Rites of Spring (23 page)

“What do you think they were doing?” my big sib asked.

“Who knows?” Demetria said. “They’re gone now.”

Ben joined us on the porch, poker forgotten. “We also found a tape recorder and the remains of a campfire. I think they’ve been here before.”

Malcolm looked at Poe, who was drawing in the dirt with a stick. “What do you make of it?”

Poe shrugged, head down. “There’s no fence around this island. I’m sure they can pretty much come and go as they please.”

“Yeah,” Jenny said. “But you know what these guys are like. They can be real creeps.” She would know.

It may have been Poe and me on the beach this morning, but the tape recorder
must
belong to the people on the other island. I shivered. “I don’t like the idea of people sneaking around here,” I said. It reminded me too much of my recent experience with Dragon’s Head. “You said stuff had already been stolen.”

“What do you want me to do?” Poe asked, finally looking up. I felt myself shrinking under his steady gray gaze. “How do you propose we keep them out?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, neither do I.” He went back to his stick.

“Whatever,” George said. “I’m sure they’re harmless.”

“Okay,” Demetria said, “you’re done.” She stood. “I’m going back to the cabin.”

“Can I come, or will they mess up?” I wiggled my toes. New pedicure or not, I needed to extricate myself from Poe’s presence.

Clarissa tossed me her flip-flops. “Here, borrow mine. You’ll be fine.”

Shod, I followed Demetria up the path. As we passed Poe, he shot me a brief, inscrutable look, and I hastened as much as one can while wearing wet paint and someone else’s flip-flops on a sandy surface.

“I can’t believe I let that bitch get to me,” Demetria said as we walked back to the cabin. “Like I care what she says about me. And then George, of all people. Rescued by our great white hope. How pathetic is that?”

“I thought it was funny,” I said.

“But you have a soft spot for Prescott,” Demetria countered. “I can take care of myself.” She opened the cabin door. “Holy shit…”

I collided with her on the threshold. “What the…?”

I’ve seen many a trashed room in my day. There was the time Lydia planted fake secret society initiation paraphernalia in our suite. There was the time Gehry’s henchmen decided to rearrange Jenny’s base of operation this fall. There was the Great Cricket Invasion in January. All paled by comparison to the disaster that lay before me.

All of our clothes were tossed about the room, and most had been covered in splashes of paint. The mattresses had been ripped off the beds and thrown up against the wall. All of Jenny’s electronics had been smashed. Most noticeable of all were the words sprayed on the walls and mattresses in neon orange.

Slut

Bitch

Dyke

You know, the usual. At first, I wasn’t even sure that all of the curlicues of paint covering the walls were even words. Half of it looked like plain damage, but if you squinted, or turned your head just so, you could make out a variety of threats. Death to the Diggers. You people make me sick. Try wearing that skirt now was scrawled across the remains of Clarissa’s designer duds. Hacker whore now decorated the cover of Jenny’s laptop.

But the one that caught my eye was on the mattress that used to grace my bed.

Keep up your BREAST stroke, or next time you WILL drown.

13.

Meetings

Nothing in this world, not even the depths of the Pacific Trench, is as scary as Demetria Robinson on the warpath. Or at least that’s what I figured until Jenny Santos got a good look at the ruins of her laptop. And Clarissa noticed that her Louis Vuitton shoulder bag had been spray-painted orange. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists camped out on the other island thought we were murdering a passel of virgins or something, the screams were so loud.

Salt, who until recently had been little more than a crotchety nuisance in the eyes of my fellow knights, suddenly became a hero. His precautions and policies weren’t old-fashioned, unnecessary, and paranoid, but well reasoned, highly advisable, and deeply worthwhile. He was very much in his element.

The males in the club did their best to calm down our half, cracking jokes about the perpetrator’s penmanship (or spray-canmanship), and, in George’s case, admiring his skilled application of that lowest form of humor, the dirty pun. When Jenny threatened them with her mangled keyboard, they backed off. Harun offered us—or at least one of us—his bed. Jenny responded with the hairy eyeball. Clarissa and I exchanged knowing looks. Something strange was going on there.

