Secret Society Girl il-1

by Diana Peterfreund

  I could only picture what life must have been like for a teenaged Clarissa. Scared, clearly confused, obviously looking for attention. I wondered what it had taken to “beat” Clarissa’s brush with bulimia out of her. Judging from the look of malicious glee on Mr. Cuthbert’s face, it hadn’t been pretty. No one would envy her wealth if they saw the price she’d paid for it.

  “And then, of course, the cover-up. We couldn’t let the universities know why our precious little girl had missed half a semester of eleventh grade, now, could we? Had to hide it. Had to lie. Had to fake all kinds of documents to make sure her record was spotless. Good thing I was a Digger, or we wouldn’t have had the connections we needed to handle it. And even that wasn’t enough. The little tramp needed our help again to get into Eli. And you think she’s good enough to be a Digger. And she can waltz in here like she has the right to. This organization is better than that. It’s better than the likes of her.”

  Clarissa’s head drooped in defeat, and something inside of me snapped.

  “Shut up!” I stood up so quickly that the cheap wooden chair went flying. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Maybe it was my oath, or maybe it was just my humanity, but I wasn’t listening to a second more of it. “What kind of father are you? What kind of person are you? You can be disappointed in your daughter, you can be angry with her, but to say such terrible things about your own flesh and blood to a roomful of people? You disgust me, Mr. Cuthbert.”

  And now everyone was staring at me. Amy Haskel, who didn’t have any excuse at all to be in Rose & Grave, except that I had a mouth that wouldn’t stay closed if my life depended on it. The man at my side was giving me a look that said, Finally.

  “She’s your daughter. You’re supposed to love her. You’re supposed to support her. You don’t think she deserves to be in your precious little secret society, but the way you just acted proves to me that you have grossly misunderstood what it means to be in Rose & Grave.” I took a deep breath. “Because since the second I was tapped, Clarissa has treated me like a sister.” I thought it had been elitism, but I’d been wrong. In Clarissa’s eyes, we’d just finally had something in common, a wedge to use to get our friendship on a roll. “We may have had our differences in the past, and I’m sure as hell not about to admit I agree with half of what she says, but she’s been loyal, and kind, and considerate of me since the second we showed up in the same tomb. That’s your daughter, Mr. Cuthbert. That’s the young woman you raised.”

  I paused, but no one seemed ready to chime in. I looked at Clarissa, who now had her head buried in her arms. Her slim shoulders were shaking with sobs.

  “And she really, really loves Rose & Grave. More than any of the other taps in my class, she’s understood what it means to be a Digger. Because you taught it to her. Aren’t you proud of that? And she couldn’t wait to show all of us. A few months ago, we’d never even acknowledge one another on the street, but now, in Rose & Grave, we have the chance to get to know one another, and to actually belong to something really big. And Clarissa embraced it. This means the world to her, can’t you see that? She worked her butt off in school, and she was tapped by the Diggers, and maybe, just maybe, she finally did something that would make you proud. Something that would make you respect her the way you so clearly don’t. Because you give your respect to the Diggers, and not to your daughter. Have you thought of that?”

  Mr. Cuthbert swallowed.

  “No, you haven’t. You’ve forgotten entirely that the Diggers are supposed to be a family, because you can’t even treat your family with the respect you’d give a stranger on the street. That’s what being a Digger is? That’s the kind of person who ‘deserves’ to be in the society? That’s what you mean by a loyal, fraternal order? That’s bullshit. Even Poe”—I pointed at him. Even that double-crossing, two-timing, malicious, sexist pig—“even Poe told me that he’d support his brothers, even if he disliked their decision, because they were his brothers, and Diggers stick together. And you somehow talked him out of that. Talked him into breaking his oath of constancy. So now who is forsworn? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not us.”

  Everyone just stared at me. Poe looked—well, if possible, he looked paler than usual. Utterly thunderstruck, in point of fact. Good. After all, for someone so society-obsessed as Poe, it must suck to be forsworn.

