Love Comes Calling Read online

  If I avoided being pinned, then I’d be able to spare Griff’s pride when I ended up leaving town. I’d been humiliated enough in my life to know how it felt, and Griff didn’t deserve that. The sooner I could get to Hollywood, the better! I’d been thinking about it since the summer of my freshman year, when I realized college wasn’t for me. Being pinned—and then leaving Griff behind—was one thing I didn’t want to have to regret when I left. I just had to figure out how to get enough money to buy my train ticket.

  “This one or this one?” Mary was holding up my drop-waisted orchid satin dress and my maize Chelsea-collared chiffon.

  “Neither.” I stepped beyond her and pulled my white tennis jumper from its hanger.

  She grabbed it from me. “You can’t wear that!”

  “Good grief! I’ve got the play tonight. Besides, I’ve already told you he’s not going to pin me. And even if he did, I’ve known Griff for . . . a long time. It’s not as if he hasn’t seen me in a plain old skirt and sweater. Or nothing at all, for that matter.”

  Mary’s eyes grew wide, and Louise looked at me as if I’d suddenly sprouted horns.

  I might have laughed, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to give them the person they so obviously imagined me to be. I smiled a long, slow, smoldering smile as if I were the actress Theda Bara. And then I gave a languorous shrug of my shoulder as I prowled toward my bed, throwing in a shimmy for good measure.

  Mary gasped. “You didn’t.” She turned to Louise. “She didn’t! She couldn’t have; she wouldn’t, would she? You don’t think they’ve—”

  I broke into laughter. Peals of it. I couldn’t help it. “No, I never—! I was talking about when we were babies. Our families have gone to the shore together every summer for practically forever.”

  Louise blushed so bright she looked like a strawberry with that green hat on her head. “I wasn’t thinking that. My goodness! How could you even . . . but . . . you almost . . . you seemed so vampy there for a second. I never quite know what to think about you, Ellis. You might want to pretend to be Mary Pickford once in a while or people might start to wonder . . .”

  Our own Mary was looking at my tennis jumper, nose wrinkled. “Honestly! You’d think you weren’t even an Eton, with clothes like that.”

  Which is what I said whenever I went home on the weekends. But Mother only sighed and talked about whether my old things were still serviceable. “Just think how many orphans can be fed and clothed with the money you’re thinking of spending.” I undid the buttons on my skirt and let it drop to the floor, and then I pulled my blouse off over my head. “Do either of you actually know when this pinning is supposed to happen?”

  “Now.”

  “Now!”

  “Sure. Just as soon as the boys get done with class.”

  “But he can’t! Tonight’s the play.” And I had to head over to the theater soon . . . where Griff would eventually be meeting me. I’d just have to make sure he didn’t catch me between here and there alone. I pulled the tennis jumper on over my head and tugged the skirt down smooth.

  There was a knock at the door.

  The girls shouted “Come in” while I shouted “Go away!” Two voices beat one, for Irene Bennett opened the door and thrust a tall glass jug in our direction. “Just look what I bought!”

  If she weren’t still standing in the door, I would have slipped around her. “Looks like a very nice jug, Irene.”

  “It’s not just a jug. It’s a jug filled with grape juice.”

  I pulled her into the room so I could get around her. “Why don’t you go drink it somewhere, then?”

  “Because, look: right there. Read what it says.”

  I obliged her. “‘Warning. If left in a dark place, will ferment.’”

  “See?”

  “So don’t leave it sitting around. Drink it now.” Somewhere else. So I could leave!

  “I’m going to turn it into wine!”

  Mary gasped. “You can’t!”

  “Of course I can. If I leave it in the dark, it’ll ferment. So . . . ?” She looped her arm around mine as she looked at me, brow cocked.

  She wanted to be my friend now, after practically ignoring me at mah-jongg that night before the economics test? “So . . . what?”

  She offered the jug up to me. “Will you?”

  “Will I what?”

