15
IVY OR BUST
Late Friday afternoon, Spencer got out of a cab at the Princeton University gates, zipped up her leather jacket, and looked around. Students in stadium-cloth coats and Burberry-plaid scarves bustled to and fro. Professors wearing wire-rimmed glasses and blazers with corduroy patches on the elbows strolled together, no doubt having Nobel prize–quality conversations. The bells in the clock tower struck six, the sound bouncing off the cobblestones.
A thrill went through Spencer. She’d been to Princeton plenty of times for debate competitions, field trips, summer camps, and college tours, but the campus felt very, very different today. She was going to be a student here next year. It was going to be such a dream to get the hell out of Rosewood and have a whole new start. Even this weekend felt like a fresh start. As soon as the train had pulled out of Rosewood, her shoulders had fallen from her ears. A wasn’t here. Spencer was safe . . . at least for a little while.
She looked at the directions Harper had sent her to the Ivy Eating Club. It was on Prospect Avenue, which everyone at Princeton simply called “The Street.” As she turned left and walked up the tree-lined boulevard, her phone chimed. Have you done any research on you-know-who? Hanna wrote.
That was code for Gayle. Nothing that’s led anywhere, Spencer wrote back. She’d scoured the Internet for details on Gayle, seeing if there was any possible way she could be A. The first order of business was to figure out if Gayle could have been in Jamaica last year at the same time the girls were—maybe, like they’d hypothesized about Kelsey, Gayle had seen what they’d done and then, later, after Emily screwed her over, she connected the dots and used it against them.
The Cliffs wasn’t the kind of place a classy, middle-aged woman would have stayed, but Spencer phoned a few resorts near The Cliffs, identifying herself as Gayle’s personal assistant and asking when Gayle had vacationed there. None of the reservations associates had any record of Gayle staying with them—ever. She’d fanned out her search, calling resorts ten, fifteen, even fifty miles away, but as far as Spencer could tell, Gayle had never even been to Jamaica.
So how could Gayle know about what they’d done to Tabitha? How would she have gotten that photo of Emily and Tabitha or of Tabitha lying twisted and broken on the sand? Had Gayle gone to Jamaica under a fake name? Was she working with someone else? Had she hired a PI, like Aria had suggested?
Furthermore, even if Gayle was A, the issue of Tabitha was still puzzling. Why had she acted so Ali-like at The Cliffs? Had she and Ali been friends when they were at The Preserve, and had she been trying to get revenge for Ali’s death? Or was it all an awful coincidence?
Before she knew it, she’d arrived at the address Harper had given her. It was a large, Gothic-style brick house with gorgeous leaded-glass windows, manicured bushes, and an American flag protruding from the front porch. Spencer walked up the stone path and rang the front doorbell, which let out a few impressive bongs to the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. There were footsteps, and then the door flung open. Harper appeared, looking fresh-faced in a purple top with dolman sleeves, skinny jeans, and leather ankle boots. A navy cashmere blanket was draped around her shoulders.
“Welcome!” she cried. “You made it!”
She ushered Spencer inside. The foyer was drafty and smelled like a mixture of leather and jasmine perfume. Blond-wood beams crisscrossed the ceiling, and stained-glass windows decorated the walls. Spencer could just picture past Pulitzer Prize winners standing by the roaring fire or sitting in the wing chairs, having important discussions.
“This is amazing,” she gushed.
“Yeah, it’s okay,” Harper said nonchalantly. “I have to apologize in advance, though. My bedroom upstairs is really drafty and kind of small.”
“I don’t mind,” Spencer said quickly. She’d sleep in the Ivy broom closet if she had to.
Harper took Spencer’s hand. “Let me introduce you to the others.”
She led Spencer through a long hallway lit by chrome and glass lamps to a larger, more modern room in the back of the house. A wall of windows faced the woods behind the property. Another boasted a flat-screen TV, bookshelves, and a large papier-mâché statue of the Princeton tiger mascot. Blanket-swaddled girls lounged on suede couches, tapping their iPads and laptops, reading books, or, in one blond girl’s case, playing an acoustic guitar. Spencer was almost positive the Asian girl fiddling with her phone had won the Golden Orchid a few years ago. The girl in bottle-green jeans by the window was a dead ringer for Jessie Pratt, the girl who’d gotten her memoir about living in Africa with her grandparents published at sixteen.
“Guys, this is Spencer Hastings,” Harper said, and everyone looked up. She pointed at the girls around the room. “Spencer, this is Joanna, Marilyn, Jade, Callie, Willow, Quinn, and Jessie.” So it was Jessie Pratt. Everyone waved happily. “Spencer is an early admit,” Harper went on. “I met her at the dinner I hosted, and I think she’s a natural for us.”
“Nice to meet you.” Quinn set aside her acoustic guitar and shook Spencer’s hand. Her fingernails were painted a preppy pink. “Any friend of Harper’s is a friend of ours.”
“I like your guitar,” Spencer said, nodding at it. “It’s a Martin, right?”
Quinn raised her perfectly plucked blond eyebrows. “You know guitars?”
Spencer shrugged. Her dad was into guitars, and she used to go to some of the vintage expos with him, searching for new ones to add to his collection.
“How do you like that?” Jessie Pratt said, pointing to the book Spencer was carrying. It was a copy of V. by Thomas Pynchon.
“Oh, it’s great,” Spencer said, even though she didn’t really get the gist of the story. The writer barely used any punctuation.
“We’d better get going.” Harper grabbed a sweater from the back of one of the couches.
“Going where?” Spencer asked.
Harper gave her a cryptic smile. “A party at this guy Daniel’s house. You’ll love him.”
“Awesome.” Spencer dropped her duffel by the front door, waited as Harper, Jessie, and Quinn put on their coats and gathered their purses, and followed them into the cold night. They trudged down the snowy sidewalks, careful not to slip on patches of ice. The moon was out, and aside from a few cars swishing down the main avenue, the world was very quiet and still. Spencer eyed a hulking SUV parked at the curb, its motor running, but couldn’t see its driver through the tinted glass.
They turned up the walkway of a big, Dutch-style mansion on the corner. Bass thundered from inside, and shadows passed in front of the brightly lit windows. There were a bunch of cars parked in the driveway, and more kids were making their way up the front lawn. The front door was open, and a handsome guy with thick eyebrows and longish chestnut-colored hair stood in the foyer, the official welcoming committee.
“Greetings, ladies,” he said in a smarmy voice, sipping from a plastic cup.
“Hey, Daniel,” Harper gave him an air kiss. “This is Spencer. She’s going to be a freshman next fall.”
“Ah, new blood.” Daniel looked Spencer up and down. “I approve.”
Spencer followed Harper into the house. The living room was packed, and a 50 Cent track blared loudly. The guys were drinking Scotch; the girls were in dresses and heels and wore diamond studs in their ears. In the corner, people were sitting around a hookah, bluish smoke wafting around their heads.
When someone grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him, Spencer figured it was a hot guy—there were so many of them to choose from. But then she looked at the guy’s droopy eyes, dirty dreadlocks, crooked smile, and tie-dyed Grateful Dead 1986 Tour T-shirt.