Secret Society Girl

by Diana Peterfreund

  Or the possibility of free crab rangoon. Forty-five minutes later, I had a belly full of pad Thai and an earful of Brandon’s theories about how worthless the archaic tradition of the Eli secret society was to the modern meritocracy of the college, how he was quite sure that we’d done a bang-up job of networking and such without the benefit of black robes and secret handshakes, and how he liked me just the way I was, Quill & Ink be damned. Altogether a very heady speech for an impressionable young girl, especially given how many polysyllabic words he used. Man, Brandon must have rocked his SATs. If I wasn’t careful, tonight might be Number Seven.

  It wasn’t until after the fried bananas that he started giving me the hard sell. “The problem with you, Haskel, is that you overanalyze everything.”

  “If you’re looking to get laid, Weare,” I snapped back, “you shouldn’t start sentences with ‘The problem with you…’ ”

  “Ooh, is that a possibility?”

  I threw my chopstick wrapper at him. “What do you mean, overanalyze?”

  “I assume you’re familiar with the definition of the word.” He waited for confirmation, then continued. “You think that your life has to be a stack of bricks, and if you put down one bad brick, the whole tower will fall over.”

  That or I’d keep stacking bricks that never became a building.

  “So you agonize over every single decision, terrified that you’re going to screw up.”

  Ha! I had screwed up with this whole Quill thing. And let’s not forget Ben Somebody. I was an old hand at making mistakes. I just wasn’t a big fan of the process.

  He waved his chopstick at me, his eyes flickering darkly by the glow of the tableside tea lights, and started ticking off my supposed bricks. “Summer internship, position on the magazine staff, commencement issue theme, secret society membership. When was the last time you did something just because it was fun?”

  “Lydia and I went dancing at Froggie’s last weekend.”

  “Something big.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “Something like…getting into a relationship with you?”

  “For example.”

  “Brandon, I think we have a great friendship. I don’t want to mess it up.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Cliché alert.”

  The waitress came by with the check. I made feeble motions toward my handbag, but Brandon shook his head and pulled out his wallet.

  “I’ll get the next one,” I offered, though I knew he wouldn’t let me. Brandon did things like hold open doors and pull out chairs and pay for dinners. He also had the ability to engineer a type of smile that I knew was just for me. The Amy-smile. It was intoxicating. And I knew if I let myself fall for him, I’d crash like a four-fold stinger.

  “Look, we’ve talked about this.” I slipped my arms back into my coat. “You’re one of my best friends, and I’m afraid that if I get involved with you, and it doesn’t work out, I’ll lose that.”

  Brandon signed his name across the receipt in a frustrated scrawl. “Amy,” he said slowly, not looking up. “We are involved. And it’s not working out.”

  “You know what I mean.” I ducked my head.

  He sighed. “Let’s get out of here.” We stood, and headed to the door, but before we got to the pink plaster Buddha at the entrance, he turned to me and looked me square in the eye. “Just promise me one thing. Just once in your life, just for kicks, don’t overthink, okay? See how it goes.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  Brandon walked me back to my dorm entryway, and I, in defiance of the promise I’d just made, brainstormed ways to leave him at the door of my suite without hurting his feelings.

  Which, as it turns out, was unnecessary. The door to my suite stood open, and Lydia sat on the couch inside our common room. She still wore her jacket, her lap was full of books, and she was staring fixedly at a small, square piece of paper sitting in the middle of the floor.

  “Lydia?” I said, waving a hand in front of her face. “Are you all right?”

  She didn’t look up at me, didn’t even blink, just whispered, “It’s yours.”

  Brandon furrowed his brow and swiped the paper off the floor. “Sure is,” he said, handing me a small white envelope edged in glossy black and sealed with a dollop of dark wax. “They must have slipped it under the door.”

  I turned the envelope over in my hands. It was made of heavy, luxurious linen paper, and my name had been printed on the front in an odd, angular font.

