The moment I saw him, I knew exactly what I should say:
1) Brandon, go home. I can’t do this tonight.
2) Oh, flowers! How sweet! Golly, I’m wiped. Can we chat tomorrow?
3) Brandon, because I like and respect you so much, I’m going to be honest. This isn’t working out. Exhibit A: I’ve just spent the last half hour making out with another man.
Funny. I knew all of this, and yet the words that tumbled out of my mouth were, “How long have you been sitting here?” In my room? Holding flowers?
“About five minutes?” I saw the notebook in his lap. He was leaving me a message, not sitting around in my room, waiting for me to return. Duh.
“Where’s Lydia?” I asked next.
“Not here.” He looked at me. “It’s Sunday night.”
Of course. A time when all the normal society members were happily ensconced in their tombs.
“Come to think, what are you doing here?”
I decided to play coy. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, Amy…” He sighed, gave up, and held out the roses. “For you.”
“Thanks.” I gave them an obligatory sniff. Like all roses, the heady scent hit my noggin a full three seconds later. It’s almost when you’ve given them up as merely pretty that a rose wallops you with its perfume.
“Your new favorite.” Brandon winked.
I smiled sadly into the blooms. “Yeah, I guess. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“It’s an apology. For the way I treated you this morning at the office. I was rude.”
“I deserved it.” Out loud, too.
He shook his head. “No. Well, okay, maybe a little. But mostly—I’m actually glad you are here tonight, Amy. We need to talk.”
“Tonight?” But…I have WAP reading. All of a sudden even Russian literature seemed preferable.
“This second.”
Uh-oh. Had Glenda talked him into this? But even as I thought it, I knew I couldn’t blame this on a conspiracy. I’d kept Brandon waiting for far too long.
But why had he chosen tonight of all nights to do something about it? Tonight, when I’d been this close to hooking up with someone else.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “We’ll talk.”
But now that I’d acquiesced, Brandon seemed in no hurry to get to the point. He stood, stalked to the bookshelves across the common room, and ran his hand through his already shaggy brown hair. It was so very Brandon that I couldn’t help but smile. He was so damn cute.
Almost instantly, a hot, horrible wash of guilt quenched that budding tenderness. Yep, cute enough to forget about and go make out with George.
“I’m not saying this isn’t my fault, too, Amy,” Brandon was saying, and I snapped back to attention.
That sounded promising. “You’re not?”
“I mean, I think if I’d been clear from the beginning, we wouldn’t have let things go down this…amorphous path.”
“Oh.”
“Because that’s not how I wanted it. Sure, you weren’t ready on Valentine’s Day, and I didn’t want to push you, but now…” He returned and sat beside me, pushing the roses aside and taking my hand in his. “After everything we’ve done together…God, it’s so ironic. Aren’t guys supposed to be trying to talk girls into strings-free sexual relationships?”
“Well, times have changed,” I said. “It’s the 21st century.” Although, try to explain that to a hundred years’ worth of Diggers….
“But that’s not what I want,” Brandon went on, then hesitated. “Because…I’m in love with you, Amy.”
PEOPLE WHO HAVE TOLD ME THEY LOVE ME
1) My parents. Duh. Also assorted relatives.
2) Little Stevie Morris, in second grade.
3) Jacob Allbrecker, because you’re supposed to say that to a girl when you take her virginity. (I said it, too, to be fair.)
4) Alan Albertson, right before he left for London.
5) Lydia, especially when I bring her late-night snacks.
From the above list, it’s easy to discern that Brandon Weare is neither the first nor the most important person in my life who has used the L-word in reference to me. And yet, my familiarity with the concept mattered not one iota in that magical moment when another person comes out and admits that they favor you above anyone else in the world.
Because, let’s face it, that’s what love—romantic love—is, right? Liking that person best?
Here’s where I wish I hadn’t dropped that Greek philosophy survey right when we got to Symposium. (That and the fact that it was way too easy for Malcolm to rag on me about Aristotle.) I remember something about aliens with too many arms and legs, but that’s about it. And really, who has a better understanding of love based on extraterrestrial appendages?
“Earth to Amy.”
Exactly. How did I miss out on this alien love-fest thingy? “I’m listening.”
He frowned. “Not the reaction I was looking for.”
“Dare I ask what it is you were?”
He took a deep breath. “What anyone is who says something like that.” But, then, just as quickly, “It’s okay. I have no expectations of you saying it, or feeling it.”
