The Ivy: Rivals (18 page)

Callie dragged her hands across her face, feeling more confused than ever.

Closing her eyes, she tried to picture the way Clint and Lexi had been looking at each other in the library. Something had passed between them that had been worth lying about; there had to be something here, in this room, to prove what it was one way or another.

Before Callie realized what was happening, she had yanked open the doors to his closet. Jackets, suits, ties, slacks, dress shirts, T-shirts, jeans, and a couple of hangers on one side with several items of women’s clothing (all Callie’s that she had left there at one sleepover or another)—that’s it. On the floor there were several pairs of shoes and one—
jackpot!
—shoe box with the cardboard lid closed tight. Bending over, she opened the box and lifted the folds of tissue paper aside, only to find . . .

More shoes.

“Dammit!” she cursed. Cocking her ear to the common room, she could still hear the faint sounds of Tyler’s—er—
interesting
attempts to sing. No sign of Clint’s return—yet. Wheeling around, she honed in on his dresser. Sock drawer: that’s where everyone hid secrets or, in her case, where she sometimes hid her phone. Pulling it open, she found herself staring down into a sea of socks.

Who knew he was so into argyle? she mused somewhat hysterically as she tossed several pairs over her shoulder and onto the floor.
Aha!
she thought suddenly, unearthing the glossy corner of what appeared to be a photograph of . . . Oh. It was a picture of Callie, and Clint, that someone had snapped at the Delphic Toga party. Her arms were looped around his neck and he was gazing down at her, half smiling, half serious while they stood, unable to keep their hands off each other, at the base of the staircase.

Gingerly she set the photo on top of the dresser.

What am I missing? she wondered, casting around the room. “There has to be something,” she murmured, returning to his desk. “There just
has
to be.”

Once again she stared at the subject headings of his e-mails. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard. Then, deciding, she opened
Gov Midterm
.

Your friend underlined, exclamation mark? Shaking her head, Callie clicked on Gatsby.

Her pulse thundering, Callie clicked on the attachment. It was a candid photograph of Clint and Lexi taken at the Fly’s Gatsby party, presumably during their sophomore year. Even though it probably wasn’t more than twelve months old, they both looked younger—happier and more carefree. Lexi wore white: a billowy muslin dress with strands and strands of pearls, and her usually pale cheeks were pink and rosy. Clint stood behind her in a tuxedo, his arms wrapped around her and holding both her hands. His eyes were diverted away from the camera down toward Lexi’s collarbone, his smiling lips only inches away from her bare shoulder. Something in his expression seemed to indicate that he had just inhaled, breathing her in.

“Callie?”

Oh god.

She shut the photo; his open e-mail account filled the screen.

“What—what are you
doing
?”

Slowly Callie turned, noting as she did the closet door, still thrown open, the shoe box lid askew, and the socks on the floor near his dresser where the picture lay exposed and the top drawer jutted out.

Clint stood in the doorway, disbelief etched across his face.

“What are you doing?” he repeated, shutting the door behind him.

“I-uh-your, um,” she stammered, starting to shake. “I know you were in the library with Lexi, okay!” she finally managed to exclaim.

“You know I was in the library with Lexi doing
what
exactly?” he said, speaking in the same calm tones one might use to coax a wild animal back into its cage.

“Studying!” she cried. “I mean, not just
studying
. It was more than that, and you were alone, and there was no study group, and you were eating, and you LIED to me; you’re a
liar
!”

Clint sat down on the edge of his bed and took a deep breath. “And so you decided to hack into my e-mail and see what you could find, is that it?”

“I didn’t
hack
into it,” she muttered. “I turned on your computer to check
my
e-mail and yours opened by accident.”

“Well,” he said. “Did you find anything good?”

How the hell could he so
calm
when she had caught him red-handed? Red-handed at what though, exactly? Her mind had gone fuzzy with confusion, doubt, and rage. She couldn’t think straight. Gripping the sides of her temples, she breathed in and out, trying to concentrate. Okay, start at the beginning. . . .

“You lied to me last week, on Wednesday before you left for Princeton. You said you had to study, and that there were multiple
guys
, as in men
plural
, in the group, but the only person I could see there with you in Widener was Alexis Thorndike!”

“Were you . . .
spying
on me?”

“I work in the library!” she erupted. “Part of that involves returning books to their proper place, which is what I was doing in Widener when I
happened
to see you.”

“Just like you
happened
to see my e-mail?”

“You also told me that you were too busy to get dinner,” she continued, ignoring him, “but then you turned around and had dinner with
her
.”

“Callie,” he said quietly. “I
was
too busy to get dinner; that’s why we ate in the library—so we could keep working without wasting any extra time by taking a break.”

“But . . .” she sputtered. “But . . . but you still
lied
about the whole study group. There was never any study group.” Or was there? She was no longer sure. She had been positive coming into this conversation that she had caught him at something and he would confess; now, with the e-mail still open behind her, argyle all over the floor, the photo on the dresser, and the way he was looking at her, she was starting to feel like it was the other way around.

Clint sighed. “There
is
a study group, actually. It’s me, Bryan, a guy named Tom, Alexis, and another girl from class. When I said
‘guys,’
I meant it the way you usually mean when you say it, as a gender-neutral term.”

