Secret Society Girl

The guy seemed to be intimating he’d like to make sure that I didn’t have one.

I couldn’t breathe.

And then the cavalry arrived, in the form of the other new taps. Demetria led the charge, followed by half a dozen others. I even saw Jennifer, though George Harrison Prescott was not around.

“No!” Malcolm said. “This is a private interview.”

“Right,” Demetria said. She puffed her chest out at the head patriarch. “Gonna screw with all of us, dipshit?”

“Let’s go,” Malcolm bellowed. He herded us up and moved us past the shield and the crowd. I saw a few familiar faces at the edge of the rabble. Senior Diggers, waiting in the wings. Malcolm nodded to one as he passed. “Get him,” he said, and I had no doubt who it was he meant. “My room. Powwow.”

The words galvanized me, and I found my voice at last. Malcolm dragged me away as I raised my fist at the patriarch to deliver a parting shot. “And, by the way, I don’t live in Cleveland. I’m a suburbs girl. Shaker Heights. Get your facts straight, sucker.”

“Amy!” said Malcolm. “Discretion.”

10. First Meeting

Malcolm hustled us away from the crowd and straight into the side entrance of Calvin College. He handed his set of keys to Greg. “Fourth floor, entryway J. I’ll wait for the others.”

I leaned heavily against the granite wall. Whatever rush of adrenaline had kept me upright for the last few minutes in front of the tomb had finally worn off. “Are we going to try to get in the back way?”

“What back way?” Malcolm blinked at me.

I waved vaguely toward the wall that separated Calvin College from the Rose & Grave property. “The back way into the tomb. The secret tunnel that the President uses during his clandestine visits.”

Malcolm snorted. “Right. Whatever. Not the time for jokes, Amy.”

There was no secret back entrance? God, weren’t any of the things I’d heard about this society true? Let’s see, they weren’t always secret, they weren’t about to gift me with a million dollars, and they weren’t hiding Nazi gold. So, what exactly were those idiots protecting with their Y chromosomes? A bunch of decades-old petty thefts from the medical school’s skeleton collection?

Still, that ass back there had seemed so…so sure of himself. Like he was more than capable of carrying out all of his threats. My legs began to feel a bit weak.

As the Diggers trickled in, Malcolm directed them up to his room. I stood against the weathered granite wall, trying to catch my breath, but my body refused to cooperate. I may not have let the patriarchs see me sweat, but to look at me now, you’d think I was busy making up for it. I tried to chill out, to think of anything but the cold looks I’d received from the men in the human shield. Okay, Amy, think of…grammar. Foreign grammar. After a few moments, Malcolm turned in my direction.

“You okay?”

I shrugged. “Sure. What, you think that guy bothered me?” As soon as he turned back to the gate, I held up my hand. It was trembling.

I clamped it into a fist and resumed conjugating irregular Spanish verbs. (Every Lit major has to take a year of literature in a foreign language. Because I’d had a head start in Spanish, I spent a few semesters misunderstanding Borges and Allende. The French people got to breeze through The Little Prince. What a gyp.)

Okay, snap out of it, Amy. Tengo, tienes, tiene. Tenemos, teneis, tienen. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since joining Rose & Grave, it’s that half the crap I’ve heard about it isn’t true. Tuve, tuvisto, tuvo. Tuvimos, tuvisteis, tuvieron. He’s an old man playing a stupid trick. Tendre, tendras, tendra. Tendremos, tendreis, tendran. He can’t do a thing to me.

I will have, you will have, he, she, or it will have….

Tapping you has fucked up my life.

Then again, maybe I should reserve final judgment until I heard what the senior knights of Rose & Grave have to say about the matter.

Malcolm was back to the cell phone, contacting, I assumed, anyone who’d managed to miss our little showdown. I watched him punch out a few urgent text messages.

RG 911. CC 4 J NOW.

“That’s the best I can do for now,” Malcom said at last, snapping his phone shut. “Come on, Amy. Let’s join the others. We’ll wait for everybody else upstairs.”

“Malcolm,” I said, and my voice had, without my permission, gone rather soft and squeaky. “That guy—”

“Is a world-class dick,” Malcom said. “And no matter what he says, they don’t have the power to kick us out, or do anything else. It’s all hot air. But let’s not talk about it here, okay? Come on, upstairs.”

