The Ivy: Secrets (18 page)

Their pity, Callie decided, was definitely worse than not making the magazine. She wished that they would all stop looking at her like her dog had just died and let her be alone. At least Gregory wasn’t there to laugh.

Vanessa, still standing near the door surrounded by her bags, was smiling. But it wasn’t a I’m-so-happy-to-see-you smile, or a I’ve-been-waiting-to-thank-you-in-person-for-economics smile. More like a your-failure-is-pleasing-to-me grimace.

“Why is it you are returned so soon?” Mimi asked her. “You are supposed to be on family vacation, no?”

“Yeah, well, my parents got into some stupid fight—no big deal, it happens every other year—and we left,” said Vanessa, hoisting two of her bags over her shoulders. “I didn’t feel like sticking around to see them through another session of couples therapy so . . .” She shrugged. Then, pulling her luggage into her room, she slammed the door behind her.

“What the . . .” Callie muttered. It was almost like Vanessa was still mad. But she couldn’t be—not after everything they’d been through—could she? Callie covered her eyes with her hands. Her head felt like it was about to split in two. It was too much: the magazine—Gregory—Clint—Vanessa—

She felt two arms wrapping around her and, opening her eyes, was surprised to find Mimi supporting her with ample strength, given that she was, in the words of certain jealous upperclassmen, “half the size of Kate Moss with twice the drug problem.” Dana stood frozen in the corner looking awkward while Adam’s eyes darted around the room, waiting to take his cue. Mimi led Callie to the couch.

“Bloody hell.” OK sighed, reaching for the bottle of champagne, which was still fizzing over exuberantly, and taking a swig. “This is
so
depressing.”

Mimi rounded on him, but before she could say anything, Callie started to laugh. It was the type of hysterical laughter that overtakes you at exactly the wrong time—the painful kind beyond your control. After all, what could be worse—no, what could be
funnier
—than a surprise party turned pity party in her honor?

“Did Matt . . .?” Adam asked tentatively.

“Yeah,” said Callie, finding that she didn’t even have to force a smile. One sidelong glance at Matt’s face before she had fled the building had confirmed it. “Yeah, he did—he really deserved it.”

“
Les idiots
.” Mimi grunted, prying the bottle away from OK and pouring some champagne into a glass. “Well, Mama always had a saying back in France: ‘Drink when you are happy and drink when you are sad as long as you do not drink in the bathtub while using an electronic device.’”

Callie took the flute from Mimi’s outstretched hand. She hesitated only briefly—it was the middle of the day, but she wasn’t in the bathtub, so . . . “To failure,” she said. Adam tried to return the toast with a glass Mimi had set near him, but once again Dana swatted his hand away. Callie took a sip and grimaced. Not even the golden tide of sweet, fruity bubbles could wash the bitter taste away.

“So, OK, how’d calculus turn out?” Callie asked, wishing that Mimi hadn’t deemed it necessary to print out that huge photo of her head.

“Grand,” he said, smiling. “And I’ve got my fabulous tutor,” he said, rising from the couch and making his way toward Dana, “to thank for it!” Dana’s attempts at backing away were futile: he grabbed her as if she were a rag doll and lifted her in a giant bear hug.

“Put me down!” she cried, her eyes wide. “Adam?” she pleaded, turning to her protector, who, to his credit, seemed like he had put on a few pounds over winter break and now might even weigh more than Mimi. He looked on helplessly while OK danced Dana around the room. Suddenly the door to Vanessa’s room opened.

“Hey,” said Callie, hoping that Vanessa might be in a better mood now that her bags were put away.

Vanessa just frowned.

“So . . .” Callie tried again, “want some champagne? Help me drink away my woes?”

Vanessa looked at the bottle and then looked at Callie. OK, in an unusually perceptive moment, put Dana down. “Sure, I’ll have some,” Vanessa said slowly, staring at Callie. “To
celebrate
.”

“Huh?” Mimi muttered.

