The Ivy: Secrets (2 page)

Left: no Vanessa.

Right: no Vanessa.

Common room: OK and Mimi . . . and Dana, her face set in a characteristic frown, were sitting on the futon couch. No Vanessa. All clear!

“Callie, darling!
Bienvenue en enfer!
” Mimi cried, running over to embrace her. “That is French for,” she continued, gesturing at Dana and OK, who had a calculus textbook open between them, “welcome to hell.”

Dana stiffened. “Mimi, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times. It doesn’t matter what language you speak in.
He
hears
everything
. Hi, Callie.”

Mimi rolled her eyes.

“Blondie!” OK cried, leaping to his feet and locking Callie in a tight embrace. “Blondie, thank god!” Dana blew a frustrated gust of air through her lips. “Do
you
know how to take the integral of a trigonometric function?” OK continued.

“Um, yes, but why—”

“Okechuwuku Zeyna,” Dana cut in, and from her tone Callie was surprised that she wasn’t actually wagging her finger. “How on
earth
do you expect to take the integral of a trigonometric function when you still haven’t learned to do derivatives?”

Mimi cupped her hands to her face and whispered, “Somebody got a letter over Thanksgiving break warning that he is failing his math class—”

“Hey!” OK cried, frowning. “A D is not a—”

“Is not a passing grade,” Dana interrupted. “Now I will help you, but you do understand that you’re going to have to actually work?”

“What, you can’t just telepathically transmit the integrals into my head?”

Dana’s expression remained unchanged.

“All right, all right.” OK sighed, sinking back onto the couch. He flipped his book to somewhere in the middle.

“Best to start from the beginning, darling,” Mimi urged, plopping down on the other side of him and pretending to examine her fingernails.

“Listen, you,” said OK, seizing her forearms with both hands, “I may be behind, but I’m not a
total
idiot.”

“Oh yeah?” said Mimi, cocking one eyebrow. “What is a trigonometric function, exactly?”

“It’s a . . . well . . . it’s a . . . Well, you know, it’s one of those things that’s difficult to say
exactly
what it means. Like the word
surreptitious
: you
know
what it means and could use it in a sentence, but nobody could really say the exact definition.”

“Surreptitious, an adjective: obtained, done, or made by clandestine or stealthy means. Middle English with Latin origins in
surrepticius
, from
surreptus
, the past participle of
surripere
, to take away secretly,” Dana recited instantly.

OK’s mouth fell open in a manner that made him look the way a caveman might if he had just been handed a cigarette lighter.

“I think I’m going to need to raise my price,” Dana said, flipping to the beginning of the book. “Now let’s see, where shall we start? Do you at least know your limits?”

“He definitely does not know his limits!” Mimi shrieked, swatting at OK’s hand, which he had
surreptitiously
—or so he had thought—placed on her knee.

“Sure I do,” said OK, smiling wickedly. “The limit, much like your beautiful self, is what I, the function, or f of x, approaches—moving closer and closer to,” he said, enacting his words and scooting closer and closer to Mimi. “But he can never,” he continued, inching closer as Mimi leaned away, “quite”—he spread his arms—“get there!” he concluded, throwing his arms around her and burying her beneath him.

Dana shook her head in disbelief and looked at Callie. “You’d think studying calculus is the one time we’d be safe from all this . . . flirting.” She wrinkled her nose.

Callie laughed. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“
Ahem!
” Dana coughed, clearing her throat and tapping OK’s shoulder. When he failed to react, she grabbed him with a strength that seemed to surprise even her and threw him back against the couch. “
You
will stay right here. And
you
,” she said, pointing at Mimi. “If you insist on staying, kindly sit in the armchair
over there
.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mimi laughed. She made her way to the overstuffed armchair where Callie was sitting and perched herself atop her roommate’s lap.

Callie smiled.

“Missed you,
ma chèrie
,” Mimi whispered, wrapping an arm around Callie’s shoulders.

“I somehow get the feeling that you’re the only one.” Callie sighed, watching while OK squinted at the notepad on which Dana was patiently drawing.

“
Tut, tut
.” Mimi clicked her tongue reproachfully. “You two . . .”

“I heard her this morning,” said Callie. “She sounded angry.”

“This is a triangle. Do you know what a triangle is?” Dana asked OK.

“A triangle—bless my boots. You mean that three-sided thing isn’t a square?”

Callie and Mimi burst out laughing. Dana silenced them with a glare. Mimi looked thoughtful. Turning to Callie, she said: “Yes, Vanessa is angry. Almost as angry as Mama the time she caught me finger-painting on her Chanel suits . . .
Pourquoi pas
: I was six and I had run out of paper!”

Was she kidding? As always, it was nearly impossible to tell.

“But seriously,” Mimi continued, “you two are so close. You will work it out.”

“I don’t know . . .” Callie murmured. She stared at the floor, wondering if Mimi knew about the tape. She certainly knew about Gregory at Harvard-Yale: he and Callie had hooked up in her shared hotel room, and even though Gregory had been gone, in mysterious Gregory fashion, by the time Callie had woken up that morning, Mimi had been the one to locate her underwear on the other side of the room.
Oops
. Mimi had spent that night across the hall in OK’s hotel room. In fact . . .

“What’s going on with you and Mr. Cotangent-ly Challenged?” Callie whispered.

