The Ivy: Secrets (20 page)

“Sounds interesting,” he said, handing her the remote.

“Oh it is,” she said. “Last week Gabriella pulled Furlawnda’s weave at the photo shoot, and Anne Marie had like a total meltdown during the makeover because they cut off all her hair, and then Tyra was like ‘
Girl
—’”

Gregory emerged from his bedroom, or what was—from the looks of all the boxes and clothes lining the wall of the common room and the books and discarded papers on the coffee table and chairs—his
old
bedroom. Vanessa stopped talking.

“Hey, Vanessa,” he said, carrying an armful of papers and notes and plunking them down on the coffee table. “These in your way?” he asked.

“No,” she said, sitting up straighter. “You’re fine.”

“You like this shit?” Gregory asked, staring incredulously at OK.

“Uhhh!” Vanessa gasped. “
ANTM
is not shit! I did not hear you just say that,” she cried, covering her ears.

OK examined the TV screen. “Fit girls?” he inquired rhetorically. “Brilliant television.”

Gregory shrugged and returned to his room, emerging a moment later with his bedding.

“It is cool if I just dump this on the chair in your room and then you can toss it on your mattress whenever you’re ready to move?” he asked OK.

“I’ll never be ready to move,” OK muttered.

Vanessa smirked. “You and Adam are switching into the double?”

“Please. Do not remind me,” OK said, his eyes glued to the screen.

“You’d better be out of there by the time I get back from the All Ivy tournament,” Gregory warned, “or you’re going to be homeless and roomless.”

“Vanessa: could you be so kind as to sock Gregory in the face? I’m busy watching
ANTM
.”

“When’s the All Ivy tournament?” Vanessa elected to ask instead.

“We’re supposed to meet on Mass. Ave. in half an hour,” said Gregory.

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, I need to pack,” he said, disappearing into his room.

“This is bloody brilliant,” OK exclaimed, watching the models on the screen prance around in their underwear.

“
Told
you so,” said Vanessa smugly, settling onto the couch.

For the next twenty minutes they watched uninterrupted while Gregory quietly moved the rest of his stuff into the common room, piled more loose papers on the coffee table, and put his gym and duffel bags by the front door.

During a commercial break Vanessa sat up and clicked Mute. Then she began rifling through the papers on the coffee table. “You’re not saving your Justice notes?” she asked mostly to herself. “But I thought those were ‘life lessons’ that we ought to ‘cherish forever’!”

Gregory came and stood behind her, leaning over the back of the couch to peer at the papers. “I probably will save those, actually,” he said. “Haven’t sorted out the trash from the treasured ‘life lessons’ yet, but there’s no point to doing it until
somebody
cleans out his desk.”

“All right, all right!” OK cried, swatting at Gregory’s hands, which had landed vice-like on his shoulders. “Now buzz off, would you, it’s back!” He seized the remote and restored the sound.

“You took calculus?” Vanessa called toward Gregory’s room. “I thought you were supposed to be in, like, genius-level econ. . . .”

“Those are mine,” said OK, glancing at the papers in her hands.

“Huh,” she said, looking down. “‘Notes on Triangles?’ You have really girlie handwriting.”

“That’s Dana’s,” OK said with a wave, clearly irritated by the interruptions.

“What about this?” Vanessa asked, ignoring him. “
This
looks like girl’s handwriting, too!”

OK turned up the volume and folded his arms. A few seconds later he stole a sidelong glance at Vanessa, presumably to see if she had gotten the memo.

Despite what one might infer about the private nature of the document that she held in her hands, Vanessa read it anyway. In fact, she read it three times, her facial expressions cycling through three stages of what appeared to be confusion, and then anger, and then finally amusement.

“I can’t believe I never saw this!” she exclaimed, setting the note on her knee. “How on
earth
did it get over here?”

Gregory, who had just shut the door to his now almost completely empty room, paused on his way to grab his bags. Seeing the note, his eyes grew wide. Bending down, he snatched it away. “That was private,” he said, his voice low and quiet.

“Obviously not,” Vanessa countered, “seeing as everyone
except
me probably had a chance to read it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Gregory, stopping just as he was about to jam the note into his pocket.

“That note—
my
note—never reached me, so I’m assuming whichever one of you found it and stole it probably read it, too.”

