I hereby confess:
There’s something rotten
in the state of Digger.
Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something that’s not over? The start of senior year at Eli seemed engineered to evoke that emotion at every opportunity. Special receptions, teas, parties, barbecues, meetings, lectures, symposiums, brunches—everything proclaimed “The best years of your life are coming to an end!”
Actually, my roommate, Lydia, had a different explanation. “They’re priming the pump for the alumni giving fund. Wait and see.”
I maintain that if they expect to hit me up for extra dough after my monthly student loan bill, they’re unfamiliar with the twenty-thou-a-year—in Manhattan! — editorial internship I have waiting for me after graduation. (That is, if I go to Manhattan. More on that later.)
Tonight’s Prescott College reception was par for the course, but as I’d told George this afternoon, at least there would be free beer.
I stood in front of my desk, brushing my hair with one hand and scrolling through my “welcome back” message from the dean of the Lit department with the other. My hair had grown out a bit over the summer, and in August, I’d capitulated to Odile’s prodding and gotten funky red highlights. She said it would match my tattoo. Of course, not many people saw said tattoo, so my correlated coloring hadn’t gotten the appreciation it deserved from anyone who wasn’t one of the five “Diggirls.”
In her adjoining bedroom, Lydia was singing. If ever a girl loved shopping period, it was my best friend. But I don’t think I’d ever seen her as happy as she was when she got back to the suite earlier. I wandered out to the wood-paneled common room, but her bedroom door was still shut, its whiteboard decorated with a blue ink smiley face sporting orange ink pigtails.
Singing and pigtails? Yeah, I was going to hear about this later on for sure. (Unless it was about something going on in her own secret society.) But as long as she was busy…
I ducked back into my room, carefully angled my computer screen away from the door, and minimized my Eli mail window.
A moment later, I was logged on to my other e-mail account. One new message.
From: Lancelot-D176@phimalarlico.org
To: Bugaboo-D177@phimalarlico.org
Subject: good luck tomorrow!
how’s my favorite little sib? all set for the stragglers? do me a favor, and try not to tear apart the foundations of the society at the initiation. i know that’s what you’re famous for. give poe a hug for me, huh?
“Hey,” Lydia said, sticking her head in. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah, just a minute,” I responded. “I’m reading an e-mail.” I took a deep breath. Don’t ask from whom. How was I to explain my sudden kinship with the wildly popular and recently graduated Malcolm Cabot? But Lydia made it easy on me.
“Okay.” She ducked out.
everything’s great up here. it’s so beautiful, bugaboo, i wish you could see it. i’ve been making a few friends, but we rarely talk about anything but fish. (that reminds me, give hale a heads-up to expect a large shipment of halibut.) i won’t lie; it’s been a bit of a letdown after the kind of closeness I had w/ the d’s at e, but I guess that’s the point. nothing is ever going to be like r&g. i’m going into juno at the end of the month. should be a fun trip. you know what they say about alaska: five men for every woman. though they never do mention how many men for every man.;-)
on the homefront, the latest report says i’m suffering from *exhaustion*—
“You know,” Lydia said, very close. I jumped a foot. She stood beside me, idly rooting through the earrings scattered across the top of my dresser. “If we get there after all the Master’s seven-layer cookies are gone, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Could she see? The text was small, and there were no incriminating graphics on the page. Just to be sure, I alt-tabbed back to the mailbox and minimized.
A second before the screen disappeared, I caught sight of another bold subject heading in my in-box. New mail.
WARNING: AMY HASKEL
Lydia waved a hand in front of my face. “Ames. Let’s go.”
I slammed the laptop closed.
Lydia jumped back. “I wasn’t snooping!”
Who sent that? Who was using my barbarian name to send me e-mail on the secret Diggers-only, society terminology—only, society time-stamps—only e-mail? It had to be from another knight of Rose & Grave. Only they knew of our secret domain or the configurations of our e-mail addresses. This had better be some kind of joke—something worth the two dollar fine for using barbarian names in society missives.
“There’s no reason to freak out,” my roommate continued.
But there was. Because Phimalarlico webmail was only supposed to come from others in the phimalarlico.org domain. It was a “virtual tomb”—no one but Diggers inside, heavily password-protected, no barbarians allowed.
Lydia was still talking. “Ten seconds and I’m leaving without you.”
“No, wait!” I cried. “I promise, ten seconds, I just have to—”
Lydia rolled her eyes and stalked out, murmuring, “Ten—nine—eight…”
I opened my laptop again.