  I barreled on, ignoring his little revelation and subsequent breakdown. Cry me a river, you arrogant ass-wipe. “And it’s not the seniors, either. And it’s not the patriarchs who helped them with the initiation. Are you hunting them all down, too? Mr. Prescott? The others? There are patriarchs on our side. You’re going to have to overhaul the entire alumni to weed us all out.” The patriarch beside me shifted slightly in his seat, and I took a deep breath. “I admit that I don’t understand how all of this works,” I said, and cast another glance at Poe, who was staring down at his own trembling hands, “but I would like to know how many of the patriarchs actually agree with this board.”

  “Sit down, Miss Haskel,” said the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, and that stopped me cold. I collected my chair and fell into it, breathing hard.

  What the fuck had I just done?

  Poe looked up, tightening his hands into fists. “She’s right,” he said simply.

  Kurt Gehry placed a reassuring hand on Poe’s arm. “Son…”

  “No, she’s very right.” He looked at Malcolm. “I’m so sorry, Lance.” He looked near tears. “I lied to you. I can’t believe I did that. You’re my brother.”

  “It’s okay,” Malcolm said.

  But my diarrhea of the mouth was obviously contagious. “No, it’s not. Don’t you see? You don’t even have to be here.”

  “Poe, shut up,” Gehry said, this time with steel behind his words.

  “And I should have told you,” Poe blabbed on. “But I didn’t want to piss them off. And I agreed with them. I thought the girls were such a bad idea. I told you so, too. Girls—well…” He ducked his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” said another patriarch. “It’s a date-rape case just waiting to happen.” He eyed Odile warily as if she were about to cry sexual assault there at the table. The other patriarchs were still in shock from Mr. Cuthbert’s outburst. Mr. Cuthbert himself looked like a deflated red balloon. Clarissa still hadn’t lifted her head from the table.

  “But I kept you in the dark.” Poe’s voice trembled, but he pushed through. Every sentence fell like a gavel. To him it must have been more like the blade of a guillotine. “All this week, when you were planning, I’ve been telling them everything, and not telling you the one thing you needed to know—”

  “Stop talking.” Gehry’s voice had gone high-pitched and desperate.

  “Because the thing is, this board—”

  “Stop. Now.”

  “They’re just the board.”

  “Stop talking, Poe.”

  “If you’re looking for permission, you don’t need theirs. You need the trustees at large. And every single alumnus, every patriarch on the planet, is a trustee of Rose & Grave.”

  Gehry’s face turned a lovely shade of magenta that almost matched Demetria’s hair. “Shut up this instant or I swear on Persephone that I’ll make you pay.”

  But Poe’s resolve had reached terminal velocity. “And we can ask them directly. Do a mail-in vote. Hell, do a call-in. I have all the info back in my room at Eli. If they vote us in, if they vote in women, there’s not a damn thing the board can do about it.” Poe paused, looking around the room at the taps gathered there, as if seeing them for the first time. His eyes settled on mine for the briefest of instants before turning back to Malcolm. “And Lance, I think they will.”

  The patriarch beside me slid his legal pad in my direction. I looked down at the message scrawled there.

  Good job, Bugaboo. Well played.

  From there, the meeting degenerated into chaos. Kurt Gehry went hysterical. He was shaking his fist in the air, swearing on every
thing that was holy that we “little girls” would rue the day we took him on. His face was the color of a ripe eggplant. I wish CNN had been there to capture it. It was hilarious. At last, three patriarchs had to haul him bodily from the room.

  Mr. Cuthbert proceeded to get sick into a large potted ficus plant, and George and Odile decided that it was the perfect time to dance a tarantella on the top of the conference-room table. (I didn’t know it was a tarantella at the time. Odile had to explain it to me later. I have no idea how George knew the steps.) Jennifer grabbed a box of tissues from the corner and began comforting Clarissa, who appeared to be making a speedy recovery (especially after watching her dad lose his lunch). Malcolm and Poe hugged for a long time, long enough to make me start wondering what exactly it was that Poe had against girls, and the patriarch Little Demon, wringing his hands and looking quite out of sorts, finally kicked us all out.

