Secret Society Girl

acerbic or sensationally snarky stories that would tell me to settle for a life of comfortable mediocrity or risk getting squashed into the pavement by the bigger rats in the race? Would that somehow prod me into picking an attainable yet still suitably lofty path, or would it simply convince me it wasn’t worth trying?

“Okay,” I said slowly, gauging his reaction, “but are we going to present said Ambition in a positive or negative light?”

Brandon, damn him, threw back his head and laughed. “Touched a nerve, Ames?”

Sometimes I suspected Genius-boy over there could read my mind. I shrugged, retrieved the airplane from where it had slid beneath my chair, and lobbed it back at him. “Fine. Ambition it is. It sounds like a Calvin Klein perfume, but let’s run with it.” I shuffled the papers on my desk, and started rearranging the thumbtacks in the side of the worn canvas cubicle according to rainbow color order.

He smoothed out the creases of the plane and studied me carefully. “What’s up with you tonight? You’re not in your usual take-over-the-world mode.” Brandon was cute, in a kind of sidekick-on-a-WB-show way. He was only an inch or two taller than me, and had plain brown hair that was overgrown into an unruly shag, light olive skin, and big, soulful puppy-dog eyes with just the slightest tilt at the corners to hint at his Asian-American (“twenty-five percent and counting!”) heritage.

Yeah, it was the eyes that got me, every time.

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. End of year stress. Seven hundred pages of War and Peace to read before exams.”

“Ah, The Russian Novel.” Brandon nodded in sympathy. “Two hundred and thirty-two cubic inches of sheer torture. I hear just lifting the class texts put some guy in traction.” He winked. “Don’t worry. In two weeks, you’ll be in Quill & Ink, and they’ve got to have an in with Lit exams. You’ll rock it.”

I bit my lip. “I’m…not getting tapped by Quill & Ink.”

“What?” He pointed at the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF sign on my desk, at me, at the writing on the door that read ELI LITERARY MAGAZINE, a look of mock incredulity on his face. “How is that possible?”

Finally, someone to talk to about this! Lydia was doing her best Tommy! impression and Glenda Foster was MIA (probably out interviewing the real Quill & Ink taps). “I don’t know! But I went to my interview, and it was all this crap about FBI files and my third-grade teacher and—other stuff—and then they told me they weren’t Quill….”

“Maybe they were lying?”

“Either way, they couldn’t stop talking about how I wasn’t right for them. They were being pretty mean, so I told them off, gave them the finger—not that they could see it, the way the room was all dark—and walked out.”

“Wow.” Brandon grinned, and those puppy-dog eyes of his began to take on a very particular gleam. One that I knew well, after working in such close quarters with him on the magazine since October. One that I’d been curiously susceptible to ever since he’d plied me with flowers and Godiva on February 14th. “I think,” he said, in a tone that betrayed how little of his interest truly lay in the subject of my society interview, “that we should continue this conversation over dinner. How about Thai? We’ve got half a dozen choices on Chapel Street alone.” New Haven is replete with houses of curry.

I gave him a hairy eyeball. Brandon never asked for dates, he sprung them on you like a bear trap. You see, Brandon Weare wanted me to be his girlfriend. Friends-with-benefits wasn’t cutting it for him anymore (though there’d been no complaints while he was receiving those benefits, let me tell you!).

Oh, yeah. I’d slept with Brandon. Six times, to be precise. Maybe I should back it up a bit:

AMY HASKEL’S HIT LIST

1) Jacob Allbrecker. 12th Grade. Prom Night. I dated Jacob for four months my senior year in high school, and he broke up with me two weeks before prom because I wouldn’t go all the way. But since we’d already bought the tickets, and I’d made my hair appointment, we went to prom together anyway, where despite my earlier protests, I ended up losing my virginity in Colleen Morrison’s little sister’s bedroom at the after-party. Glamorous, huh? Jacob and I slept together twice more before graduation and then he started Duke in the summer session. I hooked up with him on Thanksgiving Break freshman year, but we didn’t get past second base because I was already in heavy lust with

2) Galen Twilo. Freshman Year. Reading Week, first semester. Omigod, this guy was gorgeous! And an artist, the kind that a scant two years later I’d laugh at for thinking he was deep with all his black sweaters and cigarettes and dog-eared copies of Naked Lunch (which isn’t half as sexy as it sounds). I spent all of Reading Week (the week without classes just before exams, when we’re supposed to study but really just party) in his bed, where I learned all kinds of nifty facts about the male anatomy and everything I needed to rock my Twentieth Century American Poetry final. When I came back after Winter Break, though, he pretended he didn’t know me.

3) Alan Albertson. Summer-Fall-Winter. Sophomore Year. We met at a summer job at the Eli University Press, and he was two years older than me. We spent the whole summer together avoiding beach trips and pool parties (I don’t swim, c.f. unfortunate dockside incident, and he burns like a crab in the sun). It was love. And then he got a Fulbright and went to London (where there aren’t any UV rays) and broke my heart, which put me on a dark path that led directly to

4) Ben…Somebody. Sophomore Year. Spring Break at Myrtle Beach. And that’s all I know, except that I remember that his dick had a funny bend in the middle.

