I hereby confess:
I so knew it!
Lydia sat there for a moment, tapping her pen against her hand. “Does it look like I’m at a meeting?” she said at last.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Was yours over early, too?” I’d latch on to any explanation at this point.
“I’m glad this happened,” Lydia said. “I am.”
I shook my head. “This can’t be right.”
“Were you following me?” She leaned over and caught the leg of another chair, scraping it across the floor until it was positioned across from her. I collapsed onto the seat.
“Of course I was! I wanted to see what tomb you went into!” I shook my head again. “Don’t do this to me, Lydia. I honestly don’t think I can take anything else this week. What happened with your society?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not in one.”
“No shit!” I massaged my temples. If your cerebral cortex explodes before graduation, do your parents get a refund? “But what about everything you told Josh?”
“Lies.” She shrugged.
“What about everything you told me?”
“More lies.”
“What about all that crap that happened on Initiation Night? What about the fucking blood on our fucking floor?”
“Wow, language, Amy. And this is a library. Keep your voice down.”
“There’s no one around for miles, Lydia. Talk to me! I don’t believe this is happening. And if you knew anything at all about the kind of week I’ve been having, you’d know that’s saying a lot.” My best friend, a liar. My society brothers, my lover, and now my best friend. Any second now, my parents would call and tell me they were actually space aliens. Or European royalty. Or Republicans.
I considered scheduling a nice chat with the folks at Mental Hygiene. That’s what the DUH (Department of University Health, and a more accurate acronym has never been employed) calls their Psych department.
“I know, Amy. There have been so many times I wanted to confess the whole thing. But I didn’t even know how to start.”
“Just start,” I whispered. See? I can talk softly.
Another deep breath. “I didn’t get called back after interviews. I didn’t get tapped. And you did. By Rose & Grave, of all places. I didn’t even know they do women.”
“They didn’t.”
“And I was…jealous. You didn’t even want to be in a society. Not like I did. I was also a little embarrassed. So I started doing research on secret societies, and then I kind of…made one up.”
“You made up a secret society?” Maybe I wasn’t the one who needed Mental Hygiene after all.
“Yeah. I wanted you to think I’d gotten tapped, too. I figured it would be pretty easy to pretend. All I had to do was fake a couple of Initiation Night rituals and then disappear every Thursday and Sunday. And sometimes I didn’t even have to do that, since you weren’t in the suite on those nights anyway.”
“But, Lydia—the blood…the feathers…”
She ducked her head sheepishly. “Yeah, I think I went a little overboard. Still, you believed it. And it was kind of fun, having you think I was in an even more intense society than you were.”
“What I was thinking,” I corrected, “was that whoever those bastards were, they were hurting you. Nothing about it was fun.”
“That dawned on me pretty quickly. Also, the whole ruse became tiresome. Lying sucks because it’s much harder to remember. And it’s completely ruined my social life, too. All our friends go out on Thursday and I’m stuck at home because I’m terrified people will say something in front of you about how I was at a bar with Carol or something. I can’t even eat in the Prescott Dining Hall. I go someplace where no one knows me.” She laughed. “I was almost relieved when Josh and I started dating. It was pretty obvious he was in a society, so at least I didn’t have to come up with another excuse.”
Unbelievable.
“And I started to recognize that I’d been acting a little crazy.” (A little, she says.) “None of it seemed important after all the hype of Tap Night was over. But I’d built such a story, I couldn’t just abandon it. It’s what I’d always imagined for myself. I’d go to Eli, get tapped by a society, graduate into the exalted ranks of the Bilderberg Group.”
“The who?”
She blinked at me. “You’re serious? What kind of Digger are you?”
I shrugged. The bugaboo kind.
Lydia went on. “This fall, after I got into Phi Beta Kappa, I realized exactly how foolish I’d been. Here I was, in a real honor society, the oldest in the country, and I was whining about some stupid frat.”
“They’re not stu-…” I shut my mouth. Well, who was I to speak on that subject tonight? Occasionally, they were incredibly stupid. “If you were so over it, then why did you get mad at Josh when you found out his society was Rose & Grave?”
“Because you two had been pretending you didn’t know each other. You played me so well.” She started doodling on the cover of one of her notebooks. “It’s fine, though. I understand now that you guys weren’t talking about me behind my back.”
