Rites of Spring (Break) Read online

  I didn’t need him to finish the sentence. It didn’t make sense that he’d be dating Felicity and thinking about me.

  “The dance was the last straw…for both of us. She wouldn’t stop talking about you. It wasn’t even me, I swear. And when she started screaming at me…”

  Poor Brandon. He looked so lost. No one could blame me for being a shoulder for him to cry on.

  Lydia, of course, had her own perspective. As soon as Brandon left the next morning, she pounced:

  “Amy, don’t you think it’s a little odd that after having a huge screaming match with his current girlfriend, in front of the entire senior class, about how he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend, the first thing he did was go to said ex-girlfriend’s room?”

  I also thought it was a little odd to be spoken to like I was a six-year-old.

  “To be fair,” Josh said without looking up from his Wall Street Journal, “it wasn’t the first thing. We saw them fight at the dance, and judging from the state of his coat, he’d been walking around outside for at least an hour.”

  “Thank you, CSI.” Lydia rolled her eyes. “The point is, I practically bruised my jaw on the floor when I saw him standing outside. I wouldn’t even have let him in if it hadn’t been for Josh making me.”

  “Making you?” I looked from one half of the couple to the other.

  “He looked cold,” said my fellow knight, with a shrug.

  “But,” Lydia pronounced, like a judge, “in the light of day, it doesn’t look good.”

  “It looks like Felicity had a point,” Josh said from behind his newspaper.

  Yeah, she won the fight, but lost the boy. Some victory.

  Lydia snarled at her boyfriend. “Someone’s going to get hurt. It’s too soon for…whatever they’re doing.”

  “We’re not doing anything!” I insisted.

  Lydia rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s good. Did he officially break up with her?”

  I hesitated. We hadn’t actually discussed that. Just as we hadn’t discussed what we were doing. Everything else, sure. But not that. How had we spent so many hours together without it coming up?

  Lydia knew me well enough to read my expression. “Just as I thought.”

  Josh looked up now. “Say what you will, Lydia. I think it’s over. No man should have to put up with that kind of public humiliation. That girl is a harpy.”

  The harpy’s childhood friend Clarissa had a decidedly different take on the matter. She breezed into the tomb at dinner that night, filled with stories about the recent scandal:

  “So then, just as they are dancing to the new Bublé—”

  “Oh, I love that song,” said Lil’ Demon.

  “He makes some comment about Valentine’s Days of yore—” at which, she flicks a hand in my direction. “I mean, can you believe it? Most romantic moment ever, and he’s still talking about his ex. What do you expect a girl to do in a situation like that?”

  Even I couldn’t come up with a good response.

  “So they broke up on the dance floor?” Lil’ Demon asked. “Harsh!”

  “Oh, no,” Angel said. “They didn’t break up. I mean, they may, but…”

  But what? I bit my lip from bursting out—But he spent last night with me!—though I knew Angel would be obligated to keep my secrets, considering her oath. Soze glanced at me.

  “No,” Angel said. “In fact, I think they’re supposed to meet for coffee later.”

  Damn these Sunday society meetings! If it weren’t for Rose & Grave, I’d be able to stop him from keeping that coffee date. Unless he was using it to stage their official breakup. Yeah, that was it.

  Juno groaned in frustration. “If we’re all done talking about our love lives, can we get onto more serious topics?”

  “What could possibly be more serious?” Angel asked.

  Juno grabbed her bag and pulled out her laptop, opening the screen to reveal a news ticker. “World stage, people. Political upheavals. Empires collapsing. Citizens dying…”

  Thorndike read the headline. “‘UPSET IN WHITE HOUSE STAFF ROCKS CAPITOL HILL.’”

  The politically minded Diggers surrounded the laptop and started reading, but I couldn’t muster up the interest. There was a new political scandal every day. I’d catch tomorrow’s. Right now, I just wanted to figure out my love life.

  “Look alive, Bugaboo, do you know who this is about?” Soze waved a hand in front of my face. I glanced down, halfheartedly, at the article on the screen.

