I nodded, a bit taken aback, and put my hands on his chest to push him away. And, naturally, that’s when the door to the nearest entryway opened and Brandon Weare walked out.

“Hey, Haskel,” he said in a voice that was anything but casual. “What’s up?”

Malcolm dropped his hands and stepped back and I tried to think of the least awkward way to respond.

Option One:

“Whoa, Malcolm, be careful on those uneven flagstones, you don’t want to trip!”

Option Two:

“Hey, Brandon. Malcolm here was acting out this scene I missed on The OC last week.”

Option Three:

“Hi, Brandon. Malcolm and I can’t talk right now. We have to go back to the library before anyone finds the top-secret Rose & Grave correspondence Agent Double-Oh-Cabot here left in a book I had no intention of checking out.”

But Malcolm took over, going from Bobcat-Goldthwait-freaked-out to James-Dean-cool in a flash. “Hey, man, how’s it going?” He held out his hand and slapped Brandon five before my friend-with-bennies could figure out what was going on. “I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on that last intramural badminton game. Have you thought about being team captain next year? I think Calvin is going to make a real play for the Tibbs Cup.”

Brandon played badminton? Live and learn. Of course, considering the guy’s obsession with paper airplanes, the aerodynamically designed shuttle used in badminton fit perfectly.

“Thanks,” Brandon said, and stood a little taller. “I have been thinking about it.”

Unbelievable. I looked at Malcolm with new appreciation. Brandon was completely distracted. “Are you doing anything right now?” Malcolm was asking him. “We can go talk to the Calvin Tibbs Coordinator about it.”

“Well, I wanted to chat with Amy….” Brandon cast me a quick glance, but before he could break out his Amy-smile, Malcolm stepped in.

“Oh, she’s headed off to the library.” Malcolm clapped Brandon on the shoulder and made some kind of complicated eyebrow gesture in my direction. “Let’s go,” he went on, guiding my Brandon away.

I stood there, alone in the Calvin courtyard, and began to question the veracity of Brandon’s ongoing Hopelessly-Devoted-to-You act. The man had just ditched me for intramural badminton.

On the upside, I was definitely on my way to becoming a member of Rose & Grave. So, boy, did I need to reclaim those books!

I hurried back to the library, crossing my fingers that the shelving assistants hadn’t made their rounds in the reading room yet.

But my luck didn’t hold out. I got to the table where I’d been sitting, and it was completely cleared. No society tomes, no volumes of literary criticism, no missive from Rose & Grave.

Crap. The next freshman who had to read Poetics was sure in for a surprise. And I’d already screwed up my first objective as a member of a secret society—actually getting initiated. (Though, seriously, I don’t think I’m entirely to blame for this snafu. How was I to know? It’s not like there’s a “So You Wanna Be in a Secret Society” brochure.) Okay, Amy, think. They wouldn’t have had time to reshelve them yet, so they were probably sitting on one of the book carts behind the circulation desk. I could just go up to the people at the desk and tell them I needed it back.

So there I was, standing in line, practically hopping with impatience and straining my eyes to see past the counter to the book carts, hoping that I’d recognize at least one of the volumes. The petite girl working the computer had a nose ring and two green stripes in her hair, and when I told her I needed my Aristotle back, she just stared at me and blinked. “According to the system,” she said, pulling the info up on the screen, “there are 215 copies of the collected writings of Aristotle in the Dwight Stacks alone.”

“I know, but I need the one I was just looking at.”

“And another 167 in the rest of the Eli University library system.”

“Right,” I said, pointing behind her. “But I need the one on that little cart back there.”

She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “You want me to go digging through the cart to find a particular book, another copy of which you can easily retrieve from the shelves in 382 different forms?”

Nice math, bitch. I was still carrying the one. But my momma always told me you catch more flies with honey.

“Pretty please.” I leaned forward. “I left some rather sensitive health information in there, accidentally.” I gestured vaguely at my lower regions and whispered, “Test results.”

She retrieved the cart forthwith and started rummaging through the books. Unfortunately, Poetics was not among them, nor were any of the other books I’d had with me earlier.

“Sorry,” she said, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a card. She slid it across the counter, then laid her hand softly over mine. “You know, I volunteer at the Eli Women’s Center. If you need to talk about anything, we have a twenty-four-hour Crisis Help Line.”

I did my best to look somber. “Thank you,” I said, taking the card and stuffing it in my pocket. Okay, now what was I supposed to do?

“Hey! Psst, Amy. Amy Haskel.”

I turned in the direction of the voice and saw Clarissa Cuthbert seated in a leather armchair in a little reading alcove. Her Louis Vuitton bag was on her lap, a pile of library books sat on the table beside her, and between two of her French manicured fingers, she dangled a white envelope with a black border and a black wax seal.

“Looking for this?”

And let me tell you why.

Remember Galen Twilo, numero dos on my Hit List? Well, soon after our Reading Week love-in, about two weeks into the second semester, when it was just penetrating my lust-addled brain that I would never again be treated to a post-coital discussion about existentialism and the incontrovertible nothingness of being (I know, strange thing to think right after an orgasm) in the arms of Mr. Twilo, I had a rather unfortunate encounter.

There’s a sort of restaurant/club in New Haven called Tory’s that caters to the very, very old-school factions of the student body. To eat there, you have to be a member, and the dress code is incredibly strict. They serve stuff like Welsh rarebit, and campus organizations who have Tory’s members on their roster like to go and have what we call “Tory’s Nights,” where we sing songs and drink toasts out of giant silver trophy cups at the long tables in the restaurant’s private banquet rooms, though we never actually eat anything. Clarissa Cuthbert is amongst the very oldest of the old school, and her father, some hotshot Wall Street guy, is the type of person who pays the steep post-graduate membership fee to Tory’s just so he can eat toast points whenever he visits his daughter at his old alma mater.

I didn’t know any of this then. I knew of Clarissa—she was beautiful in that “Bergdorf blonde” way, dressed like she was in a fashion show for every class, and had a dorm room on campus (as all freshmen are required to) as well as a swank penthouse on the corner of Chapel and College Streets, the town’s ritziest student-friendly address. She held champagne-tasting parties. At eighteen.

I was still getting used to keggers.

My first Tory’s Night with the Lit Mag had been going on for about an hour and a half when the almost-empty trophy cup was passed to me. “Finish it,” Glenda Foster, then a sophomore, had whispered to me, and the whole table lifted their voices in song. Now, the rules of the Tory’s Cup Game are a little bit complicated (especially considering it’s a drinking game), but here’s a short list.