This was crazy. We’d been so worried about her and all the time she was making shit up? “Last night, you told Josh about how your fake society had been beating you and sticking pins in your skin.”
“He told you about that?” She smirked. “I guess I spoke a little soon about all the not-talking-about-me-behind-my-back. And it wasn’t me. It was the fake swim team members in my fake society. But yeah, it got out of hand. It seemed like he wanted to talk about society stuff. Whatever hard time you guys were having, he just needed to vent a little. And I couldn’t let him do it without giving him something in return.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing damning, I swear!” She tilted her head to the side. “Look at you, so loyal. I promise, he didn’t tell me anything. Just that he was really stressed, didn’t know how things would turn out, stuff like that. It wasn’t really the time to come clean about my…um, tall tales. He needed me to be there for him. He can trust me. You both can.”
“So you told him your society was torturing you to make him feel a little better about what was happening with his?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
The truth was, it was so adorable and so twisted that I couldn’t even condemn her for it. “But now the truth is out.”
“Yes. And, Amy, I’m so relieved. The more involved my lie became, the more I felt like I was living in a bad sitcom. It’s so embarrassing. Please forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven,” I said instantly. “I’m not even going to ask you where you got those feathers.” Lydia’s society research left much to be desired. Where had she gotten her information?
“Old pillow.” She looked at me through her bangs. “Will you let me tell Josh myself?”
I hugged her. “Gladly.” Lydia’s transgressions were minor in the scheme of things. Bizarre, to be sure, but ultimately harmless. Except, perhaps, to old pillows. A week ago, this might have put a pretty bad dent in our friendship. Now it seemed like little more than a foible. I couldn’t afford to lose another friend. At this rate, who knew what kind of perspectives I’d be able to entertain by Winter Break? Still, I didn’t want to be anywhere near Josh when he heard this one. “Though, if you want my opinion, his plate’s a little full right now. Might want to wait a few days.”
“Yes. Of course I will.” Lydia pulled back and examined my face. “Amy…is everything going to be all right?”
I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t even say I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Not after the heaping spoonful of truth Lydia had just served me. The dam broke and tears started rolling down my cheeks. I watched Lydia’s eyes grow wide as deep, heaving sobs rumbled their way up through my chest. She started holding me again and I cried, and cried, and cried. I cried until there were wet spots all over her shirt and my eyeballs felt like mosquito bites and my sinuses like cake batter.
Oh, thank God! I’d been waiting for this for days. I’d held out through the fights with Josh, Jenny’s disappearance, no one trusting me, arguing with Poe, staying up all night, fighting with Poe in the city, dealing with Jenny, dealing with Elysion, dealing with George, dealing with Poe, dealing with dealing with dealing with. I was so sick of it. The tears were like vomit, like poison. I wanted this pain out of my system. I didn’t care. No more secrets. No more Rose & Grave. What kind of knight was I?
“Oh, God, Amy, don’t tell me they’re flogging you!” Lydia said as the waterworks stretched on.
“You’d think,” I sobbed. “Maybe they should. We messed it up. The alums said we would, that we women would ruin it, and they were right. It’s over, Lydia. You should be very impressed with your roommate. I’m a goddess of destruction. I’m Medusa. I’m Kali.”
“You’re freaking me out is what you are. Calm down.” She pushed some hair out of my eyes. “I don’t even understand you. Is this some sort of society jargon?”
No. The Diggers had an entirely different pantheon in mind. “It’s been very difficult this semester. I thought we were all on the same page, but apparently no one agrees on what we’re really supposed to be about. Are we the sum of our traditions, even if those traditions suck? Or are we whatever the traditions were put there to protect?” I knew I was being too vague to get any real answer out of my best friend, but I was trapped by my vows of secrecy. Even now, I cared. “It’s just really tough, because the decisions of last year’s club blew apart the image of what the society has been…forever. And now we don’t know what we’re supposed to be.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked. “That they’ve always been the same thing?”
“Sort of.” Though, come to think of it, those industrial barons and plantation gentry of the mid-1800s were hardly the kind of diverse population on the roster today. They’d even survived the infighting faction of Elysion once before.
“Here’s a little lesson you learn in Poli-Sci,” Lydia said. “Nothing is ever as stable as you think it is. What they called Republicans became Democrats who became Republicans who ended up deeding their ideology to Democrats….”
