Tap & Gown (31 page)

“Uh, yeah? But …”

“Follow the directions.” Seriously, I was not going to hold her hand through every step of the initiation.

I’d already moved heaven and earth for this girl. Was I this whiny when I’d been tapped? I must remind myself to ask Malcolm next time I saw him.1*

“Okay, yeah, fine, but what about the flowers?”

I adjusted my towel. “What flowers?”

“The dead roses. On my doorstep this morning?”

“Uh …”

“There was a note, with your—um, the, uh, symbol on it?”

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Huh? That wasn’t us.

“So I’m just wondering which set of directions I should follow.”

“What did this note say?” I asked, baffled.

Michelle hesitated for a second. “
Coming to get you.”

“But what doesn’t make any sense,” I said, “is that he had to know, somehow, that we were tapping her. I mean, dead roses and a note with
the seal?
Left somehow in the middle of the night after we tapped her?”

“Hmm,” said Jamie, and took a sip of his wine. He was back in the black pinstripes from the night of the party. I’d borrowed one of Lydia’s springy, flowered dresses she’d bought for Spain. The restaurant was everything Jamie had requested: candles, tablecloths, romance.

“So how did Blake know?” I went on. “And how did he even get into her place? You saw that doorman. He was like a frickin’ security guard.”

“But we got in.”

“After we called up to her,” I pointed out. “Don’t you think if someone called up and then didn’t actually come into her place that she would have remembered it?”

“Maybe he dressed up in a robe and pretended to be one of us, saying he’d forgotten something in her apartment, and the guy had no idea, because of our costumes,” Jamie said.

That was a possibility. “So you’re saying that he’d been watching us all along, and just happened to have a copy of our seal, a spare black robe, and a bunch of dead roses for her?” Sounded a bit far-fetched.

My boyfriend2*shrugged. “Assuming that it was, in fact, Blake who left those flowers.”

“Who else has been terrorizing her?”

“Not
her
, Amy.” Jamie lifted his wineglass and eyed me over the rim.

And then it clicked. “Dragon’s Head?”

“Or another society. Yesterday, you were worried that Dragon’s Head was going to steal your tap list.

What if they just planned to mess with them, make sure the initiation was a disaster by delivering conflicting instructions to all your taps?”

“And since they tapped their class the previous evening, they weren’t busy last night,” I added. Of course! Well, that would be a relief to Michelle. Not Blake, but a whole new hassle.
Welcome to secret
societies, kiddo!
“Unlike the rest of the societies on campus, they could have easily followed us around and pulled this trick. Do you think that’s it?”

“I think it’s a possibility.” Poe consulted his menu. “And one that’s much more in keeping with standard society pranks than stalker ex-boyfriends.”

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“You’re right,” I said. “That makes so much more sense. It’s a good thing I have you around to explain these arcane society ways.” I smiled coyly and, under the table, ran the toe of my pump along his instep.

“Are you ready to order?” he asked abruptly. I saw the waiter approaching the table. I picked the risotto; Jamie, the ravioli. As soon as the server was out of earshot, Jamie spoke again.

“So I have … some news.”

“Good news?” I asked, and took a long drink from my wineglass. Mmm, Prosecco. I wished every night could be fancy date night with the man I loved.

“Yes and no.”

I placed the glass back on the tablecloth.

“I’ve been offered a job.”

I shook my head. “You already have a job. You’re working for that firm this summer in Manhattan, the one with the ridiculous name.”

“Not a summer associate job,” Poe said. “A real job. A full-time job.”

“Can you do that while you’re a full-time student?” I asked.

“No.” Jamie was watching me very carefully.

“But—” My forehead probably had more wrinkles than a pug. “You mean, drop out of Eli?”

“Defer my studies here, yes.”

“Why? What kind of job is this?” I asked, puzzled.

Poe cleared his throat. “That’s the part I can’t talk about.”

I blinked at him. “Can’t talk about?”

“Yes.”

“To
your girlfriend?
” I said, and my voice went up a few octaves. “
To your fellow knight?”

“To anyone,” he replied. “It’s a security-clearance thing.”

Oh.
Oh
.

Except, no. “I don’t understand. You were going to go work for a big firm, make your money back.

That’s what you told me last fall. Now all of a sudden there’s some sort of government job on the table I knew nothing about? One you’re going to drop out of school for?”

Jamie reached out to me. “It’s complicated—a long story. I wanted this job last year, but I didn’t know if I was going to get it. Eli Law was my backup plan.”

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“Your—” I croaked. “Your backup plan?” Lydia and Josh were going to break up over her dream school, and to Jamie it was little more than a
backup plan?
And then I remembered what he’d said to me right after Spring Break.
Play your cards right and no one will ever know it’s a backup plan
. Just another of his many secrets.

He took in my expression. “I’m saying that wrong.”

“You bet your ass you are.”

He sighed in frustration. “You have to understand, I always figured that Eli was the reality. This was such a long shot. I couldn’t depend on it. I mean, Kurt Gehry was supposed to help me, but—”

“But you screwed him over,” I finished. “You lost your summer job at the White House and …

whatever this was.” A picture was beginning to take focus in my brain. This was no ordinary government job, like my friends who interned at the FBI or the NSA.

“Exactly.” He sat back in his chair. “But now, with Gehry disgraced, things started moving again.”

“I see.” I took another sip of my wine and swirled it around my mouth, but the bitter flavor rising in my throat wouldn’t go away. “Are you going to be a spy?”

“Amy—”

“What? Just last night you were telling me how bad you are at keeping secrets from me. And I’m a marshmallow. I don’t own a waterboard. I don’t even own a skateboard.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

Our plates arrived, relieving us both. For the next five minutes, I kept my mouth filled with risotto and wine, and reflected on the fact that a fancy public restaurant was a shitty place to break news like this to the girl you just spent half the night having incredibly tender sex with.

