Before I left, Malcolm handed me my Rose & Grave pin. “You have to keep this on you at all times,” he said. “Pick someplace discreet.”
“What’s the point?” I asked, as I pinned the little gold hexagon to a belt loop and pulled the hem of my shirt back down. “If no one is supposed to know it’s there, why bother wearing it at all?”
“You’ll know it’s there,” he replied. He crossed to the door and peeked out. “Just checking for Brandon Weare,” he said, grinning. “We wouldn’t want him thinking you’re cheating.”
“Maybe you would,” I said. “It would add to the ruse.” Malcolm merely shrugged a response with a sort of world-weariness that made me wonder how much longer he’d be able to keep it up.
I gave him a quick hug and headed out. Like most of the entryways in an Eli dorm, this one had only one or two suites on each floor. We didn’t have “halls” like most university dorms, but rather, many-storied entryways. Camaraderie due to geographical proximity was arranged on a vertical—instead of sharing bathrooms with the people next door, you shared it with the people upstairs. Malcolm’s digs were on the fourth floor—a “garret” that when built had probably been home to a poorer student who couldn’t afford a “sitting room,” but in modern times would be a highly coveted “single” with a heap of privacy. The landing was basically deserted—just a sophomore smoking out the second-story window and chatting on his cell phone, and a junior girl with a long brown ponytail who opened her door and peeked out as I passed. I felt the Rose & Grave pin burning like a brand against my hip. Malcolm was right. I did feel the difference.
I pushed open the heavy wooden doors guarding the entryway and emerged into the sunny Calvin College courtyard. Brandon’s entryway was on the other side of the building, so it was unlikely that I might have run into him while leaving Malcolm’s room. And from what I could see, he wasn’t in the courtyard, either. I glanced up at Brandon’s suite window, wondering if I should drop by while I was on his side of the campus. No, I’d see him at the office later this weekend anyway, and there was a strong possibility that any aggressive move on my part (e.g., showing up unannounced at his dorm) would be taken as a signal to launch into The Talk. Or maybe Number Seven.
From the entrance of Calvin College, I could see the brown sandstone walls of the Rose & Grave tomb. My tomb. I fingered the little gold pin, and resisted the urge to head over and test out my memory of all the secret combinations and tricks it took to get inside (like, if you twist the knob the wrong way, you accidentally set off the doorbell, alerting anyone within that there’s a non-member on the property). But there’d be plenty of time to play Digger. I was pretty sure Lydia was waiting for me back at the suite, just dying to see what a fully initiated member of Rose & Grave looked like.
Boy, was I wrong.
The doorknob to our suite had been smeared with a dark, reddish-brown substance. I opened it gingerly, only to see more of the liquid had dribbled a path across our thrift-store area rug and straight into Lydia’s bedroom. Her torn wind-breaker lay in a heap by the entrance to her bedroom, and a pair of mud-caked shoes were overturned on the threshold. There were feathers everywhere, and the air smelled like burnt hair and bile. I immediately cracked a window and started fanning in a current with the help of Lydia’s Rocks for Jocks binder. As soon as I could breathe again, I picked my way across the floor and peeked in her room. Her lavender duvet lay in a poufy heap on her bed, but Lydia herself was nowhere to be seen. There were more smeared, rust-colored fingerprints on her desk chair and closet door.
I swallowed. Was it blood?
One thing was certain: Whatever her society’s initiation ritual, it made the staining power of pomegranate juice look pretty pale by comparison. At least Poe’s coffin hadn’t left any marks.
And where was Lydia? Her abandoned clothes made it clear that she wasn’t napping the day away on her society big sibling’s futon. Either she was out buying a can of Lysol, or…I dipped a finger in the puddle by the floor and took a whiff. An acrid, sour scent assaulted my nostrils. Yep, blood. Those bastards made my best friend bleed.
