The invitations—actual ancient-style paper messages—arrived under doors one wet, leafy October morning.
Milo did not receive an invitation from the Damocles Club. He did receive warm greetings from the Barleycorns, the Tycho Fellowship (a science organization), the Harrisons (a literary circle, publishers of the Ilion), the Harrow Intramural Team, and—what, ho!—the Hasty Pudding Club.
Just as he was thinking that he needed parental permission to join anything, his fish buzzed.
“Milo?” growled his father’s voice. “Listen: If you haven’t got plans already—oh. How have you been?”
Milo could vaguely hear Mom in the background, reminding him to “show an interest.”
“Fine, Dad. You and Mom?”
“Good, fine. Your mother wanted to know if you’d care to stop by for dinner, Friday? She hasn’t seen you for a while.”
Dammit. Lord Byron didn’t want to have dinner with his mom and dad.
“I’d be happy to,” he said.
“Well, good. Come by around five, dinner at six. Have a good day.”
The fish went dark.
“By the way,” said Milo, “I need your permission to join the Tychos and the Harrisons and the Harrow Intramurals and the Barleycorns and the Hasty Pudding Club, you fucker.”
Milo didn’t rush right over to his parents’ house on Friday.
When his classes let out at noon, he wandered the campus. The future scientist and author, hands in his pockets, windswept and poetic. Across the quad, through its forest of giant chestnuts. Down the cobblestone road between Stowe Hall and the pitch. Down along the canal, and there he stopped.
He watched the usual scattering of college men trying to impress college women by navigating the canal, standing in the stern of narrow wooden barges, steering with long wooden poles. Most of them were city boys who had never done anything of the kind before, and the rest were country boys whose whole boating experience involved no more skill than it took to yank a motor to life. Most of them went careening around the water at the very precipice of capsizing, their dates trying to keep a brave face.
Milo, on the other hand, had been paddling around on that canal since he was a baby—usually with his mother, on Wednesday evenings. He was in just the mood to get out there and show the older boys a thing or two.
“?’Lo, young Hay,” said the supervisor at the launch, Mr. LeJeune. “How’s your mom?”
“She’s fine, sir. I’d like to take a boat out. Is it still three?”
“It is, Mr. Hay. But you still got to have your majority. Are you eighteen, then?”
“Mr. LeJeune, you know I can paddle one of these—”
“Like the devil himself, sir. But I’d lose my situation here if something was to—”
“I’ll sign,” said a familiar and awful voice. “Pay him, Milo.”
Ally Shepard.
He wished he were dead.
“I don’t think—” he began, but then she touched his arm, and it was all warm kittens. Oh, did she smell nice.
She sat down in the bow of the nearest gondola, looking up at him through designer shades. And Mr. LeJeune handed him a receipt and an oar, and just like that he was master of King’s College again.
Expertly, he stepped onto the stern and drove her into the channel. They might have been riding on glass, so smoothly did he steer. And it was just as he would have daydreamed. He cut through the rest of them like a shark through a lot of clownfish, pivoted to starboard, and made speed for the castle bridge. And, oh, did the young blades glare! And, oh, did their dates raise their eyebrows, impressed!
“You’re good at this,” she told him.
He shrugged, giving his hair a rakish flip.
They passed between stone walls, under two stone bridges, where Milo had to duck. The vast green plain of St. Martin’s yard opened up on the port side of the canal. Beyond, the cliffs and spires of St. Martin’s itself.
Ally slipped out of her loafers. And her stockings, too. Then she spun around on the bench, hiked her skirt halfway up her thighs, threw one leg over each side of the bow, and let her exquisite feet trail in the water.
Milo yanked his shirttail out of his khakis, anticipating an erection.
She tucked her head around one shoulder, looking at him upside down. How could he meet her eyes, when the rest of her was hiked up and spread out like that?
Be bold, advised Milo’s ancient selves in the depths of his head.
Milo did what Lord Byron would do. He looked at her legs, gave the rest of her a burning stare, then turned the burning stare on her eyes.
In my biography, he thought, when they write about my women, they will say I was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
She laughed, righted herself, and turned again to face the canal.
Milo bumped into another gondola. Oh, way to go.
“Jackass!” said the older boy.
“It’s okay,” said Ally. “Practice makes perfect.”
What a bitch. He was her slave.
“Go to the castle,” she said.
The canal proper ran to the end of East Green, where it opened up into a wide pool, a convenient turnaround. But you could, if you liked, continue upstream all the way to the Brandy River itself. Just short of the river, the canal wound like a moat around the walls of a castle. This was the automated gatehouse between the river and the canal, really, but it was part of King’s College, so they built it like a castle and called it a castle.
“You don’t seem like fifteen,” said Ally. She leaned forward now, feet and hands trailing in the water, embracing the prow like a lover. It looked like something she was doing by accident, just relaxing. Was it an accident? (Hell no, it’s not an accident! roared the old voices down inside him.) Did she know what it was doing to him? He could stare all he liked, after all, with her head turned away. Did she know that?
“How old did you think I was?” he asked, ducking beneath the castle bridge, steering them into the wilderness portion of the canal.
Plop plop!—turtles, startled, slid off logs and vanished in the water.
Ally sat upright, scanning the shore.
“I want a turtle,” she said. And she slid sideways into the canal, almost without a splash.
Underwater, gone.
Splash!—bursting from the water hard by the shore and snatching blindly at a sycamore log there.
Damned if she didn’t catch a turtle. A small painted turtle. She held it aloft in triumph, tossing her head to clear the hair from her eyes.
She half-stood, half-floated, half out of the water, drenched and running like a waterfall. And quite translucent, Milo noted with wonder. Her King’s College uniform had all but become one with her pink skin.
“Shit,” she said. “I lost my sunglasses.”
But she didn’t much care, it seemed. She swam out to the gondola, which Milo steadied while she climbed back in.
“See?” she said, holding up the turtle for his inspection.
“Painted turtle,” he declared. “Watch it. They bite.”
Ally snapped her teeth at him and let the turtle go in the waist of the boat, where it scratched desperately at the wood, crawling under the middle bench.