“I’m
glad
you didn’t make it,” Vanessa continued, her voice rising steadily, “because if you had, then they would have published your pieces in the next issue—including the one you wrote about
me
.”

Now it was Callie’s turn to stare. “What are you talking about?”

“Really, I don’t know why you bothered ‘rescuing’ me for the ec exam. I
thought
it was because I was wrong about you, but now I know that the only reason that you wanted to keep me from flunking out was so you could publicly humiliate me later!”

What? What kind of crazy pills was Vanessa taking? “I really don’t know what she’s talking about,” Callie said to Dana and Mimi.

“‘The Roommate from Hell has an inexplicably Dutch-sounding prefix to her name’?” Vanessa shrieked, her face turning red. “‘The Roommate from Hell loses her diamonds as casually as you sometimes misplace your socks’!”

Callie’s eyes went wide. “How did you . . . I mean, that was never supposed to . . .” She frowned. “What did you do, raid my room—again?”

“So you admit it!” Vanessa screamed, her eyes wide with triumph. “And you were going to try to have it published!”

“No, I was n—”

“Well,
thank god
you didn’t make the magazine or
I
would have told the world everything there is to know about
you
!”

Callie cringed. “Vanessa,” she said slowly. “Please, let me explain.”

“No way,” Vanessa said, violently shaking her head. “I’m done hearing what you have to say. From now on you stay away from me,” she called over her shoulder. Turning at the last second, she cried, “The Roommate from Hell is LEAVING!”

The door slammed behind her with such force that the entire room shook.

Dana, Adam, and OK stared uncomfortably at their feet. “Party is over,” Mimi murmured, tossing her plastic cup into the recycling.

“Yeah,” Callie muttered. “It is.” She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until it flowed out of her in a giant gust, like a balloon deflating. Suddenly she felt exhausted. The streamers fluttered gently in the air, mocking her. Setting her glass on the table, she stood. “Thanks for the . . . all this, you guys,” she said. “I think I need to . . .” she gestured toward her room.

Fully clothed, she lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. Some of the lessons she’d learned over the past semester had been committed only to short-term memory and were now—she was finding—proving difficult to consolidate. For example:

One lesson, however, had been branded into her brain: never, under any circumstances, should you leave your e-mail, documents, or even your laptop open in a place where somebody might find a file not meant for others’ eyes, even if that place is your own bedroom, where you would
think
—stupidly, you would think—that you’d be guaranteed a little privacy.

When it comes to a college dorm room, nothing is private and nothing is safe.

M
att waved to Callie from the front of the classroom as she chose a seat in the back. She shook her head, wondering why on earth she had let him talk her into this. The wounds from her
FM
rejection were still fresh; she needed time to mourn and cycle through denial, anger, overeating too many vending machine cookies, depression, and kickboxing, or whatever the five stages of grief were and then heal. So throwing herself right into a
Crimson
COMP informational session—a form of “PTSD in vivo exposure therapy” (prescribed authoritatively by Matt after his single semester of psychology)—may have been a very poor idea indeed.

Nevertheless, here she was, pulling out a notebook and pen and watching Grace Lee take the podium. A panel of editors, writers, business staff, photographers, and graphic designers, some of whom were recently successful COMPers (including Matt) sat at a table behind Grace, ready to answer their questions.

“COMP doesn’t officially start until next semester, so you can all stop looking so terrified,” Grace Lee barked into the microphone. “The e-mail said ‘informal,’ people!”

General G. E. Lee
, Callie scribbled in her notebook with a smile. Who was more frightening: Grace or Lexi? It was a toss-up. In the Fundamentally Evil category Lexi definitely had Grace beat, but it was just as easy, if not more so, to picture Grace making somebody cry.

“The
Harvard Crimson
, founded in 1873, is the oldest university newspaper in the country. We are also the only daily newspaper in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As I’m sure most of you already know, many of our alumni have gone on to successful careers in journalism, including several Pulitzer Prize winners, and of course some of those who weren’t as lucky had mildly successful careers as presidents of the United States.”

Obligatory laugher ensued.