“I do not know what you are speaking about.” Mimi grinned. “Though one might ask
you
the same question about—” She paused when Callie winced, almost as if she were in physical pain.

“Sorry,” Mimi muttered.

“No, it’s okay—” Callie started.

“What?” asked OK.

“Ugggg. Sorry, no, not you.” Callie moaned.

“Hey! Back to work!” snapped Dana.

“Fine, fine, sorry, back to cosine . . . fascinating . . .”

Callie laughed. “It’s
all right,
” she said to Mimi. “I haven’t heard from him since Harvard-Yale.”

“Wait,” said Mimi. “Which one?”

Callie half laughed, half groaned, dragging her hands from her forehead down the sides of her cheeks. “Both. Neither. Ha-ha. Exactly.”

“And now for the
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
question,” said Mimi. “Which one do you
want
to hear from?”

Gregory paused with his hand hovering above the doorknob to C 24. Shaking his head, he turned back. Then he stopped in the middle of the hallway, eyeing the door again. “Idiot,” he muttered. Turning once more, he yanked open the door to his own suite, C 23.

“Back so soon?” asked Matt from where he was sitting on their big leather couch.

“Yeah,” muttered Gregory, sinking down beside him.

“Hey, is it cool if I use your computer to check my—”

“No!” Gregory cried, slamming the screen shut before Matt could discover a certain photograph from the Harvard-Yale tailgate that Gregory was in the habit of leaving open on his browser.

“Geez—sorry,” Matt apologized. “I’ll go get my own.”

When he returned, he found Gregory staring at his cell phone like he was facing down an archrival in a duel. For the moment they had reached a cool détente, but at any second the phone might leap up and start firing.

“Why do you keep checking your phone?” Matt asked.

“What? No reason,” said Gregory, dropping the phone like it had burned him.

“No judgment,” said Matt, holding up his palms. Gregory sighed and picked up the phone again, scrolling through his messages. Suddenly, Matt began to chuckle.

“What?” snapped Gregory.

Matt continued to laugh, shaking his head. “It’s just funny. Last fall you had all these women and now you’re kind of . . . acting like one.”

For a second Gregory looked murderous. Then he shrugged. “I fail to see the humor in that,” he murmured. “In fact, I think it’s a bit derogatory toward women.”

Matt’s eyes grew wide but Gregory didn’t notice; instead he was reading, or rather rereading, the unsent drafts in his phone’s out-box.

His fingers, as they had often done in the past few days, hovered over the Delete button. But he just couldn’t do it. Shaking his head, he keyed back over to his inbox.

It was still empty. Or at least empty of anything interesting save for the types of messages that had come in from Clint over Thanksgiving break: “A
RE YOU SURE THAT
I
SHOULDN’T AT LEAST E-MAIL HER?
N
OT TALKING IS KILLING ME . . .”

Gregory’s forehead wrinkled guiltily as he reread his own response:
“D
ON’T E-MAIL.
Y
OU GAVE HER AN ULTIMATUM AND YOU NEED TO STAND BY IT.
S
HE PROBABLY WANTS HER SPACE.
I’
M SURE SHE WILL CONTACT YOU WHEN, OR IF, SHE’s READY TO TALK.”

It was clear that neither of them had spoken to her over Thanksgiving break. Maybe that meant that he and Clint were on an even playing field. That he would have a fighting chance.

“Going somewhere?” Matt asked as Gregory stood up again.

“No,” said Gregory, sitting back down. “No I’m not.”

“Enough about boys,” said Mimi. “What are you going to do about Vanessa?”

“What am
I
going to do? Why should I be the one to
do
anything?” asked Callie.

Mimi shrugged. “I am not sure I am understanding the expression correctly, but I think it is you who should be the bigger person. Even though she is the bigger person this way,” Mimi added, gesturing toward her hips.

Callie laughed. “You might not be on her side if you knew what she did to me—”

Mimi cut her off. “I am not taking sides. I do not judge. In fact, I really do not care what happened. I just do not want to spend my reading period being the Berlin Wall.”

Am I East or West Germany? Callie wondered.

And so Callie had eventually returned to her desk to pen an apology to the girl who had sold Callie’s secrets to Satan in exchange for a “guaranteed” membership in the Hasty Pudding social club. The club, which had rejected Vanessa in favor of Callie, had been the original source of tension in their relationship. (In graphic form it looked like: frenemies → friends → BFFs → frenemies → WWIII.)

It was then that Callie had spotted the “Manifesto” taped to her bedroom window. And so, when she began to write, her words took on a slightly different tone than a traditional apology.

In response to Item 1)
You hooked up with Gregory at Harvard-Yale when you knew how I felt about him
, she wrote:

In response to Items 2)
You screwed up our entire room dynamic
and 3)
You blew it with Clint
, she couldn’t help but agree.

As for Item 4)
You’re an all-out terrible person
, she countered:

And now, on to Vanessa’s actions regarding Callie’s deepest secret, which she had conveniently neglected to include in the Manifesto.

Last but not least, in response to Item 5)
There is no hope that I will ever forgive you. We will never be best friends ever again
, she agreed, then amended:

“Let alone
best
friends,” Callie muttered aloud. And now, for the grand finale:

Setting down her pen, she took a deep breath and read the whole thing over from the beginning. Then, satisfied, she signed her name with a flourish. It wasn’t exactly the
best
apology; in fact, it sounded a bit more like a declaration of war. Better not let Mimi proofread it.