Tap & Gown (26 page)

After that, I’d gotten a Dear Jane letter. He didn’t even have the balls to tell me in person.

“And you?” I added shortly.

“Trying to figure out what’s got you so riled up.”

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“Well, that’s none of your business anymore, now, is it?” I turned on my heel to go.

“Amy,” he called to my back. “Felicity and I broke up.”

My steps faltered for a split second.

Tempting Responses

1)
A frosty “How nice for you.”

2)
Same, but can the frosty.

3)
“How ironic. I myself have a boyfriend now.”

But I kept walking, perhaps a shade more quickly, until I rejoined Michelle at the table. She looked up, startled, as I sat down.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she said. “So, we still friends?”

Friends? Yes. Potential society brothers? Not so much. “Sure.”

She looked relieved. “Good, because I have a huge favor to ask you.” She leaned over the table and lowered her voice. “See that guy at three o’clock? The one in the blue shirt?”

Though blue shirts were as common at Eli as diamond solitaires in the Junior League, I nodded. The man she meant was impossible to miss. To start with, he was at least 6'5?. And then there was the fact that the particular shade of blue in his polo shirt precisely matched the icy hue of his eyes. They stood out like laser beams in his deeply tanned, attractive face.

Also, he was staring at us.

“Mmm.” I ate a bite of Spanish rice.

“He’s my ex-boyfriend.”

“Sheesh, you, too?” I murmured. “I just ran into mine.”

“Yeah, well, if I run into mine, we’re in big trouble. So will you walk out with me?”

I looked down at my uneaten lunch. “Now?”

“Right now.” She suddenly hunched down in her seat. “Too late.”

“Shelly.” The voice boomed above our heads. I looked up to see Michelle’s mountain of an ex standing over the table. Michelle stared down at her plate. “What are you doing in Commons, honey?”

Michelle was silent.

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“It’s strange to see you down at this end of campus.” His voice was perfectly friendly, but if Michelle could have slid under the table, she would have. “Especially on days that you don’t have your Art History class.” He looked at me. “Who is your friend?” He stuck out his hand. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you yet.”

“I’m Amy Haskel,” I said, looking from Michelle and back to him. Something was wrong with this guy’s eyes. A shiver passed through me. I did not want to take his hand.

“Amy.” He smiled down at Michelle. “Nice to make new friends, isn’t it, Shelly?”

He’d positioned himself directly behind her. She couldn’t push her chair out with him standing there. Her hands pressed against the edge of the table like she was ready to bolt.

“Please go away, Blake,” Michelle said in a small but firm voice.

“Yeah, I bet you have to be getting back to your apartment anyway. It’s such a far walk from everything. Sure you don’t need me to give you a ride out there? I’d be happy to.”

“Please go away Blake,” Michelle repeated.

“Come on, Shelly, I’m just trying to help. Why do you always have to be so difficult—”

“I think she told you to go away,” I said.

His eyes shot to me and I froze like a squirrel in the path of a runaway bike. “I don’t care what you think,” he said, tone calm as ever. “Jesus, Michelle, looks like your taste in friends hasn’t improved at all.

You still like hanging out with people who think they know what’s best for you.”

“Can you back away, please?” I asked. “Michelle’s trying to push her chair out.”

Blake didn’t move.

“I think the lady asked you to back up,” Brandon said. He was standing in the space between the table rows, tray gripped in both hands, smiling serenely up at the behemoth in our way. “And since you’re blocking the aisle, I’d say it was time to move along.”

Blake stared daggers at Brandon, whose expression didn’t change a bit. Blake had two choices here: cause a scene or back down.

He chose the latter. Michelle shot out of her chair and headed for the doors at the end of the cavernous Commons. I cast a guilty look at our unbussed trays and started to follow.

“Amy,” Brandon said. I turned around and he opened his mouth to speak, then waved me off. “Later.”

“Agreed.” That was the new trend with me and guys: file under “later.”

I went after Michelle as she burst into the marble-and-granite memorial hall outside Commons and booked it toward the exit. As always, the sculpted dome and the hundreds of carved-in-all-caps names lining the walls resounded with the thunderous echoes of the students who passed through on their way to and from the science side of campus. Legend had it that the names of Rose & Grave members featured
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special carvings to tip off their Digger status, but I’d never bothered to confirm it.

“Wait!” I increased my pace to just below a sprint and as my cry bounced around the dome, several students looked up and Michelle slowed to a stop by a column and a metal stand filled with yesterday’s copies of the
Eli Daily News
.

“So,” she said, folding herself into the space behind the column, “I guess you know now why I should have picked Jamie.”

1*No wonder she and Jamie had gotten along so well. They both had an inordinate fondness for soy products.

2*For which the confessor is profoundly relieved, because, seriously? This secrecy thing? Profoundly tiring.

“Thanks for letting me come here,” Michelle said as Clarissa handed her a mug of tea.