Just hope. He didn’t even have to say it. He never should have had to say any of this.
“But I had to tell you,” he went on. “So—I don’t know. You’d know why I act the way I do.”
“I already know why, Brandon.” I put my hand over his, there between us on the sofa.
Another deep breath. “Yeah. I was kind of hoping that you didn’t, and that if I told you…” He trailed off and looked down at our clasped hands.
He hoped that if he came right out and said it, I would stop screwing around and fall in love with him, too. I knew this man. Knew him well enough to transcribe the thoughts in his head.
Strange. With most men, admission of unrequited love is a little wishy-washy. Forget Cyrano de Bergerac, forget Romeo Montague, Act One, Scene One. Girls only go mushy for those men in fiction. In real life, we like a little hard-to-get. Show me a pining man and I’ll show you a pussy.
But Brandon continued to break the mold, even here. Beneath the bare bulbs shining harsh, 120-watt light down from the common-room ceiling, seated across from me on a threadbare couch with his hands full of flower-stand roses and his eyes full of expectation, Brandon Weare had never looked more like a man worthy of my love.
And I had never felt like a bigger bitch. Here before me, in splendid, golden reality, sat a kind, brilliant, funny, cute, affectionate lover, the kind of guy that any girl I knew would be happy to not only have in her bed, but also to take home to Mom once school was out. Moreover, he loved me.
And I’d been out with George Harrison Prescott, a player, a ladies’ man of the first order. Yes, he was cute, and yes, he was funny, and for all I knew, he might be brilliant as well, but he was not and would never be boyfriend material. I’d known that for years.
But, wait a second, who said I wanted a boyfriend? I so didn’t have time for a boyfriend. Last time I had a boyfriend, I’d been totally burned. I’d told Lydia as much last night. I’d been telling Brandon as much for the past two months.
“Brandon, we’ve talked about this….”
“Yeah, we have.” He made a sound of disgust. “And I think you’re full of crap.” Mocking me, he began to tick off a list on his fingers. “We can’t be together because, one, I’m not good with boyfriends. Well, you’ve never tried it with me. Two, I’m too busy. But not too busy to have sex with me every week or so, nor go to dinner with me once a week, nor to call me and see me and hang out half a dozen other times. You think a title change will make a difference in the time commitment? Three, I don’t want to ruin our friendship. Well, I’m telling you right now, Amy, that it has ruined our friendship. I can’t ever go back to the way things were before Valentine’s Day. If I’d known it was going to lead to this, I probably—fuck it, I probably would have done it anyway, but I’d have thought about it a lot more seriously. I want to be with you…or not. I can’t be your booty call anymore.”
And there it was. The ultimatum. “So, decide tonight?”
“Yes. No. Yes. Decide tonight.” He nodded briskly.
I bit my lip, and tasted pomegranate juice. “Tonight is…not the best time.”
“You’ve had two months to think about it.”
Yeah, but twenty minutes ago I had another guy’s tongue down my throat. I could still taste him. I was surprised Brandon couldn’t smell him. “I—I need to go to the bathroom.”
Brandon’s shoulders dropped. “I’ll wait,” he said resolutely.
I rushed out of the suite and into the floor bathroom, trying not to hyperventilate. A quick trip into the stall (you do remember the four and a half 312s, right?) and then I checked out my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My mouth was stained a deep purple; it looked like I’d been sucking on pickled beets. My lips were swollen, too, and my cheeks were flushed, still (or maybe again). How could Brandon have missed these signs? I balanced my hands on the porcelain and took several deep, shuddering breaths, until my treacherous heart slowed down to normal measures.
He said he loved me.
I splashed cold water on my face and ran a comb through my hair. I brushed my teeth, concentrating on my stained red gums and scrubbing the hell out of my tongue. Thinking back on it, I should have been a little more self-aware about my actions.
I was getting rid of George.
For Brandon’s benefit.
Because Brandon had cared about me for months. Because it had been Brandon who’d sent me funny e-mails, and cards on my birthday, Brandon who had held me the last time I’d cried, Brandon who’d always been there to offer advice, who’d been the one to convince me, however obliquely, to join Rose & Grave in the first place. George was a Johnny-come-lately. I did love Brandon. Maybe not yet in a way that Shakespeare would have endorsed, but definitely in a way that probably had its own special name in ancient Greek. Phileventuallyoksis or something.