Callie shook her head. “Your text said that you
guys
were in the library.” She pulled out her phone. “Here it is right here:
‘It’s just me and a couple of guys from class over here at Widener . . .’
Well, I was there, too, Clint, and I know what I saw: Lexi was the only person with you at that table.”

She waited for him to explain that away, too, but he was quiet. Finally he said, “You’re right. I lied.”

I knew it! I . . . knew it. Just like that, the triumph faded and the reality of what might be happening sank in.

“I lied because I thought it would spare you from worrying over nothing more than two friends studying together in the library.”

Callie opened her mouth to protest but then stopped, finding it difficult to object to his claim that she would have worried. No matter what he might have said he was doing with Lexi—studying, saying hi, shopping, skydiving, sitting twenty feet away in the same classroom—knowing that he was with her
did
make Callie anxious to an almost obsessive degree. And he knew it, too, because she had never figured out how to hold her feelings inside when she was upset about something . . . even if the reasons for being upset were unfounded or wrong.

“And, to be honest,” Clint continued, “I was tired of having the same conversation over and over and over again. It’s tough enough as it is to move on from a past relationship without your current girlfriend bringing it up all the time.”

Oh my god, thought Callie, her mind going suddenly crystal clear.
I am wrong.
So he lied. So what? Obviously he only did it because she was crazy—if the state of his room right now was any indication—and he had been trying to keep her from going crazier. If she had called Alessandra “irrational” just for going through Gregory’s phone, what did that make her? Certifiable. She was, certifiably, insane.

She stared at him. He seemed far too calm, too cool, too collected. A tiny voice whispered in the back of her head—not Dana’s, not Mimi’s, not Vanessa’s, but her own: Am I really crazy, or is he just making me
think
I’m crazy?

“What about . . .” she started. “There was an, uh, e-mail. . . .”

“Yes?” he prompted. “We both know you went through them; you might as well ask me directly if you’re curious about anything.”

Fair enough. “Why did you tell Lexi that you ‘needed to talk’?” she asked.

“I . . .” he faltered. “When did I say that?”

“On Tuesday morning of last week,” she said, glancing at his inbox. “And she wrote back that she would come over at eight. So she was here. In your room. At night. Why?” She unfolded her arms, trying to look less like a lawyer cross-examining a witness. Clint definitely seemed more on edge now, coming over to his computer to read the e-mail thread.

Still, after thinking for a moment, he started to shake his head. “That was a Pudding-related thing. Don’t you remember that I told you I had board stuff going on that night when I stopped by the
Crimson
in the afternoon? She and I met up at the club to talk about a punch.”

Callie bit her lip, searching for holes in his story and finding none. . . .

“It was about Vanessa, actually,” he added, after a beat. “I suspected Lex was planning to have her cut and I thought that maybe I could convince her to drop that little vendetta if I talked to her in private before we hold elections next week.”

“She was never in your room?”

“She was never in my room.”

Callie sucked in her breath. “You invited her to Gatsby . . .” she started, all the while knowing that an old picture meant nothing and that she was grasping at straws.

“I never said I didn’t.”

“And she . . .” Callie paused, deciding that referencing the way Lexi had underlined “friend” might seem beyond crazy, even after everything she’d already done. Still, she felt curious about one last thing: her eyes flicked over the subject heading
What I told you in the Library
. Might as well ask—at this point she had nothing left to lose.

“What did Lexi tell you in the library?”

Clint looked at her and sank back onto his bed. “That’s actually something that I’ve been meaning to ask
you
about,” he said. “I was waiting until I got back, though, so we could talk in person.”

Callie said nothing, staring at him.

“At first, when she told me, I didn’t believe her. I thought that after all this time she’d been lying about wanting to be friends and had devised some new form of sabotage—a new strategy to try to break us up.”

Exhaling, he continued: “She told me that you hooked up with Gregory. She said that according to you, it happened at the very beginning of the year, during freshman week, but that she had reason to believe that something happened months later, when we were supposedly together—although she wouldn’t say who told her or anything more specific than that. Then I said she was a liar and had clearly been manipulating me for months while claiming to be my friend, and I left the library. I guess you were gone by that point,” he added ruefully, “and didn’t see me storm out.”

Callie’s eyes were wide. She gripped the sides of her chair, paralyzed and unable to speak.

“I had a chance to think about it over the weekend,” he said. “Why believe Lexi—who I know to be capable of doing or saying
anything
in the name of getting what she wants—over you? But then . . . I asked Bolton.”

“What did he say?” Callie whispered.

“He said that I should ask you; that it was between the two of us, and then he refused to say anything more.”

Callie closed her eyes.

“Is it true?” Clint asked quietly. “Did something happen at the beginning of the year?”

Slowly she shook her head. “Nothing happened at the beginning of the year,” she said. “But something did happen in November. At Harvard-Yale.”

“So in other words, the day after we agreed to take some time to think,” he said.

She swallowed. “It was a fuzzy gray area, like you said.”

“Well, what happened? Was it just a kiss?”

She shook her head again.

“More?” he asked.

She nodded.

“And it never occurred to you at any point to tell me this?” For the first time that evening, she detected a significant crack in his calm.

“I—I’m so sorry,” she finally managed, silent tears streaming down her cheeks. “I wanted to tell you—I
tried
to tell you so many times. But I thought if we just put the past in the past and moved forward, with ‘no more secrets’ like we said, that things would be better that way. . . . I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“What about the fact that you did it in the first place?” he demanded. “Are you sorry about that, too?”