Secret Society Girl Read online

  I dropped to the bench, too shocked to speak.

  He looked back at me, grimaced, and raked his hand through his hair. “I have no clue why I’m telling you all this. Guess the Digger bonding thing is starting already.”

  Like Malcolm. “The Digger bonding thing where you tell your brothers all your deep dark secrets?”

  “Yeah. Or my sister, in this case. At this rate, I’ll have nothing left for my C.B.”

  I stood. “I have a tough time believing that about you, George.” I stood very close to him in the confines of the alcove. Perhaps too close.

  His eyes widened behind his glasses, as if he was surprised to hear his reputation thrown back at him. Yep, definitely too close. He put his hand up to mine. And palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss. If he were an English major, I would have suspected he’d done it on purpose. Maybe he had. Unlike with Brandon, I couldn’t read George at all.

  TWO THINGS HE MIGHT BE THINKING

  1) Oh, look, it’s Amy. She’s cute and smart and funny.

  2) Oh, look, it’s a girl in a dark corner. Haven’t done her yet.

  I took a breath. “The coast is clear now, right?”

  He nodded, slowly, and we spilled out into the relative brightness of sodium streetlights.

  As we walked down the slate-lined alley between Hartford and Calvin Colleges, we said very little. George, I think, was still shell-shocked over his own gut-spill and I was busy contemplating if I should reciprocate. But what should I say? My parents were happily married, and rarely fought about anything more serious than whether to hire the kid down the street to cut the lawn or do it themselves. That would go over well. Or should I share something darker? The time last year that I slept with a boy whose name I can’t remember? Would that make me sound like a slut?

  We hit High Street and turned toward the tomb, still in mutual silence. The gate was closed, and George held it open for me—after we both checked to see that no one stood on the street. “Guess no one is inside,” he said, referring to the gate-position code.

  We were about to find out why.

  He jogged up the front steps to the main entrance and froze. When I arrived a moment later, contemplating how dangerous it would be to hang out inside Rose & Grave alone with George Harrison Prescott, I was similarly struck.

  The doors had been chained and padlocked together.

  * * *

  In retrospect, we should have gone to Malcolm or one of the other seniors right away, but we didn’t. After all, we were new at all of this Digger stuff. How were we supposed to know that the padlock was a recent addition to the look of the tomb? I remember reflecting to George at the time that perhaps the caretaker always padlocked it on the days when there were no formal events planned. But when we went around to the side entrance, there was a chain there, too, and neither of us knew where we might obtain the keys.

  “We could knock,” George suggested, but didn’t move to do so. I was relieved to see my hesitation echoed in someone who had been more thoroughly versed in the mores of the society. Even though I’d spent hours inside the tomb yesterday, taking oaths and learning secrets, the same unease about the property that had been cultivated in the last three years still held power over me. I felt, almost, that I didn’t belong on the site.

  Which, it turns out, is exactly how they wanted me to feel.

  Our plans to hang out in the tomb thwarted, we walked down to Lenny’s Lunch, which holds the distinction of having the most batshit hours of any restaurant in New Haven. Really, you never know when it’s going to be open. The hours are something like 11 A.M.–3:15 P.M. on Monday, noon–2 P.M. Tuesday, 7–9:30 P.M. Thursday–Friday, and noon–midnight on Saturday. I kid you not (and no, do not hold me responsible for any of these hours. I honestly have no clue when they are open). Plus, there’s only one thing on the menu—cheeseburgers on toast with onions and tomato—and the proprietor will kick you out if you ask for ketchup. But if you learn the rules, in a sort of “Seinfeld soup-Nazi” way, they make awesome cheeseburgers. (And only cheeseburgers, by the way, not hamburgers. Woe betide the lactose-intolerant.)

  We settled into the ancient wooden booths and waited for our food. Over the decades, people had carved encyclopedias’ worth of personal histories into the tops and sides of the tables and benches (the bottoms were something you stayed away from if you wanted to keep your appetite). Hearts, crests, quotes from Shakespeare and Stalin—anything goes at Lenny’s Lunch. I rubbed the condensation from my bottle of birch beer and polished a carving that read “B + A 1956.”