From: amy.haskel@eli.edu
To: Bugaboo-D177@phimalarlico.org
Subject: WARNING: AMY HASKEL
YOU THINK ITS OVER BUT ITS NOT
FROM WITHIN DOTH PERSEPHONE ROT
I closed the window as the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Leaving aside for a moment the lack of apostrophes and phenomenally bad sense of rhythm in the poem (you can take the girl out of the editorial office…), it was one seriously chilling message.
And it apparently came from me. Which meant someone out there, who knew my society identity—which, I guess, could be any Digger—had hacked into my regular e-mail in order to send it to me. What was I supposed to do? If I told the other Diggers, it would seem as if the security leak was my fault, as if I’d somehow been less-than-discreet about my society e-mail.
“Two, one and a half, one!” Lydia warned from the common room.
“Coming!” I called, and rushed to meet her.
We’d “squatted” during the housing lottery last spring, betting on keeping our top-pick junior suite rather than risking a crappy draw that might lead to a less-than-desirable senior year rooming situation. Like something on the fourth floor. It might be great for our calves, but so not worth the hassle.
Lydia stood near the door, arms crossed, foot tapping. “Can you tell me what was so important, or is it verboten?”
I fingered the Rose & Grave pin I was wearing inside my pocket. “Some bizarre Salon op-ed.”
“Aren’t they all bizarre?”
“Says the woman addicted to Daily Kos?” I replied as we lumbered down the steps of the entryway and into the Prescott College courtyard.
The air was still late-August warm and all the windows of Prescott were open, showering snatches of hip-hop music, scholarly debates, video game sound effects, roommate squabbles, and cello tuning onto the students milling about on the lawn. The cacophony was a signature start-of-term sound, one I would no doubt associate with Eli for the rest of my life.
Beneath a yellow pool of light from a lamppost, a group of students kicked around a hackey sack. Nearby, a circle of outdoor types sat tailor-style in the grass, drinking from Nalgene bottles and reminiscing about the bonding they’d done on their freshmen outdoor orientation trips. In a small stone niche, two black-clad Theater majors were smoking and arguing about whether their company should start out the year with Ibsen (too trendy), Sartre (too light), Miller (too chaste), or Williams (too avant-garde).
We arrived at the Master’s house, and if the crowd we glimpsed inside was anything to go by, we’d definitely missed the seven-layer cookies. At the door, we were met by George Harrison Prescott, who was holding fast to the arm of a pretty, dark-haired woman.
“George, let go of me. I’m perfectly capable of walking by myself,” she said, then proceeded to tumble off the stoop.
Lydia and I were right in position to catch her.
“Excuse me, I’m so sorry,” the woman said quickly, straightening her body, her skirt, and her hair. I glanced at George, who was wearing an expression I’d never seen before. His jaw was all tight. It did wonderful things for his cheekbones, which already deserved kudos.
“Mom, these are some of my Prescott College friends. This is Lydia Travinecek and Amy Haskel. Ladies, this is my mother, Kate Anderson Prescott.”
The woman eyed us. “George Harrison doesn’t have girl friends,” she said coolly. “Like father, like son.” Then she turned and marched toward the drama couple—who had moved on to a discussion about whether or not Shakespeare was too obvious—to bum a cigarette.
I swallowed and looked at George, whose permasmile was back in place. “Long story,” he said with a shrug.
The door opened again, and out came a very distinguished-looking man in his mid-forties. He glanced quickly around the corridor before his gaze landed on our little group. When his eyes met mine, his eyebrows raised, and I got a good look at the copper-colored eyes George had inherited. “You!” the man said.
“You’re looking young, Mr. Prescott,” I replied. The last time I’d seen this man, he’d been wearing Academy Award—quality aging makeup, a gray wig, and a mask made of roses.
His eyes flashed toward Lydia, and a scowl turned down the corners of his mouth. Oops, right, Barbarian-in-Vicinity. Alert, alert.
“Where did she go?” Mr. Prescott asked George, who cocked his thumb at the stone nooks, then stuck his hands in his pockets as Mr. Prescott took off after his ex-wife, sometime lover, and decades-long sparring partner.
“It’s dead in there,” George said to us. “Now at least. Amy, are you going to Clarissa’s thing?”