  “Put it in your closet for me? I was really hoping it would be done by now. I’ve had it in mine for a while, but your room is so much stuffier, I was hoping it would work better here. If I can figure out how to make my own wine, then I won’t have to depend on the boys downtown to buy it for me.”

  She had people buying wine for her? Since when?! “If you want to make wine so much, even though it’s positively illegal, then put it in your own closet.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not illegal. Legally, me and you and everyone here is allowed to produce wine in the privacy of their own house—”

  “But this is a dormitory.”

  She threw an arm around my neck. “Why do you always have to be so literal, Ellis?”

  “I’m not.” Irene had changed, and not for the better. I felt my nose wrinkle. Had she already been drinking? “Why can’t you just obey the rules like everyone else?”

  “Because they’re only made for the benefit of the poor fools who can’t figure out how to break them.”

  “By which, I suppose, you meant me?” Was she trying to be mean on purpose?

  Mary and Louise were watching us with wide eyes.

  “Of course I don’t mean you. Everyone knows rules weren’t made for the first families of Boston! You’re above the law.”

  “No one’s above the law.”

  She held up the jug. “Come on, Ellis. Will you keep it for me? Please? No one would dare expel you, but if they catch me . . .”

  If they caught Irene, then the dean of the college would throw her out on her head. After having been caught smoking in her room and out in the Yard with a boy after curfew, it was a miracle she’d made it through the term at all.

  “Please?” She batted her long, dark, incredibly thick eyelashes at me. They were the only thing I envied about her. That and her closet full of silk dresses. And her beaded handbags. And matching shoes. Come to think of it, she’d improved herself quite a bit lately. For a poor girl, she had a lot more nice things than I did!

  “Don’t do it, Ellis!” Louise was glaring at Irene. “Don’t you know what will happen if they catch you?”

  Of course I knew what would happen. The dean would call me to her office for a talk. She’d be ever so disappointed and encourage me to apply myself and buckle down and then everything would be forgiven. Just like it always was. I wouldn’t be coming back next autumn anyway. “Oh . . . go ahead. Put it in my closet.” I waved her toward it, then slipped out the door.

  “But, Ellis! You can’t just—” I stomped down the hall so I wouldn’t be able to hear Mary and Louise calling out behind me. I was so tired of people telling me what I couldn’t do! And what I wouldn’t do! And what I was supposed to do!

  As I went down the front stairs, I heard the sound of chanting. It was coming from outside.

  I tiptoed to the door and took a peek out the window. A big bunch of fraternity boys was coming across the Yard, waving their flag and singing one of their dippy songs.

  For crying out loud!

  Now I’d have to think of some other way to get to the theater unseen. At least no one else had heard them.

  As if on cue, one of the freshmen popped out of the dining room.

  “Don’t you dare answer that door!”

  She plastered herself against the wall. “I won’t. Promise.”

  Spearing her with a Pola Negri glare, I ran back up the stairs and down the hall to Martha’s room. I might have been an Eton, but she was the one who’d received the honor of the corner room.

  She didn’t answer my knock.

  Please, please, please!

  “I
’m coming!” She opened the door, her hair already set in water-wave combs and tied up in string.

  “Can I borrow one of your windows, Martha?”

  “One of my . . . windows? Why?”

  Pushing past her, I strode to one. Unlatching it, I pushed up the sash, then hitched up my skirt and sat astride the frame.

  “Ellis! What on earth—?”

  “Hush, Martha. I need to concentrate.”

  She sprang through the door and out into the hall. “Help! Help! Ellis Eton is committing suicide.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. “I am not!” I raised my voice so it could be heard over hers. “But I might just have to murder you, Martha Davis!”

  She came back into the room and shut up her mouth as she clutched her collar tight about the throat.