  Those are very common initials.

  George and I ate our cheeseburgers without ketchup, drank our pops, and talked about movies. We didn’t discuss his family, or mine, or the strange locks on the tomb door. The buzz of vodka was finally fading, and I kept my hand over the carving as I ate. George Harrison Prescott was a very attractive man, but I had no interest in contributing to his already stellar track record.

  “What are you doing this summer?” George asked.

  “I’ve got an internship at Horton. The publishing company?” A pat of cheese plopped from my burger to the wrapper. Smooth, Amy, smooth.

  “In New York? Cool.” He twirled his bottle around by the stem. “I’m going to Europe for a few weeks right after exams, and then I’ll probably work for my dad in the city. We should hang out.”

  “Do you know what you want to do after graduation?”

  He shrugged. “One of the three big ones: I-banking, consulting, law school.”

  “No preference?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. Tell me, is this your first publishing internship?”

  “In New York, yeah. I worked at the Eli Press a few summers back.”

  “Well, then you’re well positioned to get a job when you graduate. I wish I’d been thinking that far ahead.”

  See, that’s the dirty little secret they never tell anyone. When I first came to Eli, I thought that I’d have employers falling all over me upon graduation, just dying to hire someone with an Ivy League degree. When you’re signing your life away to Sallie Mae, the schools stress how fabulous a reputation they have, how it will open all sorts of doors for you. But once you’re in the thick of your education, you learn otherwise. You aren’t a made man (or woman) just because your diploma bears the Eli seal.

  PEOPLE WHODO CARE

  1) Investment banking and consulting firms where they can charge their clients through the nose since they’re providing Ivy League pedigreed staff (which they proceed to chew up and spit out).

  2) Law schools whose rankings are partially based on the credentials of the schools from which they cull their students.

  3) Your great-aunt Amelia, who likes to brag to the folks at the VFW.

  If you want a job that leads to a career rather than a quick buck, then you’d better have a pretty full resume by the time you get your diploma.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’ll be making lots more money as a consultant than I will as an editorial assistant. You’ll be a better brochure statistic by far.”

  That’s the other kicker. Eli has far more respect for its take-the-money-and-run business consulting graduates, who can turn around and give monetary gifts to the school immediately upon graduation, than for anyone who invests in a long-term career. And looking at the Rose & Grave tap class I’d just joined, I’d say it was a fair bet that the Diggers thought along the same lines. Power and/or wealth seemed to be the order of the day. And again, I was the odd one out.

  George snapped his fingers in front of me. “Hey, it’s Saturday night. Stop thinking so hard.”

  I bristled and began peeling the label off my pop bottle. “I’m not.” God, he sounded like Brandon.

  “Seriously, though, Amy, you have it all planned out. I admire that. You came to Eli knowing exactly what you wanted to do and you’re doing it. I came from a double legacy and never once planned for a summer internship.”

  “You don’t need one. You’re a
Prescott.”

  “Hmph. Prescott or not, I don’t have a clue.”

  I smiled conspiratorially. “Honestly? Neither do I.” But the internship thing I learned early on. I vividly remember sitting in the Lit Mag office one evening freshman year while Glenda tried in vain to soothe an older friend’s nerves. The girl had graduated the previous year, and had been looking for a job for the past nine months with no luck, despite her Eli pedigree.

  “They don’t care,” she’d sobbed. “They get a hundred resumes a day, and they don’t care how smart I am, or how much I’ve read of the Western canon. They just want to know where my internships were!”

  “Where were they?” I’d asked, like an idiot frosh.

  “Nowhere!” the girl had hissed at me, glaring with baleful red eyes. “I had to work in the summer to pay for this stupid place. Fat lot of good it did me. I’d rather be in more debt now and have a better resume than without a job and up a few thousand dollars.”

