituals that have origins in any variety of myths. Why the Persephone monomania?”

“Sir, I—”

“Right, right. ‘You have no idea what I’m talking about.’ Of course. I’ve been teaching at this university long enough to know the drill. But that doesn’t change my take on the matter. We in the Literature department have been dealing with this for longer than you’ve been alive, Ms. Haskel. I doubt you’re going to come at this topic from an angle we haven’t seen. Back to the drawing board with you.”

Defeated, I rose, and turned to go. I looked down at the stack of papers on his desk. “Were any of these written by a woman?” I asked him.

He considered. “No. As far as I know, you’re the first woman to try this particular trick. But don’t think that makes it acceptable.”

“So how far does it get me?”

He chuckled. “Another week to come up with a topic.”

Poe had text-messaged me to meet him at the office of the Edison dean at three-thirty, so after a short stint at a library computer terminal confirming that indeed the field of undergraduate Persephonial study was a bit crowded here at Eli, I wandered up that way, still shaken from the smackdown I’d received from my advisor. But seriously, what kind of idiots were we Diggers to think the academic bigwigs at this school wouldn’t eventually catch on to our predilection for a certain myth?
From within doth Persephone rot,
indeed! Professor Burak hadn’t accused me of trying to cheat my way through my thesis, but the concern was obvious. So now I could add another task to my already overloaded To Do list.

I found Poe loitering outside the Edison College gates, waiting for someone with an Eli College undergrad proximity card to let him in. I swiped my card at the gate and held the door open as he passed through.

“Is it annoying not to have access anymore?” I asked as we crossed the courtyard.

He clenched his jaw and glowered at me. “Yes, it’s annoying not to have access anymore.”

But I didn’t take the bait, and after a moment, he dropped the hostility.

“Actually, the most frustrating thing is that I’ve always charted my course through campus based on where the prox card let me go. Now I have to go around a lot of buildings I used to walk straight through.” We took the steps up to the dean’s office and he held the door open for me. “On the plus side, I can get into the all-night Law Library.”

Touché. Eli’s lack of an all-night study spot was a source of endless frustration for its students. Most of the university’s libraries closed early in the evening, the main stacks at Dwight closed at midnight, and even the underground study carrels located beneath Cross Campus closed by two
A.M
. If you wanted to pull an all-nighter, you did it in your room (or, if you were lucky, your tomb). I knew a few people who had sweet-talked law-student friends into purloining them passes to the forbidden zone, and in general, the Law Library was considered a sort of mecca for the serious academics. A space where the faucets issued hot and cold running coffee and all the chairs were ergonomic.

I’d never been there myself. I’d never pulled an all-nighter, for that matter. My inability to stay up has been a constant source of amusement for my friends throughout my college career. When they’re taking midnight study breaks and grabbing patty melts at the Buttery at midnight, I’ve already been hard at work for several hours, because I know by two
A.M
.—or three at the latest—I’m useless. I’ve been hitting the wall ever since I was tapped into Rose & Grave as well, starting on Initiation Night, when I passed out somewhere in the wee hours, only to be carried home, undressed, then tucked into bed by Malcolm (a situation that caused more than a little confusion when I first woke up, let me tell you), and continuing every meeting night. My club wraps up official society business around two, and then wants to hang out in the tomb and party, but all I want to do is snuggle into my duvet.

I’d be testing my condition tonight, as I struggled to get my as-yet-unformed treatise on
Humphrey Clinker
in shape by break of day.

“Did you manage to get through to anyone this afternoon?” I asked him as we entered the outer office.

“I’ll tell you later.” Poe gave our names to a secretary, whose desk was an altar to the union movement, and she announced our arrival to the dean. He appeared forthwith, ushered us into his office, and shut the door.

“You’re friends of Jenny?” the dean asked.

We nodded. White lies, since I’m pretty sure Poe ranked right up there on the list of Jenny hatahs, and she didn’t seem to think too well of him, either. As for me, I didn’t know where I stood on the issue. I was furious with her, of course, but she was still my brother, and what’s more, I felt bad for her. Hanging out for any length of time with an asshole like Micah Price had to suck.

“Here’s the situation,” said the dean. “I’ve received a call from the Santoses, indicating her friends do not know her present location. Her parents haven’t any idea where she might be, and neither do her suitemates, each of whom I’ve contacted. I’ve been in touch with the campus police, and according to policy, without any evidence of foul play, there’s little to show this is anything more than a case of a twenty-one-year-old girl taking off for the weekend. She could be at Foxwoods playing poker, for all you know. She could be raring for a night at the clubs in Chelsea. I can’t call out the dogs because a senior with no classes on Friday decides to skip town.”