  Kurt Gehry.

  What?

  All thoughts of Brandon fled, and the entire tomb was in an uproar for the next few hours. Our planned program went right out the window as we researched, discussed, and debated the various details of the case. Seems that the White House Chief of Staff had quietly resigned last week, without a formal announcement to the press, without any fanfare at all. No one knew the reason. Nobody on the President’s staff was talking about it, and Kurt Gehry himself was “unavailable for interview.”

  I almost felt sorry for Gehry, who was known to the Diggers at large as “Barebones.” (His name in my club was mud, though, since he’d not once, but twice attempted to sabotage the entire class of knights in an attempt to reform the society in the image he found most suitable—one with no women in it.)

  Speculation both in the capital and in the tomb on High Street ran rampant, and with it came an abandonment of any other topic. The job and thesis talk, which had made up the bulk of tomb discussions since consultancy and banking interviews had commenced in January, gave way to endless back-and-forths about why Gehry had really left his job and whether or not the President would tell Rose & Grave (if not the country) what was really going on.

  One theory, popular among a certain breed of paranoid conspiracy theorists (but hey, they’ve been right before), promoted the idea that Gehry and the President had quarreled over Gehry’s intervention in society matters last semester. In response to his attempts to undermine the society by siphoning off funds from the Trust to create a secret, males-only inner circle known as Elysion, my fellow knights and I had disavowed him as our patriarch, retroactively kicking him out of Rose & Grave for our year and any we tapped afterward.

  According to the conspiracy theorists, the President of the United States, good Knight of Persephone that he was, could not bear to have on his staff anyone who was running afoul of Rose & Grave. Who knew a bunch of college kids had that much clout?

  No one in my club, that was for sure.

  “This is ridiculous,” Josh said during a study session the following afternoon. He was showing a marvelous amount of aggravation for a man who’d just been accepted to Stanford Law School. (Lydia, also, had received a thumbs-up from our cousins on the Pacific, and I was positive she’d indulged in a couple of fantasies about the two of them becoming a power couple every bit as pedigreed as they were passionate.)

  As for my couple status, it remained, much like my future, undecided. After the meeting last night, I’d waited up for Brandon, but he hadn’t called. Who knew how long his conversation had gone on with Felicity? Maybe he hadn’t felt up to seeing me directly after breaking up with her. His latest e-mail to me hadn’t even mentioned the coffee date with Felicity that Clarissa had reported. He’d just asked if he could meet me in my suite after his afternoon lab. Of course I agreed.

  “It’s flatly impossible that no one knows anything,” Josh went on. “I’ve shaken down every patriarch I can, and they are either stupid or playing so.”

  “I’d guess the latter, considering they’re Eli alums,” Demetria said. She and Jenny had spent the evening finalizing plans for the second half of Spring Break. Though we wouldn’t all be visiting Cavador Key, the knights who were going to the island would be spending a week there, then renting a van, driving up the coast, and spending a week volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.*1

  “I’d guess the former,” said George, turning a page in his textbook, “considering most of them are inbred legacies with
more money than sense.” He looked up, an innocent expression pinned in place. “Wait. I meant, other than me, of course.”

  I rolled my eyes and went back to my work. Brandon got out of lab in forty-five minutes, and I wanted to make sure I had all my homework done well in advance. So far, I had three fellowship applications in, and four more in the works. I’d submitted one of my best term papers to two scholarly publications and a couple of conference listings besides, though I knew it would be a long shot. Still, anything would help beef up my grad school applications. So far the rolling admissions hadn’t trundled in my direction, and I was hoping some last-minute additions to the package would help grease the skids.

  The GREs had been a joke (ninety-eight percentile without even taking Kaplan) but I hadn’t exactly distinguished myself in front of my professors the way I’d hoped. After all, it had always been my intent to go out into the workforce instead of staying in the Ivory Tower, and recommendations from crusty Russian Lit professors didn’t carry much weight at Condé Nast. I hoped to get a few responses before Spring Break, but it was beginning to look unlikely. Landing a fellowship would vastly increase my chances of getting into the program of my choice. I still hadn’t decided what the option was if I failed to receive admission at any of the A-list programs. Did I want to go to grad school enough to go just anywhere?

