Tap & Gown Read online

  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 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.”

  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.

  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.

  But I didn’t go to my place.

  I went to Jamie’s.

  Jamie answered the door in an undershirt and sweatpants. “Hey there!” he said, smiling broadly. “What a pleasant surprise. Have you had breakf—”

  I threw myself into his arms and started kissing him.

  “Pleasanter surprise,” he managed, backing us away from the threshold. There’s the idea. I pushed him gently against the wall and started tugging on his shirt.

  “About to get even pleasanter,” I murmured against his neck as my fingers found the drawstring of his pants. Bad grammar is such a turn-on. I loosened the strings, then dragged the pants down and over his hips. Ooh, nice. He had a bathing-suit tan going on. I trailed my fingers across the line of demarcation on his torso, then lower.

  I leaned in, pressing my advantage. I was fully clothed, his pants and boxers now pooled around his ankles. He leaned against the wall of the foyer, practically in view of the street, relaxed and yet utterly alert. “No,” I whispered. “I haven’t had breakfast.”

  “Oh,” he said as I began to slide to my knees. “Because I’m making waffles.”

  “Hmmm.”

  A loud buzzing noise interrupted me. Jamie clunked his head against the wall.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I told you: I’m making waffles.”

  “Will it go away?”

  “Around the time the fire alarm starts up, yes.”

  I groaned and rocked back on my heels and Jamie hurried to pull up his pants and tend to his burning breakfast.

  I stared into the kitchen. “That’s a Dining Hall waffle maker.” I knew them well. The industrial-sized spinning machines were stationed on tables for student use every brunch.

  “I know. Can you believe they were tossing it?” He pulled a golden, fluffy Belgian waffle from the machine and plopped it on a nearby plate. “All it needed was some work on the springs.”

  “You fished that thing out of the trash and now you’re cooking with it?”

  “I washed it first. And fixed it, too, I might add. Aren’t you impressed with my engineering skills?” He rejoined me at the wall. “Okay. I’m back.”

  I stood up, lips pursed. The scent of freshly cooked waffle filled the air—sweet, bready, wholesome.

  “Or did you want me to bring the syrup?” he asked.

  The first time I’d been in this apartment, I’d felt nothing but contempt for the guy standing before me. And every ounce of that contempt had transferred to his belongings—the sagging couch, the old and threadbare clothes, the giant snake. His room hadn’t had the same panache as George’s jukebox-filled bachelor pad or the comfortable, lived-in look of the suite I shared with Lydia. But Jamie’s place had reincarnated waffle makers and half a dozen vegetarian cookbooks and a pet mouse he’d kept and named for my sake. The people in my club didn’t know this about him. I hadn’t known this about him.

  I don’t know if anyone did.

  “Why don’t you have a roommate?” I asked abruptly.

  “Huh?”

  “It would be cheaper.”

  “It would also be less private,” he hinted. “Now, about that syrup—”

  “Do you have any friends at Eli Law?” I pressed.

  His eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know?”

  So he didn’t. “How about people still in undergrad?”

  “A couple. And a few at the law school, too. Some folks from my section.”

  Study buddies. And undergrads I’d never heard about before. The defensive tone was back as well, threaded through with a shot of frustration. Now I knew what I’d done to him last semester, kicking him out of the tomb, and why it had made his general disdain for me turn into full-on hate.

  “I told you last year, Amy. I made Rose & Grave my life. Nothing else mattered. I don’t keep in touch with many of my barbarian friends.”

  Something in the way he said it gave me pause. “How about your ex-girlfriends?”

  He sighed and retied the strings on his sweatpants. “Is that what this is really about? I have condoms.”

  Wow, was that not at all what this was about. It was about knowing him, having the slightest idea of what made up this guy’s life outside the tomb.

  “Though to be perfectly honest,” he continued, “I haven’t had sex with anyone in a while.”

  “How long a while?”

  He fixed me with a look I could read clear as day. Longer than you.

  Because of course he knew all about me. Unfair.

  I swallowed. “I think you need to understand a few things about … George.”

  “I promise you I understand everything I care to.” He turned and entered the kitchen. “And my waffle is getting cold.”

  “But this is going to keep coming up.” I followed him.

  “Whose fault is that?” He ladled more waffle mix into the machine and slammed the top down.

  “What did he tell you?”

  He shoved a waffle plate in my hands. “Nothing.”

  I suppose he didn’t need to. Everyone knew George’s reputation. And Jamie was not stupid. I wondered if he thought I was different, having slept with George. If I expected something special … or could do something special.

  “You know,” I said before I could stop myself, “it’s really not George who should bug you. Remember that guy I was upset about right before Spring Break? Brandon?”

  “And I thought I couldn’t hate this conversation more than I did five seconds ago,” he grumbled without looking up from the machine.

  “Not that either of them should bother you,” I clarified.

  “They don’t.”

  “They clearly do.”

  The buzzer went off. Jamie swatted at it, then righted the machine, pulled out the waffle, and dropped it onto another plate. He grabbed my dish from my hands and brought both over to the coffee table, with the syrup and two forks. As I sat down, I noticed he’d put the older, colder waffle in front of himself.

  “What bothers me,” he said, po
uring on the syrup, “is my girlfriend coming over, making a pretty good show of seducing me in the hallway, then stopping mid-act to talk about her ex-boyfriends. Call me crazy.” He shoved a bit of waffle in his mouth.

  Reepicheep rustled in her cage. Lord Voldemort, as usual, was asleep in a coil in his tank. Jamie chewed softly. I ate my waffle. He was quite a good cook.

  Pretty good show of seducing him, eh? Go, Amy. But the tension hadn’t eased one bit from Jamie’s end of the couch. Wouldn’t either, what with this George-shaped gorilla between us.

  “The last time I had sex,” I said, “was Halloween.”

  He nodded slowly. “That was my birthday.”

  I choked on my waffle. This was getting worse and worse. “No!”

  “Why do you think they called me ‘Poe’?”

  I had always guessed it was because he was morose and taciturn and creepy. “Um … because ‘Hotstuff’ was taken?”

  He snorted. No points there.

  “Anything I say will just dig myself in deeper here, won’t it?” I asked at last.

  “Likely.”

  Did he have a crush on me way back on Halloween? He couldn’t have. I’d kicked him out of the tomb. He’d hated me. But then, I’d pretty much figured he’d hated me last month, when he’d comforted me and took me out for pizza a few short days before saving my life. He’d liked me then. And he liked me now, which was the material point.

  “I’m sorry about the hallway,” I said, after another long silence.

  “Me too,” he said. “Way sorrier than you, I imagine.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I wasn’t the one who would have been kneeling on hardwood floors.”

  Jamie and I did not sleep together that day. Or that weekend. We didn’t talk any more about George, either. Instead, we hung out, studied together, and discussed my short list and how best to approach the remaining two people to get a feel for their behavior. Arielle, of course, I had covered.

  “I just don’t know if I have the choice I’d like to,” I complained to him. I was lying with my head in his lap, pretending to read my Geology textbook. “Arielle is fine, I guess, but she’s not the person I want to leave my legacy to.”