I followed him into entryway J and we started up the stairs. On the second floor, a suite door opened and the girl with the long brown braid whom I’d first seen when I left Malcolm’s room yesterday looked out at us. I imagined she was curious about the rush hour that had so recently passed on the staircase, but she just looked from me to Malcolm, and her eyes narrowed.

With a good look at her, I realized who the girl was. Genevieve Grady, a fellow junior and the EDN’s current editor-in-chief. I was surprised that she was even home; the EIC of the school’s daily newspaper was a forty-hour-a-week job, whereas mine was relatively cushy—maybe fourteen a month, until we got to publication crunch time. I hadn’t seen Genevieve much at all this year, or even last year, which she’d spent churning out stories and networking at a rate carefully calculated to earn her the coveted position.

Perhaps, I wondered, she’d consent to write the foreword to the “Ambition” issue.

“Back for more, huh, Haskel?” she hissed. “That’s a new one on the fourth floor.”

Malcolm gave her a glance of stone-cold disdain, and ushered me up another flight.

“What’s her problem?” I asked.

Malcolm shrugged. “She’s a bitch. I imagine that knowledge keeps her in a bad mood most of the time.”

He knocked thrice, once, then twice at his own door and it opened to reveal a room in which every flat surface was covered with the behind of a Digger. They clustered on the bed, the futon, the desk, the dresser, and when perches gave out, the floor. I watched Clarissa trying to manipulate her minuscule bottom into an even tinier area of space, and then she waved me over. “Amy, I saved you a seat.”

A quick scan of the room showed it was my only option, so I took it, wondering inwardly why Clarissa seemed so damned determined to buddy up at every opportunity. Had I passed some sort of test? I was a Digger, and therefore deemed an acceptable companion in her estimation?

Of course. Ever since I’d been tapped, people had been treating me differently. The workaday Amy Haskel didn’t spend her Saturday nights flirting with George Harrison Prescott, wasn’t on Clarissa Cuthbert’s radar, and didn’t hold sleepovers with the likes of Malcolm Cabot—even if there was no sex involved. She didn’t engage in shouting matches with distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentlemen who threatened to ruin her life, nor cause older and wiser friends like Glenda Foster to get nervous in her presence.

Some of Rose & Grave’s power might be little more than perception, but perception alone seemed to lend quite a bit of clout.

And I still didn’t realize how much that meant.

“I don’t think we should wait for the others,” Malcolm said. “Let’s come to order.”

The seniors mobilized. Seemingly from nowhere, long black swaths of fabric materialized, and the boys scurried about the room, enshrouding the windows, covering the air vents, and stuffing up the cracks in the door. Soundproofing, though if anyone really wanted to listen in, I doubted that a few pieces of felt would do the trick. Still, in the absence of a real tomb, Diggers couldn’t be choosers.

An apartment over Starbucks, however, might have been preferable. I considered Glenda’s ubiquitous venti lattes. Did she get special treatment over there because she belonged to the society upstairs? Rose & Grave hadn’t even given me a gift card to Cosi.

One of the seniors shrugged. “My turn for Uncle Tony?”

The others nodded and Malcolm grimaced. “Some introduction to the taps, huh?”

“Uncle Tony” picked a paperweight off of Malcolm’s desk and rapped it thrice, once, and twice on the desk. “The time is…III and 30 minutes, Diggers-time. I call to order this…” He looked up. “What meeting is this?” Some of the seniors shrugged.

There was a pattern of three-one-two knocks on the door. Malcolm opened it to reveal Poe, who was scowling and towing along an even more petulant George Harrison Prescott. At once, my heart leapt and sank.

“Seven thousand, one hundred, and twelfth,” Poe announced. “Nice soundproofing, by the way.” Poe pushed George into the room. “Take a seat, kid.”

George plopped down next to Jenny Santos, who made a face and scooted away from him, and he grinned as if he’d just gotten away with something particularly naughty.

The seniors had gone back to padding the entrances to the room, and one was now stuffing throw pillows into the air ducts. When they were satisfied that we’d really blocked out the sound, the one playing “Uncle Tony,” the rotating parliamentary head, started up again.

“In the name of Persephone, Keeper of the Flame of Life and the Shadow of Death…I, um, call to order the Knights….” He trailed off, a sheepish shrug in place. “Sorry. I’m helpless without the Black Book.”

Another senior waved his hand in dismissal. “Whatever. Omnis vincit mors, nos cedamus nemini. Let’s get on with it.”

Poe practically growled in disapproval. “This is precisely the problem. Our club has been entirely too lax with the traditions of the society, and now we’re paying