“I think I remember failing that quiz in A.P. History,” I said.
“The point is, every generation chooses its own image, regardless of the mandates of whoever came before. You have to, or you’d lose all relevance.”
“How much relevance can we have in a tomb, in silly costumes, singing old songs?”
“How much relevance do we have sitting here, in a 1930s rip-off of a medieval cathedral, surrounded by card catalogs?” She smiled. “Those are simply the trappings. The real tradition is us—the latest in the long line of students with the privilege of receiving our education at one of the greatest universities in the nation. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not here to look pretty. The tradition I’m interested in upholding is the pursuit of academic excellence. Therefore, it follows that it may be a great honor to be tapped into Rose & Grave, but it’s an even bigger honor to be granted the responsibility of keeping it going.”
“Spoken like a woman who really belongs in a society.”
“You don’t think you belong?”
“It’s not the best time to ask me that.”
“Fine. I’ll ask you this: What do you think of the others? You don’t have to tell me if you think it will wreck your secrecy or anything. But think about it. I know Josh is in it, and you know how I feel about him. And I’m pretty sure that Clarissa chick is, too. If there were no tomb, no whatever marvelous mysteries you’ve been granted, whatever silver platter they’ve handed you—what would you be in it for?”
Lydia was right, of course. And it was the same argument Ben, Jenny, Mara, and Harun had been making, and even, to some extent, the same as I’d been making to George. What did being a Digger mean? The problem wasn’t all the nonsense of underground rooms and money and rituals and secrets leaked to the press. The problem was, we’d been so busy thinking about the society as an entity, we’d forgotten about Rose & Grave as an experience. Hostility and competition between members was no way to run a society of people who were supposed to be brothers.
When we dropped all the politics, we did have an awesome time. Like the other morning, just sitting in the Library, drinking tea and talking. Or all the pickup Kaboodle Ball games. Or the political debates, even if most of the topics went way over my head. Even my so-called enemies evoked memories that had nothing to do with our arguments. Nikolos cataloged our art collection, Kevin rewrote the Digger anthems to hip-hop songs, Omar and Ben staged Kaboodle Ball death matches, and George…George made a good time happen wherever he went. Whether it was setting up an impromptu chess tournament or reciting from his litany of dirty limericks (as if there’s any other kind), he was our resident activity director, and he charmed the pants off everyone who knew him. Usually literally.
I belonged in that Rose & Grave, the one where no one thought it odd that your fellow knights went running off to New York City if they thought you were in trouble. The question was, could the knights of D177 ever be those Diggers?
It was Wednesday before I received the first hint that such a thing was possible. Josh—who was practically a resident by this time—Lydia, and I were having lunch in the Prescott College Dining Hall and I was enjoying a surprisingly good rendition of apple-pumpkin soup (go, dining hall chefs!) when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry for bothering you at lunch, but can I talk to you?”
I looked up to see the (gorgeous, of course) arm attached to that hand, and beyond it, the rest of its owner, looking exceptionally scrumptious in a blue wool V-neck. I swear, autumn is made for boys as pretty as George. Handsome men look seventeen times more devastating when outfitted in L.L. Bean. You just want them to roll you in hay and have done with it.
Focus, Amy. “I’m not really ready to talk to you,” I said, and returned to my soup. Which was when I noticed that George’s other hand was resting on Josh’s shoulder.
“It’s about that Greek project,” he continued.
Greek. As in, more Thucydides, less Persian barbarian. Josh and I exchanged glances, and Lydia began kicking me under the table.
“Sure,” Josh said. “Lydia, would you excuse us for a minute?”
George led us out of the dining hall and up the stairs to the Prescott College Library. New Haven had taken pity on us today and bathed our campus in the type of sunlight that only exists in the autumn. Everything was brighter, as if both sun and brave surviving plants were throwing a last-ditch effort at existence. They’d fail, of course, but it was pretty while it lasted. The golden wood paneling and whitewashed accents practically glittered in the clear yellow light. Odile was squinting on the couch.
“The coast is clear,” she said, as George shut the door behind us.
“What’s this about?” Josh asked.
“We come with a proposal.”
“We do?” I asked, looking from George to Odile and back again. “Did I miss the team draft?”
Odile came forward, her arms full of papers. “I’m the architect of peace.” She dropped the load on the table before us. “I’m here to do what it takes to get us back on track. And I think this is the right way to do it.”
