After drinking the entire bottle of Billecart-Salmon on an empty stomach, Simone has two choices: vomit or eat something.
A smashburger and fries from the Grille sound good.
But when Simone leaves Classic South, she turns left instead of right.
She stands at the door of Classic North and waves her arms until some little third-former sees her.
Oh fuck, Simone thinks. It's Grady Tish, accomplice to the Zip Zap mastermind.
Simone nearly reams him out—how dare he poke his nose into other people's sensitive business!
—but he's such a pip-squeak and besides, he's already faced the Honor Board.
Simone notices him ogling her chest and she realizes she's still wearing what are essentially her pajamas—a pair of Lululemon shorts and a threadbare white T-shirt.
So yeah, her tits are on full display; she should go back to her room and change, but this feels like too much effort. She's on a mission.
"Thank you," she says. "I'm here to see if Mr. Rivera wants to go to the Grille." She breezes past Grady with authority—she's a teacher—but instead of heading down to Rhode's room, she takes the elevator to the sixth floor.
She pauses outside East's door. The hallway is deserted; all the boys are probably holed up, jerking off. Is that what East is doing? She turns the knob and walks in as though she has every right. She's a teacher.
The room is empty. East's laptop is on the bed open to a paused scene of some war movie and his phone is plugged in on the nightstand.
Simone sits at East's desk and flips through his differential equations textbook (it might as well be written in hieroglyphics), and then she notices a key in a brass tray lying among paper clips, pens, and a pair of cufflinks that look like martini glasses.
She tucks the key into the tiny zippered pocket at the back of her shorts at the same time that she hears a slapping noise in the hallway. A second later, East walks into the room wearing just a towel and a pair of rubber slides; his dark hair is wet.
"Whoa!" he says. "What are you doing here?"
"I know about your little hideaway," Simone says. "The room at the end of the tunnel. You've been inviting people there. You've been drinking there."
"Speaking of drinking…" East raises his eyebrows at her. "What have you been up to this afternoon?"
As he comes closer to her, she puts a hand on his chest, which is still warm and flushed from the shower. He's so beautiful, it's a crime.
East steps back, picks up his phone, and starts typing. "Miss Bergeron," he says. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
She has no intention of leaving until she's gotten what she came for. She came to win.
"I know what you're up to. You fixed up a room down there."
He pushes a button on his phone, then sets it down. When he looks up, he seems newly surprised to see her, but this of course is him acting cool. "We can play this out and see which one of us has more power," he says. "Or you can leave now and I'll forget you were ever here."
"I have more power," Simone says. "I'm a teacher at this school and you're a student. I will go to Ms. Robinson and tell her everything and see that you're expelled."
"You'll tell her what? That we kissed? That we fooled around in your classroom? That you brought a bottle of wine up here to drink with me over spring break?"
"That you sneaked into my room back in the fall!" Simone says. "You're the one who set this whole thing between you and me in motion."
East blinks. "But you let it happen. And, like you said, you're a teacher and I'm a student."
Simone glares at him. If he would just take her in his arms, she would let the whole thing go. But he doesn't. Even drunk, she recognizes the disdain, and the pity, on his face.
"We'll have to see what happens, I guess," Simone says. She backs toward the door, willing him to stop her. Willing him to touch her. Does he not notice her breasts?
He sits on the bed, turning his attention to his computer. "Have a good night."
When Simone steps out into the hallway, she bumps smack into Rhode.
"What are you doing ?" he hisses. He looks at her, then at East's door. "What happened in there?"
Simone sees Royce Stringfellow's head pop out of a doorway down the hall.
Simone is drunk, but not too drunk to get herself off the hook.
She takes Rhode by the arm and leads him to the back stairs.
"I had a student come to me. The kids are sneaking out, they sneaked out last night. They go down to where the tunnel is, remember? There's a room down there where they drink.
I was just confronting East about it. He's the ringleader. "
Rhode does his mighty best to look Simone in the eye and not let his gaze drift down to her chest. Five minutes earlier, he was at his laptop registering for tutoring websites when his phone buzzed with a text.
Rhode was surprised to see it was from Andrew Eastman.
