Tap & Gown (20 page)

“Definitely not.”

“Hmmmm …” He leaned in to kiss me. “Then I guess this all should be something we keep to ourselves, huh?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, and arched in his arms. “Luckily, we’ve gotten pretty adept at secrets.”

“Okay, so you’re done,” Lucky was saying to Puck as I dragged myself into the Grand Library at some godawful hour the following morning. “And thank you,” she added to him, “for not pursuing Prince Harry.

Because I really don’t have the resources to hack Buckingham Palace.”

Early meetings with the vetting committee (i.e., Lucky) on top of a Friday morning section were a travesty of college seniority. I was supposed to be utterly free from the end of the Thursday night meeting on through the start of the Sunday night meeting. But tap meant that every hour of every day was filled with obligations to Rose & Grave. After I was done with those, I could squeeze in the nonessentials like showers, toilet breaks, and finishing my thesis.

Then again, I’d had it easy. While I’d been snuggling with my boyfriend, Lucky had been up getting the files on every one of our potential taps in order.

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“Hey, Bugaboo,” Puck said as I took his place across from Lucky. “You want me to wait around here and we can head back to Prescott together?”

Curious. Puck hadn’t shown any interest in hanging lately. “Can’t,” I admitted. “Got class after this.”

“Sucks!” He waved. “I’m going back to bed.”

I bit my lip to keep from asking,
Alone?
After all, I hadn’t exactly left my bed empty this morning. Jamie had spent the night with me, curled tightly in my single dorm room bed, spooning me close to his body so I wouldn’t fall off the edge. I can’t imagine sleeping on his side was comfortable, what with those shoulders.

Jamie, however, did not complain.

The morning had been cold and clear. A fresh day, ready for revision. Of my thesis, of my relationship, of the whole tap process. To balance out all that freshness, I didn’t take a shower. I didn’t want to wash his smell from me. Plus, ten more minutes in Poe’s arms was so worth it.

Especially given the gauntlet I was about to run with the vetting committee. I’d already had one irate e-mail from Lucky.

Lucky cleared her throat. “Off with you,” she said to Puck. “Your third-generation legacy, straight-A student, chairman-of-his-college-council choice is not my problem today.” Interesting, so Puck had gone the traditional route. “I’ve got a lot of ground to cover with Little Miss Shake-Things-Up, here.”

“Me?” I pressed a hand to my chest in innocence. “What about Thorndike and her new theory about declassifying the society?”

“Angel’s handling her,” Lucky said. “And Soze if she doesn’t come to Jesus after that.”

“‘Come to Jesus’?” I asked wryly.

“It’s an expression!”

“In the Bronx?”

Lucky cleared her throat. “I’ve been hanging out with my tap a lot. He’s southern.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How does Tristram feel about that?”

“About the fact that he’s southern?” Lucky responded smoothly straightening the papers on the table in front of her. “Just fine. And don’t change the subject, missy! That was quite the bombshell you dropped on us last night, bringing an unvetted guest to the party.”

“I did leave you a voice mail,” I argued.

Lucky’s expression fell neatly into the not-amused camp. “Three hours before the event is not nearly enough time.”

The door to the Library opened and in walked Big and Lil’ Demon. “Ooh, are we talking about
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Michelle?” Lil’ Demon exclaimed and bounded over, parking herself in the chair on one side of Lucky. “I want to hear.”

Big Demon ambled in and took a seat as well. “Anything that takes the focus off Frodo and his public display of tap affection is fine by me.” He held up his hands. “I’ve nothing against alternative lifestyles, but since when did our primary criteria for who we’d like to tap become—”

“Who we’d like to
tap?
” said Juno, popping into the Library before the door closed. “Seriously! Let’s not let our standards slip, huh?” She slid into a seat next to me. “Please tell me we’re discussing Michelle.”

“We’re attempting to,” Lucky grumbled.

