Tap & Gown by Diana Peterfreund

the managing editor job I’ll never know.”
    Page 32

    So at least she knew who her competition was.
    “Maybe it was pesk—er, persistence?” I suggested. Over Arielle’s head, I saw George at the salad bar, and excused myself.
    “Hey,” I said, meeting him by the dressings. “See that girl at my table?”
    He looked. “Yeah. Cute.” He went back to spooning out blue cheese.
    “I’m not setting you up on a date, George! That’s Arielle Hallet.”
    “Oh.” He looked again. “Still cute.”
    “Well, she’s starting to piss me off. Always popping up whenever I think I’m going to get a moment to myself.”
    George grinned. “So it begins. I had to put up with that from the opposite direction all last spring.”
    “With Jamie?” I asked, my tone dry.
    He made a show of flinching. “Yeah, well … Hey, at least it’s not Topher Cox. That guy’s a douche.”
    “Arielle’s been telling us so as well.”
    “Really?” George looked up from the bacon bits. “Give her credit for doing her research as to who else you’d be likely to tap. Very Digger-esque of her. What does she say about the Kalani chick? Because if you ask me, that’s her real competition. She’s the hottest girl in the junior—” George clammed up as a group of underclassmen jostled around the other side of the bar.
    “We don’t tap on the basis of hotness, George.”
    “Speak for yourself,” he joked.
    I rolled my eyes. “Are you coming over?”
    “With that promise of scintillating table talk? Hmmm …”
    Back at the table, Josh’s frustration at Arielle’s ignorance of his own Digger status was beginning to show, and Lydia, amused by the proceedings, was holding up her end of the conversation with comments designed to make the red around his ears grow darker.
    This was the inherent design flaw of a secret society. Societies tapped ambitious, brilliant, successful young people with no lack of pride and a more-than-occasional touch of hubris. Their induction was a moment of triumph in their lives—proof that they were, in fact, one of the elect.
    Then they weren’t allowed to tell anyone.
    So Arielle’s fawning around me and my best friend only aggravated poor Josh, who should have been a prime candidate for fawning himself. Of course, as soon as I returned, all attention was back onto me, rather than Arielle just asking questions about me to Lydia. Josh’s mood did not improve.
    Page 33

    I listened with half of my attention, and kept my eyes on George. He was spending an awfully long time constructing that salad, wandering over to the other side of the salad bar and insinuating himself into the crowd there. I watched as he exchanged pleasantries with a brunette in a Prescott College T-shirt and denim skirt. Casual enough. They might be arguing over who got the last spoonful of garlic croutons.
    Then he reached over and flicked her pigtail.
    She giggled—who wouldn’t, when George Harrison Prescott flicks your pigtail?—and then hip-checked him.
    I paused, fork halfway to my mouth. George flirted as a matter of course, but a hip check was a little more intimate than I expected from a salad bar encounter. I looked more closely at the scene: 1) Body Language: check. Tops of torsos angled away, but groins definitely pointed in each other’s direction. Casual, yet secretly sexy.
    2) Teasing Touches: check. Innocent with an underlying sense of familiarity.
    3) And now he was following her to her table filled with—wait for it—sophomores.
    I had discovered the identity of George’s secret rendezvous. Apparently, secrecy was no longer an issue. He was having brunch with her. In his own college. In her own college. In front of all of us.
    Had the world gone mad?
    “What do you think, Amy?” Arielle was asking me, about heaven-knew-what.
    I thought that perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. After all, George and I had had brunch together plenty of times during our affair. But then, we’d known each other for years,