You’re joking,” Phoebe said after Nick had filled her in on the conversation. “All this art is going to be returned, and your grandfather is going to go down in New York history as this wonderful, philanthropically minded man who never did anything wrong?”
Phoebe, Nick, and Patch were standing in the kitchen. Genie had gone out to the enclosed sunporch to rest.
“Look, I don’t agree with it,” Nick said. “But we don’t have a choice. He said-”
Phoebe interrupted him. “You keep saying that we don’t have a choice. But maybe it’s up to us. Maybe we’re the ones who have to break free. As long as you keep believing your father, then you’re right, you don’t have a choice.” She was angry, but she needed Nick to know how she felt.
“Phoebe, he’s threatened us in the past. The Society has done things, appalling things. I just don’t know if we can-”
“Face it, Nick, you don’t want anyone knowing about your grandfather. It’s embarrassing. It would be in the papers for months. You and your family would face so much public scrutiny. And you can’t handle that.” She took a breath and looked at Patch. “What do you think?”
“Leave me out of it,” Patch said. “I don’t-I don’t really know.”
“You’ve got to have an opinion,” Phoebe said. “It’s your family, too.”
Patch gave her an angry look. “I don’t have to have an opinion,” he snapped. “I didn’t choose this. I’ll be on the sunporch with my grandmother. The one who raised me.”
Phoebe sighed as Patch left the room.
“Great,” Nick said. “Now you’ve gone and made him feel bad. As if he’s not feeling strange enough already, with everything that’s happened.”
Phoebe decided to ignore this. But she couldn’t deny how frustrated she was. “Nick, I’m so sick of all this. And let me guess: this gets us no closer to being free of the Society than we were in the beginning of January.”
“I’m not sure,” Nick said. “I think it may have been…”
His voice trailed off.
“A setup? Admit it, Nick, we’ve played their little game once again. We’re too trusting, that’s our problem. We can’t believe them, any of them. I’m so tired of this!” She was getting hysterical, and she felt badly about yelling at Nick.
“Phoebe, calm down,” Nick said.
“You know something else?” she said. “We’ve never considered this, but I don’t think there really is a Society.”
“What?” Nick said. “What do you mean?” He gave her a sideways look, as if she were insane.
“What I mean is, sure, there’s a group of people, and they’ve gotten together and they’ve done some good things and many bad things. But in terms of its meaning, remember how the scroll we got was written and adapted by each class? That’s exactly how they’ve constructed it-none of it has meaning in and of itself. We are the ones who have given it meaning. It’s all created to keep us in line, to keep us trapped. Initiation rituals, bonfires, Egyptian mythology, swimming parties, French philosophy, stories about drowning, people dying-”
“You’re saying that people dying wasn’t real?”
“No, it was real, but we were the ones who gave it meaning. We were the ones who decided that we couldn’t go to the police. No one told us we couldn’t. We came up with that idea, remember? We were the ones who decided to be so afraid all the time.”
“But they threatened us-when we didn’t attend meetings-” Nick sputtered.
“Right, but we decided we couldn’t handle it. I didn’t tell my mom about the rats because I was scared. Thad couldn’t tell the truth about who planted the gin bottle because he was embarrassed about his mother’s past. Lauren couldn’t say who she thought put the earrings in her bag, because they would have said she was nuts.”
Nick shook his head. “I get what you’re saying, but Phoebe, this is still as real as anything I’ve ever seen. There is stolen art in that basement, and my grandfather is responsible for it. No one can deny that. Do you really want the world to find out about that?”
“There you go again-you’ve put so much value in your family’s privacy, you’re ignoring what’s better for the rest of us.”
“Phoebe, you wouldn’t understand,” Nick said. He tapped the kitchen floor in frustration with his right foot. “And I think-I think you’re being crazy. All this stuff does have meaning. You know that. You can’t pretend it doesn’t.”
Phoebe regarded Nick. She had never been more upset with him. It was a horrible, empty feeling, as if a cavern had opened in her heart. She considered the idea that he wasn’t the person she was meant to be with.
She grabbed Nick’s shoulder and held it tightly. “Don’t ever call me crazy.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was stupid.” He put his head on the table, cradling it in his arms. When he lifted up his head a moment later, his eyes were red. “I’m so sorry. Phoebe, I love you. I really do.”
As if her body had taken over from her mind, she found herself shaking her head. “I don’t know if you do,” she said quietly. “I feel like you love your life in New York more. Your family. Everything it affords you. And maybe you even love this. All the drama. All the mystery. I mean, really, would our lives be as interesting without all this? Would we even be together? If we could break free, where would that really leave us?”
“How can you say that?” He looked at her, his face streaked with tears. “How can you say such a horrible thing?”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “I don’t quite feel like myself. I’ve just…” Her voice trailed off. “I should probably stop talking.” She sighed deeply, and only then did she realize how exhausted she was from everything. “Maybe we’d better get going. We have to get back to Manhattan for that damned cocktail party.” Claire Chilton and her parents had invited them all to a cocktail party that evening to celebrate the success of the Dendur Ball.
“Do we have to go?” Nick said. “I’m not exactly in the mood.”
“I would kill to skip it,” Phoebe said. She felt horrible for the things she had said, and now it felt like she couldn’t take them back. The worst part was that she didn’t want to take back some of it. She really would have loved to skip the party, to have some time alone to figure things out.
“Maybe we go for twenty minutes,” Nick said.
“Twenty minutes,” Phoebe said. “And that’s it.”