Gregory stared at her. “
Your
note? You mean
you
wrote this?”

“No,” said Vanessa, turning around to face him. “Callie wrote it. That’s her handwriting, right there,” she said, pointing to the note in Gregory’s hands. “And that’s her signature.
Duh.
The part I can’t figure out is how it ended up over here.”

“She told OK to give it to me,” Gregory said.

“Why would she tell OK to give my note to
you
?” Vanessa asked.

“
Uuuggh
,” OK groaned, slapping his cheeks as the show’s elimination process began. “Stop. Talking!”

“Why do you keep calling it
your
note,” Gregory asked, “when Callie told OK to deliver it to me?”

“There is no way this note was meant for you,” said Vanessa. “It’s practically a point-by-point response to the note that
I
left taped to her window right after Thanksgiving break.”

Gregory’s brow furrowed. “The note that you left . . . ?” Then he shook his head. “I think you’re confused,” he said to Vanessa.

She shook her head right back at him. “I don’t think so,” she said, taking it from his hands. “Why would Callie bother telling
you
that she messed up our room dynamic? That’s a direct response to
my
note where I accused her, I think word for word, of screwing up our room dynamic!”

“You go, Furlawnda!” OK cried as Tyra Banks handed the girl on-screen a photograph, indicating that she was still in the running.

“Or here: why would she say that she doesn’t think there’s any hope you can be friends?” Vanessa continued. “You guys were never friends to begin with!”

Gregory stood still. “I—”

“And
why
doesn’t it say ‘Dear Gregory’ or anything like that at the beginning? I’ll tell you why: because she was probably planning just to hand it to me or tape it to
my
bedroom window.”

Slowly Gregory started shaking his head again. “No,” he said. “Maybe
some
of this”—he pointed to the note—“fits in with that letter you say you wrote her first, but she actually handed this to OK and told him to give it to me.”

Finally OK tore his eyes away from the screen. He took one look at the note in Vanessa’s hands and shrugged. “I have never seen that before in my life.”

“What?” said Gregory, his voice barely above a whisper.

“See?” Vanessa said triumphantly.

Gregory stared at the note and then at OK and then at Vanessa. “But then how . . .”

Suddenly Gregory jumped around the couch and kneeled in front of OK, grabbing his forearms and forcing him to look into his eyes. “You said that Callie had a message for me.”

“Yeah, that she missed you and wanted to talk about Harvard-Yale or something, but
you
said she’d already told you herself,” OK cried. “Now can you please move? It’s down to the final two!”

Slowly Gregory stood. “I have to go,” he whispered, starting for the door.

“Yes, you do,” OK agreed, his eyes fixed on the screen. “You’re already ten minutes late.”

“Ten minutes—
fuck!
” cried Gregory, slapping his forehead. He stood in front of the door for a full thirty seconds, staring at it. Finally he shook his head and, muttering, slung his racket and gym and duffel bags over his shoulder. Hand on the doorknob he called, “Please tell Callie I’ll be back in a week and that I need to talk to her. In person. Wait,” he interrupted himself, surveying the backs of their heads. “Scratch that. Don’t tell Callie anything. I’ll tell her myself.” The door slammed behind him.

“He has been so touchy lately,” OK muttered as
America’s Next Top Model
drew to a close.

“Tell me about it,” Vanessa said with a snort, lifting the note. “‘I may be a terrible person, but if I am, you are just as bad, if not worse’? Can you believe this crap? Who the hell does she think she is?”

OK shrugged. “What’s really crap is that you two are still fighting.
Still
. I think you ought to just get over all of your girlie troubles by socking Callie in the face.”

Vanessa giggled.

“Take the girls in this show, for example,” said OK. “When they get mad, they fight, and pull each other’s hair, and not only is it fantastic to watch, but everyone feels better afterward
and
everyone is a
model
. Well, only one girl can continue on in the hopes of becoming America’s
next
top model, but I’d still bang most of them.”

“R
ick, I have to talk to you.”

“Uh-huh. I saved my first drink to have with you. Here.”

“No. No, Rick, not tonight.”

“Especially, tonight.”

“Please . . .”

“Why did you have to come to Casablanca? There are other places.”

“I wouldn’t have come if I’d known that you were here. Believe me, Rick, it’s true I didn’t know. . . .”