Maybe she’d gone to the health center to get…stitched up? I hoped she hadn’t been forced to limp all the way out to the Department of University Health (DUH, and again, not so much an acronym as a philosophy, since whether you enter with the Hama virus or a hangnail, the first test they administer is invariably for pregnancy) while her roommate of three years had tickle fights in Calvin College with some guy she hadn’t known before yesterday. Altogether, not a banner first day as a Digger. I thought about what Malcolm had said.
It’s no accident that all my closest buds are society members now.
Well, it wouldn’t happen to me! I don’t care what kind of oath I took, my real friends came first. I surveyed the wreck of our suite.
Oh, God, Lydia, please be okay. I don’t even care if you tell me what society you’re in, as long as you’re all right.
8. Barbarians
For the first fifteen minutes, I blithely convinced myself that I was just cleaning up. Then I spent a good quarter of an hour under the happy self-delusion that such discovery would assist me in tracking down my roommate. After that, I simply admitted the truth: I was damn curious.
Are you wondering why I wasn’t actively frantic?
THINGS I DISCOVERED
THAT CALMED ME DOWN
1) Lydia had taken the time to write down the phone messages before she left. Must not have been in too much of a hurry.
2) The first-aid kit we kept on the bookshelf hadn’t been touched. Must not have been hurt.
3) In one of the little puddles of blood, I found a chunk of ground chuck.
That’s right. Lydia’s society peeps had scared me half to death with a splash of raw hamburger. And hell if I knew what it meant. My society liked pomegranates. Maybe hers liked meat loaf. Or maybe the members had spent too much time watching The Ten Commandments and had decided to borrow the Semitic symbolism of smearing blood on a door to indicate who was in-the-know. Either way, Lydia would be in for an earful when she came back. Rotting hamburger in the common room? So not cool.
Round about the forty-minute mark, I heard the door to our suite open. My pin quest had stranded me waist-deep in the back of Lydia’s closet, methodically searching her winter coat pockets, where I knew Lydia kept her real valuables. But all I’d found were her emergency traveler’s checks, her passport, and her spare P.O. Box key.
Drat.
“Welcome to my bedroom,” she said dryly from the threshold.
“Lydia!” I launched myself at her. “Oh my God, girl, what have you been doing!”
She held up a plastic bag. “Mr. Clean.”
Undaunted, I pressed forward. “What happened here?” I asked. “The feathers, the dirt, the mess on the doorknob?”
No answer.
“There’s blood on the floor.”
No answer.
“Lydia! Talk to me.” I followed her back out to the common room. “I was so worried about you, when I came in and the common room…” I gestured weakly to the mess.
She mopped up one of the red pools with a wad of paper towels. “Well, I was worried about you when I came in and you were MIA.” She kept her face to the floor. “Feel like telling me where you spent the night?”
“Calvin College.”
She froze, there on the floor, then looked up at me. “Really?”
“Yes.” Not a lie. Not really.
She stood up and looked at me, a blush spreading across her skin. “Oh, Amy, I feel like such an ass. I thought—I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “What are you going to do about this? He’s a nice guy, you know.”
“Yeah.” And I was no longer just using him for sex. Brandon had now become my alibi. “He is. I’m a jerk.”
She hugged me, hard. “You’re not. You care about him. It’s not your fault that you’re a mess when it comes to men.”
“Hey!” I smacked her on the shoulder and she
pulled away.
“Look, I feel awful that I’ve been letting all this society crap get in the way of our friendship.”
“I think we both have,” I replied, almost glad of the lie now, since it seemed to have broken whatever weird tension had blanketed our suite since that letter showed up. I just wanted to put this all behind me. Yesterday’s argument, the mess in the common room, the way I’d actually sunk to going through Lydia’s stuff—Oh! Of course I couldn’t find her pin. I’m such an idiot. She’s wearing the damn thing. I checked her out surreptitiously, but if there was a society pin on her person, she kept it as hidden as I did.
Well, good. At least we weren’t shoving our society memberships in each other’s faces then refusing to spill details. We had been putting the society stuff before each other. “Let’s not do that anymore, okay?” I suggested, trying not to get a better look at a flash of shine I saw above her jeans pocket. It was probably her pin, but I wasn’t going to be tempted. See? I could do this. “Let’s just…not talk about it.”
