“I assume you don’t mind that he showed up at our door?” Lydia asked me slyly as she handed me a shot glass. “Drink up, we’re running late.”
Lydia was dressed in riding wear, complete with velvet hat and a crop, which apparently amused Josh to no end. For his part, Josh had chosen the time-honored James Bond costume (i.e., tuxedo, martini glass, and plastic Walther PPK), and George, who never missed an opportunity to be a) disaffected or b) dirty, was wearing a T-shirt that read, I AM THE MAN FROM NANTUCKET.
Together, we made our way across the campus to Memorial Hall, warmed only by our suite’s official drink of Gumdrop Drops and (in my case, at least) flimsy costumes. The whole way over, George entertained himself trying to lob candy corn into my corset-enhanced cleavage, and I did my best to ward him off with flicks of my cape.
“I’ll fish them out later,” he promised in a whisper.
The concert hall was a zoo, the way it was every Halloween. The enormous mezzanine was already near-bursting with students who, drunk and costumed, were running from aisle to aisle, showing off their outfits and sharing inebriated conversations and dramas. Above us, two successive balconies teemed with people in devil outfits, Princess Leia costumes, streetwalker-wear (whorish togs being an evergreen Halloween choice at college campuses across the nation), and obscure interpretations of abstract ideas. This last is an Eli special. The point is to dress as a sort of walking rebus in hopes of inducing everyone around you to marvel at your brilliance and beg you to tell them what the hell you’re dressed as. These clever little toolboxes were dotted about the audience, puffing out their chests and trying to stump passersby. I spotted four singing-group types wearing aprons and holding clippers and hair dryers (Barbershop Quartet), a chick with a pair of stilettos hanging around her neck (Head Over Heels), a man in a velour suit with numbers stuck all over him (Fuzzy Math), and a woman—who had me stumped for three straight minutes—wearing a bikini made out of two dining hall dishes and a computer keyboard, and carrying a bottle of Schweppes. Finally, I nailed it: Plate Tectonics.
We were trying to squeeze past a freshman in one of those purple balloon bunch-of-grapes getups I thought no one wore outside Fruit of the Loom commercials and a guy in full Mark Rothko body paint (and little else) when I felt a hand on mine.
“Amy!” Brandon cried. I turned to find him seated at the end of an aisle, dressed in a really kick-ass rendition of Alex from A Clockwork Orange—bowler cap, fake eyelashes, and all. At his side, Felicity looked as if she’d just stepped out of a U2 video in her belly dancer/genie outfit. A belt made of gold coins clinked around her hips and her long dark hair was piled artfully on top of her head. “Are you looking for a seat?”
He tried to scoot down the row a bit, but Felicity appeared to need more room than one would have imagined, considering how slim she was. I saw her take in my outfit, her eyes lingering extra-long on the scarlet letter on my chest.
“Amy.” George appeared at my side. “Lydia found us seats. Come on.” He looked over my shoulder at the space Brandon had created and shook his head. “I don’t think that place is big enough for all of us.”
Brandon only stared at me with mismatched, heavily made-up eyes and nodded slowly.
George leaned over the seat. “Hi there, I think we met last year. I’m George Prescott.”
Felicity’s eyes widened, though whether it was at the name or the corresponding reputation, I wasn’t certain.
Her boyfriend took George’s hand and rallied. “I’m Brandon, and this is Felicity.”
Dimmesdale, meet Chillingworth.
“Well, have fun at the show.” George put a hand on my waist. “C’mon, Boo. It’s about to start.”
“Nice costumes,” I said to the seated couple.
“Thanks,” Felicity replied. “I’m fascinated by yours.”
“Did everything work out for your math tutor?” Brandon asked quickly. “I mean, did you take care of it?”
No, I hadn’t. I’d been too busy taking care of my libido. And when I did try, Jenny had been a complete bitch. “It’s fine,” I lied, vowing to search out Jenny first thing tomorrow, as long as she wasn’t busy with some sort of All Souls’ Day cleansing ritual. Fight or no, I had an obligation to her.
But for now, I intended to enjoy my evening as one of the thousand or so “devil-worshipping” souls who fought to drive off the soon-to-be November chill by listening to a world-class symphony orchestra in weird outfits. I failed to see how college students dressed up like geological theories were somehow paying homage to underworld demons. I thought we were just having fun, and Halloween was the name we gave to this brand of fun.
How’s that for not overthinking?
George pulled me onto his lap as the lights went down. The ESO puts on a phenomenal show every year. Not only were the members master musicians, they had a wonderful sense of whimsy, setting each year’s live program to a homemade movie that usually followed plotlines that wouldn’t be out of place on The Simpsons’s annual spooky special. And the show always began the same way: with an organist rocking the hell out of “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” on the antique pipes embedded in the building’s walls. The lights slowly rose on a trio of fiddlers who circled a glowing cauldron spilling over with mist and tossed their dreaded hair in time to their otherworldly music. The Weird Sisters.
Man, I loved Eli.
Okay, maybe Jenny had a point about the holiday’s ties to Satanism, but she was one to talk. After all, she spent a few nights a week wearing robes in a room lit by candles inside skulls and professing allegiance to a goddess of the underworld. If anything, Rose & Grave had far more guilty-as-charged moments when it came to hellish activities.
The last strains of Bach overlaid these reflections, and then, incredibly, I wasn’t thinking about music, or Halloween, or even the way George’s hands were slowly creeping up my corset, no doubt in search of stray candy. Instead, I was remembering a conversation I’d once had with Jenny. It was the night of our Rose & Grave initiation, and we were hiding out from the other taps, who’d decided to go for a midnight swim in the indoor pool at the mansion where we had our party. I’d been trying to make getting-to-know-you chitchat and she’d been raving about the “Brotherhood of Death” and their “devious intentions.” A few days later, she’d claimed she wanted to change the organization of Rose & Grave from the inside out.
She’d shown enough contempt for our traditions over the past few weeks to convince me she hated our current setup. I really did suspect she’d told that Micah guy what I’d said at my C.B. (if not others as well), breaking her oaths and undermining the fabric of the society. The only reason the Diggers felt comfortable talking so freely in the tomb was because they knew the others would never betray them. And yet Jenny was probably doing exactly that. Who knew what other secrets could do my fellow knights serious damage if they were out in the world? I sneaked a peek at Josh and Lydia, who were canoodling at the end of the row. Even I, who had an airtight reason to spill some secrets (roommate bonds being thick as blood after three years), had managed not to break my oath.
And how realistic was it really that a computer genius, a woman who’d made several million dollars by her eighteenth birthday selling off software to Silicon Valley, couldn’t do something as simple as track down a little IP address?
And then tonight, why had she gone back to the tomb after we’d left? We hadn’t even known she was there, and she didn’t look like she was leaving until we came out onto the staircase. Had we caught Jenny in the middle of something? Had she gone back later, after she knew we were gone, to finish it?