  We whooped and hollered all the way down to the ground floor of the Eli Club and exploded onto Manhattan en masse.

  Malcolm and Poe excused themselves from the group almost immediately and caught a Metro North commuter back to Eli in order to get started on the patriarch vote. “We’ll do pro/con arguments,” Malcolm said to me, and I had no doubt who’d be providing the “con” perspective. “There are about 800 alums, though, so it might take a bit of time. I’m calling the guys who never did show up and telling them to get their asses back to school to help.”

  I wondered idly if they’d get the tomb reopened before my Russian Novel final in two weeks.

  Clarissa treated us all to a lavish dinner at an uptown steak house on her father’s AmEx gold card. “Use it before I lose it,” she said, signaling for another bottle of bubbly. It’s safe to say that no one felt the least bit guilty ordering the surf n’ turf.

  “I have to make a phone call,” Jennifer blurted out before the sliced tomatoes arrived. She rushed off, and when she returned, ten minutes later, it looked as if she’d been crying. However, no one could get her to open up.

  “Tender nerves all around,” Demetria said, patting her on the shoulder. Jennifer took a deep breath and actually directed a smile in Demetria’s direction.

  “It’s been a long day,” she admitted. “And I feel like…everything’s changed.”

  “I hope it has,” Kevin said.

  Clarissa clinked her glass with mine. “Thanks so much, Amy.” Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. But, what was that bit about not liking you before you were tapped? I didn’t even know you.”

  I bit my lip. “You knew me well enough to—never mind. It’s in the past.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “Galen Twilo. Freshman year.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “That loser? I don’t think I’ve spoken to him in years. Do you know he stole my BlackBerry to buy pot?”

  “Do you know he slept with me and never spoke to me again?”

  She grinned broadly. “Then you had a lucky escape, my friend. That guy is such a little prick.”

  “Having seen it, I’m inclined to agree. But at the time, I overheard you say he was ‘slumming’ with me.”

  Her mouth turned into a little pink O. “I didn’t. Did I? My God, what a bitch move!” She put her drink down, and enveloped me in a hug scented with Chanel and tears. “Now I’m really grateful that you stood up for me. Lord knows I hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”

  “You had.” I hugged her back. “You’re my sister now. We shouldn’t be held responsible for stuff we did as teenagers. We’ll just stick that bit in the vault along with all—”

  “The other crap my dad was talking about?” She smiled mirthlessly. “I hate the girl I used to be, Amy.”

  I met her eyes. “Good thing she’s not around anymore.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I do,” I replied. “Because I’ve been looking for her since initiation, and I haven’t seen her once.” And I had. I’d been so ready to judge Clarissa by everything I knew about her, rather than who she actually was. Maybe, if Clarissa could change, then a centuries-old society could as well.

  After dinner, Clarissa paid the check and all the girls, true to form, took to the bathroom as a group. “I can’t believe they wanted us to give back the pins,” Demetria said, admiring the way hers flashed in the mirror.

  “Yeah, but you weren’t about to let go,” I said. “I think we’d have swallowed them or pinned them straight to our bodies before handing them over to those assholes.”

  “It’s too bad they aren’t permanent,” Odile said. Four pairs of eyes met in the mirror.

  Jennifer exited the stall. “Hey, guys,” she said, heading toward the nearest sink. “What’s the plan now?”

  ***

  “Absolutely not.” Jennifer folded her arms across her chest.

  “Come on, Jen,” Demetria said, tugging her into the tattoo shop. “I have seven, and they hardly hurt at all.”

  Jennifer planted her feet on either side of the doorway and resisted the larger girl’s efforts. “They aren’t safe. You can get hepatitis.”

  Odile rolled her eyes. “Please. This is where Ani Di Franco goes. You wouldn’t believe the strings I had to pull to get us in here. It’s perfectly clean, and more important, über hip.”

