Rites of Spring (26 page)

“That’s silly,” I said. “I hated you for much better reasons than that.”

“But not anymore?”

I looked down at our hands, beside one another on the rail, and twined mine in his. “Nope. Not anymore.”

“Because of yesterday?”

“Stop asking me that.” I squeezed his hand once, then let it go. “Ask the real question.”

He was silent for a long time. “Fine.
What is this?
”

I shut my eyes tight against the sight of the water and the night, but I could hear the sea slapping against the side of the boat. I could hear Poe breathing, and over it all, I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.

It’s Spring Break.

C
ONCLUSIONS
I R
EACHED
L
AST
N
IGHT

1)
The view from a boat railing is a lot more enjoyable when the boat is only three inches from land.

2)
As with the SATs, if you don’t know the answer to a question, you’re better off skipping it.

3)
I’m not giving up on boys. Not yet anyway.

4)
Kisses Nice.

C
ONCLUSIONS
P
OE AND
I R
EACHED
T
OGETHER
L
AST
N
IGHT

1)
It’s very unlikely that anyone is after me, in particular. For nefarious purposes anyway.

2)
For the time being, we will not mention our private time to anyone else.

3)
See #4 above.

I know nothing about conclusions Poe may have reached on his own. Like I said, the boy is very hard to read.

When I finally returned to the cabin, the girls were all sharing guilty expressions, and for a second I thought they suspected everything.

“We were just talking,” Clarissa said, “and we think we owe you an apology.”

“For what?” I was truly mystified.

“For putting you on the spot about George,” Demetria said. “Glass houses and all.”

I looked at the three of them. “It’s fine.”

“You don’t need to avoid us, is all we’re saying. We won’t talk about it anymore,” Jenny said. She was on the floor with a screwdriver and computer innards.

“I’m not avoiding you.”

Clarissa shook her head. “Come on, Amy, you weren’t in the shower all this time.”

I decided to pretend that their apology was acceptable to me, and that I wouldn’t avoid them anymore. Except I was hoping to get in another swimming lesson with Poe tomorrow morning. Or “swimming lesson,” as it were. I feared feigning interest in an isolated jog would prompt a request from Demetria to join me, so I decided to just let the whole situation work itself out tomorrow, and spent the rest of the evening learning how to construct a working computer from slightly battered scraps.

Jenny really is a genius.

And as I settled into bed that night, it occurred to me that knowledge of that sort of thing was bothering me less and less as time went on. I hadn’t gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I’d been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I’d figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh—truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile—who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers—but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I’d come to accept it.

And I understood that it didn’t make them any better than me. Jenny was a computer genius, but she had enough issues to overcome that I didn’t want to trade places with her. Odile might get her name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but she also had to deal with every bad hair day being splashed on the cover of a magazine.

But to say that it didn’t bother me from time to time? That would be a lie. The biggest problem with being a relatively small fish in the best pond ever is that you start to lower your own expectations. Maybe if I’d gone to a smaller school, or a less prestigious school, I’d have convinced myself that I was still the hotshot I’d thought I was as a high school valedictorian headed to an Ivy League college. Instead, I’d spent three years recalibrating my dreams to fit into the caste that the resident geniuses at Eli had shown me to be a part of. Above-average, to be sure, but not
summa
. Every high school student-council leader gets voted “most likely to be President.” Only two or three per decade actually get to be so. When you’re at Eli, and you’re surrounded by future presidents or children of current presidents, you see what it really takes, and then you get real. Maybe you even overcompensate in the other direction.

And no one had stopped me. Brandon may have loved me, but he’d never once suspected that I’d been looking for advice every bit as much as confirmation when I started talking about my modest ambitions. He was so sure of what he wanted in his life, why would he suspect I was wondering about my own? Why would he suspect that I’d aspire to anything else unless I said I did?

Or maybe…the mere thought burned inside my chest, but it must be completed…maybe he didn’t think I was really capable of anything else. After all, he’d edited the Lit Mag on a lark, while it had been the biggest gold star on my résumé. And all those hours last month ostensibly spent “working” on fellowship applications when really we were just talking or napping? He hadn’t actually helped me at all. Maybe he didn’t want to encourage me in that direction. Maybe he didn’t want to push me toward something where he thought I’d fail.

Perhaps he’d been every bit as shocked as I was when I’d been tapped by Rose & Grave.

What if that was why the society had become so significant in my life, the way Quill & Ink never would have been? It was the one thing about my college career that was really extraordinary. I was a Digger, a member of the most illustrious society on campus, filled with all of the brightest and most promising students at Eli. Proof positive that there was something of that teenaged hotshot inside me still. The knowledge that I’d been a substitute tap had bothered me for quite a while, but perhaps it was time to get over it. The events of the previous year showed that I did have what it took to wield significant influence in Rose & Grave, and—I suspected—beyond. Wasn’t that exactly what Poe had said last semester? Long before he had any warm feelings toward me, he’d respected what I could do.

I was never going to be famous. Didn’t want to be. But I would be important.

Once I figured out how.