  George dropped his book next to me on the table. “Stressed about the future?”

  “Not really.” I turned a page and typed another line into my file.

  “You know, it occurs to me that we’re the only two people in the club who don’t have our futures planned out like a military invasion.”

  “Oh?” I said, looking up.

  “Look.” He began pointing. “Kevin’s going to work for CAA, Clarissa’s starting at McKinsey in the fall, Demetria got into Berkeley, Omar’s headed to the Kennedy School, Jenny’s starting that company of hers, Josh to Stanford Law, Odile to her next film, Ben to PwC, Mara to Wharton for her MBA…”

  I wondered how long it had taken him to memorize that list for recitation. And to think that, last year, I chose him over Brandon. “We haven’t heard from Greg yet.”

  “You think there’s a chance he’s not going to get that Fulbright? I’m just saying we’re a dying breed.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “And that I’m sick of it being all political scandals, applications, and interviews around here. Don’t you think it was better when our weekly conversations were a tad more colorful?”

  “No. I’d rather this than sit through another eight hours of your C.B.”

  Oops. That was a mistake. He leaned in. “Could have been longer.” He’d spared me that humiliation at least. Sitting there while George kissed and told, and kissed and told, and kissed and told ad infinitum was a lesson in agony. The Connubial Bliss reports were a right of passage for every knight in Rose & Grave, but I had dreaded hearing George recount every sexual encounter he’d ever had for two reasons: First, I would learn exactly where I fell on his lengthy list. Second, so would everyone else. I had spent a week preparing to hear him report the gory details of our affair to our entire club. But he hadn’t even touched upon it—for reasons that were still beyond my comprehension.

  “I could always present a coda,” he said. “If you think it’s necessary.”

  “Is that a threat of some sort?” I asked.

  “A threat?” He pressed his hand to his chest. “You wound me, Amy.” He also hadn’t called me “Boo” since I’d broken it off in November. It had been Amy outside the tomb and Bugaboo inside. He stared at me through his copper-rimmed glasses. His eyes, gorgeous as always, were steady and unblinking. “I wasn’t even the one to bring it up. You’re the one who has sex on the brain. Feeling frustrated? You can tell me.”

  I abandoned the table then and there. Maybe I was frustrated, but I also had a date that could, hypothetically, fix all that.

  When Brandon arrived at my room, his face was practically glowing. “I got in!”

  “To what?” I said.

  “NYU. Math!” He grabbed me and spun me around. “I just had to tell you first.”

  I beamed. Eat your heart out, George. Knowing that Brandon wanted me to be the first to know his news was so much better than sex. “Oh, Brandon, that’s amazing! I’m so happy for you!” I enclosed him in a hug. “I’m applying for some stuff in New York, too. We could be together there next year. Wouldn’t that be wild?”

  And he hugged me again, which was not really an answer, but never let it be said that Amy Maureen Haskel doesn’t do denial with the best of them. I didn’t even have the heart to ask him about his breakup conversation with Felicity after that. He was in such a great mood. Why spoil it with sad remembrances?

  Brandon and I spent the rest of the evening in my room, talking about everything in the world but what was going on with him and Felicity, and doing everything in the world except the kind of activity that might lead to something I’d have to relate in a Connubial Bliss report. The rules, apparently, still applied.

  Curious.

  The pattern repeated for several days in a row. He’d come over, ostensibly there to help me out with my applications, but not a moment’s work would get done. “This is boring,” he’d say. “Let’s put on a DVD. We deserve it.” Which was all well and good, except I didn’t deserve it yet. I still hadn’t gotten into grad school.

