In retrospect, we should have gone to Malcolm or one of the other seniors right away, but we didn’t. After all, we were new at all of this Digger stuff. How were we supposed to know that the padlock was a recent addition to the look of the tomb? I remember reflecting to George at the time that perhaps the caretaker always padlocked it on the days when there were no formal events planned. But when we went around to the side entrance, there was a chain there, too, and neither of us knew where we might obtain the keys.
“We could knock,” George suggested, but didn’t move to do so. I was relieved to see my hesitation echoed in someone who had been more thoroughly versed in the mores of the society. Even though I’d spent hours inside the tomb yesterday, taking oaths and learning secrets, the same unease about the property that had been cultivated in the last three years still held power over me. I felt, almost, that I didn’t belong on the site.
Which, it turns out, is exactly how they wanted me to feel.
Our plans to hang out in the tomb thwarted, we walked down to Lenny’s Lunch, which holds the distinction of having the most batshit hours of any restaurant in New Haven. Really, you never know when it’s going to be open. The hours are something like 11 A.M.–3:15 P.M. on Monday, noon–2 P.M. Tuesday, 7–9:30 P.M. Thursday–Friday, and noon–midnight on Saturday. I kid you not (and no, do not hold me responsible for any of these hours. I honestly have no clue when they are open). Plus, there’s only one thing on the menu—cheeseburgers on toast with onions and tomato—and the proprietor will kick you out if you ask for ketchup. But if you learn the rules, in a sort of “Seinfeld soup-Nazi” way, they make awesome cheeseburgers. (And only cheeseburgers, by the way, not hamburgers. Woe betide the lactose-intolerant.)
We settled into the ancient wooden booths and waited for our food. Over the decades, people had carved encyclopedias’ worth of personal histories into the tops and sides of the tables and benches (the bottoms were something you stayed away from if you wanted to keep your appetite). Hearts, crests, quotes from Shakespeare and Stalin—anything goes at Lenny’s Lunch. I rubbed the condensation from my bottle of birch beer and polished a carving that read “B + A 1956.”
Those are very common initials.
George and I ate our cheeseburgers without ketchup, drank our pops, and talked about movies. We didn’t discuss his family, or mine, or the strange locks on the tomb door. The buzz of vodka was finally fading, and I kept my hand over the carving as I ate. George Harrison Prescott was a very attractive man, but I had no interest in contributing to his already stellar track record.
“What are you doing this summer?” George asked.
“I’ve got an internship at Horton. The publishing company?” A pat of cheese plopped from my burger to the wrapper. Smooth, Amy, smooth.
“In New York? Cool.” He twirled his bottle around by the stem. “I’m going to Europe for a few weeks right after exams, and then I’ll probably work for my dad in the city. We should hang out.”
“Do you know what you want to do after graduation?”
He shrugged. “One of the three big ones: I-banking, consulting, law school.”
“No preference?”
He shrugged. “Not really. Tell me, is this your first publishing internship?”
“In New York, yeah. I worked at the Eli Press a few summers back.”
“Well, then you’re well positioned to get a job when you graduate. I wish I’d been thinking that far ahead.”
See, that’s the dirty little secret they never tell anyone. When I first came to Eli, I thought that I’d have employers falling all over me upon graduation, just dying to hire someone with an Ivy League degree. When you’re signing your life away to Sallie Mae, the schools stress how fabulous a reputation they have, how it will open all sorts of doors for you. But once you’re in the thick of your education, you learn otherwise. You aren’t a made man (or woman) just because your diploma bears the Eli seal.
PEOPLE WHODO CARE
1) Investment banking and consulting firms where they can charge their clients through the nose since they’re providing Ivy League pedigreed staff (which they proceed to chew up and spit out).
2) Law schools whose rankings are partially based on the credentials of the schools from which they cull their students.
3) Your great-aunt Amelia, who likes to brag to the folks at the VFW.
If you want a job that leads to a career rather than a quick buck, then you’d better have a pretty full resume by the time you get your diploma.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’ll be making lots more money as a consultant than I will as an editorial assistant. You’ll be a better brochure statistic by far.”