“Make no mistake,” said Grace, silencing them, “we here at the
Crimson
take our newspaper very seriously. This isn’t our Thursday pullout,
Fifteen Minutes
magazine,” she continued, her gaze resting briefly on Callie. “And we’re not here just to drink, pull pranks, and give fake awards to the Paris Hiltons of this world like the members of that semisecret Sorrento Square organization that used to publish a so-called humor magazine.”

Ah. The
Crimson-Lampoon
rivalry was alive and kicking. Callie glanced at Matt. He winked at her.

“We deliver the news,” Grace continued, “from on campus and beyond, and we do it every day in time for breakfast. It’s a tremendous responsibility—”

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” a low alto trilled suddenly from the doorway. Callie looked up. Even though she’d seen her only once before, there was no mistaking her: the dark-haired beauty from the hallway, who, Callie decided as the girl slipped off her coat to reveal another sweater of the extremely low-cut variety, would hitherto be known as Perky Boobs, Queen of the Amazon.

“It’s fine; come in,” Grace snapped in a tone that said,
lateness is the opposite of “fine” and I’d tell you so if you were important enough to be lectured by me directly.

Perky Boobs smiled and slid into a chair at the front of the room, flipping her long hair back with both arms. Every set of male eyes in the room locked in on her—and some of the ladies’ eyes did, too. Callie was certainly struggling not to stare. What the hell was this girl doing here? She didn’t go to Harvard; she belonged at BU, or Tufts, or Boston Modeling Academy, or wherever it was she came from.

Before Callie knew what was happening, her hand had shot into the air.

“Question? Ah, yes, Ms. Andrews,” said Grace, giving Callie a tiny smile.

Whoa. She remembered my name. Callie didn’t know whether to feel flattered, or terrified, or both. Probably both. “Um,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I was just wondering—you can’t COMP the
Crimson
unless you go to this school, right?”

Everyone stared at her like she was a politically incorrect term for a mentally handicapped individual. Matt shook his head. “No,” Grace answered slowly, “you cannot write for the school paper unless you are enrolled as a Harvard undergraduate and complete the series of requirements for the election process we call COMP.”

Callie folded her arms and leaned back in her chair, staring at Perky Boobs’s head. But Perky Boobs appeared to be staying put. Callie frowned.

“If there are no more questions,” said Grace, “then I’ll hand things over to our editors.”

Callie doodled in her notebook as one of the editors began to talk about the business board. She knew she should probably take notes, but in truth she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to be here. Did she really have the energy to survive another semester of COMP?

The business board editor finished speaking, and one of the writers took his place. She seemed happy and highly animated as she started discussing a series of articles she had written the previous semester on the asset allocation of the Harvard endowment. Callie sighed and wished she had COMPed the paper and not the magazine last semester. In fact, if she could do it all over again, there were a lot of things that she would have done differently.

Well, live and learn, she thought, flipping to a fresh page in her notebook. Surely part of being a freshman involved making one or two (okay, maybe three or four) epic mistakes. Weren’t they the ones that made the best stories later?

Before she knew it, an hour had passed and the meeting was drawing to a close.

Matt ambled over, a goofy grin on his face. “So,” he said, “what’d you think?”

“Sounds . . . like a lot of work,” she said, standing and tucking her notebook under her arm. They started walking. “I’m not sure I’m ready to jump back in again . . .” Callie realized Matt’s attention had gravitated elsewhere: specifically to the largest gravitational mass force in the room—in other words: Perky Boobs.

Not Matt, too! Suppressing a groan, Callie grabbed the edge of his sleeve and dragged him toward the door. They were almost there when Grace Lee intercepted them. “I hope you’ll decide to COMP,” she said, speaking to Callie. “You’re a strong writer from what I saw in English class, and we could use a few more like you.”

“Th-thanks!” Callie stammered.

Grace nodded curtly and walked away.

