Under the Rose by Diana Peterfreund Read Free Book Online Page B

me?
    Clarissa: And after a few weeks, he asked me if I’d get a Sphinx Brazilian.
    Jenny: A what?
    Odile: Bikini wax. All of it.
    George: (grins) Cool.
    Jenny: (looks horrified)
    Clarissa: (not even pausing ) But after I did it, I felt prepubescent. I haven’t seen that part of me since I was eleven. I wasn’t in the mood for sex until it had grown back.
    Nikolos: (snorts)
     
    See how that might be a tough act for me to follow? I didn’t know how I’d deal with another night of Nikolos’s snorts. And what if they snickered at my more embarrassing anecdotes? At least I’d already fallen in the middle of the statistics in the “virginity lost” and “partners had” categories.
    Still, I doubted my tale of prom after-party sex in the bedroom of the host’s kid sister was going to impress anyone. I’m pretty run-of-the-mill for a Digger. Especially since there was only one orgasm involved, and it wasn’t mine. I bet Odile had done it on the top of the Eiffel Tower at midnight, or maybe on the Concorde. George had probably done it on the space shuttle. Would not surprise me a bit. As for Jenny, I was beginning to get the impression she was still a virgin. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Quick C.B. and then we can all go home and study. I was all for it, especially now that it was October and classes were in full swing.
    Not to give you the impression we only talked about sex! Before the C.B.s began, we’d tested the waters of knightly bonding with reports that amounted to recaps of summer vacation. I told everyone about my summer spent transcribing and editing narratives by exploited women, an experience I still hadn’t wrapped my mind around. I’d always figured I’d move to New York after graduation and work in publishing. All of a sudden I was gathering Peace Corps brochures from the Eli Career Center and looking into graduate school programs. All of a sudden I couldn’t picture myself in a cubicle, a realization I sheepishly shared with the other knights. But they were surprisingly supportive. I’d have thought with the Diggerly emphasis on ambition, the other knights would scoff at a career path that wasn’t fast track. I was wrong. Demetria had told me all about an upcoming project she was running for Habitat for Humanity, and Jenny—in one of her increasingly infrequent talkative phases—explained that she’d gone through a similar enlightenment after being involved in an Indonesian clean water project her church had sponsored two summers ago.
    I’d spent my whole life getting my resume in order. Maybe it was time to turn it into confetti.
    I swung my legs over the side of the bed and padded out to our common room, bypassing my computer for the time being. If I was going to deal with “Graverobber’s” griping, I needed sustenance. I reached to the top shelf, where we hid our contraband hot pot behind a large hardback of Art Through the Ages, and filled it with water from our purifying pitcher. (I will never understand who the fire marshal thinks he’s kidding with his surprise inspections every semester. He knows we have coffeepots and stuff in here, and we know he knows. It’s all such a game. Demetria tells this story about sophomore year when he came into her suite while she and her roommates were huddled about the hot pot, smoking—another no-no—and waiting for their soup to warm. He just shook his head and wrote them a ticket. Demetria claims she used it for rolling papers.)
    What was I going to say at this thing? I plugged in the pot and plopped down on the couch, drawing my knees up inside my oversized sleep shirt and pondering the issue at hand. How embarrassing would it be to let everyone know that a week in my arms caused number two on my Hit List, a faux-beatnik named Galen Twilo, to pack up his dog-eared copy of Howl and burn for a different “ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo of…” whatever-it-was.
    Or would I open up the wound from number three,