  I took it as my creed. This Horton job was the culmination of everything I’d been working for. It was my ticket to post-grad entry into the world of publishing.

  Okay, maybe I did have it all together. Because here I was on a Saturday night, out to eat with the hottest guy in my college (yes, he even paid), a member of the school’s most elite secret society, a top student headed off to a glamorous summer job in New York City…from where I stood, the plus column looked pretty good.

  He walked me back to my entryway at Prescott College, and I brainstormed ways to leave him at the door that would make me look mysterious, rather than uninterested.

  Though if one were to ask Brandon, I apparently always managed the former without breaking a sweat.

  I opened the door to the suite carefully, avoiding all contact with the stains still smearing the doorknob, and slipped inside.

  “See you tomorrow,” he murmured.

  I turned back to him. His copper eyes shimmered as if they’d been freshly smelted, and I had to tilt my chin up to look him head-on. Rather nice, actually. “Tomorrow?”

  He nodded. “First meeting, remember? Five minutes to six, or VI Diggers-time.”

  That’s right. From now on, the Diggers held the deed to my Sunday and Thursday nights. Missing a meeting was not permitted under any but the most life-threatening circumstances. (As Poe put it, even if you’re in the hospital, you’d better be in a coma.) Ditching was viewed as a violation of the oath of fidelity.

  I swear to cleave wholly unto the principles of this ancient order, to further its friends and plight its enemies, and place above all others the causes of the Order of Rose & Grave.

  Of course, if George didn’t put much stock in the secrecy oath, who knew what else about Rose & Grave he’d blow off? Probably skip a meeting the first time it conflicted with getting booty.

  “Okay, then,” I said, and began to shut the door between us. “Thanks for the burger. Good night, George.”

  See? See how good I am? I didn’t even think about kissing him. Didn’t even think about letting him kiss me. I could withstand the charms of even George Harrison Prescott. A veritable pillar of self-control, that’s Amy Haskel.

  “Good night,” he murmured in a voice of unmistakable invitation. The door slid shut. “Good night…Bugaboo.”

  I melted on the parquet.

  I might be freely able to commit my entire Sunday and Thursday evenings to Rose & Grave come next fall, but this spring I still had obligations to the facets of my existence that made me worthy of membership in the society in the first place. Not WAP, though. I’d decided it was a lost cause. My Sundays had been seriously proscribed by this new development in my extracurriculars. I had two choices:

  1) Wake up at 8 A.M. every Sunday like I’m some sort of science major who has early-morning labs, and read a thousand pages of Tolstoy before any other college kid could reasonably be expected to be conscious, or

  2) Take advantage of Rose & Grave’s rumored library of final exams so that I’d have time in my all-too-short Sunday afternoons to deal with, I don’t know, everything else in my life? Little things like laundry?

  No-brainer.

  Today, the top of my To Do list involved finalizing a lineup for the commencement issue of the Lit Mag. Word had leaked out about the proposed Ambition theme, and, at last check, I had twenty-three irate e-mails in my in-box from Eli scribblers about how this development gave them no time to allow their muses to percolate, ruminate, agitate, and/or commiserate over the subject. Someone stayed up with a thesaurus, me-thinks (though “commiserate” was stretching it a bit). But please. God forbid they actually write from the heart and let us choose the pieces that best fit the anthology. I foresaw twenty-three unhappy careers.

  Borrowing a trick from my Rose & Grave big sib, I stuck my society pin through the strap of my Eli-blue messenger bag, slung it over my shoulder, slipped my feet into a pair of yellow Chuck Taylors (Prescott College colors), and headed out the door. In the last week, spring had acquiesced to summer’s control, and the student body was out in full force, pasty white and doing everything they could to counteract the damage of being indoors all winter. Girls lay strewn about the courtyard in pastel summer skirts as if they were posed for a campus brochure, while shirtless boys practiced their Frisbee flicks. Prescott College was not known for its Ultimate team, but the chests were mostly decent. Eww, except for that one.