After all, that Roxanne chick went for Cyrano once he finally approached her himself, right? (Or was that just in the Steve Martin version? My literary education is notoriously deficient in Balzac—if it even was Balzac.[4] It’s because the Balzac and Dickens seminar was full last semester, further proving my theory that students will study anything if it has a cool enough title.) Try someone else. Jane Austen. Marianne Dashwood and—well, Colonel Brandon. Now, if that’s not a hint, I don’t know what is.
I rushed back into my suite, hoping Brandon hadn’t misinterpreted my prolonged absence. While I’d been gone, he’d managed to stuff the entire bouquet of roses into a crackled-finish plastic dining-hall glass and had wedged the whole top-heavy shebang between two of Lydia’s thick poli-sci textbooks. Now he was back on the couch, fingering the strap on my messenger bag. I froze.
“Nice pin.”
“Brandon—”
He stood, his hand out as if to stop me. “Don’t leave the room. I’ll never mention it again. Tabled forever, if that’s what will make you happy.”
But the thing was, I actually wanted him to ask me about it. I wanted to tell him what was going on, and see if he could parse it any better than the rest of us had. Brandon fixed things. He’d always fixed things for me.
Who wouldn’t love a guy like him?
“Should I go?” he asked.
“No.”
He blinked, as if surprised. “Really?”
I nodded. “I can’t—I can’t say what you want me to. I won’t say that…yet. But I want to be with you. For real.”
It was as if Brandon had been strapped to a frame that collapsed at my words. He took two steps forward and enfolded me in his arms. His brown eyes had never seemed so bright, his Amy-smile, the one I knew he reserved just for me, had never seemed so unreserved.
I ran my hands through his hair and cupped his face in my hands. His skin was golden beneath my fingertips. He’d gotten a tan this weekend. Probably out somewhere, playing badminton while I fooled around with boys in black robes. Boys who, as it turned out, never wanted me around in the first place.
Whereas Brandon always had.
I kissed him, and his mouth felt warm and familiar against mine. His breath was not tinged with pomegranate and honey, and our bodies lined up perfectly with no need for me to tilt my chin to meet him. Yet, I sighed, and he smiled, and I took his hand and led him into my bedroom, thankful to whatever it was that had made me hesitate outside with George, and only mildly curious whether a girl who would hook up with two boys in the same night was a totally irredeemable slut or just a person who had managed to come to her senses before she completely screwed up her life.
In retrospect, I probably should have pondered this last part a bit more.
I woke up super-early on Monday morning (okay, more like 9 A.M.—but I am a college student) to the phone ringing. As I have already mentioned, my mother has a freaky sixth sense of when her daughter has engaged in illicit sexual activity, even from five states away. She was probably calling to see if she could discern any post-coital qualities to my voice, or perhaps detect the rustlings of a boy in the background, shimmying into his boxer briefs.
I stumbled over a cascade of paper airplanes (don’t ask, really) and, hopping into a robe, ran out the door to answer the phone.
“Hello?” Hello, Mom. No, of course you didn’t wake me. Don’t you know? I often engage in Monday morning orgies. In fact, as you called, I was just enjoying an especially thorough rogering from two men named Paolo and Butch. (That would throw her for a loop.)
“Amy?” The voice at the other end of the line was not maternal, yet it did sound worried. “It’s Malcolm.”
“Oh.” Couch. Plop. “Call to apologize?”
Silence. “Right. Yesterday. No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t, because I, for one, do not agree with—well, I can’t really talk about that right now.”
“Figures.” I wondered when Brandon’s first class was.
“That’s actually not why I’m calling. I need to see you, ASAP. Do you have any classes this morning?”
“Don’t you already know that, with your awesome Digger mind tricks? Oh, wait, I forgot, there are no mind tricks. No special powers, no secret shadow government, no ‘we’ll cut out your tongue if you talk’—it’s all a big smoke screen designed to make your dicks look bigg—”
“Amy, I need to see you right away. It’s important. Barbarian matters.”
Barbarian? I stole another look into my bedroom, where Brandon, still dead to the world (lucky guy), was making my lumpy duvet look even lumpier. Did Malcolm know about that? And how? Maybe it wasn’t all a trick. I looked around the room. Nah. That whole bugging thing was just another one of the conspiracy theories.
And yet…“What is it?” I asked.
“Not on the phone.” Oh, right, and I’m not supposed to buy into the bugging thing when he says stuff like that? “Can you meet me in half an hour?” He named a campus coffee shop.
