The fun part about humiliating yourself in front of a cadre of shadowy figures is that you get to spend the next two days wondering if everyone you pass on campus saw you at your worst. I was in line at the dining hall last night and I swear I saw this trustafarian girl sniggering behind her bulgur-wheat pilaf. I spent the next two hours (WAP forgotten!) trying to figure out which secret society was most likely to tap vegan Environmental Science majors who wear designer dreadlocks and hundred-dollar hemp necklaces—well, other than joke organizations like Joint & Bong.
Cute name, huh? That’s how things go at Eli University. Everyone copies everyone else. Rose & Grave set the trend back in the 1800s, and now anyone with a yen to start a social club has followed their illustrious lead: Book & Key, Sword & Mace, Quill & Ink. There are a few holdouts among the major societies—Dragon’s Head, Serpent, St. Linus Hall—but nothing gives a proposed clandestine organization the Eli air like an ampersand. Lydia and I used to joke that they were in practice for joining law firms—they’re all Blank & Blank as well, right?
That was before Lydia lost her sense of humor when it came to all things secret society. Seriously. I tried to talk to her about my interview that night at dinner, and she responded like my mom whenever I brought up sex. Which is to say, not at all.
The conversation went like this:
Me: So you want to hear what happened at my interview?
Lydia:(fork paused halfway to her mouth) Are you supposed to talk about that?
Me: Why not? I haven’t taken any vows of silence. I don’t even know who they were. Why, did yours tell you not to talk about it?
Lydia:…
Me: They did? Did they tell you who they were?
Lydia:…
Me: They did! Wow, I must have screwed up worse than I thought.
Lydia:(glancing around furtively) Amy, I really, really don’t think we’re supposed to talk about this.
Me: I can talk about anything I want. They’re a bunch of strangers, and they were really rude to me, to boot.
Lydia: Amy! You’re going to ruin your chances.
Me: I don’t think I have any chances. And please. They didn’t bug the tables or anything.
Lydia: Rose & Grave would.
Me: Rose & Grave doesn’t tap women. Just future Presidents.
Lydia:(standing and lifting her tray) I’m not going to keep talking about this here.
Me:(following) Fine, let’s do it in the suite.
But Lydia didn’t go back to the suite. She went to the gym to swim laps, which, considering my long-standing aversion to deep water (my cousin threw me off a dock when I was a kid—don’t like to talk about it), was a downright slap in the face. And as if the Chlorine Defense wasn’t enough, whenever I saw her at all over the following two days, she rushed off before I had a chance to bring up the subject again.
Not that I was sitting around. With commencement just around the corner, I was super-busy with the literary magazine’s commencement issue. Since I wasn’t going to be tapped by Quill & Ink—or any other secret society—I couldn’t afford any more missteps. This was my penultimate issue, and it needed to kick ass.
So, to be blunt, the theme of “Ambition” was not going to cut it.
“Been there, done that,” I informed my second-in-command, managing editor Brandon Weare. “At Eli, Ambition is the new black.”
“What a lovely pull quote for your intro page,” Brandon said, putting the finishing touches on his fifth paper airplane.
“If we pick a good enough theme, I won’t need to jazz it up with taglines.”
“Ah, but then, what sort of Cosmo girl would you be? It seems to be all about the cutesy tagline there. It’s certainly not about actual content.” He launched the plane, and I watched it swoop and dive directly into the smudgy linoleum floor of the magazine office. A nose-heavy dart.
“You read Cosmo?”
“Female sex tips?” He toed the plane. “You betcha.”
Brandon was an expert in the art of “Aerogami,” and since we’d started working together in October, I learned that his chosen designs possessed a direct correlation with his opinion of the manuscript from which he drew his construction materials. Woe betide the writer whose submission merited a four-fold stinger…but if he sailed a square-nosed glider (Ken Blackburn’s Guinness World Record design, I’d learned) past my nose, I should drop everything and read the story.