Matt gaped, speechless as they left the room. “I can’t believe she just spoke to you,” he finally whispered in a tone that bordered on reverential awe, like he was ready to tattoo
G. L.
on his bicep. “
And
she knows your name! She still calls me Robertson when she uses a name at all, but mostly it’s just ‘Hey, you!’ or ‘Where’s my coffee?’”

Callie shrugged, trying to restrain her grin. She could already tell that Grace’s compliments were probably rarer than diamonds and made you feel twice as sparkly. Maybe she
would
COMP the
Crimson
, she thought as their heels clicked down the hall.

“Excuse me,” a sultry female voice called from behind them. They turned. Perky Boobs was hurrying to catch up.

“Yes?” Callie finally asked when it became apparent that Matt had momentarily lost his powers of speech.

“I recognize you,” the girl said, her huge heart-shaped lips forming an enormous smile. “From the other day, in the hallway in uh . . . Waggensworth—”

“Wigglesworth,” Callie corrected her. As you should know, she added silently, if you’re going to pretend to go here.

“Right!” the girl said brightly. “I’m Alessandra,” she added, extending her hand. Callie hesitated, but Matt, his eyes wide, reached for it. “I’m Matt Robertson—huh—Robinson,” he said with a demented giggle. “It’s Robinson,” he repeated, placing a hand on Callie’s shoulder, “I was just telling Callie here”—grudgingly Callie shook hands—“that Grace, who was my COMP director before she made managing editor, is always messing up my name.”

Alessandra smiled at Matt like he was a perfectly normal, non-demented teenage boy. “That’s a shame. If it were me, I would
definitely
remember your name!”

Great! So she’s nice, too, Callie thought staring at her own feet. Not to mention a
huge
flirt!

“I just transferred here from USC,” Alessandra explained, looking back over to Callie.

“Congratulations,” said Callie. “Well, so nice to meet you,” she added, starting to walk, “but we should really probably get go—”

“Do you need someone to show you around?” Matt volunteered at the same time.

“Actually,” said Perky B—
Alessandra
, “I was wondering if you two could tell me where I might find the Harvard squash courts.”

At the word
squash
Callie stopped walking. “Why do you ask?” she blurted.

“A friend of mine invited me to watch his scrimmage.”

Callie stared at her, processing that tidbit and then biting back the urge to demand
which
friend. There’s no way Gregory would invite a girl to watch him play. Maybe before he slept with her but certainly not after. Still, there was only one way to be completely sure. Plus, a certain teammate of his might be on the courts today, too.

“What a coincidence,” said Callie, forcing her face into a smile. “Matt and I were on our way over there right now to watch the game!”

Matt, finally tearing his gaze away from Alessandra, looked at Callie. “We were . . . ?”

“We were!” she chirped, gripping his arm and squeezing.

“Ho-kay,” Matt said with a shrug, apparently up for anything that involved spending more time with Alessandra.

Turning to her, Callie said sweetly, “Shall we?”

Fifteen minutes later, after crossing a bridge over the Charles River, they arrived at the Murr Center. Games were raging in all five spectator courts, and the bleachers opposite the glass back walls were surprisingly full.

Callie barely had time to register the shock of spotting Gregory, in one of the middle courts, playing a fierce match against none other than Clint, in light of the bigger surprise that awaited her: middle bleachers, far left, second row.

Alexis-MotherFreaking-Thorndike.

She wore an old maroon squash polo (
CLASS OF 2012
), faded from many washings, over her designer jeans, and even though it was the most dressed-down Callie had ever seen her, Lexi still managed to pull off the look impeccably. She held a Starbucks cup between both hands and was leaning forward, watching the game intently. She had yet to notice Callie, so there was still time to make a run for it—

“Aren’t you going to sit?” Matt asked, patting the spot next to him on the bleachers.

“Uh . . .” Callie hesitated. Alessandra clapped her hands together as Gregory smashed the ball. Callie frowned and looked back over at Lexi: her eyes were glued on Clint, who was diving to return the shot. Maybe I really am stupid, she mused, watching Lexi watch Clint. It was Clint Lexi had wanted the entire time, not Gregory.