“Well, I kind of have some work—” Like a kilo of WAP.
“It’s an emergency.”
I grunted. “Fine. You’re buying the mochas.”
Having agreed to the rendezvous, I rushed off to the shower for a quick eradication of last night and then back to my room to dry off and dress in a manner that wouldn’t disturb my—my boyfriend. The pristine term fairly crackled in my head.
I ran a comb through freshly shampooed hair and glanced over at Brandon, who lay twisted in my sheets. Blue morning light from the small window above my bed cast a pale glow over his golden skin, and his hair stood up in all directions. Even in sleep, he was smiling.
I twisted my hair into an impromptu updo, leaned over the bed, and deposited a light kiss on his cheek. “I’ll be back soon,” I whispered to his sleeping form.
First, I had to get some things straight with Malcolm.
A very weary Malcolm looked as if he’d been waiting at the coffee shop for a while, but the paper cup of mocha he slid at me the second I arrived was still scorching hot. I softened slightly. He still owed me an explanation for what had gone down at the meeting yesterday, but at least he was picking up the tab.
“Right on time,” he said. “Promptness is much admired by Diggers.”
“So I was told at my interview.” I slugged back a draught of the coffee. “But let’s get a couple things straight here, Lancelot.” He flinched at the name, but I ignored him. “The ladies of D177 are not going to roll over to some outdated Neanderthal ideas of a ‘woman’s role.’ So if that was your plan, you can drop it right now.”
“That was never my plan,” Malcolm stated. “Though I apparently can’t speak for all my brothers.”
Frickin’ Poe.
“In fact,” he went on, “I want to apologize for the way the meeting went yesterday. If it’s any consolation, most of the seniors went and found the taps at the bar last night. We heard about the New York scheme and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to help.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.” After all, when the girls had stormed out yesterday, Malcolm hadn’t moved a muscle. And I wanted to know why.
“You would have seen it last night. But I think you’d already left.” He tilted his head and looked at me curiously. “With…George?”
Oh, yeah. That reminded me. “And another thing, I will date whoever I want to, and sleep with them, too, and there’s not a thing you society people can say about it.”
Malcolm stared at me with his mouth open. “Excuse me?”
“Come on, Malcolm. ‘Barbarian matters’? Please.”
He laughed out loud then, the creases between his eyes momentarily fading. “Yes, Amy, you can sleep with whomever you want. But that’s not why I called you this morning. I don’t care what you and George do, and none of the other Diggers do, either.”
“I did not sleep with George!” I cried, indignant. No, I turned him down, and really, how many women can say that? “I slept with…someone else.”
Malcolm blinked. “Um, okaaaay. Whatever. I don’t have time for a rundown of your obviously very busy social life.”
Hey! It wasn’t all that busy!
“And honestly, I don’t really care. Save it for your C.B.”
Those Connubial Bliss reports he’d told me about after the initiation, where we spill the history of our sex lives. “Right. As if we’re ever going to see the inside of that tomb again.”
“I think you will. The taps I talked to last night seemed pretty determined.” He shook his head. “But I digress. Amy, I need your help. It’s an emergency.”
“The ‘barbarian matters’ of which you spoke?”
“Exactly.” He took a deep breath. “Remember that girl you saw on the stairs yesterday?”
“The one from the EDN? Genevieve Grady? Yeah.” After all, we both ran in the same English Lit circles. I think I even had a lecture or two with her freshman year.
“Well, she’s my ex-girlfriend.”
Does not compute. Though it explained her hostility. “How long ago was this?”
“Would it surprise you if I said six weeks?”
“Recalling our conversation in your bed not two days ago, yes.”
He took a sip of his drink, as if for fortification. “Are you familiar with the term ‘beard’?”
I furrowed my brow. “Not the facial hair?”
“No. The fake lover.”
“Not really.” But then it hit me. “So you were dating Genevieve in order to throw off—”
“My dad, other suspicious individuals, anyone who might rat me out.” He toyed with the corrugated cardboard ring on his cup. “Anyway, Genevieve didn’t really get it, though after a while, she kind of figured out the score when I didn’t…” He gestured weakly. “The problem is, she sort of fell for me. I liked her a lot, she was a really great girl. But not like that. I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”
But he hadn’t bothered to tell her beforehand! Even I hadn’t been that cruel to Brandon. At least he’d known where I stood all these months. “And she resents that? Gotta tell you, buddy, so far I’m on her side.”