That’s the other kicker. Eli has far more respect for its take-the-money-and-run business consulting graduates, who can turn around and give monetary gifts to the school immediately upon graduation, than for anyone who invests in a long-term career. And looking at the Rose & Grave tap class I’d just joined, I’d say it was a fair bet that the Diggers thought along the same lines. Power and/or wealth seemed to be the order of the day. And again, I was the odd one out.
George snapped his fingers in front of me. “Hey, it’s Saturday night. Stop thinking so hard.”
I bristled and began peeling the label off my pop bottle. “I’m not.” God, he sounded like Brandon.
“Seriously, though, Amy, you have it all planned out. I admire that. You came to Eli knowing exactly what you wanted to do and you’re doing it. I came from a double legacy and never once planned for a summer internship.”
“You don’t need one. You’re a Prescott.”
“Hmph. Prescott or not, I don’t have a clue.”
I smiled conspiratorially. “Honestly? Neither do I.” But the internship thing I learned early on. I vividly remember sitting in the Lit Mag office one evening freshman year while Glenda tried in vain to soothe an older friend’s nerves. The girl had graduated the previous year, and had been looking for a job for the past nine months with no luck, despite her Eli pedigree.
“They don’t care,” she’d sobbed. “They get a hundred resumes a day, and they don’t care how smart I am, or how much I’ve read of the Western canon. They just want to know where my internships were!”
“Where were they?” I’d asked, like an idiot frosh.
“Nowhere!” the girl had hissed at me, glaring with baleful red eyes. “I had to work in the summer to pay for this stupid place. Fat lot of good it did me. I’d rather be in more debt now and have a better resume than without a job and up a few thousand dollars.”
I took it as my creed. This Horton job was the culmination of everything I’d been working for. It was my ticket to post-grad entry into the world of publishing.
Okay, maybe I did have it all together. Because here I was on a Saturday night, out to eat with the hottest guy in my college (yes, he even paid), a member of the school’s most elite secret society, a top student headed off to a glamorous summer job in New York City…from where I stood, the plus column looked pretty good.
He walked me back to my entryway at Prescott College, and I brainstormed ways to leave him at the door that would make me look mysterious, rather than uninterested.
Though if one were to ask Brandon, I apparently always managed the former without breaking a sweat.
I opened the door to the suite carefully, avoiding all contact with the stains still smearing the doorknob, and slipped inside.
“See you tomorrow,” he murmured.
I turned back to him. His copper eyes shimmered as if they’d been freshly smelted, and I had to tilt my chin up to look him head-on. Rather nice, actually. “Tomorrow?”
He nodded. “First meeting, remember? Five minutes to six, or VI Diggers-time.”
That’s right. From now on, the Diggers held the deed to my Sunday and Thursday nights. Missing a meeting was not permitted under any but the most life-threatening circumstances. (As Poe put it, even if you’re in the hospital, you’d better be in a coma.) Ditching was viewed as a violation of the oath of fidelity.
I swear to cleave wholly unto the principles of this ancient order, to further its friends and plight its enemies, and place above all others the causes of the Order of Rose & Grave.
Of course, if George didn’t put much stock in the secrecy oath, who knew what else about Rose & Grave he’d blow off? Probably skip a meeting the first time it conflicted with getting booty.
“Okay, then,” I said, and began to shut the door between us. “Thanks for the burger. Good night, George.”
See? See how good I am? I didn’t even think about kissing him. Didn’t even think about letting him kiss me. I could withstand the charms of even George Harrison Prescott. A veritable pillar of self-control, that’s Amy Haskel.
“Good night,” he murmured in a voice of unmistakable invitation. The door slid shut. “Good night…Bugaboo.”
I melted on the parquet.
I might be freely able to commit my entire Sunday and Thursday evenings to Rose & Grave come next fall, but this spring I still had obligations to the facets of my existence that made me worthy of membership in the society in the first place. Not WAP, though. I’d decided it was a lost cause. My Sundays had been seriously proscribed by this new development in my extracurriculars. I had two choices:
1) Wake up at 8 A.M. every Sunday like I’m some sort of science major who has early-morning labs, and read a thousand pages of Tolstoy before any other college kid could reasonably be expected to be conscious, or
2) Take advantage of Rose & Grave’s rumored library of final exams so that I’d have time in my all-too-short Sunday afternoons to deal with, I don’t know, everything else in my life? Little things like laundry?