“It’s funny about your voice, how it hasn’t changed. I can still hear it. ‘Richard, dear, I’ll go with you anyplace. We’ll get on a train together and never stop—’”

“Don’t, Rick! I can understand how you feel.”

“You understand how I feel. How long was it we had, honey?”

“I didn’t count the days.”

“Well, I did. Every one of ’em. Mostly I remember the last one. The wild finish. A guy standing on a station platform in the rain with a comical look on his face because his insides have been kicked out.”

“Can I tell you a story, Rick?”

“Has it got a wild finish?”

“I don’t know the finish yet.”

“Well, go on. Tell it—maybe one will come to you as you go along.”

Tears streamed down Callie’s face at the familiar, yet never tiresome, images on the screen. She was watching
Casablanca
on her laptop, again, alone in her room, lying in bed, and it was not unusual for her to begin crying at Ingrid Bergman’s “Play it, Sam” and continue weeping until long after “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” ended the film. At least, it wasn’t unusual these days.

Today was day four of official “Hide in Your Room Week.” Since second semester didn’t even start until the end of the month, there was really no reason for her to do anything other than stay right here in bed. For food—though her appetite had all but disappeared—there was Dana, who seemed happy to drop off meals as long as she didn’t have to stay and talk, which was fine, more than fine, by Callie.

Three things she avoided like the plague: answering her cell phone, checking her e-mail, and the online edition or any paper copies of the
Harvard Crimson
. (She was surprised that the HUPD had yet to burst into her room to verify that she was still alive, as her mom often threatened to call the police when Callie was unresponsive for over forty-eight hours.) After all, it was one thing to read the article but quite another to face the reaction. Or what she could only guess the reaction would be. The snatches she’d heard coming from the common room the day the feature ran had been bad enough. . . .

Mimi murmuring something about how it “explained a lot.” Dana saying a prayer and then (and Callie was really starting to love her), banning the incident as a topic of conversation. She even added the ban to the official-looking document she had typed, printed, and taped to the wall above the couch to give them a fresh start for next semester: “Rules of the Common Room.” Right underneath
All visitors of the male persuasion must vacate by 11
P.M.
—preferably to their own homes, please; and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
(they were still debating exactly what she meant by that); she had written,
Please be Courteous and Respect the following Banned Conversational Topics when I am present: inappropriate behavior in the library, Paris Hilton,
Chelsea Clinton,
The entire Clinton family, Anything X-rated including: tapes, files, photos, websites, or what Mimi did last night.

And of course, there was Vanessa, who had remained oddly, uncharacteristically silent. Callie had listened particularly hard for her voice, but the anticipated commentary, like “can’t believe she figured out another way to be the center of attention” or “at least now the whole school knows she’s a slut,” simply had not come. Perhaps, after a semester of ups and downs and in light of Callie’s recent social kamikaze, they had finally reached a denouement. Or Vanessa was just busy or off with Tyler somewhere and still hated Callie’s guts. Either/or, Callie had more important things to worry about.

In a lot of ways Callie felt relieved. She had been able to control the way the story came out, and she and Matt had phrased the article in a manner that would keep all but the most shameless people from seeking out the video. Even though Callie had stopped checking her e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and voice mail—addictions that just a month ago she would have declared impossible to live without—she had a feeling that Lexi had been silenced. Yes, Lexi could still out the tape, but it would be at the risk of exposing herself as the “unnamed upperclassman who had secured a copy of the file and used it throughout the semester for coercive purposes” referenced in the article.

Callie imagined that she could probably watch
Casablanca
at least seven more times before she started getting bored. She turned up the volume, trying to drown out what sounded like OK and Mimi messing around in the common room. Laszlo’s face filled the screen.

“I know a good deal more about you than you suspect. I know, for instance, that you’re in love with a woman. It is perhaps a strange circumstance that we both should be in love with the same woman.”

It sounded like Mimi and OK were arguing. Sighing, Callie reached for her headphones as Rick replied:

“You love her that much?”

“Apparently you think of me only as the leader of a cause. Well, I’m also a human being. Yes, I love her that much.”

“BLITZKRIEG!” a male voice yelled, and Callie’s bedroom door banged open against the wall. Two figures clad in black ski masks rushed inside.

Callie barely had time to flip her laptop shut before she heard Mimi shrieking, “Red team, move! Now, go, do it now!” and Callie was lifted into the air.

