Secret Society Girl

passed. I felt the Rose & Grave pin burning like a brand against my hip. Malcolm was right. I did feel the difference.

I pushed open the heavy wooden doors guarding the entryway and emerged into the sunny Calvin College courtyard. Brandon’s entryway was on the other side of the building, so it was unlikely that I might have run into him while leaving Malcolm’s room. And from what I could see, he wasn’t in the courtyard, either. I glanced up at Brandon’s suite window, wondering if I should drop by while I was on his side of the campus. No, I’d see him at the office later this weekend anyway, and there was a strong possibility that any aggressive move on my part (e.g., showing up unannounced at his dorm) would be taken as a signal to launch into The Talk. Or maybe Number Seven.

From the entrance of Calvin College, I could see the brown sandstone walls of the Rose & Grave tomb. My tomb. I fingered the little gold pin, and resisted the urge to head over and test out my memory of all the secret combinations and tricks it took to get inside (like, if you twist the knob the wrong way, you accidentally set off the doorbell, alerting anyone within that there’s a non-member on the property). But there’d be plenty of time to play Digger. I was pretty sure Lydia was waiting for me back at the suite, just dying to see what a fully initiated member of Rose & Grave looked like.

Boy, was I wrong.

The doorknob to our suite had been smeared with a dark, reddish-brown substance. I opened it gingerly, only to see more of the liquid had dribbled a path across our thrift-store area rug and straight into Lydia’s bedroom. Her torn wind-breaker lay in a heap by the entrance to her bedroom, and a pair of mud-caked shoes were overturned on the threshold. There were feathers everywhere, and the air smelled like burnt hair and bile. I immediately cracked a window and started fanning in a current with the help of Lydia’s Rocks for Jocks binder. As soon as I could breathe again, I picked my way across the floor and peeked in her room. Her lavender duvet lay in a poufy heap on her bed, but Lydia herself was nowhere to be seen. There were more smeared, rust-colored fingerprints on her desk chair and closet door.

I swallowed. Was it blood?

One thing was certain: Whatever her society’s initiation ritual, it made the staining power of pomegranate juice look pretty pale by comparison. At least Poe’s coffin hadn’t left any marks.

And where was Lydia? Her abandoned clothes made it clear that she wasn’t napping the day away on her society big sibling’s futon. Either she was out buying a can of Lysol, or…I dipped a finger in the puddle by the floor and took a whiff. An acrid, sour scent assaulted my nostrils. Yep, blood. Those bastards made my best friend bleed.

Maybe she’d gone to the health center to get…stitched up? I hoped she hadn’t been forced to limp all the way out to the Department of University Health (DUH, and again, not so much an acronym as a philosophy, since whether you enter with the Hama virus or a hangnail, the first test they administer is invariably for pregnancy) while her roommate of three years had tickle fights in Calvin College with some guy she hadn’t known before yesterday. Altogether, not a banner first day as a Digger. I thought about what Malcolm had said.

It’s no accident that all my closest buds are society members now.

Well, it wouldn’t happen to me! I don’t care what kind of oath I took, my real friends came first. I surveyed the wreck of our suite.

Oh, God, Lydia, please be okay. I don’t even care if you tell me what society you’re in, as long as you’re all right.*

8. Barbarians

For the first fifteen minutes, I blithely convinced myself that I was just cleaning up. Then I spent a good quarter of an hour under the happy self-delusion that such discovery would assist me in tracking down my roommate. After that, I simply admitted the truth: I was damn curious.

Are you wondering why I wasn’t actively frantic?

THINGS I DISCOVERED

THAT CALMED ME DOWN

1) Lydia had taken the time to write down the phone messages before she left. Must not have been in too much of a hurry.

2) The first-aid kit we kept on the bookshelf hadn’t been touched. Must not have been hurt.

3) In one of the little puddles of blood, I found a chunk of ground chuck.

That’s right. Lydia’s society peeps had scared me half to death with a splash of raw hamburger. And hell if I knew what it meant. My society liked pomegranates. Maybe hers liked meat loaf. Or maybe the members had spent too much time watching The Ten Commandments and had decided to borrow the Semitic symbolism of smearing blood on a door to indicate who was in-the-know. Either way, Lydia would be in for an earful when she came back. Rotting hamburger in the common room? So not cool.