No-brainer.
Today, the top of my To Do list involved finalizing a lineup for the commencement issue of the Lit Mag. Word had leaked out about the proposed Ambition theme, and, at last check, I had twenty-three irate e-mails in my in-box from Eli scribblers about how this development gave them no time to allow their muses to percolate, ruminate, agitate, and/or commiserate over the subject. Someone stayed up with a thesaurus, me-thinks (though “commiserate” was stretching it a bit). But please. God forbid they actually write from the heart and let us choose the pieces that best fit the anthology. I foresaw twenty-three unhappy careers.
Borrowing a trick from my Rose & Grave big sib, I stuck my society pin through the strap of my Eli-blue messenger bag, slung it over my shoulder, slipped my feet into a pair of yellow Chuck Taylors (Prescott College colors), and headed out the door. In the last week, spring had acquiesced to summer’s control, and the student body was out in full force, pasty white and doing everything they could to counteract the damage of being indoors all winter. Girls lay strewn about the courtyard in pastel summer skirts as if they were posed for a campus brochure, while shirtless boys practiced their Frisbee flicks. Prescott College was not known for its Ultimate team, but the chests were mostly decent. Eww, except for that one.
Unlike the girls, I was dressed for work rather than sunbathing, in another of my ubiquitous pairs of jeans and a Prescott College T-shirt. (By junior year, the average student amasses about a dozen of those things. They hand them out at will for every college event, from move-in day to the annual spring barbeque. I even have one from a Jell-O wrestling match between the Prescott College dean and master that happened sophomore year, but I don’t wear it much. It’s still stained blue.)
I arrived at the Literary Magazine’s minuscule storefront office and found Brandon already deep in damage control. The floor around his feet was littered with four-fold stingers.
I toed the nearest plane. “You’re lucky we never went to electronic submissions.”
He didn’t look up.
“Ever notice how we get five times the submissions for the commencement issue as we do for every other issue combined?” I placed my bag on my desk. “With the other issues, we’re scrambling for stories or reduced to whipping up something at the last minute ourselves so that the layout isn’t all ads for Starbucks and stationery shops.”
Brandon turned a page and kept reading.
“Of course,” I went on, taking my seat and swiveling to face him, “you’ve always been better than me at that. Writing stories on the fly, I mean.”
His eyes paused their back-and-forth scanning, and he blinked. “Thanks.”
“I’m better at the scrambling.”
“You’re certainly demonstrating that now.”
I swallowed. Too far.
Brandon nodded his head toward a neat stack of manuscripts at the corner of the desk. “Those four are possibilities.”
And the Terse Award goes to…Brandon Weare. “I’m sorry about last night.”
He finally looked at me, for all the good it did. I couldn’t tell thing one from his expression. “Which part?”
Any part that hurt his feelings.
The door to the office opened and in walked Glenda Foster, bearing a cardboard drinks holder with two Venti iced something-or-others.
I had never been happier to see my mentor, even if she had failed to tap me into her secret society and concealed from me her period of lesbian experimentation. Everyone had her off days. I was sure Glenda still loved me, even if Brandon—
Well, we don’t use the L-word in reference to Brandon.
Glenda stopped dead as she caught sight of me. “A-Amy,” she said, her voice tinged with nerves. “What are you doing here?”
My brow furrowed. “Excuse me?”
She handed one of the drinks to Brandon. “Okay, B, iced latte for you, caramel frapp for me.” Glenda licked a spot of whipped cream off the heel of her palm and avoided meeting my gaze. “Sorry to have skipped you, Amy, but B and I kinda figured you weren’t going to show up today.”
I flashed a look at Brandon. How dare he? I had just as much right to be here as he did! More even, because I was the editor! We may have argued last night, but he’d have to have a pretty low opinion of me indeed to think I’d abandon my post at the Lit Mag just to avoid him.
“What do you mean?” I asked, turning to him and struggling to keep my voice casual. “I told you I’d be here.”