  Sometimes it felt like senior year in high school all over again. Once you got into college, nothing seemed very important. You’d skip classes, blow off homework, party on weeknights. Now, with most of my friends’ futures secure, I was witness to much of the same behavior all around. Not that I indulged too much. After all, the shenanigans from Dragon’s Head were getting more outlandish every day (I’d taken to keeping my shower supplies out of the bathroom, as the other day I’d found my conditioner bottle filled with blue dye, my soap covered in drain hair, and all the safeties removed from my razor blades), and I was a bit nervous about what they’d try on me if I ventured out and about.

  My fellow knights were at a loss as to revenge schemes. Attacking one society member for the crimes of all of them was taboo in our little culture, and we were pretty sure Dragon’s Head was keeping a close eye on their tomb after our most recent raid. Their attacks on me were reminiscent of the kind of pranks we pulled on barbarians, not other society knights. Our rivalries were held to a different standard of honor entirely. Dragon’s Head was breaking the code by treating me like a barbarian. I admit I was beginning to pity—or at least empathize with—poor Micah Price, the last barbarian victim of Rose & Grave. The guy had been a first-class jerk, and had caused a huge amount of pain to both my fellow knight Jenny and the society as a whole. But, on the other hand, we’d filled his apartment with rats. Way worse than crickets.

  I felt so left out that on Wednesday, when Brandon asked if I wanted to skip my Geology lecture in favor of taking a short afternoon nap with him, I acquiesced to his demands. After all, maybe this time we’d finally cross the line we’d set back on Valentine’s Day.

  We didn’t. And we didn’t again on Thursday after my society meeting, nor on Friday when neither of us were skipping any classes at all.

  Meanwhile, every kiss we didn’t share made the next one that much harder to resist. I was lying there beside him during these indulgent—yet platonic—afternoon naps, knowing that it would take little more than a swivel of my hips to bring our bodies into alignment, to cross that invisible and all-important line between right and wrong. So I dared not move, because I was terrified of what his response would be. I knew, somehow, that if anyone was to cross the line, it had to be Brandon, just like it had to be Brandon who came over that night, had to be Brandon to be the first to admit that he missed me, to say that he still wanted me, regardless of our past.

  On Saturday, Lydia waylaid me outside my bedroom door.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  Because I’d turned into a hermit? “I know I haven’t exactly been a soci
al butterfly lately—”

  “No, Amy. Brandon.” She sat down. “When he came over the night of the Valentine’s Day Ball, I was so excited. Everyone had seen his girlfriend storm out of the dance. I thought they were through, or as good as through.”

  “So?”

  “So Clarissa apparently told Josh that they’re not.” She gauged my reaction, and I fought to keep it under control. “Josh thinks you don’t care. But I said that couldn’t be so.”

  Why did I feel a sudden stab of guilt for disappointing her? “Thanks for discussing me behind my back.” Again.

  “You’re welcome. Isn’t it nice to have friends who care? Now tell me what’s going on. Are they broken up? And if not, why not?”

  What was going on was that Lydia had gone and gotten herself a perfect boyfriend and had suddenly forgotten how complicated the battle of the sexes could be. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. Maybe they weren’t broken up. Maybe they were, and he was just practicing some sort of…mourning period before becoming involved with someone else. Did I really want to know that answer? “It’s complicated.”

  “Bullshit,” Lydia pronounced. “It’s easy. He wants you, or he wants her. They aren’t married. They don’t have shared property or children. They’re dating. Sure, there are going to be hurt feelings, but that doesn’t make it complicated. Awkward and potentially hurtful, but not complicated. ‘Hi, Felicity, you’ve been grand and we’ve had a really good time together, but I don’t think it’s fair to keep dating you, since I realized I still have feelings for my ex—as you know—and she wants me back—as you may not know. I’m sorry; I’m a shithead, but you’re fabulous and beautiful and I’m sure there’s a line of amazing guys waiting for the day you’re single.’ See? Easy.”

  Felicity was indeed fabulous and beautiful. I didn’t need Lydia or her imaginary suitors-in-the-wings to remind me of that.

  “So I can’t see why he’s spending so much time hiding out in your bedroom and still dating her.” Lydia shrugged. “Why doesn’t he make a choice? If it makes sense to you, please explain.”