Then I turned on my heel and marched out. And as I exited into the hall, head held high, I thought I caught the flicker of a dozen tiny booklights.

2. Tap Night

The fun part about humiliating yourself in front of a cadre of shadowy figures is that you get to spend the next two days wondering if everyone you pass on campus saw you at your worst. I was in line at the dining hall last night and I swear I saw this trustafarian girl sniggering behind her bulgur-wheat pilaf. I spent the next two hours (WAP forgotten!) trying to figure out which secret society was most likely to tap vegan Environmental Science majors who wear designer dreadlocks and hundred-dollar hemp necklaces—well, other than joke organizations like Joint & Bong.

Cute name, huh? That’s how things go at Eli University. Everyone copies everyone else. Rose & Grave set the trend back in the 1800s, and now anyone with a yen to start a social club has followed their illustrious lead: Book & Key, Sword & Mace, Quill & Ink. There are a few holdouts among the major societies—Dragon’s Head, Serpent, St. Linus Hall—but nothing gives a proposed clandestine organization the Eli air like an ampersand. Lydia and I used to joke that they were in practice for joining law firms—they’re all Blank & Blank as well, right?

That was before Lydia lost her sense of humor when it came to all things secret society. Seriously. I tried to talk to her about my interview that night at dinner, and she responded like my mom whenever I brought up sex. Which is to say, not at all.

The conversation went like this:

Me: So you want to hear what happened at my interview?

Lydia:(fork paused halfway to her mouth) Are you supposed to talk about that?

Me: Why not? I haven’t taken any vows of silence. I don’t even know who they were. Why, did yours tell you not to talk about it?

Lydia:…

Me: They did? Did they tell you who they were?

Lydia:…

Me: They did! Wow, I must have screwed up worse than I thought.

Lydia:(glancing around furtively) Amy, I really, really don’t think we’re supposed to talk about this.

Me: I can talk about anything I want. They’re a bunch of strangers, and they were really rude to me, to boot.

Lydia: Amy! You’re going to ruin your chances.

Me: I don’t think I have any chances. And please. They didn’t bug the tables or anything.

Lydia: Rose & Grave would.

Me: Rose & Grave doesn’t tap women. Just future Presidents.

Lydia:(standing and lifting her tray) I’m not going to keep talking about this here.

Me:(following) Fine, let’s do it in the suite.

But Lydia didn’t go back to the suite. She went to the gym to swim laps, which, considering my long-standing aversion to deep water (my cousin threw me off a dock when I was a kid—don’t like to talk about it), was a downright slap in the face. And as if the Chlorine Defense wasn’t enough, whenever I saw her at all over the following two days, she rushed off before I had a chance to bring up the subject again.

Not that I was sitting around. With commencement just around the corner, I was super-busy with the literary magazine’s commencement issue. Since I wasn’t going to be tapped by Quill & Ink—or any other secret society—I couldn’t afford any more missteps. This was my penultimate issue, and it needed to kick ass.

So, to be blunt, the theme of “Ambition” was not going to cut it.

“Been there, done that,” I informed my second-in-command, managing editor Brandon Weare. “At Eli, Ambition is the new black.”

“What a lovely pull quote for your intro page,” Brandon said, putting the finishing touches on his fifth paper airplane.

“If we pick a good enough theme, I won’t need to jazz it up with taglines.”

“Ah, but then, what sort of Cosmo girl would you be? It seems to be all about the cutesy tagline there. It’s certainly not about actual content.” He launched the plane, and I watched it swoop and dive directly into the smudgy linoleum floor of the magazine office. A nose-heavy dart.

“You read Cosmo?”

“Female sex tips?” He toed the plane. “You betcha.”

Brandon was an expert in the art of “Aerogami,” and since we’d started working together in October, I learned that his chosen designs possessed a direct correlation with his opinion of the manuscript from which he drew his construction materials. Woe betide the writer whose submission merited a four-fold stinger…but if he sailed a square-nosed glider (Ken Blackburn’s Guinness World Record design, I’d learned) past my nose, I should drop everything and read the story.

I’m pretty sure this was not how things worked at Horton.

Not that Brandon would care. He was one of those true geniuses that dotted the campus population, the kind that could compose concertos on breaks from discovering the cure for cancer. His raison d’être was applied math, but he spared enough time to fit in his knack for writing appallingly good short stories, and to compete with me for magazine editorships (I’d only just barely beat him out for this one). No scrambling for internships or resume stuffers for Brandon. He just went around being quietly brilliant, unapologetically dorky, and universally well liked.

And he had a point about the theme’s potential. Ninety percent of the graduating class already had ambition oozing from their pores. The other ten had daddies that would pound it into them by the time they were thirty. The theme possessed a broad scope, as well as the possibility of incorporating some sort of existentialist statement about the futility of desire, the impossibility of purpose, all the stuff that made future Master’s-in-Creative-Writing-from-Iowa candidates hot.

(Iowa, if you didn’t know, is the place to go to graduate school to learn how to be a novelist. Don’t ask me why. Must be the chemicals in the corn.)

The problem was, I was having enough troubles with ambition myself. Sure, my resume and GPA were in order, but if my snafu of a society interview proved anything, it was that all that accomplishment needed to add up to a plan, or it didn’t count. Did I really want to spend the next month reading achingly bitter or brilliantly 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.