  “You know,” I said, “if she doesn’t want one, she doesn’t have to—”

  “Oh, no you don’t, Amy,” said Clarissa. “All for one and all that. We’re Diggers forever after tonight.”

  The much-illustrated tattoo artist eyed us warily. “What are you chicks, some kind of girl gang?”

  “Something like that,” Odile said, putting the finishing touches on her sketch and sliding the paper to him. “There. In black, red, and green. Put the numbers underneath.”

  “How big?”

  “Small as you can make it,” Clarissa said. “As Malcolm says…”

  We all punched our fists in the air. “Discretion!”

  As it turns out, “small as he could make it” was about an inch square, and despite all of Demetria’s reassurances, the damn thing hurt like hell.

  “That’s because you’re getting it on your spine, girlfriend,” Demetria called out from her chair, where Manhattan’s second-hottest tattoo artist was mapping out a small hexagon in between the tribal markings already gracing her upper arm. Apparently, Odile’s connections got us double-teamed.

  I took a deep breath and looked at Clarissa, who, shirt off, was standing before the mirror and admiring the freshly colored tattoo on her shoulder blade. “Right where my Angel wings would be,” she said. Clarissa hadn’t moved a muscle as the ink was sliced into her flesh, as if the pain of the needles was nothing compared with what she’d already experienced today.

  “Okay, do it again,” I said. The infernal buzzing started up and I could feel it in my teeth. A million bee stings formed the shape of the seal of Rose & Grave low on my back, and I squeezed my eyes shut—not that it helped, since I couldn’t see what they were doing anyway. “How many of these have you done?” I asked the guy, hoping it wouldn’t distract him. Since it wasn’t distracting me any, I figured I was safe.

  “None so cool as putting a coffin on Odile Dumas’s breast,” he replied. “I gotta get a picture of that for the website.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Yeah, well, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. This is kind of a secret.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Odile leaned in, her scarlet hair arranged to cover her braless chest. “Have you ever heard of Rose & Grave?” she asked the guy.

  “The secret society?” His eyes widened.

  Odile smiled and put her finger to her lips.

  The buzzing stopped, and the man pulled the tattoo machine away from my skin. “You guys aren’t, like, going to have us killed when we’re done here, are you?”

  Clarissa tilted her head to the side. “Hmmm, that’s probably a good idea. What do you think, Lil’ Demon?”

&nb
sp; Odile ruffled the man’s hair. “No, but we might dictate what it is you’re allowed to tell Page Six.”

  When Demetria was finished, Jennifer asked the artist to take her into the back room, and she returned half an hour later, her eyes watery, and refused to let any of us see her tattoo. “It’s um, private,” she said, eyes downcast.

  “That girl,” Demetria whispered, “has more secrets than any five Diggers.”

  “I bet she’s really a big kink,” Clarissa added. “These religious chicks often are.”

  I was twisted, the better to see my new tat, which the artist was smearing with Vitamin E as he explained to me what to expect from my first few days of being inked. I glanced at Jennifer, who was popping M&M’s (to restore her blood sugar post inking) and laughing with Odile. I touched my skin, which was swollen and tender where the seal had been embedded in my flesh. “We’ll find out when we start the meetings, I guess.” Those C.B.s were guaranteed to be a hoot.

  Clarissa beamed. “Yes, and I’ll finally get the equality of hearing some of your secrets. You already heard all of mine.”

  Odile joined the group. “Well then, let’s even the playing field. We’ll all tell a secret. I’ll start.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go back into the industry after graduation. There, I said it.”

  “Okay, I’ll play.” Demetria ducked her head. “I’m…kind of into John McCain.”

  Jennifer chewed her lip for a few seconds, then whispered, “I don’t always agree with my pastor.”

  I tried to sit up, grimacing when the tattooed area ached with every move. “I’m writing a novel,” I admitted.

  Clarissa laughed. “And here we all thought you were going to tell us if George is a good kisser!”

  I turned as red as the skin around my tattoo. “Since when is that a secret?”

  “Just teasing,” Clarissa said. “To the Diggerettes!”