Rhode gave all the boys in the dorm his number, but East had never before used it, which made sense—East was on the sixth floor, Roy Ewanick's domain.
Rhode clicked on the alert: Miss Bergeron appeared in my room uninvited and she won't leave. I think she's drunk.
Simone is in East's room, she won't leave, East thinks she's drunk. Rhode wasn't at all surprised.
Now, in the stairwell (which has a wicked echo), Simone is blathering about a room down where the tunnel is. She fumbles with the back of her shorts and produces a key that she—Rhode can't believe this— stole from East's room.
"You can't just steal things from the kids' rooms!" Rhode says (forbidden: page 1 of The Bridle, no stealing or "borrowing without permission"). "Besides, that's probably the key to his truck."
"Thisssss," Simone says, "is not a truck key. Surely even a city boy like you realizes that."
She's slurring her words, but before Rhode can figure out what to do—text Audre? Does he want to be that guy?—she drags him down six flights of stairs, then outside into the rain.
They make a run for the door to the cellar and descend the steep flight to the brick barrel-ceilinged tunnel.
Rhode had hoped never to return, though now that he's here, he gets a vivid flashback: He saw Simone and East together in this tunnel pulling apart after what must have been a kiss.
Rhode was too na?ve (and optimistic about his own chances with Simone) to have let himself believe it way back during First Dance.
But he is neither na?ve nor optimistic anymore.
Rhode turns on the light of his phone so that Simone doesn't stumble and fall on her face.
The hallway ends with, yes, a door. When Simone turns the knob, it's locked.
She brandishes the key, and the scene then becomes a comedy of errors—first she puts the key in upside down, then she pulls it out and drops it and neither of them can find it.
Rhode panics for a second because now his curiosity is piqued.
He spies it almost all the way under the door and he says, "Why don't you let me…
" but Simone wants to be the one to open the door. This is her discovery.
Finally, the lock releases with a satisfying thunk and they both step in.
Rhode fumbles against the wall for a light switch, and when he finds it, a chandelier in the middle of the ceiling throws spangles of light across a…
wow. It's a room unlike any other at Tiffin.
There's a Persian rug, a deep leather sofa and suede chairs, a granite-topped bar.
Rhode moves farther into the room. The walls are brick, the floor is glossy hardwood.
In the back there's a powder room that looks like it belongs in a magazine: light fixtures with fringed red shades, wallpaper printed with sailor's tattoos, a hatbox toilet.
"This is the coolest place I've ever seen," Rhode says. "East masterminded this?"
"It's a drug den," Simone says. "Or a sex club. At the very least, the kids drink down here."
Rhode sees how she might think this; he would love to settle on the sofa with a bourbon himself.
Alongside the copper sink he finds a garnet-red cocktail napkin with the word PRIORITIES printed on it in gold.
Beneath the counter is a stainless steel drinks fridge, empty.
The illuminated shelves above the sink are bare.
"I'm going to tell Audre," Simone says. "I want to see East get kicked out."
Her words are, of course, fueled by passion. Rhode has read both Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary multiple times; he knows what a woman undone by her desire sounds like. He won't ask Simone straight up, she'll just lie.
Rhode says, "I'm not going to tell anyone that you're drunk or that you confronted East in his room or that you stole his key, okay?"
Simone moves her lips but the sound she makes is unintelligible.
"But I would advise you to think long and hard about how you explain this place to Audre," Rhode says. "It could backfire on you."
"Backfire how?" Simone waves her arms at the chandelier, the copper sink. "Nobody could forgive this."
"There's no alcohol, there are no empty bottles," Rhode says. "You don't have any proof that East or anyone else was drinking down here."
Simone scoffs. "Isn't it obvious?"
"I just don't want you to get hurt." Rhode swallows. The truth is, he cares about Simone even more now that he can see her cracks. "I don't want to see you get in trouble."
"Why would I get in trouble?" Simone asks. Her eyes blaze; she's challenging him. "Go on, say what you think."
Rhode crumples the cocktail napkin and stuffs it in his pocket. "I think Andrew Eastman is untouchable."
Simone glares at him, but then a single tear rolls down her face. "I want to see him fry," she says.
Of course you do, Rhode thinks.