“Good!” Juno smiled, an expression I’d learned to associate with the same anticipation as I would a shark attack. No doubt she disapproved of my untraditional choice as well.

But even Juno had some surprises up her sleeve. “I really liked her,” she said. “I mean, she’s a liberal nutbag, but she gave me some great advice about hybrid cars.”

“So that makes for good tapping criteria?” Lil’ Demon asked.

“Guys, please!” Lucky exclaimed, raking her hands through her short, choppy hair. “I’ve got a dozen more of these to do and I haven’t been to sleep yet.”

Everyone settled down.

“Okay.” Lucky spread out some papers. “So, leaving aside for a moment your totally uncool springing of this upon me, Bugaboo, let’s discuss Michelle because, as I think we’ve now seen, she made quite the impression last night.”

Well, that was nice to hear!

“There’s good news and bad news.”

Uh-oh.

“First, the good. Here’s a copy of her college application. As you can see, she’s stellar. Westinghouse scholar, state science fair champ, rocked 5s on her AP Physics, Calculus A and B, Chemistry, Biology, U.S. History, and English exams, and made all-state on her cross-country team.”

“Cool!” Big Demon said, tilting the application toward him. “What were her times?”

“She was accepted into Duke, Rice, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, Bates, and turned down a scholarship at NYU Polytech to come to Eli.”

Lucky pulled out a new sheaf of papers. “At Eli, she jumped into the sciences with both feet. Freshman year she took seven classes and three half-credit labs and had a GPA of three-point-five, which is crazy good once you consider that two of those classes were Molecular Biochemistry and its lab.”

Lil’ Demon looked confused. “Why is that a big thing?”

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“It’s a weed-out class,” Juno explained. “If you break C-plus, you’re a superstar.”

Lucky cleared her throat and pressed on. “That summer she was a research assistant for a Professor Coudriet, who together with ‘et al.’ recently published an article on—” Lucky squinted at the printout

“—calcium regulated apoptosis pathways—whatever those are—in the journal
Biochemical
Pharmacology
and thanked Michelle in the acknowledgments.”

“Good thing for LexisNexis,” I said.

“Indeed,” Lucky said. “Sophomore year was more of the same, plus she began volunteering at a local middle school to tutor children in the sciences and run their science fair. There’s an article in the
EDN

about the program she started.” She held up another printout. “Looky here: written by Topher Cox.”

“Weird!” I said. And yet simultaneously awesome. Michelle, on paper, was working out to be a fabulous choice for science tap. No one would be able to deny her qualifications. Now all I had to do was convince them to tap her for that spot, and then I’d take Topher as my “official” choice to appease the patriarch powers that be. This would work! It had to!

“Now, here’s where things start getting wonky.”

Crap.

“That summer, she was apparently supposed to work for Professor Coudriet again, but she bailed by July.”

“To do what?” I asked.

“Take a class in River Chemistry and Reclamation at the Eli Forestry School. Which she aced.”

I pursed my lips. “Well, she is my Geology T.A. Maybe she decided to leave Pharmacology and get into Natural Science?”

“Possibly,” said Lucky. “But would one class prevent her from assisting this guy again? I mean, she was on campus anyway. And, because Professor Coudriet has this embarrassing habit of saving e-mail drafts to himself on the Chem department server, I know that in order to entice her back, he offered to add her to the ‘et al.’ on the list of authors in his latest article.”

“Publication credit?” Lil’ Demon asked, already wide eyes growing wider. “As an undergrad? And she skipped out on that?”

Juno’s eyes narrowed as she scanned the e-mail. “He sounds like he has a crush on her, here. Sketchy.”

Everyone’s heads went back and Lucky nodded sagely. “There may be another reason that she quit.”

Lil’ Demon rolled her eyes. “You people and your standards. Put up with the old lech for a few months and get your name on a paper, girl!”

Lucky flipped to a new page in the pile. “Junior year is when we get to the bad news. First of all, her grades went into the toilet. Her GPA dropped to a two-point-three first semester. She quit the mentoring program she’d started. She dropped not one, but two labs. And the semester abroad she supposedly took in the spring? It’s a fantasy.”