“Um…” I hadn’t quite been able to explain to Lydia why my sworn enemy was now sending me party invites and showing up in our suite for impromptu chats. She probably suspected I’d gone shallow in my old age. Or maybe she figured it was one more Digger-inspired change that had come over me since being tapped. She’d adjusted splendidly to the sudden location switch of my summer internship from Manhattan to D.C. (mostly because it meant we could stay together over the summer). However, we’d enjoyed a strict moratorium on all secret society—related conversations since May, and activities skirting that topic—such as a party with a Digger friend—might be dangerous. Whenever I brought up anything that could be construed as heading in the direction of society talk, she clammed up faster than a biochem major after mid-terms. And I thought Rose & Grave valued secrecy! Evidently, we had nothing on Lydia’s brothers.
My roommate, however, was even now on her way into the Master’s house.
“They’re out of the cookies,” George warned, and Lydia slumped.
So, it was off to Clarissa’s shindig. Clarissa Cuthbert lives in a very swank penthouse on the top floor of one of the classier apartment buildings in town. Her dad is some sort of Wall Street bigwig who thinks nothing of throwing money at a problem. The Cuthberts had even donated a very valuable Monet to Eli upon their daughter’s admission to the university, though the ongoing campus debate about which came first, the admission or the donation, was not one I participated in anymore, for two reasons:
1) Clarissa is a fellow knight, and also a friend.
2) She told me the truth last year. (The donation, and it doesn’t bother her, either.)
Clarissa is also rather notorious for her champagne-tasting parties, to which I’d never before rated an invitation. Apparently, all it took to pass the bar around here was an initiation to an elite society, and of course, the subsequent bonding over a vast misogynistic conspiracy that almost ruined us both. Clarissa and I were pretty tight these days.
But try explaining that to your barbarian best friend.
“I don’t get it; why is it we like this bitch now?” Lydia asked, as we were ushered into an apartment scented with calla lilies and lit by hundreds of floating tea lights. A man in white tails offered us slender glasses of rosé champagne from a silver tray.
“What’s not to like?” George said, taking his. “Thank you, my good man.”
Clarissa Cuthbert, a vision in white silk and salon-sprayed tan, met us a moment later. “Darling!” she cried, air-kissing me on both cheeks as if we hadn’t spent the afternoon together in a darkened tomb. “George, sweetheart!” Same for him. She turned to my roommate. “Lydia, right? We met last spring.”
“Hi,” Lydia said. “Nice digs.”
“Thank you! Canapés are on the back sideboard.” She turned to point and her long, perfectly highlighted blond hair swung over her shoulder, revealing for a moment the edge of the Rose & Grave tattoo on her shoulder blade. George looked at me and raised his eyebrow. Lydia clamped down on my arm. Crap.
POSSIBLE RESPONSES
1) “What tattoo? I think there was something in her hair.”
2) “Roses. How cliché.”
3) Deny, deny, deny.
But, as it turns out, Lydia’s grip had not been inspired by the tat. “Oh, my God, Amy. Don’t. Look.”
Of course, I looked. Across the room, picking through a tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries, stood Brandon Weare. His hair was even longer this year, and streaked with golden highlights. His tan had deepened over the summer, like always. Brandon. From what I heard at the Lit Mag, he’d just gotten back to campus. He hadn’t been at school in time to help me on the frosh issue. Luckily, I’d had Arielle for backup. It was little more than a clips issue, so no biggie, but—
Lydia’s grip on my arm grew tighter. His plate loaded with fruit, Brandon crossed the room and joined a group of attendees. One turned and smiled at him. She had straight black hair. She had wide-set black eyes. She had an eensy waist. And as I watched, she snagged a strawberry and brought it to his lips.
I threw back the champagne.
“Maybe she’s helping him because his hands are full,” Lydia suggested.
The girl kissed a trace of chocolate from the corner of his mouth.
“Or not.”
The two of us shuffled behind a shoji screen. “Okay, game plan,” I said, steeling myself. “I’ve seen him, so the initial shock has passed.”
“Right. Step one achieved without public humiliation.”
“So the next question is: Approach him or wait for him to approach me?”
“Tough call. Approaching him puts the power in his hands,” Lydia said, “but in this crowd, he might not see you at all, and the resulting ego blow would be—”
“Crippling.” I nodded. “It’s a dilemma.”
The screen shook slightly. “Knock, knock,” George said. “Is this some kind of private summit usually reserved for group trips to the ladies’ room?”
“Ah, a wingman!” Lydia exclaimed.
