Secret Society Girl

this afternoon?”

Again with the silence, though this one was punctuated with a few snickers. Finally, Shadow-Who-Smiles (and he was definitely doing it again!) spoke up. “Glenda Foster is not a member of this organization.”

Holy shitzu.

Who were these people?!?

Okay, to be fair, there was still one little corner in my mind that was shouting that Glenda had been lying to me all year, and that she wasn’t a member of Quill & Ink after all. But it was a pretty minuscule corner, the one where all of my most paranoid tendencies live. The rest of my head was busy spinning. I’d been taking this process rather lightly because, hey, it was Quill & Ink. Not a big deal, and I was a sure bet anyway.

But they obviously weren’t Quill & Ink. I was out of my depth, for one of the first times in my life. And I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do.

“I think we’re done here,” Shadow Guy #2 said.

“No, we’re not,” insisted Shadow-Who-Smiles.

Shadow Guy #2 turned around and I caught a glimpse of perfectly shaved neck. “She’s not what we want. We have to be serious about this.”

“I can be serious!” I leaned forward and smacked my hand down on Shadow Guy #2’s notes. I saw his mouth drop open. Oops. “Sorry,” I said, sitting back and folding my hands demurely. “I was a little—confused.”

“Clearly.”

“Can I ask who you people are?”

This time, they all laughed, before Shadow Guy #2 said, “No.”

“So you get a list of my middle-school study-hall proctors and I get squat?”

“That’s why we call it a secret society.” Shadow-Who-Smiles cleared his throat.

“Fair enough.”

Shadow-Who-Smiles flicked his light on and off a few times, and all the members began shuffling the papers on their desks. I wondered what the signal meant.

Okey-doke. I figured I’d humiliated myself enough for one afternoon. I rose from my seat. “Am I free to go?”

“One moment, Ms. Haskel.” Shadow-Who-Smiles put his hand out, and I was surprised that I could see it. Apparently, my eyes were adjusting to the dark. “Tell us. What do you have to offer this organization?”

I bit my tongue to keep from snapping back with, And what organization is that? Okay, so they weren’t Quill & Ink. Someone else was courting me, and I’d royally screwed up any chance I might have had to impress—whoever. The real question was, did I care? After all, this wasn’t my thing. Lydia was the one who wanted to get into a secret society—any prestigious secret society. I just wanted to be in Quill & Ink, so I could keep tabs on which literary agents were hiring assistants and whether or not Cosmopolitan needed interns.

And finally, the absurdity of the whole situation hit me. All the juniors who, like me, had spent an hour in a darkened classroom, answering vague questions about their ambitions and accomplishments for a bunch of shadowy strangers—they hadn’t the foggiest clue to whom they were spilling their guts. Lydia, for all her secretive, superior smugness, didn’t know if she was being courted by Dragon’s Head or punk’d by a bunch of rowdy frat boys. And neither did I.

What did I have to offer this mysterious, unidentified organization? Aside from the finger, which I lifted, to little effect in the darkness.

I straightened my skirt, stuck out my chin, and laughed. “You already know what I have to offer. Straight As in the major, except for that little snafu with Ethiopian Immigrant Narrative; the editorship of the Lit Magazine; participation and leadership in any number of other small campus publications; and thirty pages of a badly written novel. I don’t do drugs, I’ve never been arrested, and from what I hear, I’m not too shabby in bed. Not that any of you people will ever have the opportunity to discover that firsthand.” (Though, to be honest, I’d have no way of knowing, now would I?)

Then I turned on my heel and marched out. And as I exited into the hall, head held high, I thought I caught the flicker of a dozen tiny booklights.

2. Tap Night

The fun part about humiliating yourself in front of a cadre of shadowy figures is that you get to spend the next two days wondering if everyone you pass on campus saw you at your worst. I was in line at the dining hall last night and I swear I saw this trustafarian girl sniggering behind her bulgur-wheat pilaf. I spent the next two hours (WAP forgotten!) trying to figure out which secret society was most likely to tap vegan Environmental Science majors who wear designer dreadlocks and hundred-dollar hemp necklaces—well, other than joke organizations like Joint & Bong.

Cute name, huh? That’s how things go at Eli University. Everyone copies everyone else. Rose & Grave set the trend back in the 1800s, and now anyone with a yen to start a social club has followed their illustrious lead: Book & Key, Sword & Mace, Quill & Ink. There are a few holdouts among the major societies—Dragon’s Head, Serpent, St. Linus Hall—but nothing gives a proposed clandestine organization the Eli air like an ampersand. Lydia and I used to joke that they were in practice for joining law firms—they’re all Blank & Blank as well, right?