Malcolm and Poe arrived, and the latter took one look around the room and marched back out. Fine. Who wanted him here? Who wanted him to even
act
like he cared what happened to her? Not me.

Malcolm stayed to help us with cleanup, and Salt departed to look for clues. Our activities were punctuated with the following exclamations (each on repeat):

1)
“Who could have done this?”

2)
“When did they get in here? We were here all afternoon!”

3)
“Oh my God, my bag/dress/new Gucci!” (Clarissa.)

Eventually, everything got back in (spray-painted) order, and the boys left us alone after an offer to stick around, “just in case,” was roundly trounced by Demetria for being some patriarchal, women-are-weaklings, anti-feminist bullshit. She was in rare form.

“I can’t put up with this anymore,” she said, pacing across the painted floors. “I’ve had it up to here with Rose & Grave crap.”

“This isn’t Rose & Grave,” Jenny said quietly.

“Oh, no?” Demetria said, swooping down and grabbing Jenny’s twisted screen out of the wastebasket. “So you’re saying you haven’t seen any suspicious e-mails this time around? Aren’t keeping any secrets from the rest of us? Where’s your poem?”

“That’s not fair,” Jenny said, then hesitated. “Actually, it’s fair. But no, no I haven’t, since you mention it. Give me back my screen.”

“The Diggirls being targeted again?” Demetria went on. “Come on, people, open your eyes!”

“There’s an easier explanation,” Clarissa said.

“Lay it on me.”

“It’s the people from the other island.”

I ducked my head, but Demetria was on a roll. “Bullshit. It’s obviously little Mrs. Myers. It’s the same old bullshit it’s always been since we’ve been tapped. The patriarchs of this organization are a bunch of racist, misogynist, homophobic assholes.”

“But Kadie’s not a patriarch,” I said. “She’s not even a Digger.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what’s going on around here. You should have heard her talking about Gehry on the boat this morning. Like he was some kind of maligned saint. I wouldn’t be surprised if he put her up to it.”

“Gehry?” I said. “I hate the guy as much as the next person, but this so isn’t his style.”

“Yes it is,” Jenny said. “Remember what he had his goons do to my room last year?” True. He’d had a guy break into my room as well.

“But he’s
hiding out
here,” Clarissa said. “Hiding out and praying that he and his wife aren’t brought up on charges and that their kids don’t find out that their darling nanny’s been shipped back to Bolivia. He’s not here to start a war with us.”

“But he is here, and we’re here…” Demetria argued.

“The others are trespassing here…” Clarissa pointed out.

Demetria groaned. “What the hell, Clarissa? You’ve been watching too much
Lost
. ‘It’s the others, it’s the others.’ It’s
not
the others. Occam’s Razor.”

“Fine,” I said. “But Occam’s Razor does not explain why a bitch in a snit fit would be the accomplice of a patriarch who thinks as much of women as he does of barbarians. I think it’s Kadie, too—and her husband, if you want to go there. She was the one who called us dykes right before she ran off.” I pointed at the wall, where the word was still visible despite Kevin’s careful scrubbing. “And here it is again. Coincidence? I think not.”

“And you’re all just going to ignore the possibility that Gehry, who not once, but
twice
has tried to destroy us, who has been known to send his lackeys to break into our quarters and destroy our property, is involved in this little escapade?”

“I’m going to say it’s unlikely,” Clarissa said. “He’s pretty much been a shut-in, hasn’t he?”

“The perfect cover!” Demetria paused. “Or maybe he sent his son…”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that guy would win Father of the Year. ‘Here, son, now I’m going to teach you the fine art of vandalism.’ Besides, I hung out with Darren this morning. He’s a nice guy.” He would not be wrecking my stuff after our dart game.