  But it was the back that truly held my interest, for into the solid black wax was pressed the unmistakable imprint of a rose inside an elongated hexagon.

  The seal of Rose & Grave.

  I stuffed the envelope into my jacket pocket quicker than a jock with a cheat sheet, and then turned to my friends.

  “So Quill came through after all?” Brandon said with a wry smile.

  “Quill & Ink,” Lydia said in that same strange, flat voice, “gives out blue-and-silver edged envelopes.”

  Brandon and I exchanged looks at Lydia’s display of society obsession. “So who gives out black ones?” he asked her.

  Lydia’s eyes met mine, but she said nothing, and I knew then that she’d gotten a very good look at that seal. If she was knowledgeable about random society-stationery factoids, then she sure as hell knew what that seal meant.

  I turned to Brandon. “Thanks so much for dinner. I wish I could hang out more, but it’s getting late, and I have a lot of work to do tonight—”

  “No way.” He crossed his arms over his sweatshirt and planted his feet on my parquet. “Not until I get to see that envelope again.”

  Lydia appeared to have finally found her tongue, for she leapt to her feet and began ushering him out the door. “The lady says she’s busy, Weare,” she said, crowding up on him. “And much as we both like you, that means out. Now.”

  “But—” Brandon said, looking over his shoulder at me as Lydia hustled him out. I would have spoken up about the way she was manhandling my—well, my friend-with-bennies—but my mind was too busy doing round-off back handsprings and I was caressing that wax seal in my pocket like I was Frodo and it was the One Ring.

  “Good night, Brandon!” I called as Lydia shoved him over the threshold and shut the door in his face. “I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise!”

  She threw the lock and turned to me. “Open it.”

  I drew back, protecting my pocket. “In front of you?”

  “I’m your best friend!” she argued.

  I snorted. “You’ve been pulling a disappearing act all week! You won’t tell me a thing about your society interview, and yet you think you get dibs on reading my letter?”

  She thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yes!”

  “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” I put my hands on my hips, realizing even as I did that I was leaving the envelope wide open for pickpockets.

  “Fine,” Lydia said, stepping back. “Be that way. I’ll leave you alone with your precious envelope.” And then she turned, walked into her room, and shut the door, leaving me blinking at her whiteboard in surprise.

  That’s not how I expected that to go at all. But I recovered a few seconds later, remembering that I still hadn’t opened the envelope.

  I spent a good long time just staring at the seal. Would it crack when I opened it? I turned the paper over and over in my hands. Yep, that was my name, and yep, that was the Rose & Grave seal. And that was still my name.

  But Rose & Grave did not tap women.

  What the hell was going on?

  Finally, I carefully slipped my fingertips beneath the wax and popped it open in one piece. The envelope split on irregular lines, and unfolded into an odd, distorted hexagon. The words were written on the diagonal in a heavy, angular script, and this is what they said:

  B. S. C.* Amy Maureen Haskel:

  You have been judged and found worthy. Be in your room tonight at five minutes past eight o’clock and await further instructions.

&nbs
p; And then beneath that was the mark of Rose & Grave.

  I was being tapped by Rose & Grave!

  Oh wow. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. (As missives go, it wasn’t too groundbreaking, but at the time I was over the moon.)

  I ran toward Lydia’s bedroom, then skidded to a stop. Wait a second, I wasn’t going to tell her anything until she shared with me.

  Brandon! I bet he’d be back to his room by now. I could call—No, he’d just finished telling me how Paleolithic he thought secret societies were, and Rose & Grave was the undisputed T-Rex of the country. They were old school and blue blood and their pedigreed members grew up to be Supreme Court Justices and CEOs and founders of major media conglomerates like AOL Time-Warner. Male ones.

  Could all of those rumors be wrong? Or worse, could this be someone’s idea of a sick joke? Poor little Amy Haskel, didn’t get an election, let’s mess with her head. Such things had been known to happen before—of course, they tended to happen to gullible freshmen who didn’t know any better. Every few years you heard stories about college pranksters dressing up in robes, kidnapping a gaggle of frosh, and putting them through all manner of humiliations in the guise of “initiation.”