With such ruminations lulling me to sleep, is it any wonder I spent the night with shadow governments and secret plans? In my dreams, there was a vast conspiracy afoot, and I was the only person who could bring it to light. I had all the connections to do so, but was afraid of how the consequences would affect the leaders I had come to love. What did I value more: my friends within the conspiracy or the world at large? My unconscious state had a hard time coming to a conclusion about it
^*7
, but it was undisputed that my brain had whipped up some really great costumes for us all to wear whilst I fretted.

Costumes are of the utmost importance, as any good society member knows.

I was no closer to a scheme for sneaking off with Poe the following morning, and as the clock ticked on inexorably to breakfast time, I began to fret about my options.

1)
Spend time with Poe

2)
Spend time with my friends

3)
…

I desperately needed a number three. Why was this always the choice when it came to guys? You could either avoid them and spend quality time with your girlfriends (who, let’s face it, have all had a longer shelf life than any of your romantic relationships), or you could ditch your friends and do the romance thing, thereby providing you with fodder for the very thing you and your friends spent the most time talking about: boys.

Look at the situation with Lydia. I had a hard enough time tolerating her joined-at-the-hipness with Josh, and I considered him a close personal friend. It was a lot harder to accept a friend’s ditching if you actively disapproved of the guy she was ditching you for.

And they would if they knew. I was glad we’d decided not to tell anyone. It was too new, for starters, and too amorphous. He wasn’t my boyfriend, wasn’t even my friend-with-benefits. How could I explain this whole development to them when I couldn’t even figure it out for myself? Plus, they’d all pretty much made their positions clear regarding society incest.

I watched the other girls as they got ready. Jennifer, clearly struck with a bit of hair envy since hers had yet to grow out of its pixie cut (which, if you ask me, suited her just fine, in a sort of Angelina Jolie-in-
Hackers
kind of way), was tying Clarissa’s blond tresses into something called a “Dutch braid.” Demetria was moaning about starvation and cursing the island policy of keeping food out of the cabins (and thus away from invading hordes of bugs).

None of them knew it, but I was once again living up to my society name: Bugaboo. Clarissa had been wrong. The Diggers weren’t devolving into a dating club. Just me. Demetria and Odile may have had a moment or two, but from what she said yesterday, it sounded a heck of a lot more chaste than my little shower encounter. And I had no idea what was going on with Jenny (not a new circumstance, to be sure), but whatever her feelings were for Harun (and vice versa), I doubted she’d acted upon them. No, it was just me who had dipped my toes into Rose & Grave waters, and was now blithely double-dipping. Not only was I the club conspiracy theorist, I was fast becoming the club slut as well.

“I can’t take it anymore! When’s breakfast?” Demetria said. “This is why I don’t live on campus. I like to eat when I want to eat, not sit around like a calf in a feedlot and wait for the dining halls to open.”

“Was that your first attempt at a barnyard metaphor?” Clarissa asked. “Because it wasn’t half bad.”

I doubted any of the three of them had actually seen a barnyard in their lives.

Jenny tied off the end of Clarissa’s hair. “This is why we have Starbucks.”

“We don’t have Starbucks on Cavador.” Demetria rolled off the bed and crossed to the dresser. “Whose mints are these? Can I have one?”

I looked up too late and saw that she was ripping open my Life Savers. Poe’s Life Savers.

“No!” I shouted. Demetria froze.

It was too late. They were open. Fourteen tiny little white rings exposed.

“I’m sorry,” Demetria said, her tone one of pure confusion. “Were you…saving these for something?”

“No,” I said quickly. “It’s fine, go ahead.” They were just mints. He hadn’t even bought them with me in mind. They weren’t a love token, weren’t something special. They were a joke. He’d been making fun of me. But they were also the first thing Poe had ever given me.

I didn’t watch as Demetria popped one in her mouth, but I heard, or thought I heard, a decided crunch as she crushed the ring between her teeth. She wasn’t even going to savor them.

Oh, for Pete’s sake. This was ridiculous. They were mints. I hopped to my feet and joined her by the dresser. I pulled another Life Saver out of the package and put it in my mouth, letting the menthol burn against my tongue. Just mints.

Demetria narrowed her eyes. “You okay?”

I ran my finger over the package, trying in vain to pat down the ragged ends of wax paper and foil. “Yeah, why?”

“’Cause you’re freaking me out.”

And a moment later, we both almost choked as a voice broke through the morning stillness. “All knights, to the tomb. All knights, to the tomb.”

Demetria laughed. “Okay, that’s gotta be the weirdest announcement anyone’s ever made over a P.A.”

And when we finished dressing and arrived at the tomb, it was to greet the solemn face of Salt, who frowned at us all. “It is my great regret to inform you,” he said, with vast solemnity, “that I have received a very disturbing report from my counterpart in New Haven.”

“What?” George said. “Has something happened to Hale?”

“No.” Man, could Salt draw it out or what? “According to my counterpart, alarm bells went off in the Inner Temple of the tomb yesterday evening at 7:45
P.M
. Apparently, the Inner Temple was breached by an outsider.”