“So,” I said slowly, “what does this mean for us?”

He swallowed a piece of ravioli and spoke. “That’s what I wanted to talk about. We’ve been very good, up until now, about not discussing the future.”

“Because we don’t know what that is,” I said. I refilled my glass of wine to the very top. I was going to need it. “I don’t know where I’ll be. And now, well, I don’t know where you’ll be. What’s different?”

“The time line,” Jamie said. “Back then, we didn’t need to make any decisions for another month or two.

But I have exams next week, and then, if I … do this, I’ll be gone.”

I choked on my wine. “Next week?”

“And by gone, I don’t mean that I’m going to England for a few weeks and can call you every night. It doesn’t mean I’m moving to Boston or D.C. or Palo Alto. Amy I’ll be gone.” Jamie held my eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

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Of course I did. Rumors of this were as prevalent on the Eli campus as legends about Rose & Grave.

Students who vanished in the middle of their final exams and never showed up to graduation exercises.

Never showed up anywhere, until forty years later, when they came back to Eli to tell their old secret societies or singing groups about their decades in Moscow or Nicaragua or Iran. Not that they could ever tell the students who heard the stories too much—classified. State secrets. You know the drill.

How many heads of the CIA had been in Rose & Grave? How many students whose names appeared in the Black Books had suddenly disappeared off the face of the planet? Having gone through their trial by fire as Knights of Persephone, how many graduated to even bigger secrets?

“Then don’t do it,” I whispered. “It sounds horrible. Leaving everyone you love—”
Oh, wow. This is a
new record for you, Amy Haskel, both in speed and severity of abandonment. One night with you
and Jamie’s ready to go into hiding
. “When did you know about this?”

“Last night,” he said. “After we … I got an e-mail sometime during Tap Night preparations. And then this morning I had to meet them.”

“You didn’t have a study group,” I realized aloud.

“No.”

I wondered if we were being watched right now, and for a split second, my mind concocted several desperate plans to get Poe’s offer—whatever it was—withdrawn.

D
ESPERATE
P
LANS

1)
The Plame Approach: Stand up and shout, “This man is a secret government operative working for the NCS.”

2)
The Narcotics Strategy: “Why, darling, do you think that’s wise, given your ongoing and debilitating addiction to heroin/crack cocaine/crystal meth?” (Note: Quickly find way to spike wine with drugs.)
3)
The Madonna Gambit: “But what about our baby?”

Sadly none of these would achieve the desired result of a continued relationship with Jamie. I didn’t even know if I had the power to screw him over like that. Only someone like Kurt Gehry could submarine Jamie’s chances. But Gehry was no longer in a position to do anything either, and hadn’t been for several months.

Another thought came to me. “That night, in January, when I caught you in the tomb with all those old files? What were you doing?”

He hesitated before answering, not once looking me in the face. “What I had to.”

“And what was that? Contacting other Diggers who could help you?”

“Sort of.”

Because what could other Diggers—even ones in the CIA—do if Kurt Gehry had tabled Jamie’s
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application? If he were hired, Gehry would know, and he was not above making the guilty parties pay, just like he’d made Jamie pay for helping D177 last spring. No, Gehry had to be brought down before there’d be any movement for my boyfriend.

“You did it,” I said in a voice little more than a breath. “The Gehry scandal, his resignation.”

Now Jamie raised his gaze to meet mine. “Yes.”

“You—” My throat had gone dry. “How did you—”

“I talk to servants, Amy” he said. “Cooks, maids, butlers,
gardeners
. They’re who I am, and they’ve always been the ones with the dirt. When I visited Gehry for my White House interview last year, I talked to his. And it paid off. I contacted a few Diggers who had their own grudges against Gehry, and they took it from there.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“You think they offered me this job because of my fashion sense?” The sardonic glint was back in his eyes. “Now, take the next step.” His tone was cold, manipulative. At this moment, he was the Poe who’d put me in the coffin. The one who’d played the Grim Reaper. “You know you want to.”

The risotto began to churn in my stomach and I took a deep breath. “Darren was right. Gehry
did
have Rose & Grave to blame for his humiliation. But it wasn’t D177. It wasn’t me.”

“No,” said Jamie. “It was me.”

I fell against the back of my chair, speechless, breathless.

“You okay?” he said, and pushed my glass toward me. “Have some water.”

“I’ve had quite enough
water
, I think,” I snapped. “You know all that stuff you said about not being able to keep secrets from me is bullshit, right?”

“Well, you know them all now,” he said. “And I was afraid to tell you that one. Way more afraid than I was to tell you that I loved you. I knew if I did, if you thought I was at fault for what happened to you, you’d leave me.”

“And you’re not afraid I’ll leave you now?” I said, much more harshly than I’d intended.

Jamie was silent.

Last night, I’d told him that I loved him, too. Whatever series of events led to my kidnapping, he couldn’t have known. It wasn’t Jamie’s fault that Darren was a psychotic little snot. It was an accidental consequence, and one that someone who loved him as I did couldn’t possibly hold against him. All this time, I thought his guilt about Darren had the same genesis as all my friends’: He hadn’t been there when Darren had found me. But it went deeper than that.

“I’m not afraid of it,” he said sadly. “I know it’s going to happen. Not because of Gehry. Because I’m taking the job.”

“No!”

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“Amy,” he said, “what are you imagining for us? Pretend it’s not me. Pretend it’s Lydia. She’s been with Josh for months and months, and you’re still urging her not to make life decisions based on her boyfriend.

I wouldn’t want you to make decisions based on me, and I can’t make decisions based on you, either.”