  But really, wouldn’t it be just as easy to fool an upper-classman? It wasn’t as if I could ask a bunch of black-robed figures for ID when they showed up. As that Shadow-Who-Smiles guy had said to me at the interview, that’s why they called it secret.

  I stabbed my hands into my hair in frustration. Why was there no information session on this? Why wasn’t it covered in the student handbook? Why had the paranoid corner of my brain hog-tied and gagged the rational part?

  Okay, Amy, think. Think. I checked my watch, and amended my mantra. Think quicker. I had ten minutes before the boys in black arrived.

  Should I accept? Should I accept, even if I suspected this was nothing but a mean prank—because what if this was Rose & Grave? And if this invitation was what it appeared to be, what would membership in the society mean to me?

  I was still considering this nine and a half minutes later, when there was a knock on my door. I froze, clutching the envelope tightly in my hands and staring at the door as if it were the only thing standing between me and Armageddon.

  There was another knock.

  Lydia cracked her bedroom door, stuck her head out, and glanced from the entrance to me and back again. “Gonna get that?”

  “I’m deciding.”

  “Oh, is that what you’re doing?” She quirked an eyebrow at me. “ ’Cause you don’t look particularly decisive.”

  Another knock, this one very insistent. Lydia rolled her eyes, crossed to the door, and opened it wide…and in they came, brushing right past a bemused Lydia and surrounding me.

  I couldn’t tell how many there were—at least, not before they swept me up in their arms and hustled me out the door, their black cloaks flapping in their wake. It was every bit as exciting as I’d always hoped it would be. But the trip ended abruptly about ten seconds later when we entered another dark room (they really go in for dark rooms) somewhere in my building. They deposited me right-side up and backed off.

  After a second, I caught my breath. The room was lit by a single black taper candle, behind which I could see a man with his black hood pulled low over his eyes. I obviously hadn’t been eating my carrots, because I couldn’t see anything beyond the glow of the candle. There was an odd smell in the air, something familiar but unidentifiable, and definitely incongruous with the sight before me.

  “Amy Maureen Haskel?”

  “Yes,” I said in a rather breathless voice.

  “Rose & Grave: Accept or reject.”

  Here it was. No more time. And I had no idea what to think.

  And then, Brandon’s words came back to me: Promise me, just once in your life, just for kicks, don’t overthink.

  I opened my mouth. “Accept.”

  * * *

  As soon as I spoke the words, the light was extinguished, and judging by the bustle that followed, they weren’t waiting around to relight it. Someone leaned in and hissed in my ear, “Remember well, but keep silent, concerning what you have heard here.”

  By the time I stumbled to the wall and felt cool tile beneath my fingers, everyone was gone. I flipped on the light. I was standing in a bathroom, alone, with nothing but condom dispensers and mildewy grout to keep me company. So that was the smell. And it wasn’t even my entryway.

  Um, hello? Weren’t they supposed to spirit me off to their stone tomb and introduce me to a life beyond my wildest dreams? I frowned, opened the bathroom door, and stepped outside.

  About half a dozen students milled around the hall, watching me. One of those guys—there’s one in every dorm—who never did get used to the idea of Eli’s unisex bathrooms hopped up and down on the balls of his feet as if waiting for the girl to leave before he braved the toilet. “You done, or is there gonna be another party in there?”

  I schooled my features into a neutral expression. “Anyone have a roll of toilet paper?”

  See? I would be an expert at this secret stuff yet.

  Ignoring the onlookers, I made my way back to my suite, where I assumed Lydia would be waiting to receive her blow-by-blow of the whole (truncated) experience. But Lydia was gone—tapped, perhaps, by another society in my absence. She wouldn’t have left for any other reason, right? Not tonight.