“Just wait.” He looked down at the table, as if bracing himself for the next part of his story. “When we broke up, it was…really bad. I wanted to stay friends. I wanted it to be what it has always been, but she was…vicious. She said the most awful things to me, and we didn’t speak for weeks. You have to understand, I had thought very highly of her. But not after the way she treated me when we broke up.”
My sympathy meter hovered in the negatives. “Well, yeah, but she was the victim here. You made it out as if you wanted to be her boyfriend, but you were just using her.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t wrong,” Malcolm replied. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. At least, not without her understanding what was really going on.”
“Did you tell her that?”
Malcolm shrugged. “Do you think it made her feel better?”
He had me there. If she had truly been in love with him, hearing that he’d thought she’d be cool with using her wouldn’t have mollified her in the slightest. But what was the point? “So what does this have to do with me?”
He took a deep breath. “Actually, Amy, it has everything to do with you.”
“You lost me,” I said, shaking my head.
“I really cared about Genevieve. She was so smart, so talented, so accomplished. The editor of the Eli Daily News. Pretty. Well connected, going places. She’d be the type of girl my father would be proud to see me dating.”
I circled my hand in the air. “Yeah? And?”
“A model woman.” He looked at me meaningfully.
Where had I heard that phrase recently? Someone had said it to me, like a command, almost. Like an expectation to live up to…
Oh. My. God. He was not telling me this. I might not be the genius that Jennifer Santos or Joshua Silver was, but this Digger tap was not a complete fool. And she’d just figured out the score.
Malcolm, like a runaway train speeding toward a cliff, went on. “But after we broke up, she was so wretched and mean-spirited, I just couldn’t bring myself to—”
“Tap her.”
He let out the breath. “Yeah.”
“So,” I said, pushing forward to the excruciating finish, “you tapped me instead.”
“Yeah.”
I spilled my mocha right then. The hot liquid splattered all over the table, soaking our napkins, drowning his weird combo bagel, staining the sleeve of his stylish denim jacket, and making a glorious little puddle in my lap.
“Fuck.” Malcolm grabbed a handful of napkins and started tossing them around to mop up the worst of the spill. I took another handful to dab at my lap.
“Amy, are you all right?”
When I looked up, it was through a veil of hot tears.
“Oh, I’m fine,” I hissed at him. “Everything makes sense now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been asking myself why the hell Rose & Grave would ever be interested in a person like me. Now I know. They weren’t.”
“That’s not completely accurate, Amy.”
And now he was channeling Poe! “I know what I’m talking about! At least in this, I know I do. I was sitting there, wondering why all the other taps seemed to already understand so much about the Diggers and know each other so well. It’s not like Clarissa and Demetria run in the same social circles. You had a grooming period, didn’t you?” Poe had even said as much to me yesterday, but it had been tough to hang on to every detail in his sexist diatribe. “They all knew, unlike me, exactly who was coming for them on Tap Night.”
He nodded, still not looking at me.
“That’s why Clarissa was so surprised to see me with that letter in the library! That’s why they all rushed me in the Grand Library after I was initiated.”
Again, a pitiful little nod.
“See?” I tapped my temple with my free hand. “Not so clueless as I seem! And you—I thought you were my champion! You stood up for me back at the interview, you watched over me during the initiation. You were just trying to ensure that I made the cut.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s a standard thing for big sibs to do.”
“But it was more important for me than for the others. I was a last-minute substitute. All those other taps were known quantities. You had to make sure I worked out.”
“Amy, that doesn’t really matter now.”
“Clearly, it does. Because I can tell that I’m different from the others. And they can tell, too. The rest of the taps look at me and ask themselves what I’m doing here. I know they do.”
“I think you’re being paranoid.”
I gave him a look. Get in line. The other Digger taps looked at me as if I were about to fit us all for aluminum sombreros.
He quickly backtracked. “Okay, if they were acting weird at first, it’s just because they were expecting Genevieve. But you were the one who, as you said yesterday, got tapped, got initiated. You’re the member now. You’re their fellow.”
I twirled my finger in the air. “Whoopee. A year spent knowing I’m not really good enough to be there. At least it explains the real reason behind the society name you picked out for me. Bugaboo. Pretentious-speak for pain in the ass. Is that what your expectation was? That I’d constantly be trailing behind the others?”
“Good job with the dictionary.” He rolled his eyes. (Excuse me? Now he doesn’t even have faith in my standing vocabulary. I don’t look everything up.)
