Diana Peterfreund - Secret Society Girl

I clenched my jaw. “Then let me describe it to you.”

“Oh, please do!” She smiled sweetly. “Especially what’s on the inside.”

I sat down on the chair opposite her. “Clarissa, I’m not kidding around here. Give it back.”

She hesitated, frowned, and handed it over. I snatched it out of her claws and, after ensuring the seal remained unbroken, shoved it between the covers of WAP. Well, that was easier than I thought it would be. Dude, if it were me, I’d have put up a real fight to get a look inside her letter.

All business between us seemingly at an end, I rose to go.

“Wait, Amy.” She touched my arm, and I was quite proud of myself for not jerking away in revulsion. “We should talk.”

“About what?” I said haughtily.

“You know about what.” Her eyes softened for a second. “Please?”

What a crock. Like she’d be my friend now that I had won the approval of a group like Rose & Grave? I pulled out of her grip. “Sorry, Clarissa. I’m not into slumming.”

The inside of the letter had been burned in places, and large charred blotches left black streaks on my hands as I tried to unfold it and read the writing. Like before, the print was lopsided on the page, which was folded into an irregular hexagon. This time, it smelled like smoke.

This is what it said:

Neophyte Haskel,

At five minutes past eight this evening, wearing neither metal, nor sulfur, nor glass, leave the base of Whitney Tower and walk south on High Street. Look neither to the right nor to the left. Pass through the sacred pillars of Hercules and approach the Temple. Take the right Book in your left hand and knock thrice upon the sacred portals. Tell no one what you do.

— Rex Grave

Um, okaaaay. I knew what all those words meant, but the sum was still a mystery. Who wears sulfur? The glass restriction was okay, since I was blessed with 20/20 vision, but the metal thing would be a tough one. Jeans were out—what with all those copper rivets and the zipper and buttons. In fact, most of my pants had metal zippers in them, and even the button-fly ones had metal buttons. Was I supposed to wear a skirt? Sweatpants?

Lydia knocked on the door as I was ripping open the lining to one of my bras.

“What are you doing?” she asked, sticking her head in.

“Trying to find the underwire.” Aha! I yanked it out, only to discover that “wire” was a relative term, and that Victoria’s Secret apparently used some sort of hard, springy plastic. “Ruined that one for nothing,” I said, tossing the torn bra to the bed.

“What do you have against support?” Lydia sat down on the edge of the bed. I looked over in alarm, but the mountain of discarded clothes covered the Rose & Grave letter.

Shrugging, I pulled out another Vicky’s bra—they’re all plastic, right? — and shimmied into it. “Nothing. That one was just poking through.” I glanced in the mirror over my dresser and pulled off my silver earrings.

“So I was thinking of going over to see that Pinter play Carol’s putting up,” Lydia said. “Wanna come?”

About as much as I wanted to dress in head-to-toe sulfur. “Pass.” I made a face. “What would possess you to spend a beautiful Friday night watching something so depressing?”

“You have a better idea?”

I leaned against the counter, regarding my very best friend. Any other night, I would. We could pick up some smoothies and sneak them into the campus movie theater to avoid the overpriced refreshments they used to balance out the el cheapo entrance fees. We could order pizzas and spend the night watching the Meg Ryan oeuvre on Lydia’s twelve-inch set. We could run down to the CVS, stock up on nail polish, and have a pedicure party. We could grab that Finlandia Mango bottle and a bag of gumdrops, get drunk, drop the weird tension that had permeated our friendship since Tap Night, stop acting like children, and tell each other exactly what was going on with these secret societies we were joining.

But I wanted Lydia to go first.

“Not really,” I replied. And on a scale of 1 to maturity, I’d call that a 2.3.

Lydia held one of my shirts up to her chest and checked out her reflection. “Yellow does nothing for my complexion.”

“Yeah, but you look great in that blue silk blouse of mine that you’ve had for—what, five weeks?” It very much suited her Black Irish looks. I took off my watch, wondering if the Diggers were going to do something weird and magnetic to me. No metal? I was lucky I didn’t wear braces. I had half a mind to call Malcolm Cabot and ask him for wardrobe advice.

Lydia flopped back across my clothes. “Look who’s talking! I haven’t seen my red ankle boots since Spring Break.”

I ducked my head guiltily and unclasped my necklace. Those boots were at Brandon’s.

With all vestiges of metal removed, I headed back to my closet to find a pair of pants that didn’t need to fasten and still looked like something you’d wear outside the gym or the bedroom.

Lydia started rooting through my pile of discards. “What are you dressing for?”

Beats me. “I’m going out, and I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to end up, so I want to be prepared.”

She sat up. “Prepared? Are we talking society here?”

I rustled my clothes and pretended I didn’t hear her.

“Amy?”

Rustle, rustle, rustle. My velour loungewear? How come they never looked as good on me as they did on (a pre-pregnancy) Britney Spears?

“Amy?”

The corduroy skirt might work, but it was too short to do anything but sit or stand in. Somehow, I suspected the initiation would require a tad more.

“Neophyte Haskel?”

I snapped to attention and pulled out of the closet. Lydia had found my letter, and was reading it out loud. Appalled, I launched my body toward the bed. “Give me that!” Lydia rolled away and I landed with my face in a pile of winter sweaters.

She skipped across the room, giggling and reading in a creepy, Vincent Price—esque singsong. “ ‘Pass through the sacred pillars of Hercules and approach the Temple.’ Oooooh…This thing reads like an online Role-Playing Game.”

“Lydia, stop it!” I fought to untangle myself from the sleeves of my fleece.

Sighing, she tossed the letter in my direction. “Here, don’t have a coronary.”

I stuffed the letter in my desk and glared at her. “Are those like the instructions you got in your letter?” I asked with a sneer.

She looked away. “I can’t talk about that.”

“Oh, please! You’ve got to be joking!” I pointed at my desk drawer. “Is there any way on earth that your society could take things more seriously than mine ?”

Oops. Her face turned hard. “And the true colors come out. Pardon me for intruding. I should have known a peon like me had no business invading the room of a high and mighty Digger .” She practically spat the word. At the door, she paused. “Don’t wear the velour,” she said coldly. “It makes your butt look huge.”

As luck would have it, I owned a pair of cargo pants with a drawstring waist and Velcro fastenings, and so, properly attired at last, I set forth to meet my destiny. At Whitney Tower, I hung out, periodically checking the time on the clock face and hoping I looked more casual than I felt. Five minutes after the Whitney Tower Carillon finished sounding off the eight o’clock hour, I did an about-face and marched toward the Rose & Grave tomb. I was determined not to repeat the mistakes of my interview—I wasn’t going to be late for initiation.

As I approached the tomb, I caught sight of another figure walking toward me from the south side of the street. Dammit. I couldn’t enter the Rose & Grave yard with someone standing right there watching me, could I? How did the members keep their secrets without a private entrance?