Lydia surveyed the mess, then eyed me carefully. “You know that’s going to be tough, right?”
I nodded. I knew. It would be the elephant-shaped puddle of blood in the room. I loved my relationship with Lydia, but now everything would change. Like us disappearing every Thursday evening instead of hanging out to do Gumdrop Drops. Like spending the night in a bed with your gay society big sib and not being able to dish to your roommate afterward. Like leaving your best friend out of what was about to become the most important part of your Eli career.
The phone rang and I picked it up without answering Lydia. “Hello?”
“Good morning!” my mother exclaimed. “You must have been sleeping pretty deeply not to have heard me before.”
My mother likes to play this game where she calls me early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, trying to catch me being not in my bed. You wouldn’t believe how many early breakfast meetings I’ve had in the last three years.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. “When did you call? Lydia and I were out shopping.” Lydia smiled indulgently.
“Oh. Well, that explains it.” My mother doesn’t press to uncover obvious lies. I bet she called at eight, before we could even be expected to be at the 24-hour pharmacy. She really doesn’t want to know the truth, she just can’t prevent herself from confirming her obscene fears. After all, I’m her baby girl. “So, are you studying hard?”
“You know it.” This is the Number Two thing she always asks. Sometimes I can follow a script for the conversation. I was so tempted to reply, No, but that’s okay, because my posh secret society guarantees me that I’ll ace my exams with the help of their decades’ worth of cheat sheets. But I couldn’t tell her anything about that. Not even my mom. Which meant that her Number Three standard question was going to be a bust as well.
And here it was, Number Three: “That’s good, sweetie. Have you been up to anything interesting lately?”
Does drinking pomegranate juice out of a human skull and swearing undying fealty to a shadow organization dressed in outlandish costumes count? “Um…nope. My life’s pretty much been the same-old, same-old.”
Lydia shook her head as she went back to scrubbing the floor. I tugged the hem of my shirt down over my belt loops, over the tiny gold pin that was already pricking my side.
Like anything would ever be the same again.
***
But we tried. After all, it was Saturday night, and spring, and we were two young, smart, single girls who knew exactly how to have a good time.
Which is how we found ourselves at eight o’clock that evening spread out on the sofa in T-shirts, pajama bottoms, and sweat socks, with a bottle of Finlandia Mango, a set of Eli-official “Harvard sucks, Princeton doesn’t matter” shot glasses, a bag of gumdrops, and Lydia’s DVD of Bridget Jones’s Diary. We were debating the rules of the game over the opening credits.
“How about we take a drink every time she lights up?” I suggested.
Lydia set about hogging the red gumdrops. “I don’t feel like getting alcohol poisoning tonight.” She popped a few in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “How about we take a drink every time they do a gratuitous, Hollywood-standards-are-out-of-control camera shot of Renée’s extra poundage?”
I shrugged. “That sounds more manageable. But…new rules for the sequel.” They really started milking the fat jokes in that one.
“Of course!”
It was a relief to talk about something other than secret societies. As we settled into our usual routine, my curiosity about Lydia’s society waned (it helped that, if she was wearing their pin, she kept it well hidden). I was still taken aback by the lengths that her group had gone through in their initiation. I would have thought Rose & Grave had the most elaborate, outlandish ceremonies, but then again, a newer organization might make it a point to take their traditions to new heights, each trying to outdo the ones that came before in a sort of secret-society pissing contest. Maybe I’d ask Malcolm what he knew about other organizations’ initiation rites and see if I could suss out who included hamburgers in their ceremonies.
Okay, so I was still wondering. Sue me.
Three shots later, Lydia and I were debating whether or not Bridget was making a fool of herself in those see-through office outfits, when there was a knock at our suite door. Lydia leaned over to open it and Brandon walked in.