“You just want to see Gehry, Demetria!” Clarissa exclaimed. “It all makes sense now. You’ll blame him if it means you can drag him into the daylight and grill him about everything they haven’t covered on CNN.”

“What, are you sympathizing with that asshole now?” Demetria asked, turning on her.

“No, but I’m beginning to wonder if you’re happy this happened. You’ve perked right up with all this drama.”

Demetria gave her a look that said,
Bitch, please.
“And you don’t want to think that your future Junior League co-president is capable of destroying your stuff. Would blaming this on Kadie wreck your debutante sponsorship?”

Clarissa huffed. “That’s so unfair!”

“I’m with Amy,” Jenny said, straining to steer us back on topic. “Kadie was clearly angry at us back there on the lawn. Let’s go get her. I’m thinking full-scale interrogation. Bright lights, Scotch tape on the eyelids…She’ll cave like an undercooked soufflé.”

“Kadie wouldn’t have had time to pull this off,” Clarissa pointed out. “This kind of damage took more than a few minutes.” And more than a few paint cans.

“Well, if she didn’t act alone…” Demetria was persistent, but we all ignored her.

“And again,” Clarissa said happily, “we return to the others.”

“No,” Jenny said. “Whoever did this
knows
who we are. I say it’s Kadie. I say we go all Micah Price on her ass.”

“You would,” Clarissa said. “You seem to have gotten over him just fine.”

“Yeah. He was a jerk. Your point?”

“Nothing,” Clarissa said, with an expression that indicated butter would have no business melting in her mouth, as she returned to scrubbing paint off her purse. It was very clearly
not
nothing. And Jenny knew it.

“If you have something to say, Angel, say it.”

“Two dollars,” said Demetria and I in unison.

Clarissa looked up from her work. “It’s nothing, really. I’m just wondering if it’s the best idea in the world to rebound with a fellow knight.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t,” Clarissa said. “But Amy’s got a broken heart, too. You don’t see her hooking up with another Digger.”

I blushed furiously at this, but no one guessed the true reason.

“Amy’s already had her taste of society incest!” Jenny cried.

“What, so we each get one? Is that how it works?” Clarissa said. “By my count, I’m the only person here who hasn’t tried out the merchandise. Maybe my dad and Kurt Gehry were right. Rose & Grave
is
turning into a dating club!”

“Whose business is it who I fuck?” Demetria asked from her corner. “And, by the way, it wasn’t even sex. It was just a couple of kisses—but that’s not the point.”

“Yeah? Tell us why Odile’s not here, then,” Clarissa said. “Maybe because it would be too awkward to stay here with you.”

“I don’t know. I’m hardly her keeper.” Demetria seemed to reflect upon how this might sound. “And you aren’t Jenny’s, Clarissa. She could do a lot worse than Harun. And has,” she added under her breath.

Jenny looked appalled. “I really don’t know why you keep saying that. I’m not dating Harun.”

Clarissa threw her hands up. “Amy, you tell them. Tell them what a mess it becomes.”

Oh, it was a mess all right, but not the way Clarissa thought.

“Or doing anything else with him, for that matter,” Jenny went on, though no one seemed to be listening.

Clarissa kept pressuring me. “Tell them how you’re always fighting with George.”

“Oh, yes, do tell us everything about George,” Demetria said sarcastically. “Tell us what you did to keep your sordid little affair out of his C.B.”

“I figured he just ran out of time and Amy ended up on the cutting-room floor,” Jenny offered.

Hey, how did it get to be Bag on Amy Hour? “Guys, please,” I began.

“Yeah, guys, please,” said a voice at the door. We all looked up to see the object of our conversation standing there. “It takes two to tango. And if you wanted to know something, all you had to do was ask me.”

“George—” I started.

But he wasn’t going to listen. He crossed the threshold and walked right by me. “I was never one for secrets. It’s Amy that likes to keep them, isn’t that right?”