I’m pretty sure this was not how things worked at Horton.
Not that Brandon would care. He was one of those true geniuses that dotted the campus population, the kind that could compose concertos on breaks from discovering the cure for cancer. His raison d’être was applied math, but he spared enough time to fit in his knack for writing appallingly good short stories, and to compete with me for magazine editorships (I’d only just barely beat him out for this one). No scrambling for internships or resume stuffers for Brandon. He just went around being quietly brilliant, unapologetically dorky, and universally well liked.
And he had a point about the theme’s potential. Ninety percent of the graduating class already had ambition oozing from their pores. The other ten had daddies that would pound it into them by the time they were thirty. The theme possessed a broad scope, as well as the possibility of incorporating some sort of existentialist statement about the futility of desire, the impossibility of purpose, all the stuff that made future Master’s-in-Creative-Writing-from-Iowa candidates hot.
(Iowa, if you didn’t know, is the place to go to graduate school to learn how to be a novelist. Don’t ask me why. Must be the chemicals in the corn.)
The problem was, I was having enough troubles with ambition myself. Sure, my resume and GPA were in order, but if my snafu of a society interview proved anything, it was that all that accomplishment needed to add up to a plan, or it didn’t count. Did I really want to spend the next month reading achingly bitter or brilliantly acerbic or sensationally snarky stories that would tell me to settle for a life of comfortable mediocrity or risk getting squashed into the pavement by the bigger rats in the race? Would that somehow prod me into picking an attainable yet still suitably lofty path, or would it simply convince me it wasn’t worth trying?
“Okay,” I said slowly, gauging his reaction, “but are we going to present said Ambition in a positive or negative light?”
Brandon, damn him, threw back his head and laughed. “Touched a nerve, Ames?”
Sometimes I suspected Genius-boy over there could read my mind. I shrugged, retrieved the airplane from where it had slid beneath my chair, and lobbed it back at him. “Fine. Ambition it is. It sounds like a Calvin Klein perfume, but let’s run with it.” I shuffled the papers on my desk, and started rearranging the thumbtacks in the side of the worn canvas cubicle according to rainbow color order.
He smoothed out the creases of the plane and studied me carefully. “What’s up with you tonight? You’re not in your usual take-over-the-world mode.” Brandon was cute, in a kind of sidekick-on-a-WB-show way. He was only an inch or two taller than me, and had plain brown hair that was overgrown into an unruly shag, light olive skin, and big, soulful puppy-dog eyes with just the slightest tilt at the corners to hint at his Asian-American (“twenty-five percent and counting!”) heritage.
Yeah, it was the eyes that got me, every time.
I shrugged again. “I don’t know. End of year stress. Seven hundred pages of War and Peace to read before exams.”
“Ah, The Russian Novel.” Brandon nodded in sympathy. “Two hundred and thirty-two cubic inches of sheer torture. I hear just lifting the class texts put some guy in traction.” He winked. “Don’t worry. In two weeks, you’ll be in Quill & Ink, and they’ve got to have an in with Lit exams. You’ll rock it.”
I bit my lip. “I’m…not getting tapped by Quill & Ink.”
“What?” He pointed at the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF sign on my desk, at me, at the writing on the door that read ELI LITERARY MAGAZINE, a look of mock incredulity on his face. “How is that possible?”
Finally, someone to talk to about this! Lydia was doing her best Tommy! impression and Glenda Foster was MIA (probably out interviewing the real Quill & Ink taps). “I don’t know! But I went to my interview, and it was all this crap about FBI files and my third-grade teacher and—other stuff—and then they told me they weren’t Quill….”
“Maybe they were lying?”
“Either way, they couldn’t stop talking about how I wasn’t right for them. They were being pretty mean, so I told them off, gave them the finger—not that they could see it, the way the room was all dark—and walked out.”