  I waited in the common room for fifteen minutes, figuring that if her tap worked the way mine had, she’d be back in no time. I drank a Coke and tried to read a three-month-old copy of Cosmo that was lying on the coffee table. Brandon was right; the taglines were much more intriguing than yet another recycled article explaining that women have G-spots. I didn’t make it past the third perfume ad (none of which, I was chuffed to see, hawked anything called “Ambition”).

  I got up and went to the window, but there was no sign of Lydia or of a bunch of robed figures. Half an hour later, I decided to calm my nerves by taking a nice stroll—down to High Street.

  Now, aside from being home to the English department and the Art History lecture hall, High Street is also known for hosting the Rose & Grave tomb. (These “tombs” dotted the campus, their huge, mausoleum-like facades hiding interiors that were supposedly more like mansions. Remember, the Egyptian pyramids were tombs as well. But no one knew if the society tombs held actual…bodies.) According to rumor, there’s an intricate code for members that can tell them exactly what is going on inside the tomb based on the position of the low, wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance. I didn’t know what the code was, but I assumed that I’d find out. Sometime.

  I walked past the entrance to two residential colleges, and then, as was common amongst all students, crossed to the other side of the street so I wouldn’t be seen walking in front of the Rose & Grave tomb. It was an unwritten rule on campus—the college equivalent of refusing to walk in front of a haunted house in our childhood neighborhoods.

  The tomb was made of sandstone blocks and seemed somehow darker than the surrounding stone and slate buildings. A fence surrounded an unkempt yard spotted with patches of grass and a few late, struggling daffodils. Strange that the Diggers didn’t keep up the landscaping, though it added to the imposing nature of the property. The sodium streetlight nearest the tomb was perpetually out of order, meaning that the tomb itself stood in a pool of deep shade and long, sinister shadows. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they did it on purpose.

  Maybe I didn’t know better. I sat down on the curb and rested my chin in my hands, regarding the building warily. The gate was half open. What did that mean? Someone was inside? Someone wasn’t? Someone was lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on me the second I came near? I looked both ways down the street, but it was deserted.

  The niggling fear in the back of my mind rose up to taunt me. It wasn’t Rose & Grave who carried you into the bathroom. It was a prank, and you fell for it, hook, line, and hooded robe. Stupid Amy Haskel, you’ll be the laughingstock of Eli
tomorrow.

  Why hadn’t they taken me away with them? They’d tapped me, right? I was a member now, right? So if I wanted to go up to that gate, if I wanted to walk right through and pound on the door and demand to know what the hell they were doing—then I was entitled to. Right?

  And if you’re not a member, they’ll cart you away to the dungeon.

  I stood up, clenched my fists at my sides, and marched across the street, utterly determined for all of ten steps. As soon as I got to the gate, my resolve wavered and I stopped to check again. Still no one coming.

  I held my breath and put my hand on the gate. Nothing. No one came to arrest me, or yell at me, or threaten to eradicate my existence from the planet for daring to infiltrate the society grounds without permission. I took a step inside. Then two. Somewhere around six steps, the gate clanged shut behind me. I yelped, jumped about two feet in the air, and rushed back to the fence.

  The gate wouldn’t open. I fumbled with the catches, but if there was a release mechanism, my fingers weren’t finding it, and I couldn’t see a thing in the dark. Oh, crap. I’d been a member for all of fifty minutes and I’d already broken the fence and messed with the secret code.

  And trespassed. Don’t forget how you trespassed. They’re going to get you. Run! Run, before anyone catches you.

  The voice won, and I climbed over the gate, catching the flare of my favorite jeans on one of the spikes protruding from the top. For several seconds, I acted like a hopscotch player on crack while trying to free my leg from its wrought-iron trap. Then I saw a group of three students exiting Calvin College and heading toward Old Campus. I stopped hopping. Maybe they wouldn’t see me if I stayed perfectly still. Hey, it worked for those people in Jurassic Park.