“Don’t even think about it,” said my fellow knight, patting Michelle on the shoulder and returning to her seat across the room. She curled her feet up underneath her on the buttery, cream-colored leather love seat, and picked an invisible bit of fluff off her white silk slacks. “As I said last time: Any friend of Amy’s is a friend of mine.”

Michelle nodded in understanding. “That’s how it works, right?”

Clarissa smiled in a much better imitation of the Madonna than I’d ever been able to pull off. “If you like.”

“I was just worried that if I went straight home …” Michelle shuddered. “He’d follow me.”

“Has he done that before?” I asked.

She nodded. “I had to change apartments once this semester already. This one’s got a doorman, but …”

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She shrugged. “People aren’t always militant about making guests sign in, you know?”

“True,” Clarissa said, and I imagined the kind of riffraff she had experience keeping out of her Park Avenue place.

“The last time …” Michelle began, then hesitated. “I sound like an idiot whenever I try to explain this. It seems so reasonable at the time, and then afterward, I think I must have brain damage or something.”

She stood up and crossed to the window.

“What do you mean?” I scooted over and Clarissa started straightening up the bookshelves, as if pretending not to pay attention would help the poor girl relax any more. It was clear she didn’t trust either of us enough to tell this story. If she would only sit still. Not even the tea seemed to help. Was she even in the frame anymore?

Michelle played with the tassel on the edge of the cream brocaded curtain. “He’s not like that always, you know. Sometimes he cries, and says really sweet, sweet things, and tells me that it’s just the way I disappeared, it was so unfair to him, he needs closure, if he just had closure … he’d leave if he just got closure.”

Clarissa’s hands stilled on a digital picture frame showcasing shots of our Spring Break Habitat for Humanity team. In the current photo, George was grinning as he and Harun wielded their paintbrushes like light sabers.

Michelle laughed mirthlessly. “Do you know how many times he’s gotten
closure?”

I held on to my own mug of tea as if for balance. It’s a very, very good thing that Jamie wasn’t here. I couldn’t imagine him listening to this with anything approaching composure.

“I don’t understand,” said Clarissa, though we both understood far more than Michelle knew. “Why don’t you go to the Strathmore dean? The college deans are supposed to be our advocates.”

“The dean was the one who got me into this mess,” Michelle said, and returned to her seat. Luckily, Clarissa was still by the bookshelves. “I went to her last year. Told her everything that was going on. I told her about the time he wouldn’t let me leave my room for a day and a half. I told her about why I’d really failed that Organic Chem lab—how he’d taken my notebook as punishment because I wouldn’t drop the class. He was convinced I was having an affair with the professor. I even told her about how my PhysChem T.A. had found his car smashed in the parking lot. And that was
after
I’d switched out of his section and into a female T.A.’s.”

“Not that I’m countenancing his behavior in the slightest,” Clarissa said, “but why did he always suspect you of cheating on him?”

Michelle and I exchanged glances.

“Because she was,” I said, staring resolutely into my tea. “With Jamie.”

“Oh.” Clarissa’s tone was even more clipped and proper than usual. Her pink phone began to buzz on the table. “Excuse me,” she said. “That would be my friend Demetria.”

I rolled my eyes. Forget Jamie. It was Demetria who wasn’t capable of listening to this without going ballistic.

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Clarissa read the text message and pursed her lips. “She’d like to, uh, come over. Do you mind, Michelle? It might be good. Demetria’s got a lot of experience at the Eli Women’s Center and—”

“I’d prefer not to have to talk in front of an audience, if you don’t mind,” said Michelle, in what had to be the greatest irony since I’d first brought her to the party. “This is hard enough in front of you two. I know I can trust you, Clarissa, because you’re Amy’s
special friend
, but …” She trailed off, no doubt remembering that Demetria had also been at the party and was therefore also likely a
special friend
. “I just … can we keep this between us?”

“Sure,” I said, and raised my eyebrows at Clarissa.
Oh, well. Too late for that
. She shrugged and shut down her phone. “We’re great at secrets.”
As long as we could share them with the whole club
.

“And it wasn’t really cheating,” Michelle said. “I want to be clear about that. The end of—whatever I had going on with Jamie sort of overlapped with my relationship with Blake. A little. Not that Blake ever knew. Jamie was a junior who pretty much kept to himself; Blake was a freshman already in charge of half the college activities … I don’t think they even knew each other.”

Good thing. Otherwise, he’d probably have gone after Jamie as well. “In other words, he was just naturally a jealous lunatic psycho bastard?”

Michelle smiled a bit. “Yeah. He suspected every guy in the Chemistry department of wanting to be with me. I know I sound like a moron for dating someone like that for a year. I mean, I’m smart and modern and independent and all those things. I’m not supposed to be with a guy who tries to control me. I’m supposed to recognize all those warning signs and avoid men like that.”

Now my phone went off. Text message from Jenny. Of course.