That was before Lydia lost her sense of humor when it came to all things secret society. Seriously. I tried to talk to her about my interview that night at dinner, and she responded like my mom whenever I brought up sex. Which is to say, not at all.

The conversation went like this:

Me: So you want to hear what happened at my interview?

Lydia:(fork paused halfway to her mouth) Are you supposed to talk about that?

Me: Why not? I haven’t taken any vows of silence. I don’t even know who they were. Why, did yours tell you not to talk about it?

Lydia:…

Me: They did? Did they tell you who they were?

Lydia:…

Me: They did! Wow, I must have screwed up worse than I thought.

Lydia:(glancing around furtively) Amy, I really, really don’t think we’re supposed to talk about this.

Me: I can talk about anything I want. They’re a bunch of strangers, and they were really rude to me, to boot.

Lydia: Amy! You’re going to ruin your chances.

Me: I don’t think I have any chances. And please. They didn’t bug the tables or anything.

Lydia: Rose & Grave would.

Me: Rose & Grave doesn’t tap women. Just future Presidents.

Lydia:(standing and lifting her tray) I’m not going to keep talking about this here.

Me:(following) Fine, let’s do it in the suite.

But Lydia didn’t go back to the suite. She went to the gym to swim laps, which, considering my long-standing aversion to deep water (my cousin threw me off a dock when I was a kid—don’t like to talk about it), was a downright slap in the face. And as if the Chlorine Defense wasn’t enough, whenever I saw her at all over the following two days, she rushed off before I had a chance to bring up the subject again.

Not that I was sitting around. With commencement just around the corner, I was super-busy with the literary magazine’s commencement issue. Since I wasn’t going to be tapped by Quill & Ink—or any other secret society—I couldn’t afford any more missteps. This was my penultimate issue, and it needed to kick ass.

So, to be blunt, the theme of “Ambition” was not going to cut it.

“Been there, done that,” I informed my second-in-command, managing editor Brandon Weare. “At Eli, Ambition is the new black.”

“What a lovely pull quote for your intro page,” Brandon said, putting the finishing touches on his fifth paper airplane.

“If we pick a good enough theme, I won’t need to jazz it up with taglines.”

“Ah, but then, what sort of Cosmo girl would you be? It seems to be all about the cutesy tagline there. It’s certainly not about actual content.” He launched the plane, and I watched it swoop and dive directly into the smudgy linoleum floor of the magazine office. A nose-heavy dart.

“You read Cosmo?”

“Female sex tips?” He toed the plane. “You betcha.”

Brandon was an expert in the art of “Aerogami,” and since we’d started working together in October, I learned that his chosen designs possessed a direct correlation with his opinion of the manuscript from which he drew his construction materials. Woe betide the writer whose submission merited a four-fold stinger…but if he sailed a square-nosed glider (Ken Blackburn’s Guinness World Record design, I’d learned) past my nose, I should drop everything and read the story.

I’m pretty sure this was not how things worked at Horton.

Not that Brandon would care. He was one of those true geniuses that dotted the campus population, the kind that could compose concertos on breaks from discovering the cure for cancer. His raison d’etre was applied math, but he spared enough time to fit in his knack for writing appallingly good short stories, and to compete with me for magazine editorships (I’d only just barely beat him out for this one). No scrambling for internships or resume stuffers for Brandon. He just went around being quietly brilliant, unapologetically dorky, and universally well liked.

And he had a point about the theme’s potential. Ninety percent of the graduating class already had ambition oozing from their pores. The other ten had daddies that would pound it into them by the time they were thirty. The theme possessed a broad scope, as well as the possibility of incorporating some sort of existentialist statement about the futility of desire, the impossibility of purpose, all the stuff that made future Master’s-in-Creative-Writing-from-Iowa candidates hot.

(Iowa, if you didn’t know, is the place to go to graduate school to learn how to be a novelist. Don’t ask me why. Must be the chemicals in the corn.)

The problem was, I was having enough troubles with ambition myself. Sure, my resume and GPA were in order, but if my snafu of a society interview proved anything, it was that all that accomplishment needed to add up to a plan, or it didn’t count. Did I really want to spend the next month reading achingly bitter or brilliantly