“Right,” Glenda said. “It’s just…with everything going on…” She waved her hand north by northwest, as if the direction was significant.
“Everything going on?” I prompted.
Brandon cleared his throat. “At Rose & Grave.”
I froze, there on the scuffed linoleum. I reached for my belt loop, then remembered I’d put the pin on the handle of my bag.
“What,” I whispered, “is going on at Rose & Grave?”
Glenda’s eyes got wider. “You mean you don’t know?”
In one heartbeat, I’d snatched up my bag, and in the next, I was out the door. And as I left, my mind whirling with concerns, there was one that seemed to float to the top.
Great job at secrecy, Amy. This is barely your second day as a Digger, and not a single person of your acquaintance is still in the dark.
The “something going on” proved to be a crowd of about fifty people clustered at the apex of High Street. The twenty that stood out were a row of elderly men, all in business suits and sunglasses, in a line that stretched across the front border of the Rose & Grave property like some sort of human shield. Whoever had coordinated their outfits was just a tad too into those agents from The Matrix, as far as I was concerned. The tomb itself appeared to have sprouted even more padlocks and chains since my last visit.
Everyone else milled about across the street, trying their best to look as if they hadn’t staked out a seat for the showdown.
I spotted Malcolm and Clarissa and sauntered over. “What is this?”
“The backlash,” Clarissa sniffed, shooting a glance over her shoulder at the line of men. “Assholes.”
Well, that was helpful. I turned my attention to Malcolm, who was in the midst of a heated argument with his cell phone.
“I don’t care, just get your ass here—now. I can’t believe they went through with their threat. The bastards. No, no, of course not—What, you want me to just go up there and confront them? You aren’t hearing me, man, I’m telling you, there’s a crowd.”
“Just as they wanted it, too, no doubt,” observed Greg Dorian, sidling up on the other side.
“They’re patriarchs?” I said, trying to feel my way through the dark.
Everyone else nodded, leaving me wondering what meeting I’d missed.
“Look. Just get here before the newspapers do, okay?” Malcolm slammed the clamshell phone closed and commenced pacing.
Josh joined the group from where he’d been idling nearby. “Screw the crowd, Cabot. I say, if they don’t care to protect their secrecy, then why should we?”
Malcolm shook his head. “Because, newbie, unlike those guys, we actually have a secret to protect.” He glared at the shield group. “Very clever composition. I’d bet a hundred dollars that not one of them was tapped after D134—er, that is, the class of 1964.”
“What happened in 1964?” one of the other new taps asked.
“Elitist guilt. It was no longer cool to be a Digger, and they went underground.”
“Wait a second.” I sliced my hand in front of Malcolm to make him hold up. “Are you saying all this secrecy stuff is new?”
Malcolm clucked his tongue. “No respect for history, young’uns. Yes and no. We were never supposed to talk about what we do inside that tomb, or even talk about the membership. It was almost a joke, back in the 19th century when everyone would be wearing full suits everywhere, with their society pins on their suit lapels right at eye level. Insolence. Your pin would be staring everyone right in the face, but they couldn’t breathe a word about it, or you’d walk out the door.”
Things hadn’t changed too much, I reflected.
“But that same membership wasn’t a secret,” Malcolm went on. “Everyone knew who was in Rose & Grave. Hell, they used to publish the list of Digger taps in the New York Times every spring.”
“But, the oath…” I stammered. So Lydia had been right. But what kind of crap was that? If it wasn’t a secret, why did they call it a secret society? They were supposed to kill people who told! Or stick them in a dungeon. Or punish them. Or something. (Come on, you thought so, too.) They weren’t supposed to publish their names in the frickin’ New York Times!
Though, I reasoned, that might be a good thing for me. A lot of publishing people read the “paper of record.”
I clearly needed to brush up on society lore (as soon as I figured out a way to slip it into my schedule).
“It was a different oath. They didn’t talk about what happened behind the closed doors of the tomb, but everyone knew who was in the club. And that was becoming a problem. Diggers were actually getting harassed on campus. Potential taps didn’t want to be associated with the organization. We started receiving”—Malcolm shuddered—“rejections from taps. So, to survive, the membership became informally secret. Over the decades, tradition turned it into formality. Times change and so do we.” He clenched his fist and I thought he might shake it at the patriarchs. “Don’t they get that? Times fucking change!”
