“Phoebe, calm down,” Nick said.
“You know something else?” she said. “We’ve never considered this, but I don’t think there really is a Society.”
“What?” Nick said. “What do you mean?” He gave her a sideways look, as if she were insane.
“What I mean is, sure, there’s a group of people, and they’ve gotten together and they’ve done some good things and many bad things. But in terms of its meaning, remember how the scroll we got was written and adapted by each class? That’s exactly how they’ve constructed it-none of it has meaning in and of itself. We are the ones who have given it meaning. It’s all created to keep us in line, to keep us trapped. Initiation rituals, bonfires, Egyptian mythology, swimming parties, French philosophy, stories about drowning, people dying-”
“You’re saying that people dying wasn’t real?”
“No, it was real, but we were the ones who gave it meaning. We were the ones who decided that we couldn’t go to the police. No one told us we couldn’t. We came up with that idea, remember? We were the ones who decided to be so afraid all the time.”
“But they threatened us-when we didn’t attend meetings-” Nick sputtered.
“Right, but we decided we couldn’t handle it. I didn’t tell my mom about the rats because I was scared. Thad couldn’t tell the truth about who planted the gin bottle because he was embarrassed about his mother’s past. Lauren couldn’t say who she thought put the earrings in her bag, because they would have said she was nuts.”
Nick shook his head. “I get what you’re saying, but Phoebe, this is still as real as anything I’ve ever seen. There is stolen art in that basement, and my grandfather is responsible for it. No one can deny that. Do you really want the world to find out about that?”
“There you go again-you’ve put so much value in your family’s privacy, you’re ignoring what’s better for the rest of us.”
“Phoebe, you wouldn’t understand,” Nick said. He tapped the kitchen floor in frustration with his right foot. “And I think-I think you’re being crazy. All this stuff does have meaning. You know that. You can’t pretend it doesn’t.”
Phoebe regarded Nick. She had never been more upset with him. It was a horrible, empty feeling, as if a cavern had opened in her heart. She considered the idea that he wasn’t the person she was meant to be with.
She grabbed Nick’s shoulder and held it tightly. “Don’t ever call me crazy.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was stupid.” He put his head on the table, cradling it in his arms. When he lifted up his head a moment later, his eyes were red. “I’m so sorry. Phoebe, I love you. I really do.”
As if her body had taken over from her mind, she found herself shaking her head. “I don’t know if you do,” she said quietly. “I feel like you love your life in New York more. Your family. Everything it affords you. And maybe you even love this. All the drama. All the mystery. I mean, really, would our lives be as interesting without all this? Would we even be together? If we could break free, where would that really leave us?”
“How can you say that?” He looked at her, his face streaked with tears. “How can you say such a horrible thing?”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. “I don’t quite feel like myself. I’ve just…” Her voice trailed off. “I should probably stop talking.” She sighed deeply, and only then did she realize how exhausted she was from everything. “Maybe we’d better get going. We have to get back to Manhattan for that damned cocktail party.” Claire Chilton and her parents had invited them all to a cocktail party that evening to celebrate the success of the Dendur Ball.
“Do we have to go?” Nick said. “I’m not exactly in the mood.”
“I would kill to skip it,” Phoebe said. She felt horrible for the things she had said, and now it felt like she couldn’t take them back. The worst part was that she didn’t want to take back some of it. She really would have loved to skip the party, to have some time alone to figure things out.
“Maybe we go for twenty minutes,” Nick said.
“Twenty minutes,” Phoebe said. “And that’s it.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Lauren had been dreading the Chilton cocktail party that night. A snow had started falling earlier that day in Manhattan, and by evening it had turned into a blizzard. The cars along Park Avenue were inching through the powdery banks, and it was the kind of night when you wanted to stay in and relax, not go to a cocktail party. Luckily for Lauren, Claire and her parents lived only a few blocks away. Thad would be picking Lauren up at seven.
When he arrived, Thad’s cheeks were pink from the cold outside, and he still had a few snowflakes in his curly blond hair. Lauren knew that he had started something with that guy, Kurt, whom he had met at the ball, and she was eager to get the details from him.
“You getting excited for your Paris trip?” he asked her. She had told him about the opportunity that Sebastian had offered her.
She shrugged as she buttoned her wool overcoat and stepped into the elevator. “To be perfectly honest, not really. I wish I were. Something doesn’t feel right about it.” She was supposed to leave in several weeks; the trip was scheduled for the second week of spring break. “I know it’s an amazing opportunity, and I should be thrilled.”
“Well, the question is, what exactly are the strings, right?” He looked thoughtfully at the numbers in the elevator as they descended.
“That’s what I’m worried about. Is it right for me to be going on this trip alone?”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Thad asked. “I mean, I don’t mean to invite myself along or anything, but it would be amazing…”
She smiled. “I could tell them that you have to come with me. But are you sure I won’t be keeping you from being with Kurt?”
Thad shrugged. “It’s so new, I think I’m allowed to go away for a week, right?”
“How’s it going, anyway?”
Thad blushed, and Lauren started tickling him in the elevator. “Stop, stop, I’ll tell you!” he said, laughing. “It’s going great. He’s wonderful. He’s, like, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. I didn’t think they even made guys that smart in New York.”
“Well, he’s from New Jersey,” Lauren said.
“And I like that about him-he’s not all stuck-up like everyone around here.” The elevator doors opened and they stepped out.
“Does he know about… you know.” She was referring to the Society, but they were walking through the lobby and she wanted to be discreet.
“I don’t think so,” Thad said quietly. “I haven’t told him. I haven’t gotten a haircut recently, so he can’t really see the tattoo. I keep wishing that by the time we have that conversation, we’ll all be out of it.”
“Here’s hoping,” Lauren said with a sigh as she stepped out from under her building’s awning and through the five inches of snow that had already fallen on the sidewalk. “Well, I’m really happy you can come on the trip.” She took Thad’s arm as they walked. “With you along, I’m starting to think it might be fun.”
The cocktail party was being thrown to celebrate the success of the Dendur Ball, though Lauren recognized it all as a sham. Letty Chilton-and probably Claire as well-felt awkward about the power outage and the jewelry theft and, more than anything, that the media coverage of the ball had focused more on its scandalous aftermath than on the new additions to the museum, the money that was raised, or all the hard work that Letty and her daughter had done.
When they got to the party, the first thing they noticed was the music. Mrs. Chilton had clearly made an attempt to keep the atmosphere “youthful” as opposed to the classical selections she usually would have played at an event like this. Lauren recognized the Rolling Stones’s song “Play with Fire,” a creepy, bizarre song about a woman with an heiress mother, beautiful clothes, diamonds, and a chauffeur. It seemed appropriate, somehow, for the evening: vapid and mysterious.
It also reminded Lauren of Alejandro, for it was one of the songs that had come on when they swam in that heated pool last November. Since that day, Lauren had found it on iTunes and would sometimes play it over and over again, as it reminded her of that moment. A moment she would never have again.