“Negatory.” If I was going to appear on anyone’s arm, it wouldn’t be George Harrison Prescott’s. Brandon had broken up with me after discovering I’d hooked up with George mere minutes before I’d agreed to make our friends-with-benefits relationship official. I doubt such a display now would improve my rating on the slut-o-meter.
“What are you two plotting?”
“George,” I said, “be a darling and get us more champagne.”
As soon as he was gone, I slipped out from behind the screen and sashayed across the room, head held high. With my snazzy red highlights, I was hardly about to blend into Clarissa’s “Martha Stewart is my godmother” white décor. He’d see me, and he’d stop me to say hi.
But not before Clarissa did. “Amy, honey, come meet my good friend from camp!” One perfectly French-manicured hand on my elbow later, there I was, face-to-face with long black hair, wide-set eyes, eensy-weensy waist, and—dear Lord, those boobs couldn’t be real, could they? “This is Felicity Bower and her boyfriend, Brandon. Felicity and I spent six summers together at Camp Lake Hubert for Girls.”
And that simply couldn’t be her real name, either. “Hi, I’m Amy Haskel,” I said in as strong a voice as I could muster.
Felicity’s eyes got even bigger, but it was Brandon who spoke. “Hi, Amy. How was your summer?”
And then he hugged me.
I pulled back right before my major organs went into emergency shutdown. “It was good.” I swallowed. My throat was parched. Jesus, where was George with that champagne? Where was George with that body and that face and those eyes? Felicity was blinking at me. “I was in D.C., working for a think tank.” Was Brandon taller? What was up with the five o’clock shadow on his chin? Who did he think he was, Keanu Reeves? Did Felicity actually go for that shit? “We were putting together narratives by exploited women.”
“Wow!” Felicity said. “What an amazing job! How did you score that one?”
“It sort of fell in my lap, last minute,” I offered lamely. The kind of last minute that comes of knowing a Digger patriarch. Of course, the society owed me after screwing up my first job. A waiter passed by and I swiped another glass of champagne.
“Man,” Felicity said, “all I did this summer was house-sit my uncle’s place.”
Clarissa heaved a dramatic sigh. “Woe is you, lounging in the Hong Kong mansion.”
Felicity blushed, beautifully. Of course. “Well, I almost died of boredom until I met this one.” She ruffled Brandon’s hair. “And then my uncle totally made it all up to me when he lent us his yacht for our cruise around Fiji.”
Okay, she totally knew about me and Brandon, so she was just doing that to be a bitch. As soon as he saw the focus of my gaze, Brandon caught her hand and pulled it down.
(I’m not ashamed to admit he’s a far better person than I am. Had he treated me the way I’d treated him, I would have basked in showing off my new, drop-dead-gorgeous, rich-as-Pluto significant other in front of him.)
“No dates for me this summer,” Clarissa said, oddly oblivious to the tension. “After Mom found Dad in flagrante with the dog-walker, she went on this whole I-am-woman-hear-me-purr kick. Completely cut the Y chromosome out of her existence. Except for the divorce lawyer, of course.”
“What happened to your dad?” I asked. There was no love lost between Mr. Cuthbert and me, not after the way he and his Rose & Grave patriarch cronies had sabotaged our tap class. Of course, he’d sabotaged his daughter at the same time. I wondered exactly how daddy dearest and his dog-walker had gotten caught.
“Considering the heinous details of the case,” Clarissa began, then shot me a look reminding me, as if I needed it, never to get on the bad side of the Digger named Angel, “we suffered obvious emotional trauma such that…well, let’s just say my father readily arranged to keep us both in the manner to which we’d become accustomed.” She stopped the latest server. “Beluga, anyone?”
“Actually, we’d better get going,” Brandon said, slipping an arm around Felicity’s waist. “It was nice meeting you, Clarissa.” He nodded at me. “See you later, Amy.”
And then they were gone, before I had time to figure out whether it was a see you around kind of “see you later” or an I’m going to call you so we can discuss this kind of “see you later.” I wasn’t given much chance to ponder it either, as we were immediately set upon by the Prescott College contingent—George and Lydia.
“Well?” Lydia asked.
“He looks different, he smells different, and he’s dating a girl named Felicity.” Still quite the hugger, though.
Comprehension dawned chez Clarissa. “So you know that guy pretty well?”
“Biblically.”
She groaned (though George was grinning). “Total social faux pas. So sorry, Amy.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m fine.”