“Wow.” Brandon grinned, and those puppy-dog eyes of his began to take on a very particular gleam. One that I knew well, after working in such close quarters with him on the magazine since October. One that I’d been curiously susceptible to ever since he’d plied me with flowers and Godiva on February 14th. “I think,” he said, in a tone that betrayed how little of his interest truly lay in the subject of my society interview, “that we should continue this conversation over dinner. How about Thai? We’ve got half a dozen choices on Chapel Street alone.” New Haven is replete with houses of curry.
I gave him a hairy eyeball. Brandon never asked for dates, he sprung them on you like a bear trap. You see, Brandon Weare wanted me to be his girlfriend. Friends-with-benefits wasn’t cutting it for him anymore (though there’d been no complaints while he was receiving those benefits, let me tell you!).
Oh, yeah. I’d slept with Brandon. Six times, to be precise. Maybe I should back it up a bit:
AMY HASKEL’S HIT LIST
1) Jacob Allbrecker. 12th Grade. Prom Night. I dated Jacob for four months my senior year in high school, and he broke up with me two weeks before prom because I wouldn’t go all the way. But since we’d already bought the tickets, and I’d made my hair appointment, we went to prom together anyway, where despite my earlier protests, I ended up losing my virginity in Colleen Morrison’s little sister’s bedroom at the after-party. Glamorous, huh? Jacob and I slept together twice more before graduation and then he started Duke in the summer session. I hooked up with him on Thanksgiving Break freshman year, but we didn’t get past second base because I was already in heavy lust with
2) Galen Twilo. Freshman Year. Reading Week, first semester. Omigod, this guy was gorgeous! And an artist, the kind that a scant two years later I’d laugh at for thinking he was deep with all his black sweaters and cigarettes and dog-eared copies of Naked Lunch (which isn’t half as sexy as it sounds). I spent all of Reading Week (the week without classes just before exams, when we’re supposed to study but really just party) in his bed, where I learned all kinds of nifty facts about the male anatomy and everything I needed to rock my Twentieth Century American Poetry final. When I came back after Winter Break, though, he pretended he didn’t know me.
3) Alan Albertson. Summer-Fall-Winter. Sophomore Year. We met at a summer job at the Eli University Press, and he was two years older than me. We spent the whole summer together avoiding beach trips and pool parties (I don’t swim, c.f. unfortunate dockside incident, and he burns like a crab in the sun). It was love. And then he got a Fulbright and went to London (where there aren’t any UV rays) and broke my heart, which put me on a dark path that led directly to
4) Ben…Somebody. Sophomore Year. Spring Break at Myrtle Beach. And that’s all I know, except that I remember that his dick had a funny bend in the middle.
5) Brandon Weare. Junior Year. February 14th. All girls are notoriously weak-willed on Valentine’s Day—it’s like some sort of cosmic alignment of the Pathetic Planet and the Couples-Everywhere-You-Look Constellation in the seventh house of Loneliness. All I know is that every February 14th, even the most independent and academically focused girl on campus can be wooed with a dozen drugstore roses and a Hallmark card.
I’ve always been completely honest with him about the fact that I wasn’t exactly girlfriend material (see above list if you don’t believe me). Even on that Valentine’s Day, somewhere between the removal of the tops and the removal of the bottoms, I told him, “This can’t be serious, okay?”
And of course he said, “Okay.” It doesn’t matter how many articles of clothing you’re still wearing. As soon as a guy thinks there’s sex on the table, he’ll agree to anything.
The five times I slept with him after Valentine’s Day…well, what can I say? I’m a pushover. Now, at least, I knew what he’d been getting at with all the paper airplane–throwing and origami leapfrogs he’d been shooting my way since we’d met sophomore year. (Geeky boys flirt in random-access ways.) Brandon has been steadily campaigning for clarification on our “status” since February, and I’ve been putting off the conversation with notably more success than I’ve had resisting the temptations of the flesh.
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.[2] 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.
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.”
The confessor later discovered this stood for Barbarian-So-Called.