“You didn’t want me.”
“Now, that’s not true. You may not have been my original choice—note that I’m not saying first—but we wouldn’t have tapped you at all if we didn’t think you belonged. We only have fifteen slots.”
I was…wait-listed. At Rose & Grave. I’ve never been wait-listed. I even got into Eli through Early Decision. Amy Haskel is not wait-list material.
“Now, where have I heard you say that before?” I asked facetiously. “Oh, that’s right, when you were talking about how much everyone wanted women in the group. Well, we disproved that little theory yesterday, didn’t we? How many of your brothers will I have to survey before I get to the truth about this one?” Probably only one: Poe.
“Enough!” Malcolm banged his hands down on the sticky, mochafied table. “You know, this is exactly why we burn the records of our delibs. People’s feelings get hurt. I want you, and they want you, and what happened before doesn’t matter. You’re in; she’s not. I never would have told you at all if I’d known you’d take it so poorly.”
“News flash, honey,” I shot back. “Women don’t like being used.”
Malcolm stared at me for one long, silent moment. Then he stood up, threw his wad of towels down on the table, and walked out. Through the pane of glass in the front of the shop, I watched him cross the street and pause on the opposite corner, covering his face with his hands and taking several deep breaths.
Good riddance. After all, it’s not as if the jerk had done me any favors recently. Well, he’d washed my clothes and bought me two breakfasts (like a Hobbit). There was that. But he’d also dragged me into a Battle of the Sexes that should have been over and done with a good thirty years ago, all because he needed a warm body to fill a slot.
I didn’t belong in Rose & Grave, and that was that. There. Easy. Over. No more rubbing elbows with Clarissa Cuthbert and trying to keep the peace between Odile and Demetria. No more putting up with the condescension of that wretched Poe. Just leave them all to their little games and get back to the life I had before this mess started. Who needed a secret society anyway? I’d only joined because Rose & Grave was supposed to be so all-powerful and scary. But in truth, they were exactly like Brandon had characterized them: Paleolithic, in both outlook and influence. Hardly anything I’d heard about them was true, and on top of their utter lack of omnipotence, they had a seriously backwards perspective on gender equality.
So, who needed them? Who needed rich old men trying to tell me who I was and could be? Who needed rich, young, gay—if closeted—men measuring my worth on a scale? Who needed any of them threatening my future? I had good grades, good friends, a great—if new—boyfriend, and a prestigious-sounding—if boring—summer job.
Screw ’em.
I dumped the mess of napkins and soggy breakfast in the nearest trash can and marched out of the shop, head held high. I was going to go straight home and tell Brandon he was right all along.
But when I arrived back at the suite, the whiteboard hanging from our door had a note scrawled across it. “Call Horton, 911” with a number, and Lydia’s scrawled “L” beneath. Puzzled, I skipped waking up the boy in my bedroom and went straight for the phone.
An assistant, sounding nervous, put me right through.
“Oh, Amy,” said my future boss, her tone boding ill. “I thought your roommate left you a message.”
“She left me a message to call you.”
“Yes, well…” The woman trailed off, seeming to grow more uncomfortable with each passing second. “The thing is, Amy, we’re going to have to cancel your internship with us this summer.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “What? Why?”
My future boss (No! No, not my boss now! My ex–future boss? My future contrary-to-fact boss?) hesitated. “Well, I’m not really at liberty to get into company policy right now, Amy. I can’t apologize enough for putting you in this difficult situation. I feel terrible, really—”
“Tell me why.” You know how in books, they say, ‘Her blood ran cold’? So not just an expression.
Good luck with your career.
“I’m sorry. I’m not at liber—”
“Give me a satellite view,” I insisted. “Budget cuts? Departmental shifts? Decided I’m not qualified to run the Xerox machine? Tell me. I need to know.”
“Amy, I can’t—”
“No!” I cried into the phone, probably shocking myself more than her. “You have to tell me why.”
“I can’t tell you why.” Or she’d have to kill me, no doubt.
“Does it…” I swallowed, composed myself, and began again, softly. “Does it have anything to do with Rose & Gr—”
“I need to go now, Amy. Good-bye.” And she hung up.
I was still staring at the phone, mouth agape, when Brandon, my sweet barbarian boyfriend, came out of my bedroom, rubbing his eyes. I must have awakened him with my screaming.
“Hey,” he said. “Anything wrong?”
Yes. Everything.
4 The confessor freely admits that this was a blatant lie.