Demetria popped up in a patterned scarf and a pair of battered, paint-splattered overalls. “Hey, gang’s all here! Some protest, huh? Pretty good for a bunch of old guys.”
“I still say we confront them,” Josh said.
“That’s just what they want,” Malcolm argued. “Give them the excuse they need to nail us.”
Clarissa seemed to agree. “They didn’t take the same oath of secrecy we did. And going up to them in front of all these other people would be a broken oath on a silver platter. Ammunition. Pardon the mixed metaphors.”
“Then let’s call the police,” I suggested. “Don’t we have serious pull from them? At the very least, we could make them break up the crowd.” I was met with five imperious, incredulous stares.
“Pull?” Clarissa asked. “You’re joking, right?”
“Hey, guys, what’s up?” Kevin Lee, a.k.a. Frodo, skidded in, arching his neck to see over the heads of the gathered bystanders.
But clearly a group of seven exceeded the limits of Malcolm’s plausible deniability and he threw up his hands. “People, people, do none of you understand the value of discretion? Disperse, disperse.”
And everyone did, melting into the crowd with such alacrity that I lost track of them (and any chance of getting a straight answer) almost immediately.
I turned around twice, scanning for other Diggers, and finally caught sight of the senior I knew only as Poe. He was sitting on the steps of the English department, a little ways away from everyone else, pretending to read from a volume of Nietzsche while snacking on a bag of Doritos and watching the proceedings with an inscrutable eye.
Poe. Why’d it have to be Poe? As I saw it, approaching him already set me up with a handful of problems.
POSSIBLE DIFFICULTIES
1) I didn’t know his real name. Awkward, awkward.
2) He was positioned as far away from the action as one could possibly get.
3) I hate the jerk.
But the pickings were slim. I couldn’t even find Clarissa in the crowd anymore, and the blond bitch at least held the distinction of not being a person who had threatened my life recently. I took the stairs two at a time, and came to a halt directly in front of him.
“Ah, Miss Haskel,” Poe said, snapping his book shut. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”
“Exquisite. I’m looking for a straight answer on what’s going on here.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like a member of the fourth estate. Interesting. And here I thought Cabot was prevaricating.”
Dude, the SATs were four years ago. Get a life. “Listen, what’s the deal with those guys?”
Poe brushed nacho cheese dust off on the leg of his pleated dress pants, which he’d paired with a rather shabby white undershirt. Fashion victim, on top of everything else. “Those guys, as you so eloquently put it, are patriarchs merely acting upon the board of trustees’s promise, which most of my club believed to be a bluff.”
And Poe hadn’t, clearly. “What promise?”
“To close the tomb if we were so bold as to carry through with our intent to tap members of the fairer sex.” He nodded in deference to me.
The backlash…“What! This is all because of us?”
“You and the other females,” he continued as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “They refuse to recognize your inclusion.”
I tossed my hair. “They need to join the 21st century.” Or even the 20th.
“And furthermore, the board and supporting coalition of unwilling patriarchs intend to visit a punishment upon those who acted without their permission. They informed us that they would close the tomb and invalidate the membership of any Digger who supported and/or acted upon the initiation of females.”
“You sound like a lawyer,” I spluttered through my shock. He sounded so…calm!
“Thank you. I’ll be attending Eli Law come fall. At least, that’s the plan.”
(Eli Law, by the way, is rather infamous for not turning out lawyers. Supposedly the best law school in the country, but everyone on their roster either becomes professors or politicians.)
“How the hell can you be so blasé about this?” I practically shouted (Malcolm would say I was being indiscreet). “You tapped us, too!”
“Indeed I did,” Poe replied, in that infuriatingly unruffled tone.
“Well, aren’t you upset about having your—your membership invalidated?”
“I’ve had a few weeks to get used to the idea.” Poe shrugged. “I’m certainly upset about the development. But I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, I was just telling Malcolm a few moments ago—”
“That was you on the cell phone.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“And you were already here.”
“I assure you, as I’m sure you heard me assure him, my presence isn’t about to make a modicum of difference at this juncture.”
