Tap & Gown (33 page)

Lydia shook her head. “Why do you guys even bother with the cover stories anymore?”

Honestly? I had no idea.

“Fine,” she said in resignation. “I’ll feed your stupid rat.”

“Mouse.”

“Sewer dweller, carrier of plague, whatever.” She tapped the tank. “Well, it’s probably better that I have some time alone to think this weekend.”

Page 156

I cocked my head at her.

“Law school, Ames. I have to choose.”

“I thought you had.”

“Yeah, well …” She hunched her shoulders. “Not yet. Now that Josh knows, he’s been giving me all this grief about self-sacrifice. And I went to talk to some professors at the law school the other day and now I’m all confused.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’ve been talking about it. I’ve talked to you, I’ve talked to Josh, I’ve talked to professors, my advisors, my parents. My letter to Dear Abby should be published any day now.”

“I hope you’re kidding.”

She turned to me. “I’m just saying that I’ve got all the advice I can take. What I need is to talk to myself for a little while. Maybe it’s good you two are going to be unreachable this weekend. I’ll get the other voices out of my head and just … I don’t know. Find a solution.”

I took her hands in mine. “You know what the real problem is?”

“Enlighten me.”

“No matter what you decide, you won’t be with me next year.”

Her laugh sounded more like a cry. “I know. I have no idea how either of us will survive. Who will have Gumdrop Drops with me?”

“Who will trash our suite with feathers and raw hamburger?” I asked.

“Who will pound on the wall when my boyfriend and I get rowdy?”

“Who will despair of me ever finding a boyfriend?”

Lydia bit her lip in contrition. “That actually reminds me. You had a phone call while you were out.”

“Jamie?” I exclaimed in hope.

“No,” said Lydia. “Brandon.”

Brandon and I met at our favorite coffee shop. He was waiting for me with my usual order, iced mocha with whipped cream and shaved cocoa toppings.

“You remembered,” I said when he handed it to me.

“Of course.” He smiled, and his melted-chocolate eyes went right through me, as always. “Want to sit down, or walk?”

Page 157

“Walk, I think,” I said. “I can’t get enough of looking at the campus these days.”

“Me neither.” We exited into the late-April sunshine and started down the street, sipping our drinks and enjoying the interplay of new wet leaves and old Gothic architecture. “Remember the first time you saw this place?”

I did. I’d been on a college tour with my parents and was utterly bowled over by the buildings, by the groups of students quoting Shakespeare and playing Frisbee. It was a picture postcard of American college life and I wanted in.

“Hard to believe we’re leaving,” he said. We passed into Old Campus and started down one of the paths that crisscrossed through the green. “I always figured I’d have more time here.”

“Pretty easy to visit, though,” I said. “With you in New York.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Not the same.”

“No,” I agreed.

We reached a relatively dry bench and sat, facing out over the campus.

“I’m glad you called,” I said to him. “I didn’t want things to end the way they did, between us.”

“I didn’t, either,” he said. “And I felt like I owed you an explanation about Felicity.”

I busied myself with my mocha. In the church hall nearby, the Russian Chorus was doing warm-up exercises, their harmonized voices wafting through the spring breeze. I kicked at the mulch beneath my feet. Perhaps Brandon was waiting for a response, but I wasn’t about to give one. The Diggers had taught me the power of silence.

Brandon broke first.
Watch out, Jamie, I’ll become a spy next
.

“When I found out she was in Dragon’s Head,” he said, “I thought all my hesitance, all my distance from her had been justified. After all, I’d already been burned by you and Rose & Grave last spring. You were supposed to be my girlfriend, but when something bad happened to you, who did you tell? Some people you’d known for a few days, people who wore silly costumes. Not me. I thought I’d learned my lesson after that. Do not get involved with society girls, you know? They’ll always put their societies first.”

And still, I stayed quiet. There was no denial. I not only chose the society over Brandon, I chose George, my society brother, over him, too.

“But then—she shocked me. She admitted that she’d been behind those attacks on you, confessed like I was a priest or something. Is that what they teach you people?”

“I can’t tell you that,” I recited.

“Whatever. Anyway, she told me that she’d halt the whole thing if I wanted. She told me she’d do whatever it took, that I was the thing that was most important to her—”

“Stop,” I whispered, hit with the weight of the sacrifice that came with Felicity’s triumph. If Dragon’s
Page 158

Head was anything like Rose & Grave, she’d lost major capital within her society the moment she chose barbarian matters over them. And more than that, she’d done it for something as inconsistent as love. She hadn’t let me see it last February, but she had been the one to make the choice that none of us were able to. Not Jamie or me, not Lydia or Josh, not Harun or Jenny. For Felicity alone did love conquer all.

Yet Felicity, like the rest of us, was left with no one.

No wonder she had called me a bitch back in that Sign of the Unicorn shop. I was the cynic, the one willing to weigh love on a scorecard. Had she interpreted my asking after Brandon as rubbing salt in the wound? I’d meant to hurt her, to reference the fact that she’d bound Brandon to her through bribery and blackmail. But what if all I’d really done was remind her that her efforts had been in vain?