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“What!” She had to be kidding.

“Well, she may in fact have gone abroad. I don’t know. But she wasn’t enrolled in any program, and get this—according to the records I snagged from the Registrar’s Office, she
was
signed up for five classes until the end of the drop/add period.”

“So what was it?” Big Demon asked. “An incomplete?”

“Since she dropped them in time, technically she wasn’t enrolled as a student in Eli at all that semester.

But it’s clear she’d been planning to be.”

I slumped in my seat. Well, that was that. There was no way Rose & Grave would countenance a 2.3

GPA, even from a science major, unless they were about to quarterback for the NFL.1*

“So … is she a burnout, then?” Lil’ Demon asked.

“It looks that way,” said Juno, adding “Liberals” under her breath.

(This had been happening a lot, ever since her Spring Break job put her under the mentorship of one of the world’s foremost neocons.)

“Not entirely,” Lucky said. “The research project she was doing first semester this year was totally legit, and what’s more, it might get published. And despite the poor showing at the beginning of her junior year, she was still invited to T.A. a class her first semester back. Whatever happened to her, she seems to have gotten her act together.”

“Maybe she went to rehab,” suggested Lil’ Demon.

“A drug addict?” Juno said. “Yeah,
that’s
who I want in my society.”

“Ex-drug addict,” Big Demon corrected.

“And she wouldn’t be the first,” added Lil’ Demon.

“At any rate,” said Lucky, her tone weary, “that’s her story. I’ll see what more I can find.” She reached her hand across the table and touched my arm. “Look, Bugaboo, I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue this. I’m not even saying that the things we’ve found are necessarily deal-breakers. But know right now that she’s going to have to explain herself at the interview if there’s even a chance of us considering her.

And the explanation better be a heck of a lot better than ‘rehab.’” She shook her head. “You’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you.”

Of course I did. Of course.

To my credit, I did attend my Geology section afterward. Michelle winked at me when I arrived, which caused an involuntary stiffening of my spine.

It was, I admit, not entirely fair to her. After all, if she wasn’t going to act any differently after discovering Jamie was my boyfriend, then I shouldn’t act any differently after discovering he used to be hers.

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Or that she was a potential burnout and possible drug addict who had just complicated my life in a completely different way. I wondered which bit of info I was reacting most strongly to?

The class itself was genuinely interesting. The professor presented slides from his recent trip to Antarctica and the section (of suck-ups, showing up on a Friday without owing favors to the T.A.) paid careful attention. Some even took notes, as if the shots of the professor and his intern trying to digest Meals-Ready-to-Eat would be on the final exam.

Michelle remained rapt throughout the entire lecture. I kept my focus on her. Perhaps I should be taking notes of my own. Why We Should Tap Michelle Whitmore, Reason #335: It would be cool to have a knight at the South Pole.

Would that make up for the lousy GPA?

When class ended, I tried to get Michelle’s attention, hoping she’d meet me for lunch, but she was deep in conversation with the professor and eventually I figured it was awkward to stand around any longer.

They clearly had plans.

I hiked back to Prescott and found Josh and Lydia snuggled on the couch, flipping through an IKEA catalog. “Amy!” Josh called. “Maybe you can help us end a debate. Birch finishes are too eighties, right?”

Lydia and I exchanged long looks. “I think it’s too early to be thinking about furnishing your apartment in Palo Alto,” I said.

“Man, you sound like Lydia,” said Josh. “Whereas I’d be on Craigslist today if I had my way. She wants to wait until August to move out there. Why don’t we just go, you know? After graduation?”

Lydia stared at her hands.

“I’m sure you’ll be deciding soon, either way,” I said, giving her a meaningful glance she utterly ignored.

Whatever. I had my own issues to deal with. I headed for my room.

“He went home, you know,” Josh said, flipping a page in the catalog.