  “Wish me luck.” I hoped this would go more like a Douglas Fairbanks movie than a Charlie Chaplin one. Leaning forward, I swung my other leg over the window ledge. Then I pushed off the sill as I grabbed at the edge of the gutter. As I hung there, I wrapped my legs around the downspout. I’d seen Buster Keaton do it once in a movie; it had looked so easy as I was sitting there in the theater, but now I couldn’t quite figure out how it worked.

  I loosened my hold on the pipe and started to slide, then tightened my grip and stopped. Nothing to it! And much easier than climbing down a tree.

  Only . . . those voices sounded louder. Were they getting nearer?

  I loosened my grip again and started to slide, when my thighs got hung up on something sharp and pointy.

  Ow!

  It probably would have worked just fine if the pipe hadn’t separated from the building just then and swung me out away from the dormitory like a ride at Salem Willows Park. I tried to hold on as long as I could—I really did—but with the pipe peeling off and then curving down toward the ground, suddenly I was sliding along the gutter in the wrong direction, upside down. And before I knew it, I’d reached the end of the pipe and sailed off through the air.

  I closed my eyes.

  There wasn’t anything else to do, and I really didn’t want to see where I was headed.

  3

  My landing wasn’t quite what I’d expected. It was much softer, and it was also accompanied by a grunt. A very masculine grunt. Which was followed by a laugh and the scent of black licorice. “Fancy seeing you here, Ellis.”

  I’d shut my eyes up so tight it took me a moment to open them. And another long moment to believe what they insisted on telling me. Apparently, my attempt at escape had been spotted, and when I’d fallen it had been straight into the arms of Griffin Phillips.

  He was staring down at me, his blond hair flopping forward into those gorgeous blue eyes he had. “Are you all right?”

  Someone started up a Harvard fight song, and all the fraternity brothers joined in.

  Griff slung me over his shoulder as if I were some damsel in distress and ran several yards down the grass before stopping and setting me carefully down on the ground. Everyone cheered as if he’d just scored another touchdown.

  Rah-rah. Sis-boom-bah.

  I pushed through the boys and headed out toward the street.

  Griff jogged to catch up with me. “Hey—you headed to the theater? Can I come with you?”

  “Sure.” Why not? I would have done better just to have opened the front door to him in the first place, but that’s about the way things had been going this term, and there was no reason to think they might change now.

  We walked together, Griff whistling the way he usually did and me wishing I were anywhere but there. He shot a glance over at me. “What were you doing on that gutter anyway?”

  “I was trying to leave.”

  He squinted at me. “Wasn’t the front door working?”

  “I wanted to make a quick getaway.”

  He smiled that old Griff smile, which always made me want to smile too. So I did. And then I started to laugh.

  “That’s what I like about you, Ellis. You’re always doing things no one else would ever think of.”

  Then he was the only one who liked that about me. But that’s exactly why I liked him too. He’d never once, in all the time I’d known him, said, “Oh, Ellis!” or shaken his head over some dumb thing I’d done . . . or tried to do.

  He slanted a look over at me. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  Oh, crumb. “And there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you too.”

  “Then go ahead. Please. You first.”

  I knew I could count on him to be a gentleman!

  “So . . . what was it?”

  Oh. Well, now I had to think of something to say. “I was wondering . . . wanting to know . . . what do you think about . . . ?” What? What would make him go on and on long enough to make him forget about his fraternity pin? And me. Harvard? No. Bad idea. That would just make him think about his fraternity again. Football? No, the season was long over. Baseball! “What do you think about Roy Powell?”

  “You mean about the trade?”

  “You can’t really call it a trade if he refused to be traded.” That’s what my brother Lawrence had taken to saying.

  “Well, now . . . I don’t know if I agree with that.” He talked up and down and around both sides of the issue until we reached the theater, just as I’d known he would. He was studying to be a lawyer, after all.

  I ran up the steps ahead of him and opened the door. “Thanks for walking me over. There sure is lots to do to get ready. . . .”