“We’ve all had time to think now,” said George. “And most of the other Elysians and I agree we made a mistake. We’d like to disband Elysion and work to rebuild the unity of our club.”
“Most of you?”
George ignored my crack. “But we also realize that treachery can’t just be swept under the rug. If an act of disloyalty has the power to dissolve our bonds and threaten the order, then an act of extreme loyalty should have the power to renew them.” He pulled forward one file. “And that goes for all of the knights. Even the—uh—traitors who weren’t in Elysion.”
Jenny. I raised an eyebrow at him. “What kind of act?”
“From our conversations with Jenny,” Odile began, “we’ve come to the conclusion that there are certain factions—”
George coughed a bit.
“Fine. Certain people who claim to be enemies of the order.”
They were talking to Jenny? Wow, maybe I had underestimated them.
“And we plan,” said George, “to show this person what it really means to be an enemy of Rose & Grave. To give him a taste of what will happen if he ever tells anyone the things he may know of our C.B.’s.”
“No way,” said Josh. “I think I’ve had enough of conspiracies and crimes to last one semester.”
“This is, like, barely a crime,” Odile said, squeezing her thumb and forefinger together. “Total misdemeanor territory.”
“Out of curiosity,” I said to George, “how many people do you have going along with this scheme so far?”
He hesitated, then turned to Odile. “Well, Jenny, of course, and Ben and Harun, too. If we get the two of you in, that’s seven.”
“Fifty percent?”
“We have high hopes,” said Odile. “We’re really lobbying. I feel very sure that before tomorrow’s meeting—”
“The fact is,” George interrupted, fixing me with his copper eyes, “I think the holdouts are waiting to hear what you think.”
“Me? Are you kidding? Why?”
“Because you made it all happen. You found Jenny. You uncovered Elysion.”
I rolled my eyes. “Jenny uncovered Elysion, and I doubt most of the Elysians are happy about it.” I noticed that Omar, Kevin, and Nikolos weren’t part of the present support group.
Josh cut in. “Jenny doesn’t count, though. She’s in more trouble than anyone. After all your effort last week, Amy, it makes sense.”
“Ah, that reminds me,” said Odile. “The plan takes care of Jenny, too. See, according to my research, all the stuff she allegedly ‘leaked’—”
“There’s nothing alleged about it,” I said. “She pleaded guilty.”
“—had already been leaked in 1972 in an article in Harper’s, in 1983 in an article in Esquire, and in 1990 in an exposé by the BBC. Certain details of our initiation rituals are no secret, and haven’t been for quite some time.”
“That’s what she meant when she said she’d chosen carefully!” I said with a gasp. Anyone with even a vague grasp of Boolean searches could have figured out what had been leaked a long time ago. And Jenny was a girl who could Google.
“Gehry and the other patriarchs knew it, too,” George said. “But the week of the leak, they played up the damage to the Elysians—told us this was an example of how far Rose & Grave had fallen—and we fell for it.”
“You weren’t the only ones,” Josh said.
“Well, I should have…been more responsible. Taken my own counsel. Been more—” he caught my eye “—adult.”
“But if you look at it from this perspective,” Odile said, “Jenny’s crime wasn’t really so heinous.”
“I beg to differ,” Josh argued. “Look at all the media attention. If it really was old news, why would everyone care so much?”
“Because memories are short and there’s a 24-hour news cycle that needs filling,” Odile said.
“Even though we would freak, in the end it wouldn’t make a difference.” I marveled at the deviousness of the angelic Jennifer Santos. I’d need to learn to watch my step around her.
“See?” Odile gave us a megawatt smile. “I think we can make this work.”
George leaned in. “Trust me, Boo. This will fix us.”
Trust him? Trust him? Now I knew I’d entered Bizarro World.
“Come on, Boo. With one fell swoop we can pay back Micah Price, who’s not only been working to bust open the secrets of our order, but has completely screwed over one of our own. And we can get the Diggers back on track. All three of our tenets. One little punk. What do you say?”
I looked at them. Smart move, putting the most beautiful people in the club on this particular campaign. Odile and George stood there, looking like a cross between a beer commercial and an ad for face wash, and silently encouraged me to let them do their worst.
Three oaths. One caper. And it would make Micah miserable?
“Have at it.”