OK slung Callie over his shoulder. “Red team to common room, we are a go, code red, code blue, blue forty-two now now NOW!” Mimi yelled as the three of them exploded into the common room.

“Put—me—DOWN!” Callie screamed, her arms and legs flailing ineffectually.

“Suit yourself,” said OK, dropping her.

“OWW!” Callie yelled, hitting the floor with a thud.

“Whoopsie,” Mimi muttered, removing her mask. The face underneath looked sheepish.

“What—the—hell,” Callie asked, pushing herself to her feet, “is going on here?”

“Er . . .” said OK, glancing at Mimi for guidance. She nodded. “We came here to kidnap you—ow!”

Mimi, frowning and shaking her head, had just slapped him on the arm.

“Oh, right,” he remembered. “What I meant to say is you
have been
kidnapped. And now you have to . . . uh . . .”

“Come with me if you want to live,” Mimi finished in a surprisingly accurate imitation of California’s former Governator.

Now that Callie had recovered from the shock of being “kidnapped” and held hostage in her own common room, she had a moment to take in her captors’ outfits.

Mimi, who was always gorgeous no matter what—or how little—she was wearing, looked even more like a prostitute than she had the night she agreed to let Vanessa dress her for “National American Girl Slut Day” (Halloween). OK, on the other hand, in his baggy gold pantaloons (there was no other word for them) purple vest, which he wore without a shirt, and red do-rag looked like . . . Aladdin.

“What . . .” said Callie, starting to laugh. “Why are you guys dressed like that?”

“It is part of our so-called ‘Pudding Initiation,’” Mimi explained. “Dress up. Go out. Experience humiliation. Etcetera, etcetera. We were assigned ‘ho and pimps.’”

“Woman, I told you, I ain’t no pimp—I’m a
rapper
pimp,” OK said, making his best attempt at a “ghetto-fabulous” accent. It came out sounding slightly Australian.

Callie was now laughing so hard that she accidentally snorted. “You look”—she gasped, snorting again—“like Aladdin!”

“Who is this Aladdin?” Mimi asked, eyes wide with innocence. OK looked at Callie, looked down, then looked at Mimi and yelled, “MI-MI!”

“What?” she cried, unable to contain her laughter any longer.

“You told me you were going to make me a
rapper pimp
!” he cried, chasing her around the room.

“You think I know
ce que c’est
?” she shrieked, darting out of his grasp.

“
Arrête! Maintenant!
” Mimi gasped when he caught up to her. “We—are—supposed—to—be—on—une—MISSION!”

And it was then that Callie noticed the outfit on the armchair: a shiny minidress that her mother would describe as “cheap looking” regardless of what had probably been an exorbitant price tag.

“That,” she said, pointing to the dress, “is not happening.”

Mimi looked at OK. “OK?”

Nodding, he reached into the folds of his pantaloons and pulled out a small squirt gun. “Afraid you don’t have a choice, love,” he said, aiming it at Callie.

Callie laughed, holding up her hands. “Please don’t shoot,” she pleaded.

“Now, do as we say and put that on,” he continued, gesturing toward the dress, “or I’m going to make it rain.”

Callie laughed again.

“What?” he demanded, looking put out. “Rappers make it rain . . . right, Mimi?”

“Oui,”
Mimi agreed. “But seriously, Callie darling, you must come with us to the Harvard pub.”

“Harvard pub?” asked Callie. “I thought this was a Pudding thing.”

“
Oui
, but the public venue is the key to the humiliation, you see?”

“Ah,” said Callie. Public humiliation and initiation: two of my favorite things. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to pass.”

“
Mais non
,” Mimi whined. “
Tu vas venir
, we have not been to an initiation event since Limericks, and this will be a perfect opportunity for you to . . . ah, how is it you say? ‘Get back out here’?”

Callie considered but then shook her head.

OK looked at Mimi. “But last week Anne said that if she didn’t come—”

Mimi gave him a look, and he stopped talking, but Callie got the message. “I don’t care if they kick me out. I never cared much about the stupid club anyway.” Since December 31 had long since passed and she had never paid her dues, and had been dutifully deleting every Pudding-related e-mail from her in-box without reading, her membership had probably already been deactivated and she simply had yet to receive the news.