“Felicity?” Lydia cocked an eyebrow.
I glared at her in warning. “I said I’m fine.”
“Which is more than I can say for some of my other guests.” Clarissa gestured to Jenny Santos, who was sitting on a white couch looking disdainful. I don’t know what that girl’s deal is. If you’re going to take part in something, shouldn’t you commit yourself? She’d skipped out on our rehearsal earlier, and now she was acting too good for a fellow Digger’s party. And while I could dismiss the former as merely overextending her activities, I’m not quite sure what motivated the latter. If she didn’t want champagne, Clarissa no doubt had plenty of fancy French spring water.
“She’s been hiding out all evening,” Clarissa said. “George, want to come with me and get her circulating?”
George began to edge toward the sideboard. “I think I’ll pass. That girl has always looked at me like she’s Salome and I’m John the Baptist.”
If he used lines like that more often, Jenny would probably like him better. Clarissa went off to cheer up our resident party-pooping Digger, and Lydia and I found space to perch on the edge of a wingback chair.
“So what do you think was up with George’s parents?” Lydia asked over the din of the party. “His dad acted like he knew you.”
“I think we met move-in day freshman year,” I lied smoothly. “Or maybe he got me mixed up with one of the billion girls always dangling off his son.” I knew all about George’s divorced parents’ long-term love-hate (or at least lust-hate) relationship, but George had told me that in confidence, Digger to Digger. The report wasn’t for Lydia’s barbarian ears, or even, as far as I was concerned, for other Diggers until George felt like sharing it himself. Had I not spent last spring keeping the secret of my society big sib Malcolm’s sexual identity?
Malcolm’s e-mail made him sound so lonely up there in Alaska. I understood his desire to take a gap year before starting business school, especially given the trauma of coming out to his ultra-conservative governor father, but did he have to do it in such an isolated locale? That reminded me, I didn’t finish reading his e-mail.
Or figure out who had sent me the other one. I looked over at Clarissa and Jenny, whose company had grown. “Excuse me for a minute,” I said to Lydia, who was already waving to a fellow Debate Team member near the cheese fondue, and crossed the room.
The knot of girls on Jenny’s couch had only two things in common:
1) A small tattoo of a rose inside an elongated hexagon somewhere on their bodies.
2) The fact that they’d once taken on a group of powerful and vicious men and lived to tell the tale.
Other than that, we didn’t look as if we’d be friends at all, and I wondered if—extreme circumstances aside—we really were. Sure, we’d bonded as taps and at various society events over the summer, but once we got into the schedule of classes and regular meetings, what would we have to talk about? A club of Diggers was supposed to offer one another support and advice. But what did a Hollywood starlet like Odile Dumas have to say to a computer whiz like Jenny Santos? What kind of support could a radical activist like Demetria offer to a socialite like Clarissa Cuthbert?
Still, you’d think I was the only one questioning stuff if you saw the enthusiasm with which they greeted me. “Hey, chica!” Odile called, pulling me down next to her. “We were talking about Mara. One more girl for our little revolution, eh?”
“I saw her this afternoon,” I said. “She’s kind of intense.”
“She’s a classist bitch.” Demetria sniffed. “Did you read her column in The Ivory Tower about how they never should have let women into Eli?”
“Sounds like a girl the patriarchs would like,” I said. “Did she really write that?” The Ivory Tower is this crazy conservative paper on campus.
“Yes. Said the school was at its height before they sullied the student population with an excess of estrogen. Wonder what she thinks of breaking the gender barrier at our club?”
“I wonder why she even accepted the tap,” Clarissa said.
“You expect a hypocrite to act rationally?” Jenny asked. “She thinks women shouldn’t be at Eli, but she’s a student here. If she really believed we don’t belong here, wouldn’t she be cooling her heels at Wellesley or someplace?” She toyed with the end of her long, dark braid and tucked her chin into her chest, as if the outburst had sapped all of her socializing strength. “Sounds less as if she’s saying what she really means than that she’s parroting the words of her cronies.” And then she clammed up completely, as if afraid to say more on the subject.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t seem the submissive type in class today. Took on Professor Branch and everything.”
“Well, we’ll get the scoop tomorrow,” Clarissa said.
I twirled the glass in my hand. “Hey, guys?” I said, tentatively. “I have to tell you something. Before I came here tonight, I was checking my D-mail, and there was this message….”
They all froze. They all looked down at their drinks. And then Jenny said, “So, you got it, too?”