Rites of Spring (11 page)

“Poor kids,” Lucky said. “I don’t feel bad for him, but those children…”

“Hey, Soze…” I tried again, but he was glued to the monitor as the talking heads started doing their thing.

“This is really big news, guys,” Thorndike went on. “Gehry could end up in jail.”

“Josh!” I cried. He turned to me at last.

“Two dollars, Bugaboo,” Angel said.

“I need to talk to you. Now.”

Soze followed me into the library, and I was pleased to see that Angel and Lucky could manage to tear themselves away from the news for five minutes as well. I showed them all the note.

“Well, this is good news,” Angel said.

Lucky snorted. “You can’t actually be considering this. After everything they’ve done to you, you want to go over there alone?”

“Well, that’s what I was wondering,” I said. “Does it have to be, like,
alone
alone? I mean, couldn’t you guys just come and lurk in the shadows or something?”

“It’s the shadow-lurkers I’m worried about,” Lucky said. “I’m sure Dragon’s Head has this place scoped out. How naïve do you really want to be about this? Considering everything they’ve done already?”

Angel studied the letter. “I don’t know. There is a degree of honor between societies. If they say they want to parley, maybe they mean it.”

“But why with Bugaboo alone?” Soze said. “Why don’t they want to parley with all of us?” He glanced back into the Firefly Room. “Is there any way we can talk about this later?”

“Later!” I cried. “There’s a 24-hour news cycle covering Gehry. I promise you, you’re not going to miss a thing. The
parley
is happening now.”

“But the Gehry situation is
unfolding
tonight,” he said. Almost whined it, in fact.

Hale cleared his throat. “Should I serve dinner now? We’re running late.”

I appealed to the small contingent of knights. “Should I go? Should someone come with me?”

“I vote yes to the former and no to the latter,” Angel said. “There
is
a code. Just because they haven’t been following it so far…”

“Doesn’t mean they’ll start following it now,” Lucky pointed out. “Stay far away.”

We looked at Soze, who was clearly straining to hear the newscast from the next room.

“Well?” I asked.

“Go,” he said in a distracted tone. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

All three of us glared at him in frustration, and when he noticed our expressions, he threw up his hands. “Fine! I don’t care, okay? These stupid pranks…they don’t matter. There is serious stuff happening in the world and I’m sorry if I can’t get all worked up over every little drama this society goes through. Sheesh!”

“Fine!” Lucky exclaimed. “Let her go, and if she winds up dead, it will be on your head.”

“They aren’t going to kill her,” Angel said. “They have expulsion to think of, too, you know.”

Some comfort. Over dinner, we discussed the parley offer with the rest of the club, and it was agreed upon (rather quickly, in my opinion, so conversation could turn back to Gehry’s political and legal troubles) that Angel was right. I should follow the instructions on the note, despite the risk.

“Think of it this way,” Angel argued, “if they wanted to ‘get’ you, they’ve been doing a bang-up job of it without arranging it with you in advance. If they’re bothering to send a letter saying they want to parley, maybe they really mean it.”

“Or maybe that’s what they want you to think,” Thorndike pointed out.

Finally, we decided I’d go, with a small contingent of Diggers waiting for me outside the library, and my finger poised over the
Send
button on Jenny’s Push-to-Talk cell in case things got hairy.

At fifteen minutes to midnight, I left the tomb and began walking to the library. It was raining, the type of wintry, New Haven downpour that seems to come at you from all sides, thwapping at you with clammy bursts of wind and making every step away from shelter seem like a futile, if not downright insane, gesture. But I soldiered on and eventually made it across the campus to the steps of the library. The timing of this part of the journey was very important, since the library closed at midnight and they stopped letting patrons enter at quarter-till.

I made my way through the front door and into the splendid, Gothic-cathedral entrance hall. With the security guard and the research-desk employees looking on, I tried to casually gravitate toward the West Reading Room, which had, among its many desks, wingback chairs, and private nooks, a fire entrance to the central courtyard that was often propped open when the building’s ancient heating system threatened to turn the Stacks into a sauna.

Tonight I was lucky. I sat and waited, wondering in turn how many of the library’s remaining visitors were Dragon’s Head spies and if a security guard would be along presently to kick me out.

At 11:58, I stepped outside into the cold rain, which felt that much worse after the dry heat of the Reading Room. As the golden light faded into blue-gray darkness, I strained my eyes to determine if there were any people waiting in the courtyard, but the only things I could see were stone carvings of grimacing gargoyles, winter-dead trees, and piles of grayish ice. I kept my gloved hand in my coat pocket, ready to press the button on the phone.

And I waited. And waited. It seemed much longer than 120 seconds before I heard the distant chimes from the clock tower. Midnight.

On my left, I saw a shadow move. It drew closer to me, but all I could make out was a vaguely human shape. Still ten yards away, the figure stopped and sat on one of the stone benches. It raised a hand and beckoned to me. I stepped forward, and as I did, the figure’s features came into focus.

Felicity.

6.

Sweet Defeat

“Oh, come closer,” Felicity said, as I struggled to breathe. “It doesn’t count unless we talk.”