5) Brandon Weare. Junior Year. February 14th. All girls are notoriously weak-willed on Valentine’s Day—it’s like some sort of cosmic alignment of the Pathetic Planet and the Couples-Everywhere-You-Look Constellation in the seventh house of Loneliness. All I know is that every February 14th, even the most independent and academically focused girl on campus can be wooed with a dozen drugstore roses and a Hallmark card.

I’ve always been completely honest with him about the fact that I wasn’t exactly girlfriend material (see above list if you don’t believe me). Even on that Valentine’s Day, somewhere between the removal of the tops and the removal of the bottoms, I told him, “This can’t be serious, okay?”

And of course he said, “Okay.” It doesn’t matter how many articles of clothing you’re still wearing. As soon as a guy thinks there’s sex on the table, he’ll agree to anything.

The five times I slept with him after Valentine’s Day…well, what can I say? I’m a pushover. Now, at least, I knew what he’d been getting at with all the paper airplane–throwing and origami leapfrogs he’d been shooting my way since we’d met sophomore year. (Geeky boys flirt in random-access ways.) Brandon has been steadily campaigning for clarification on our “status” since February, and I’ve been putting off the conversation with notably more success than I’ve had resisting the temptations of the flesh.

Or the possibility of free crab rangoon. Forty-five minutes later, I had a belly full of pad Thai and an earful of Brandon’s theories about how worthless the archaic tradition of the Eli secret society was to the modern meritocracy of the college, how he was quite sure that we’d done a bang-up job of networking and such without the benefit of black robes and secret handshakes, and how he liked me just the way I was, Quill & Ink be damned. Altogether a very heady speech for an impressionable young girl, especially given how many polysyllabic words he used. Man, Brandon must have rocked his SATs. If I wasn’t careful, tonight might be Number Seven.

It wasn’t until after the fried bananas that he started giving me the hard sell. “The problem with you, Haskel, is that you overanalyze everything.”

“If you’re looking to get laid, Weare,” I snapped back, “you shouldn’t start sentences with ‘The problem with you…’ ”

“Ooh, is that a possibility?”

I threw my chopstick wrapper at him. “What do you mean, overanalyze?”

“I assume you’re familiar with the definition of the word.” He waited for confirmation, then continued. “You think that your life has to be a stack of bricks, and if you put down one bad brick, the whole tower will fall over.”

That or I’d keep stacking bricks that never became a building.

“So you agonize over every single decision, terrified that you’re going to screw up.”

Ha! I had screwed up with this whole Quill thing. And let’s not forget Ben Somebody. I was an old hand at making mistakes. I just wasn’t a big fan of the process.

He waved his chopstick at me, his eyes flickering darkly by the glow of the tableside tea lights, and started ticking off my supposed bricks. “Summer internship, position on the magazine staff, commencement issue theme, secret society membership. When was the last time you did something just because it was fun?”

“Lydia and I went dancing at Froggie’s last weekend.”

“Something big.”

I raised my eyebrow. “Something like…getting into a relationship with you?”

“For example.”

“Brandon, I think we have a great friendship. I don’t want to mess it up.”

He rolled his eyes. “Cliche alert.”

The waitress came by with the check. I made feeble motions toward my handbag, but Brandon shook his head and pulled out his wallet.

“I’ll get the next one,” I offered, though I knew he wouldn’t let me. Brandon did things like hold open doors and pull out chairs and pay for dinners. He also had the ability to engineer a type of smile that I knew was just for me. The Amy-smile. It was intoxicating. And I knew if I let myself fall for him, I’d crash like a four-fold stinger.

“Look, we’ve talked about this.” I slipped my arms back into my coat. “You’re one of my best friends, and I’m afraid that if I get involved with you, and it doesn’t work out, I’ll lose that.”

Brandon signed his name across the receipt in a frustrated scrawl. “Amy,” he said slowly, not looking up. “We are involved. And it’s not working out.”

“You know what I mean.” I ducked my head.

He sighed. “Let’s get out of here.” We stood, and headed to the door, but before we got to the pink plaster Buddha at the entrance, he turned to me and looked me square in the eye. “Just promise me one thing. Just once in your life, just for kicks, don’t overthink, okay? See how it goes.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Brandon walked me back to my dorm entryway, and I, in defiance of the promise I’d just made, brainstormed ways to leave him at the door of my suite without hurting his feelings.

Which, as it turns out, was unnecessary. The door to my suite stood open, and Lydia sat on the couch inside our common room. She still wore her jacket, her lap was full of books, and she was staring fixedly at a small, square piece of paper sitting in the middle of the floor.

“Lydia?” I said, waving a hand in front of her face. “Are you all right?”

She didn’t look up at me, didn’t even blink, just whispered, “It’s yours.”