“Yeah,” he said. “We were together for Spring Break, and it was beautiful. We went down to the Golden Isles, stayed in some haunted B&B in Savannah, soaked up the South. It was like last summer in Hong Kong. But as soon as we got back to campus, we realized that it was make-believe. What was broken between us last February—it wasn’t what Felicity had done. It was what I did.”

“She dumped you.”

“Yeah.” He was staring down at his coffee.

“I’m sorry, Brandon.”

“Maybe it was broken all along,” he said. “That’s why we worked on vacation, but not in the real world.” He cast me a sidelong glance. “Heard you got together with someone over Spring Break.”

“I did.” A sip of mocha and a firm resolution not to burst into tears.

“Is it working out?”

“No.” Firm resolution. Firm resolution.

“Thought not.”

Ouch. Though I suppose I deserved that. After all, the girl Brandon knew had been terrified by the idea of commitment.

“I’m beginning to think the whole system is flawed,” he went on. “Boyfriends and girlfriends. You had the right idea all along.”

What? I turned to him, sure he was joking, but Brandon’s expression was closed, his face reflecting only bitterness.

“It’s the underlying inequality. Someone is always the one who loves more, and it eventually drives the other—the less loving one—away. Just the pressure of it.”

“Been reading your Auden, I see.”

“Huh?” he said, furrowing his brow. “Oh, right. ‘If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.’” He took another sip of his coffee, then made a face. “I don’t know if W.H. was right about that.

I’ve been both. And I prefer guilt to humiliation.”

Page 159

I swallowed with some difficulty. Who was this guy? He wasn’t the Brandon I’d known junior year. It was me; I had been the one to do this to him. Felicity was right to blame me. Brandon had loved me without reservation, without fear, and I’d broken his heart. Broken it so that he couldn’t let Felicity in, no matter what she tried. He, in turn, had broken her heart. Was this some never-ending chain?

“No,” I said softly. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Brandon. “Not anymore.”

I hunched into my coffee drink. Brandon might claim to prefer the guilt, but he had no compunction about handing it off to me.

“Which role did you play with that guy from Spring Break?” he asked abruptly.

I straightened. “I have no idea. That’s not what happened.” Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me. Sometimes they did it without even knowing, as I had done to Jamie long before.

But how could I explain that to Brandon? He’d asked the same things of me that Jamie had. He’d been as forthright with his feelings—even more so. And yet, I hadn’t loved him. I’d loved Jamie. Brandon’s method was not at fault. Pursue a girl who could love you that way, and it would be bound to succeed.

Had I killed that possibility? Had I destroyed him for future girls, the same way I had for Felicity?

No, I realized. That hypothetical loving girl would come, and Brandon would forget his bitterness. He’d forget what I’d done, and he’d think only of her, as right this second, I could think only of Jamie.

“Really?” Brandon asked. “You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”

Of course he did. After all, it was me. And to explain what happened—to tell him that Jamie and I loved each other, but had chosen certain ambition over uncertain futures—well, wouldn’t that sound like commitment issues in disguise? It was more than Josh and Lydia’s conundrum. Choosing the life he did meant Jamie had to give me up. To give it all up.

“I’ll forgive you.” I looked at him. “If you’ll forgive me.”

Brandon said nothing.

I gave him a weak smile. “Not yet, huh?”

“Not yet.” He didn’t meet my gaze. “Not when you can sit there and act like you’re in love.”

“For all the good it’s doing me.”

He snorted and stared out over the quad. Whatever he’d been hoping for from this interview, it hadn’t happened. If anything, I’d probably made it worse.

I’m sorry for breaking you, Brandon. I’m sorry you weren’t the one for me, and that we hurt each
other the way we did. But you’ll be okay. You’ll be better than okay. At NYU, you’ll meet
someone. She’ll be pretty and smart and fun and funny, and she’ll love you beyond all reason, and
Page 160

what’s more, you’ll love her back. I promise
.

But I couldn’t say that to him, so I just joined him in observing the students on the grass.

Which is when I saw him. Even from across the quad, his eyes burned like laser beams. And those beams were focused right at me. Blake Varnham.

How long had he been standing there, staring?

“Brandon, see that guy?”

It took him less than a second. “The one from Commons?”

“Yeah.”

“What a creep.” He smirked, and for a second, I got a flash of the old Brandon. “Let’s wave at him.”

We waved. Blake put his hands in his pockets, but did not break his gaze.

“Okay,” said Brandon. “Now he’s just pissing me off.”

“Me too.” Across the lawn, someone called Blake’s name, and he dragged his attention away from us at last as the newcomer met him on the walk. His back was to us. They spoke, and then Blake pointed in our direction. The newcomer swiveled to follow Blake’s finger, and his face fell as our eyes met.

Topher Cox.

“Read it!” I hissed at the neophyte from beneath my mask of roses. The clamor rose around me, knights and patriarchs shouting and banging copper pots as they whirled in a circle around us.

“Read it!” they echoed in their best scary voices. “Read it!”

The neophyte ducked his head and peered at the parchment.

“I, Christopher Lionel Cox, Barbarian-So-Called, most solemnly pledge and avow my love and
affection, everlasting loyalty and undying fealty. By the Flame of Life and the Shadow of Death, I
swear to cleave wholly unto the principles of this ancient order, to further its friends and plight its
enemies, and place above all others the causes of the Order of Rose & Grave.”