Secret Society Girl

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.

I spotted Malcolm and Clarissa and sauntered over. “What is this?”

“The backlash,” Clarissa sniffed, shooting a glance over her shoulder at the line of men. “Assholes.”

Well, that was helpful. I turned my attention to Malcolm, who was in the midst of a heated argument with his cell phone.

“I don’t care, just get your ass here—now. I can’t believe they went through with their threat. The bastards. No, no, of course not—What, you want me to just go up there and confront them? You aren’t hearing me, man, I’m telling you, there’s a crowd.”

“Just as they wanted it, too, no doubt,” observed Greg Dorian, sidling up on the other side.

“They’re patriarchs?” I said, trying to feel my way through the dark.

Everyone else nodded, leaving me wondering what meeting I’d missed.

“Look. Just get here before the newspapers do, okay?” Malcolm slammed the clamshell phone closed and commenced pacing.

Josh joined the group from where he’d been idling nearby. “Screw the crowd, Cabot. I say, if they don’t care to protect their secrecy, then why should we?”

Malcolm shook his head. “Because, newbie, unlike those guys, we actually have a secret to protect.” He glared at the shield group. “Very clever composition. I’d bet a hundred dollars that not one of them was tapped after D134—er, that is, the class of 1964.”

“What happened in 1964?” one of the other new taps asked.

“Elitist guilt. It was no longer cool to be a Digger, and they went underground.”

“Wait a second.” I sliced my hand in front of Malcolm to make him hold up. “Are you saying all this secrecy stuff is new?”

Malcolm clucked his tongue. “No respect for history, young’uns. Yes and no. We were never supposed to talk about what we do inside that tomb, or even talk about the membership. It was almost a joke, back in the 19th century when everyone would be wearing full suits everywhere, with their society pins on their suit lapels right at eye level. Insolence. Your pin would be staring everyone right in the face, but they couldn’t breathe a word about it, or you’d walk out the door.”

Things hadn’t changed too much, I reflected.

“But that same membership wasn’t a secret,” Malcolm went on. “Everyone knew who was in Rose & Grave. Hell, they used to publish the list of Digger taps in the New York Times every spring.”

“But, the oath…” I stammered. So Lydia had been right. But what kind of crap was that? If it wasn’t a secret, why did they call it a secret society? They were supposed to kill people who told! Or stick them in a dungeon. Or punish them. Or something. (Come on, you thought so, too.) They weren’t supposed to publish their names in the frickin’ New York Times!

Though, I reasoned, that might be a good thing for me. A lot of publishing people read the “paper of record.”

I clearly needed to brush up on society lore (as soon as I figured out a way to slip it into my schedule).

“It was a different oath. They didn’t talk about what happened behind the closed doors of the tomb, but everyone knew who was in the club. And that was becoming a problem. Diggers were actually getting harassed on campus. Potential taps didn’t want to be associated with the organization. We started receiving”— Malcolm shuddered—“rejections from taps. So, to survive, the membership became informally secret. Over the decades, tradition turned it into formality. Times change and so do we.” He clenched his fist and I thought he might shake it at the patriarchs. “Don’t they get that? Times fucking change!”

Demetria popped up in a patterned scarf and a pair of battered, paint-splattered overalls. “Hey, gang’s all here! Some protest, huh? Pretty good for a bunch of old guys.”

“I still say we confront them,” Josh said.

“That’s just what they want,” Malcolm argued. “Give them the excuse they need to nail us.”

Clarissa seemed to agree. “They didn’t take the same oath of secrecy we did. And going up to them in front of all these other people would be a broken oath on a silver platter. Ammunition. Pardon the mixed metaphors.”

“Then let’s call the police,” I suggested. “Don’t we have serious pull from them? At the very least, we could make them break up the crowd.” I was met with five imperious, incredulous stares.

“Pull?” Clarissa asked. “You’re joking, right?”

“Hey, guys, what’s up?” Kevin Lee, a.k.a. Frodo, skidded in, arching his neck to see over the heads of the gathered bystanders.

But clearly a group of seven exceeded the limits of Malcolm’s plausible deniability and he threw up his hands. “People, people, do none of you understand the value of discretion? Disperse, disperse.”

And everyone did, melting into the crowd with such alacrity that I lost track of them (and any chance of getting a straight answer) almost immediately.

I turned around twice, scanning for other Diggers, and finally caught sight of the senior I knew only as Poe. He was sitting on the steps of the English department, a little ways away from everyone else, pretending to read from a volume of Nietzsche while snacking on a bag of Doritos and watching the proceedings with an inscrutable eye.

Poe. Why’d it have to be Poe? As I saw it, approaching him already set me up with a handful of problems.

POSSIBLE DIFFICULTIES

1) I didn’t know his real name. Awkward, awkward.

2) He was positioned as far away from the action as one could possibly get.

3) I hate the jerk.

But the pickings were slim. I couldn’t even find Clarissa in the crowd anymore, and the blond bitch at least held the distinction of not being a person who had threatened my life recently. I took the stairs two at a time, and came to a halt directly in front of him.

“Ah, Miss Haskel,” Poe said, snapping his book shut. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Exquisite. I’m looking for a straight answer on what’s going on here.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You sound like a member of the fourth estate. Interesting. And here I thought Cabot was prevaricating.”

Dude, the SATs were four years ago. Get a life. “Listen, what’s the deal with those guys?”

Poe brushed nacho cheese dust off on the leg of his pleated dress pants, which he’d paired with a rather shabby white undershirt. Fashion victim, on top of everything else. “Those guys, as you so eloquently put it, are patriarchs merely acting upon the board of trustees’s promise, which most of my club believed to be a bluff.”

And Poe hadn’t, clearly. “What promise?”

“To close the tomb if we were so bold as to carry through with our intent to tap members of the fairer sex.” He nodded in deference to me.

The backlash…“What! This is all because of us?”

“You and the other females,” he continued as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “They refuse to recognize your inclusion.”

I tossed my hair. “They need to join the 21st century.” Or even the 20th.

“And furthermore, the board and supporting coalition of unwilling patriarchs intend to visit a punishment upon those who acted without their permission. They