We were Diggers, and nothing would ever be the same.

15. Commencement Issues

When I finally got home that night, Brandon was—wait for it—not sitting on my couch. Probably a good thing, too. Though I knew that eventually he’d see my new body décor, I figured it was best to wait until:

1) The onion-peel scabs began to heal.

2) It stopped stinging like a bitch.

3) I figured out a way to explain it without breaking my vows.

My parents were going to have a fit when they saw it. Luckily, I wasn’t much for wearing bathing suits. It’s not like anyone would get a good view unless they caught me in my skivvies. Which, now that I’d solidified a status with Brandon, really limited the options. (Not that I was complaining.)

I tried to go to bed, but I was way too wired to sleep, and seriously considered skipping down to Calvin College and giving Brandon a midnight wake-up call. Instead, I buckled down and started studying. I’d been neglecting my schoolwork since the day the first letter came from Rose & Grave, and I needed to reverse the trend. Exams were in a week and a half, and I had a slew of papers to write before finals.

I managed sixty-four pages of WAP before I fell asleep. (On my stomach, of course.)

The next morning, I was awakened by the sound of persistent thwapping at my door. I opened it to find Lydia holding a black cardboard coffin sized for a member of the terrier family.

“What died?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

She turned it in my direction. “For you, Bride of Dracula.” Inside the coffin-shaped box lay two dozen phenomenal scarlet roses and a small card in creamy, off-white linen. I opened it.

Good job, Boo.

—Your brother

George. Tiny thrills coursed through my body before my higher brain functions could tamp them down and remind them that my boyfriend’s name was Brandon and that he would never send me such a macabre, if perfectly suited, gift.

I looked at Lydia. “Can I borrow your vase?”

She shook her head. “Hon, I’m only going to say this once, and then we can go back to our ‘let’s not talk about it’ treaty, but your people have very strange taste.” And then she went to fetch the vase. (Like she should talk? It wasn’t two weeks ago that there was dried blood on our doorknob. Her society people were, if possible, even stranger.)

When she returned, we took to arranging the flowers together, and wouldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

“Lydia?” I said, and she glanced at me over the top of a blossom. “Is this going to destroy us?”

She swallowed. “God, I hope not.”

“It’s not fair, you know,” I said. “You at least know the name of my society. I don’t know anything about yours.”

She smirked. “Yeah, but who said life was fair?”

“Hmph.” I swatted her with a piece of greenery.

“Buck up, Amy,” she said in consolation. “Who needs revelations when you’ve got roses?”

Good point. I marveled at the blooming perfection of each gorgeous rose and tried in vain to ignore the stubborn thrills that persisted in tripping down my spine as if I weren’t in a committed relationship.

They clearly knew something I didn’t.

Brandon didn’t show up at the Lit Mag office all afternoon, and three messages on his voice mail failed to produce a single callback. At dinnertime, I finally tracked him down outside his dining hall.

“Where have you been?” I asked as he exited the building with an enormous sandwich clumsily wrapped in napkins. He spared me a glance, then turned toward his entryway. I tried again, hoping he’d just—I don’t know—been struck with sudden hysterical blindness? “Brandon?”

He took a closer look at his sandwich (See, maybe he was losing his eyesight!), then dumped it in the nearest bin and gestured to me. “Not here.”

Oh, God. More secret society crap? How the hell could those bastards have gotten to him, too? Brandon was…untouchable. He didn’t give a shit what they said. Right?

I followed him into his room, and he sat down on his high-backed, obviously single-serving-only computer chair and surveyed me carefully. “Where were you yesterday?”

“In New York,” I replied. Somehow standing there before him made me feel as if I were reporting to a judge. Even the Diggers had let us sit at our meeting. “Remember how I told you a few days ago that I was going down there on…business.”

He nodded, then took a deep breath. “I was talking to some friends, and they said they saw you in a bar on Sunday, making out with some guy.”

I dropped to the bed. Crap. Crap crap crappity crap. I knew this was going to happen. I just hoped it would have waited until our relationship had fully gelled.

“The thing is,” Brandon said, leaning forward and putting his hands together until all his fingertips lined up exactly, “I think I know what you’re going to say.”

“That it was before…?”

“Yeah.”

See? Told you he was a genius. “It was.”

“Hmmm.” He studied his hands, made little twisted figures out of his fingers. “I thought so. I wanted to talk to you straightaway, but you weren’t around last night, so instead I got to spend the evening thinking about it. A lot.”

A strange nausea blossomed in my stomach. “Thinking too much isn’t a good idea, though, right?” I laughed, nervously. “That’s what you’re always telling me.”

“Maybe I’m wrong.” He looked up. “Because what I finally settled on is that even though I don’t really have the right to be upset about it, since it happened before we made our agreement to be monogamous, I’m still upset about it. Does that make sense?”

I nodded, since my mouth was too dry to speak. Me, I’d be furious to discover that Brandon had hooked up with someone else milliseconds before sleeping with me. But then, I’m a lot less reasonable than he is. Right?

“And last night, I was hoping that when I asked you about it, you’d say, ‘Why, Brandon, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. They must be thinking about some other girl. I only have eyes for you.’ ” He pursed his lips. “But you wouldn’t have said that, would you?”

No, because it happened. “I can’t lie to you.”

He nodded, slowly. “Right. That’s what I thought. So, first I was angry, and then I thought that I didn’t have any right to be angry, and then I thought that that was stupid, and why do I need to be logical about whether or not I’m going to be angry, and then I was angry at myself for thinking that I had the right to be angry without firm logical footing…as you can see, it was a while before I had it all worked out.” He shrugged, sheepish. “So the thing is, I don’t think I’m going to get over that. It would be nice to, and that would be the technically correct thing to do, but underneath all this logical applied-math exterior, I’m…” He trailed off. “Even if you hadn’t made me any promises, Amy, I still wanted to believe that you were coming around to my way of thinking. Not believe that if you’d gotten just a little bit luckier at that bar, you wouldn’t have come home at all.”

All these imperfect verbs. As if it was a done deal. I swallowed the enormous lump in my throat. “Would it help to know that’s what made me understand that I wanted to be with you?”

“Kissing someone else?” He considered it. “Yes, it makes me feel a little bit better about myself. But, Amy, it’s not enough. Because it’s not just that, you know? You’ve been so distant all week. As if now that we could say that we were together, you’d placated me for a while. And I know”—he held up his hand—“you’ve had stuff going on, and I know that it’s not something you’re ‘allowed to talk about,’ but when I woke up in your room that morning, you were crying so hard.” His brow furrowed, as if he was remembering it with pain. “And you wouldn’t even tell me what had happened. You just disappeared. You lost your job, but it wasn’t me that you turned to for comfort. That’s not a good sign.”