“Have you met this girl?” Poe asked. “I can guarantee she’s not playing poker.”

“What do you mean, no evidence?” I asked, trying to keep on topic. “Have you seen her room?”

The dean eyed me. “Have you?”

I offered a weak smile and a shrug.

“I was up there earlier with two officers,” he continued. “Nothing appeared out of place.”

Nothing out of place? Was this guy saying that disaster zone looked normal? He’d obviously grown cynical from too many years living with messy college kids. I opened my mouth to speak, but Poe laid his hand over mine.

“We’re so sorry to be a bother, sir,” Poe said, as I steeled myself not to snatch my hand away, “but Amy here is a little worried about her friend. They had some kind of spat the other day and she’s been beating herself up about it.” He looked at me and shook his head slightly, his expression full of patronizing concern. I clenched my free hand into a fist. “What you’ve said makes a lot of sense, and I’m sure Jenny will be home by Sunday night.”

“I’m sure she will, too,” said the dean.

“Honey,” Poe said to me, and I flinched, “why don’t you leave Jenny a note? It can be the first thing she sees when she gets home. And much more personal than some e-mail or a scrawl on a whiteboard.” Yeah, especially since she didn’t even have a whiteboard. “Maybe the dean will let you put it on her desk, you know,
near her keys and cell phone.
” He looked at the dean. “That would be okay, right?”

“Sure,” said the dean. “I’ll get the skeleton key from my secretary.”

Two minutes later, we were in the Edison College Tower elevator, and the dean and Poe were expounding on the virtues of modern architecture while I scribbled a missive to Jenny.

Dear Jenny,

Pardon my language, but where the fuck are you? You have some serious answering to do, chica! Anything that results in protracted tête-à-têtes with James Orcutt is not easily forgiven. You’d better be in actual trouble, or you’re dead meat.

Love,

Amy

There. That should take care of it. We arrived on Jenny’s floor and headed to her room, which now, shockingly, sported a freshly cleaned whiteboard on the door the dean unlocked. I stifled a gasp.

The room was clean. Like,
brochure
clean. Sure, Jenny’s overload of computers were still in evidence, and there was a pile of unopened mail on her desk, but the cascade of papers and tangle of wires were nowhere in sight. The floor was swept and smelled faintly of lemon Pledge. Her bed displayed hospital corners.

“See?” said the dean. “Everything’s fine. Go leave your note.”

So I did, and while Poe distracted the dean with more chitchat, I dropped off her keys and phone and furtively searched the desktop for any clue as to what may have happened in this room in the last eighteen hours. Nothing. Not an illegible Post-it note, not a stray syllabus, not a scribble on the latest page of her Scripture-a-Day calendar (which, I might add, was turned to Friday’s date). There was a neat mug filled with pens, a neat tower of library books, and a neat stack of the aforementioned junk mail. Her walls held the same posters of Impressionist art and Victorian portraiture. The altar in the corner looked fresh and shiny. Shivers flew up and down my spine, and didn’t neglect my extremities, either.

What had happened here?

“Ready to go?” the dean prompted, and, like a zombie, I toddled out.

Wait. Wait, stop. Guys, something really weird is going on. Listen to me! Listen to me!
The words welled up in my throat and I opened my mouth.

Poe grabbed my elbow.

At the base of the tower, Poe bade the dean a cheery adieu and steered me down the steps and across the courtyard. As soon as the dean vanished into his office, I whirled away.

“How…dare…you…” I spluttered.

“I got us in the room, didn’t I?” he said.

“Yes. By treating Jenny and me like idiot girls! It was humiliating.”

Poe sighed. “You know, Amy, if you’d just step back for a minute in the middle of all your feminist ranting, you’d see that sometimes acting like an idiot—girl or otherwise—in matters of espionage can be a good way to get things accomplished. You’re the Literature major. Did you skip
The Scarlet Pimpernel
?”

“Then
you
act the fool, Sir Percy.”

He shook his head. “Not in that situation. Had the dean been a woman, I’d have been happy to play the worried lover to your concerned Cupid, but it wouldn’t have budged that guy.”

Yeah, especially considering one would first have to buy Poe as boyfriend material (nice shoulders aside).

“Don’t tell me you’ve never put on an act to get what you wanted.”

He had me there.

“Maybe your problem was that the chosen act hit a little too close to home.”