And everyone did, melting into the crowd with such alacrity that I lost track of them (and any chance of getting a straight answer) almost immediately.

I turned around twice, scanning for other Diggers, and finally caught sight of the senior I knew only as Poe. He was sitting on the steps of the English department, a little ways away from everyone else, pretending to read from a volume of Nietzsche while snacking on a bag of Doritos and watching the proceedings with an inscrutable eye.

Poe. Why’d it have to be Poe? As I saw it, approaching him already set me up with a handful of problems.

POSSIBLE DIFFICULTIES

1) I didn’t know his real name. Awkward, awkward.

2) He was positioned as far away from the action as one could possibly get.

3) I hate the jerk.

But the pickings were slim. I couldn’t even find Clarissa in the crowd anymore, and the blond bitch at least held the distinction of not being a person who had threatened my life recently. I took the stairs two at a time, and came to a halt directly in front of him.

“Ah, Miss Haskel,” Poe said, snapping his book shut. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Exquisite. I’m looking for a straight answer on what’s going on here.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like a member of the fourth estate. Interesting. And here I thought Cabot was prevaricating.”

Dude, the SATs were four years ago. Get a life. “Listen, what’s the deal with those guys?”

Poe brushed nacho cheese dust off on the leg of his pleated dress pants, which he’d paired with a rather shabby white undershirt. Fashion victim, on top of everything else. “Those guys, as you so eloquently put it, are patriarchs merely acting upon the board of trustees’s promise, which most of my club believed to be a bluff.”

And Poe hadn’t, clearly. “What promise?”

“To close the tomb if we were so bold as to carry through with our intent to tap members of the fairer sex.” He nodded in deference to me.

The backlash…“What! This is all because of us?”

“You and the other females,” he continued as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “They refuse to recognize your inclusion.”

I tossed my hair. “They need to join the 21st century.” Or even the 20th.

“And furthermore, the board and supporting coalition of unwilling patriarchs intend to visit a punishment upon those who acted without their permission. They informed us that they would close the tomb and invalidate the membership of any Digger who supported and/or acted upon the initiation of females.”

“You sound like a lawyer,” I spluttered through my shock. He sounded so…calm!

“Thank you. I’ll be attending Eli Law come fall. At least, that’s the plan.”

(Eli Law, by the way, is rather infamous for not turning out lawyers. Supposedly the best law school in the country, but everyone on their roster either becomes professors or politicians.)

“How the hell can you be so blasé about this?” I practically shouted (Malcolm would say I was being indiscreet). “You tapped us, too!”

“Indeed I did,” Poe replied, in that infuriatingly unruffled tone.

“Well, aren’t you upset about having your—your membership invalidated?”

“I’ve had a few weeks to get used to the idea.” Poe shrugged. “I’m certainly upset about the development. But I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, I was just telling Malcolm a few moments ago—”

“That was you on the cell phone.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“And you were already here.”

“I assure you, as I’m sure you heard me assure him, my presence isn’t about to make a modicum of difference at this juncture.”

“Dammit, stop talking like that!”

His gray eyes went cold, but he obeyed. “Look, honey, I happen to agree with them. I don’t think women should be members of Rose & Grave, and I argued that point as long as my voice held out. I also held no illusions that the TTA board would ‘come around’ as soon as they saw what a great group of girls we tapped, which was the mistaken hypothesis of the rest of my club. However, when it became obvious that I was the only one of the Diggers who thought so, I decided to support my brothers.”

“Why?”

“Because the decision to tap has to be unanimous, and we were at an impasse. From that point on, I didn’t say a word. We interviewed girls, we groomed girls, we deliberated about girls, we tapped girls, and we initiated girls, and during the whole process, I never once spoke up about how I thought it was a really bad idea.”

He said “girls” like it was a dirty word. I wanted to slap him.

And still, the lecture went on. “What’s happening now is exactly what I said would happen, but I’m not going to start throwing ‘I told you so’s around. We went over the board’s head, and acted without the support of the trustees at large. We can’t take back the initiation now—you’ve been inside the tomb, inside the Inner Temple. You’ve seen everything, know everything. As far as they are concerned, we’ve committed heresy, and your class’s club is an abomination of the Order. Malcolm wants me to go down there and talk to the patriarchs because he thinks that they’ll be more likely to listen to someone who’s on their side. But because I’m on their side, I have no argument to make.”

Forget arguments to them—talk about a rimshot! I could make a dozen without breaking a sweat. “Why don’t you think women should be allowed in Rose & Grave?”

He looked at me for a long time without blinking, then stood. “Right now, the quickest answer is that tapping you has fucked up my life. They aren’t going to stop with the tomb. They’ll go after our school records. They’ll go after everything. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a resume to update. If I were you, I’d do the same.”

“You’re a sexist asshole.”

He stopped for a moment. “Maybe I’ll put that down under Skills.”

“And get a job with whom?” I snapped. “The Taliban?”

Emotions flashed so quickly across his face that I had a tough time catching them, but he finally settled on disdain. “I am not implying that women are in any way inferior to men. I am in full support of an elite women’s secret society on campus.”

I rolled my eyes. “Separate is not equal, buddy. An Eli law student should know that.”

“When Wellesley accepts my little brother, I’ll revisit the issue.” And then he took off down the steps.

At least now I was up to speed. And I also knew that I disliked Poe whatever-his-real-name-was a lot more than even Miss Clarissa “Slumming” Cuthbert. I trudged back down the steps and ran smack into Malcolm, who was redialing his cell phone.

“You can forget it,” I said. “He’s not coming.”

Malcolm looked at me. “Who?”

“Poe.”

Malcolm flinched at my use of the society name, but was all business as he grabbed my arm. “How do you know?”

“I just talked to him.”

“Here?” Malcolm searched the area with his eyes. “That sneaky bastard!”

“That’s not the adjective I’d use.”

He frowned. “You don’t really know him.”

Man, that whole oath of constancy thing really took, didn’t it? I wondered if I’d be jumping in to defend Clarissa next. “I know he doesn’t want me in the society.”

Malcolm sighed. “That’s not true. If he truly didn’t want it, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I shook my head. Malcolm might think he knew his society brother, but I’d looked the guy in the eyes. He’d wanted nothing to do with the “fairer sex.” Stone Age jerk.

“Okay, then, Amy, we’re on our own.” His hand slipped down to mine, and he began pulling me forward.

“What are you doing?” I cried as we pushed through the crowd.

“We’re going to talk to them.”

I started to dig my heels into the asphalt. “But what about…all that stuff you said?”

Malcolm looked back and winked. “Loophole, kiddo. We’re press.”

WAYS IN WHICH AMY HASKEL AND MALCOLM CABOT DIFFER FROM “PRESS”