“Dammit, stop talking like that!”
His gray eyes went cold, but he obeyed. “Look, honey, I happen to agree with them. I don’t think women should be members of Rose & Grave, and I argued that point as long as my voice held out. I also held no illusions that the TTA board would ‘come around’ as soon as they saw what a great group of girls we tapped, which was the mistaken hypothesis of the rest of my club. However, when it became obvious that I was the only one of the Diggers who thought so, I decided to support my brothers.”
“Why?”
“Because the decision to tap has to be unanimous, and we were at an impasse. From that point on, I didn’t say a word. We interviewed girls, we groomed girls, we deliberated about girls, we tapped girls, and we initiated girls, and during the whole process, I never once spoke up about how I thought it was a really bad idea.”
He said “girls” like it was a dirty word. I wanted to slap him.
And still, the lecture went on. “What’s happening now is exactly what I said would happen, but I’m not going to start throwing ‘I told you so’s around. We went over the board’s head, and acted without the support of the trustees at large. We can’t take back the initiation now—you’ve been inside the tomb, inside the Inner Temple. You’ve seen everything, know everything. As far as they are concerned, we’ve committed heresy, and your class’s club is an abomination of the Order. Malcolm wants me to go down there and talk to the patriarchs because he thinks that they’ll be more likely to listen to someone who’s on their side. But because I’m on their side, I have no argument to make.”
Forget arguments to them—talk about a rimshot! I could make a dozen without breaking a sweat. “Why don’t you think women should be allowed in Rose & Grave?”
He looked at me for a long time without blinking, then stood. “Right now, the quickest answer is that tapping you has fucked up my life. They aren’t going to stop with the tomb. They’ll go after our school records. They’ll go after everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a resume to update. If I were you, I’d do the same.”
“You’re a sexist asshole.”
He stopped for a moment. “Maybe I’ll put that down under Skills.”
“And get a job with whom?” I snapped. “The Taliban?”
Emotions flashed so quickly across his face that I had a tough time catching them, but he finally settled on disdain. “I am not implying that women are in any way inferior to men. I am in full support of an elite women’s secret society on campus.”
I rolled my eyes. “Separate is not equal, buddy. An Eli law student should know that.”
“When Wellesley accepts my little brother, I’ll revisit the issue.” And then he took off down the steps.
At least now I was up to speed. And I also knew that I disliked Poe whatever-his-real-name-was a lot more than even Miss Clarissa “Slumming” Cuthbert. I trudged back down the steps and ran smack into Malcolm, who was redialing his cell phone.
“You can forget it,” I said. “He’s not coming.”
Malcolm looked at me. “Who?”
“Poe.”
Malcolm flinched at my use of the society name, but was all business as he grabbed my arm. “How do you know?”
“I just talked to him.”
“Here?” Malcolm searched the area with his eyes. “That sneaky bastard!”
“That’s not the adjective I’d use.”
He frowned. “You don’t really know him.”
Man, that whole oath of constancy thing really took, didn’t it? I wondered if I’d be jumping in to defend Clarissa next. “I know he doesn’t want me in the society.”
Malcolm sighed. “That’s not true. If he truly didn’t want it, it wouldn’t have happened.”
I shook my head. Malcolm might think he knew his society brother, but I’d looked the guy in the eyes. He’d wanted nothing to do with the “fairer sex.” Stone Age jerk.
“Okay, then, Amy, we’re on our own.” His hand slipped down to mine, and he began pulling me forward.
“What are you doing?” I cried as we pushed through the crowd.
“We’re going to talk to them.”
I started to dig my heels into the asphalt. “But what about…all that stuff you said?”
Malcolm looked back and winked. “Loophole, kiddo. We’re press.”
WAYS IN WHICH AMY HASKEL AND MALCOLM CABOT DIFFER FROM “PRESS”
Considering the above, you can probably guess my reaction.
“The hell I am!” I shouted, drawing the attention of more than a few interested bystanders. “Malcolm, have you ever even read the Eli Literary Magazine?”