  He caught up with me and took hold of the door, pulling it open wider. “But I wanted to ask you if—”

  One of the freshman girls came toward us. “There you are! One of the curtains won’t work, and I can’t find the flashlight and—”

  “The curtain always catches. You just have to know how to pull it the right way.” I sent a glance back over my shoulder at Griff as I gave a shrug. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

  After I’d taught her how to coax the curtain open and closed, I went on a search for the missing flashlight. Without it, the props girl would never be able to see in the dim light backstage. There were always a million things to do the afternoon of a performance, and they kept me busy enough to avoid Griff, who finally decided to change into his costume and then take a seat out in the auditorium to wait.

  About forty-five minutes before show time, my assistant walked up as she consulted a clipboard. “Everyone is here except for two of the trolls, the maid, and the queen.”

  The queen: Irene. I could have torn my hair out. This play was mine. I’d written it for my English 47 class; my professor had let me direct it, and I was also acting in it. Lots of the girls had wanted to play the queen, but I’d chosen Irene because she was the person I’d imagined as I wrote the part back at the beginning of the year. Since I’d cast her, however, she’d been nothing but trouble.

  I told her to send someone over to the dormitory to look for Irene.

  As she left by way of the stage, I saw Griff back in the far corner of the theater, talking to a man with hair so slick it might have been patent leather. Though he was too old to be a student, he looked too young to be a parent. As I watched, he laid a hand on Griff’s arm.

  Griff shrugged it off and turned away, walking down the theater toward me.

  The man darted in front of him, putting a hand to Griff’s chest. “It’s not like we’re asking for the whole season. Just one game. A couple of plays. That’s all.”

  Sidestepping the man, Griff continued on toward me.

  “Tell me you’ll at least think about it! He won’t take no for an answer.”

  “I already told you: I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t, that’s all!” The man turned on his heel, jammed his hat on his head, and stormed away.

  “What did he want?”

  Griff shrugged. “He just wanted to talk about football.”

  Football! That’s all anyone ever seemed to talk about. Another reason to be glad I wouldn’
t be here in September. “Forget about football.” I pulled him over to the props table and . . . was that the flashlight? Squinting, I grabbed at it. It was! I switched it on.

  Unfortunately, it was pointed right at Griff.

  He put a hand up in front of his eyes. “Watch it!”

  I swung the light toward the table as I switched it off. “Sorry.” I grabbed his crown and stood on tiptoe to set it on his head. Then I pressed a mustache to his upper lip. Pulling his cape from a chair, I handed it to him. “Could you put this on?”

  A growing murmur from the other side of the curtain told me the audience was starting to arrive.

  “Do I have to?”

  “You’re the king. Of course you have to.”

  He grimaced. “I’m only doing this because you asked me to.”

  Oysters and clambakes! You’d think I’d asked him to fly to the moon and back instead of giving him the starring role in my play. “Do you remember your lines?”

  “Of course I remember my lines!” He scowled and walked off, muttering to himself.

  Normally, Griff wasn’t involved with theater, but I’d begged him to do my play. If truth be told, he wasn’t very good at acting in general, but I knew he’d be terrific in this part because all he had to do was be himself: strong, kind, smart, loyal, handsome, steadfast, resolute, considerate, and . . . well . . . perfect.

  I went and put my costume on. I was the court jester, providing the comic relief for the tragedy through a running gag and a series of misunderstandings. It wasn’t a big part, but it was important, and it left me free most of the time to supervise. When I returned to the props table, my assistant was standing there with Irene, clutching the clipboard to her chest.

  “Have you seen the trolls and the maid yet?”

  “They’re in the washroom, changing.”

  Good. I opened the curtains and took a peek. People were starting to come in, although my parents weren’t yet among them. I looked the scenery over. One of the trees had a precarious tilt. I sent a stagehand out to fix it. Then I found the prompter’s copy of the play, sent the actors for the first scene out, and made sure the props girl stood at her station beside the table. I checked my watch, signaled the boy in charge of the lights, and . . . the lights dimmed.