  Unlike the girls, I was dressed for work rather than sunbathing, in another of my ubiquitous pairs of jeans and a Prescott College T-shirt. (By junior year, the average student amasses about a dozen of those things. They hand them out at will for every college event, from move-in day to the annual spring barbeque. I even have one from a Jell-O wrestling match between the Prescott College dean and master that happened sophomore year, but I don’t wear it much. It’s still stained blue.)

  I arrived at the Literary Magazine’s minuscule storefront office and found Brandon already deep in damage control. The floor around his feet was littered with four-fold stingers.

  I toed the nearest plane. “You’re lucky we never went to electronic submissions.”

  He didn’t look up.

  “Ever notice how we get five times the submissions for the commencement issue as we do for every other issue combined?” I placed my bag on my desk. “With the other issues, we’re scrambling for stories or reduced to whipping up something at the last minute ourselves so that the layout isn’t all ads for Starbucks and stationery shops.”

  Brandon turned a page and kept reading.

  “Of course,” I went on, taking my seat and swiveling to face him, “you’ve always been better than me at that. Writing stories on the fly, I mean.”

  His eyes paused their back-and-forth scanning, and he blinked. “Thanks.”

  “I’m better at the scrambling.”

  “You’re certainly demonstrating that now.”

  I swallowed. Too far.

  Brandon nodded his head toward a neat stack of manuscripts at the corner of the desk. “Those four are possibilities.”

  And the Terse Award goes to…Brandon Weare. “I’m sorry about last night.”

  He finally looked at me, for all the good it did. I couldn’t tell thing one from his expression. “Which part?”

  Any part that hurt his feelings.

  The door to the office opened and in walked Glenda Foster, bearing a cardboard drinks holder with two Venti iced something-or-others.

  I had never been happier to see my mentor, even if she had failed to tap me into her secret society and concealed from me her period of lesbian experimentation. Everyone had her off days. I was sure Glenda still loved me, even if Brandon—

  Well, we don’t use the L-word in reference to Brandon.

  Glenda stopped dead as she caught sight of me. “A-Amy,” she said, her voice tinged with nerves. “What are you doing here?”

  My brow furrowed. “Excuse me?”

  She handed one of the drinks to Brandon. “Okay, B, iced latte for you, caramel
frapp for me.” Glenda licked a spot of whipped cream off the heel of her palm and avoided meeting my gaze. “Sorry to have skipped you, Amy, but B and I kinda figured you weren’t going to show up today.”

  I flashed a look at Brandon. How dare he? I had just as much right to be here as he did! More even, because I was the editor! We may have argued last night, but he’d have to have a pretty low opinion of me indeed to think I’d abandon my post at the Lit Mag just to avoid him.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, turning to him and struggling to keep my voice casual. “I told you I’d be here.”

  “Right,” Glenda said. “It’s just…with everything going on…” She waved her hand north by northwest, as if the direction was significant.

  “Everything going on?” I prompted.

  Brandon cleared his throat. “At Rose & Grave.”

  I froze, there on the scuffed linoleum. I reached for my belt loop, then remembered I’d put the pin on the handle of my bag.

  “What,” I whispered, “is going on at Rose & Grave?”

  Glenda’s eyes got wider. “You mean you don’t know?”

  In one heartbeat, I’d snatched up my bag, and in the next, I was out the door. And as I left, my mind whirling with concerns, there was one that seemed to float to the top.

  Great job at secrecy, Amy. This is barely your second day as a Digger, and not a single person of your acquaintance is still in the dark.

  The “something going on” proved to be a crowd of about fifty people clustered at the apex of High Street. The twenty that stood out were a row of elderly men, all in business suits and sunglasses, in a line that stretched across the front border of the Rose & Grave property like some sort of human shield. Whoever had coordinated their outfits was just a tad too into those agents from The Matrix, as far as I was concerned. The tomb itself appeared to have sprouted even more padlocks and chains since my last visit.

  Everyone else milled about across the street, trying their best to look as if they hadn’t staked out a seat for the showdown.