Round about the forty-minute mark, I heard the door to our suite open. My pin quest had stranded me waist-deep in the back of Lydia’s closet, methodically searching her winter coat pockets, where I knew Lydia kept her real valuables. But all I’d found were her emergency traveler’s checks, her passport, and her spare P.O. Box key.

Drat.

“Welcome to my bedroom,” she said dryly from the threshold.

“Lydia!” I launched myself at her. “Oh my God, girl, what have you been doing!”

She held up a plastic bag. “Mr. Clean.”

Undaunted, I pressed forward. “What happened here?” I asked. “The feathers, the dirt, the mess on the doorknob?”

No answer.

“There’s blood on the floor.”

No answer.

“Lydia! Talk to me.” I followed her back out to the common room. “I was so worried about you, when I came in and the common room…” I gestured weakly to the mess.

She mopped up one of the red pools with a wad of paper towels. “Well, I was worried about you when I came in and you were MIA.” She kept her face to the floor. “Feel like telling me where you spent the night?”

“Calvin College.”

She froze, there on the floor, then looked up at me. “Really?”

“Yes.” Not a lie. Not really.

She stood up and looked at me, a blush spreading across her skin. “Oh, Amy, I feel like such an ass. I thought—I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “What are you going to do about this? He’s a nice guy, you know.”

“Yeah.” And I was no longer just using him for sex. Brandon had now become my alibi. “He is. I’m a jerk.”

She hugged me, hard. “You’re not. You care about him. It’s not your fault that you’re a mess when it comes to men.”

“Hey!” I smacked her on the shoulder and she pulled away.

“Look, I feel awful that I’ve been letting all this society crap get in the way of our friendship.”

“I think we both have,” I replied, almost glad of the lie now, since it seemed to have broken whatever weird tension had blanketed our suite since that letter showed up. I just wanted to put this all behind me. Yesterday’s argument, the mess in the common room, the way I’d actually sunk to going through Lydia’s stuff—Oh! Of course I couldn’t find her pin. I’m such an idiot. She’s wearing the damn thing. I checked her out surreptitiously, but if there was a society pin on her person, she kept it as hidden as I did.

Well, good. At least we weren’t shoving our society memberships in each other’s faces then refusing to spill details. We had been putting the society stuff before each other. “Let’s not do that anymore, okay?” I suggested, trying not to get a better look at a flash of shine I saw above her jeans pocket. It was probably her pin, but I wasn’t going to be tempted. See? I could do this. “Let’s just…not talk about it.”

Lydia surveyed the mess, then eyed me carefully. “You know that’s going to be tough, right?”

I nodded. I knew. It would be the elephant-shaped puddle of blood in the room. I loved my relationship with Lydia, but now everything would change. Like us disappearing every Thursday evening instead of hanging out to do Gumdrop Drops. Like spending the night in a bed with your gay society big sib and not being able to dish to your roommate afterward. Like leaving your best friend out of what was about to become the most important part of your Eli career.

The phone rang and I picked it up without answering Lydia. “Hello?”

“Good morning!” my mother exclaimed. “You must have been sleeping pretty deeply not to have heard me before.”

My mother likes to play this game where she calls me early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, trying to catch me being not in my bed. You wouldn’t believe how many early breakfast meetings I’ve had in the last three years.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. “When did you call? Lydia and I were out shopping.” Lydia smiled indulgently.

“Oh. Well, that explains it.” My mother doesn’t press to uncover obvious lies. I bet she called at eight, before we could even be expected to be at the 24-hour pharmacy. She really doesn’t want to know the truth, she just can’t prevent herself from confirming her obscene fears. After all, I’m her baby girl. “So, are you studying hard?”

“You know it.” This is the Number Two thing she always asks. Sometimes I can follow a script for the conversation. I was so tempted to reply, No, but that’s okay, because my posh secret society guarantees me that I’ll ace my exams with the help of their decades’ worth of cheat sheets. But I couldn’t tell her anything about that. Not even my mom. Which meant that her Number Three standard question was going to be a bust as well.

And here it was, Number Three: “That’s good, sweetie. Have you been up to anything interesting lately?”

Does drinking pomegranate juice out of a human skull and swearing undying fealty to a shadow organization dressed in outlandish costumes count? “Um…nope. My life’s pretty much been the same-old, same-old.”

Lydia shook her head as she went back to scrubbing the floor. I tugged the hem of my shirt down over my belt loops, over the tiny gold pin that was already