“What…are…”
Get ahold of yourself, Amy.
“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to parley, of course.” Her tone was perfectly calm, perfectly kind. Perfectly perfect. I knew this unflappable socialite charm, had seen it at work in Clarissa—had hated it in Clarissa, long before I ever grew to hate it in Brandon’s girlfriend. “As I assume you are.”

“I’m here to parley with Dragon’s Head,” I replied.

She smiled and flashed me her pin. “Well, I’m in Dragon’s Head, but I’m here to parley with
you,
Amy Haskel.”

My name on her lips was a curse, the opposite of everything Brandon made it sound like. I swallowed my disbelief. “This never had anything to do with that raid.”

“Of course it did,” she said. She patted the seat beside her. “Come sit next to me. We’re protected from the rain by the eaves.”

“I’ll stand, thanks,” I said, though my teeth were starting to chatter as the water seeped under my collar.

“Suit yourself.” She took a deep breath. “Here’s the deal, and don’t think it was an easy one for me to concoct. The members of my society will henceforth cease and desist from their personal campaign against you. And in return…” she paused. “…you will never see my boyfriend again.”

“I’ll
what
?” I cried. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t agree to that!”

Felicity’s beautiful brow furrowed. “I’m sorry, perhaps my letter was a tad unclear.
You
don’t have to agree to anything. I made this deal with Brandon.”

I stood there, dumbstruck, wishing I had a bench to fall onto.

“You see, Amy, my boyfriend, for reasons passing understanding, took umbrage at the fact that we were, shall we say, persuading you to return our property.” She paused. “You wouldn’t be interested in doing that now, would you?”

“Over my dead body,” I hissed.

She sighed. “At any rate, my boyfriend had this crazy theory that I, as the director of our little campaign of persuasion, had some sort of personal stake in the matter, above and beyond the usual society feud. Barbarians and their strange ideas! Of course, you and I know that’s silly.”

I personally didn’t know anything of the sort. “Your
campaign,
as you call it, was a bit out of the mainstream.”

“As is
everything
about your club,” Felicity replied. “My boyfriend was under the impression that I had used his inexplicable lingering fascination with you to discover your schedule, habits, and even brand of shampoo.”

“Which you did.”

“Don’t you find it odd that anyone would remember someone’s favorite brand of cheap, drugstore shampoo?” Felicity’s smile remained sanguine, and my hands fisted inside the pockets of my coat. “And I don’t even know my own roommate’s class schedules.”

“Brandon must really care about me,” I shot back.

Here, her smile grew wide. “My boyfriend is a kind person.” She kept saying that phrase,
my boyfriend.
She must have known how much it needled me. “And I really care about him. I love him. I love him ever so much more than I love some silly feud between two college clubs. I care about him so much more than I care about some silly college secret society.” She paused. “I don’t know if anyone else could say that.”

The little bitch. Brandon had apparently told her everything about our breakup last year. She’d never needed the shoes to identify me. She’d always known I was in Rose & Grave. And she also knew I’d chosen it over Brandon.

“And it was surprisingly easy to convince my boyfriend of that fact. For him to give you up, I just had to promise that I would as well. Which I have.”

“Your society won’t accept that!” I said.

“Oh, we aren’t letting go of the feud, or of our statue. The Diggers are going down, mark my words. We just won’t be after you—specifically—anymore.”

Frustration and rage bubbled inside me, cutting off rational thought, any argument. “I don’t understand! If this was a decision made between you and Brandon, why this whole parley charade? Why drag me out here in the rain?” I mean, aside from the obvious pleasure of watching me look like a drowned rat.

“How else would you know?” she asked simply. “How else would you know that I won, and how I won, and how, now that I’ve chosen him over my society, Brandon loves me even more than he did before?” She rose. “Have a good night, Amy. I hope you get in safe from the storm.” She brushed past me, and it took all my self-restraint not to pummel her into the mud. Girls like Felicity probably had years of kickboxing or Krav Maga training anyway. “Oh, and if I were you or any of the other Diggers, I’d be watching my back.”

I stood there for way too long after Felicity left, not from any desire to savor the New Haven climate. I just didn’t know what to do next.

Where do you go when everyone you know owes you a big fat
I told you so
? Where do you hide on a night so wretched that even Dickens wouldn’t have chosen it to illustrate his character’s desperation? Where do you run to the moment you realize that your SAT scores were a lie, your transcript obviously faked, your faculty recommendations the apparent result of a parental bribe, your acceptance letter from Eli University clearly some sort of cosmic joke, because there is no way that anyone in their right mind would mistake you for someone smart?

Someone with operational gray matter would never have let this happen to her. Someone with the intelligence of your average housefly would have put two and two together when Brandon had IM-ed her about “society nonsense.” Someone who had spent a moment examining her history, her experiences, or even the rational order of the universe would have noted at least one of the following:

1)
Mr. Let’s-Define-Our-Relationship Weare had never professed any interest in discussing what we were really doing in our stolen afternoons.

2)
The fact that after he told me he was going to make a decision, he never called again. Hello, clue phone.

3)
Or how about the simple truth that when someone has the choice of the beautiful, polished, rich girl who has never broken his heart—the girl who would forgive his transgressions, would sacrifice her position in her society to make him happy—or the girl like me, it’s a no-brainer. Whatever else I might be tempted to say about Brandon at this moment, I’d never insult his intelligence.