“Is that dried blood on your doorknob?” he asked without preamble. Lydia and I exchanged glances and shrugged, while Brandon took in the coffee-table spread. “I don’t know if Willy Wonka would approve.”
“Nonsense,” Lydia slurred, pounding her fourth as Daniel successfully navigated Bridget’s oversized granny panties. “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”
I didn’t drink. This was about to get very sticky, and I knew I’d need every wit that hadn’t ceded to the considerable powers of mango vodka. I telepathed to Brandon my fervent desire that he not ask me what I’ve been up to this weekend.
“So,” he asked, taking a place on the sofa between us. “What have you been up to this weekend?”
Supposedly, you. So much for my psychic powers. Must be dulled by alcohol. “Maybe you can help us solve a debate,” I cut in, though Lydia was engrossed in the goings-on of Bridget and didn’t even appear to have noticed that the man I’d supposedly spent last night with seemed unaware of that fact.
“Shoot,” Brandon said, picking out a handful of green gumdrops from the pile. I watched him, wondering if he also had a thing for black jelly beans. And if so, why wasn’t I head over heels for him?
“We’re trying to decide if Renée Zellweger looks better as Bridget or as a stick figure.”
He glanced at the screen. “What does she usually look like?”
Men! You’d think they never read People. “Half of that.”
Brandon watched Bridget smile. “I think she looks pretty there.” And then he looked at me, his brown eyes very warm. “But, then again, I’ve got a thing for girls in publishing.”
I scooched my feet farther up beneath me and Lydia fired off warning glances from behind Brandon’s head.
“Amy, you’re falling behind.” She waved at me with the shot glass. “Brandon, if you don’t mind, we’re kind of in the middle of a game here.”
But Brandon was clearly in no mood to take a hint. He swiped the vodka and an extra glass and poured himself a drink.
“Be careful,” I said as he downed it. “The green ones don’t really go with the mango.”
“Blecch.” He grimaced and stared at the empty glass. “You know, I learned in my White Male Sexuality and U.S. Pop Culture class that one sign of masculinity is to drink only alcoholic beverages that are brown or clear.”
“This one’s clear…except for the gumdrops,” I argued.
He laughed. “I don’t take it seriously. Besides, I already screwed up. My favorite drink is an amaretto sour. Plus, I’m not entirely a white male.”
“My dad likes Bloody
Marys,” Lydia said. “Which are red. Are you saying he’s gay?”
“Merely a metrosexual.”
“And what about wine?” she said, concealing a burp. “It’s purple.”
And until yesterday, every Digger in history had been male, and to the best of my knowledge, their official drink was bright pink pomegranate punch. The Order of Rose & Grave must have been very secure in their masculinity.
Either that or Brandon’s White Male Sexuality professor was very insecure in his. It was a toss-up.
I wondered what was going on in the tomb right now. Were the other new taps there, learning the ropes and bonding with one another? What was I missing out on?
I looked back at Lydia and Brandon, who were cracking up at Daniel’s spill in the lake. Not a thing. Just because I was in Rose & Grave did not mean I had to abandon my barbarian friends. Nothing had changed.
“Amy!” Lydia threw a gumdrop at me. “Stop cheating. Drink up.”
I returned my attention to my forgotten shot glass, where the orange gumdrop had begun to disintegrate. Nope, nothing had changed. Lydia could still drink me under the table. (Note to self: Never do shots with a girl from western New York. They’ve been drinking since birth.)
“Oops.” I tilted the glass toward my mouth, then dug the gooey gumdrop out with my fingers. Inelegant, perhaps, but judging from the look Brandon was giving me, he didn’t mind watching me lick melted candy off my thumb.
“Sidebar!” Lydia popped up from the couch, grabbed my arm, tossed a “We’ll be right back” in the general direction of Brandon Weare, and dragged me into her bedroom.
As soon as the door was shut, Lydia turned to me and said, “What do you want to do here? Do you want me to leave so you two can be alone? Do you want to go somewhere with him? It’s obvious the man didn’t come here to watch chick flicks with the roomie.”
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