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Despite Cassie’s warnings, I had been roommates and close friends with Ellie Patton during all of my time at Collier, and I had yet to feel that she viewed me as any sort of feminine threat. She was quite attractive, with her tall, slim, fashion-model figure, her thick and rich licorice-black hair and stunning pearl-black eyes. Her facial features were as diminutive as mine. If I had anything over her, it was my higher cheekbones and more shapely bosom, but to my way of thinking, that would hardly tip the scales in my favor when it came to competing for boys. Not that I ever did.
In fact, it was only at her insistence that I attended any social functions at all. Whenever I did, I looked for the warning signals Cassie had taught me, but none of the young men who showed interest in Ellie showed any interest in me. I knew a few of them actually felt uncomfortable in my presence, and one of them, according to Ellie, stopped calling her because of me.
“In other words,” she said, “you spooked him. I told him that was just too damn bad. We were roommates, and if he didn’t like it, he knew what he could do.” She shrugged. “I guess he did. He stopped talking to me.”
I started to apologize, but she wasn’t upset about it. She wasn’t particularly fond of him. In fact, Ellie was as flighty about her male relationships as I was indifferent. Her problem was quite unlike mine, though. She was always worried that she was settling too soon or too low, and consequently, she was always looking over their shoulders at the next possibility or someone else’s boyfriend. I couldn’t imagine Ellie thinking of me in Cassie’s feminine gunslinger terms, but that was about to change.
About two weeks after she had walked in on my secret birthday ceremony in the bathroom, which was about a week after we had returned from spring break, Ellie told me I had to do her a big favor.
“And don’t pull a Norma Bates on me,” she said before she got specific. “Don’t come up with any of your weird excuses this time, Semantha.”
She had come back from a late tutoring session with Mr. Schooner, our math teacher. Ellie rarely got better than a C or C-plus, whereas I rarely got a grade below B-plus. I thought for sure she was going to ask me to do one of her final research papers or some extra math assignments Mr. Schooner had given her. From time to time, I did help her understand things, but there was no secret about her lack of interest in education. In fact, she thought most men disliked very intelligent women. She based her opinion on her own father and her brothers and how they thought of women. She would say, “I don’t know why you care so damn much about your grades. You’re rich, and your father will get you anything you want anyway. And it might stop someone wonderful from falling in love with you.”
Maybe she was right, but I didn’t really care, not that I was hung up on being a very good student. Most of the time, I was just going through the motions. I even walked to and from my classes like a zombie, or at least that was what Ellie had been told and told me in the hope that I would change. She was always trying to get me to change. She never gave up on me during our years together. It wasn’t that she felt sorry for me so much as that she wanted to take credit and get more recognition. I was positive that I was a topic of conversation at her family dinners now. At least, I had given her something, a way to be heard, I thought.
“What is it?” I asked timidly.
“What’s that face you’re putting on? Don’t act like I’m asking you to contribute a kidney or something, Semantha.”
“Okay, what?”
“Remember Ethan Hunter?”
I thought for a moment and shook my head. She sighed deeply and then plopped onto her bed.
“I did speak about him so much before we left for spring break that I thought you would puke, Semantha. I remember telling you about all the times he called me to beg me to go out with him and those supposed coincidences when he appeared at the shopping mall when I was there. You have to remember me talking about that.”
I nodded, even though it was quite obvious that I still didn’t recall. That wasn’t her fault, but she could surely tell now that I often listened to her with what my father would say was half an ear. She babbled so much about one boy or another that I didn’t pay too much attention to their names. There were times when she talked after we had gone to bed and I was sure she was still talking long after I had fallen asleep. I could hear Cassie complaining inside my dreams.
“Oh, forget it, already. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll tell you about him again. Ethan’
s a senior attending SUNY Albany. I met him at that fraternity mixer you wouldn’t attend.”
“We weren’t supposed to go,” I reminded her. “It was a school night, and Mrs. Hathaway specifically forbade us to go to college social events without specific parental permission.”
To violate that rule was almost serious enough to justify expulsion. We were on our honor when we went shopping or to a movie at the mall, but Mrs. Hathaway had her ways of finding out things. Some of the girls thought she even had undercover detectives, and others always talked about the so-called plant, a girl who was older but pretended to be one of us.
“It’s how they break terrorist groups,” Emerald Fitzgerald declared. “They infiltrate them.” She was successful enough to spread rampant paranoia. Sometimes I thought they believed I was that girl and that my sessions with Mrs. Hathaway were reports about them. I became a logical suspect, but Ellie went out on a limb reassuring them all about me. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have taken the risks she took.
Ellie and two other girls from Collier had snuck off campus to go to the forbidden college fraternity party. Although the dormitory doors were locked to prevent anyone from coming in after hours, they couldn’t be locked to prevent anyone from going out. There were fire regulations. To get back into the dorm later that night, they crawled through an unlocked window. I knew she would talk my head off, so I pretended not to hear her enter. She made as much noise as she could without alerting Mrs. Hingle, our dorm mother, and then gave up and went to sleep, but she began describing the adventure the moment my eyes opened and didn’t stop until we entered English lit class.
“Oh, right,” I said, pretending to remember now. “Ethan Hunter. Yes.”
Whether she believed me or not didn’t matter. She was on a roll, and nothing except a call to evacuate the building would stop her, and even then she would talk all the way out.
“I didn’t have a particularly fabulous time with him that night, but he was persistent, and as you might recall if you strain your brain a little, I’ve seen him and spoken with him a number of times since. He’s very good-looking, and I can tell he really likes me. His father is a very successful accountant in Buffalo and . . .”
“So, what’s the favor, Ellie?” I didn’t want to seem impatient, but I had about four hundred pages of outside reading to do for anthropology.
“I’m on probation because of my grades, which means I’m grounded.”
“What? When did this happen?”
“I just found out. And this weekend, there’s a big party at his fraternity, like the biggest party of the year.”
I stared at her for a moment. This was a long pause in an Ellie Patton speech. What was coming next? It looked as if I would have to pry it out of her.
“I still don’t see how I can . . .”