He made a face, as if the very suggestion was anathema to all he found acceptable in his reading material. (Note to self: Include more page-turners in next issue.) “Please, Amy.” Regrouping, he yanked me along. “Look, you’ve got a media outlet at your disposal. That’s all I care about right now.”
Well, I thought, as he swung me face-to-face with a silver-haired human shield, at least this fit the theme of “Ambition.”
“Mr. Cabot,” said one of the patriarchs. “Quite a daring move, I must say. Whatever must your fellows think?”
My society big sib didn’t miss a beat. “Malcolm Cabot, Eli Daily News. May I ask what brings you to High Street today, sir? It appears you’re guarding the entrance to the Rose & Grave tomb. Is this true?” And then, leaning in, he hissed, “I think it would be better if this matter were handled in-house.”
“I’m sorry,” the patriarch replied. “But I really can’t talk about that.”
“You’re making fools of all of us,” Malcolm continued under his breath. “No one wants the society to be a laughingstock.”
“I’m sorry,” the patriarch replied. “But I’m really not allowed to talk about that.”
“Come on,” Malcolm said. “You have to open up a dialogue here. Stop treating me like some kind of bar—” He froze, then straightened, his eyes wide as the rules of the game became clear. “Barbarian. You prick.”
“You defied us. You pay the price.”
“Like hell.”
The patriarch went on. “And that’s not all. We intend to pursue this to the fullest extent. Good luck with your career, Mr. Cabot.”
A frigid cord of fear seemed to band my lungs at the man’s oh-so-casual tone, and I felt my blood rush in retaliation. Now it was my turn to be indignant. “Hey! Don’t you think that’s taking things a little too far?” I caught Malcolm’s warning glance. “Um, Amy Haskel, Eli Lit Mag.” Formalities aside, I continued in a lower voice. “Some stupid undergrad organization is one thing, but you have no right to mess with his future—”
“Amy Haskel,” the patriarch said. “Editor of the literary magazine.”
I flicked a strand of hair behind my shoulder as if I hadn’t a care in the world. “That’s what I said.”
“Prescott College.”
And he could read my T-shirt, too. Big deal.
“Hails from Cleveland, Ohio. Daughter of Carl, an accountant with Simpson Associates, and Mardie, a housewife and former Montessori school teacher. Literature major. Scheduled to begin an editorial internship at Horton Press in Manhattan on June 12.”
There seemed to be a sudden blockage in my throat and I fought the urge to swallow convulsively. Ignore him. It’s the stupid Diggers trick. Blah blah blah files on me. Whatever.
But…my parents’ names, my internship start date…Poe had said they’d go after me….
“Nice plan,” he sneered. “Good luck with your career.”
Malcolm had to hold me back.
A scream rose within my chest and somehow, I managed to keep my mouth shut, though I could feel my lungs constrict with the effort of holding it in. You wouldn’t dare! I thought, staring at the man so intently that even my non-existent powers of telepathy couldn’t fail in getting the point across. I’d never once looked at an adult with more concentrated animosity, but then again, I’d never before been in a situation where one had threatened me. No, they usually tried to help me—teach me something, write me recommendations, give me a summer job, tell me how impressed they were with my prodigious achievements and how excited they were to see what I’d be making of my future.
The guy seemed to be intimating he’d like to make sure that I didn’t have one.
I couldn’t breathe.
And then the cavalry arrived, in the form of the other new taps. Demetria led the charge, followed by half a dozen others. I even saw Jennifer, though George Harrison Prescott was not around.
“No!” Malcolm said. “This is a private interview.”
“Right,” Demetria said. She puffed her chest out at the head patriarch. “Gonna screw with all of us, dipshit?”
“Let’s go,” Malcolm bellowed. He herded us up and moved us past the shield and the crowd. I saw a few familiar faces at the edge of the rabble. Senior Diggers, waiting in the wings. Malcolm nodded to one as he passed. “Get him,” he said, and I had no doubt who it was he meant. “My room. Powwow.”
The words galvanized me, and I found my voice at last. Malcolm dragged me away as I raised my fist at the patriarch to deliver a parting shot. “And, by the way, I don’t live in Cleveland. I’m a suburbs girl. Shaker Heights. Get your facts straight, sucker.”
“Amy!” said Malcolm. “Discretion.”