Diana Peterfreund: Secret Society Girl

Could all of those rumors be wrong? Or worse, could this be someone’s idea of a sick joke? Poor little Amy Haskel, didn’t get an election, let’s mess with her head. Such things had been known to happen before—of course, they tended to happen to gullible freshmen who didn’t know any better. Every few years you heard stories about college pranksters dressing up in robes, kidnapping a gaggle of frosh, and putting them through all manner of humiliations in the guise of “initiation.”

But really, wouldn’t it be just as easy to fool an upper-classman? It wasn’t as if I could ask a bunch of black-robed figures for ID when they showed up. As that Shadow-Who-Smiles guy had said to me at the interview, that’s why they called it secret .

I stabbed my hands into my hair in frustration. Why was there no information session on this? Why wasn’t it covered in the student handbook? Why had the paranoid corner of my brain hog-tied and gagged the rational part?

Okay, Amy, think. Think. I checked my watch, and amended my mantra. Think quicker. I had ten minutes before the boys in black arrived.

Should I accept? Should I accept, even if I suspected this was nothing but a mean prank—because what if this was Rose & Grave? And if this invitation was what it appeared to be, what would membership in the society mean to me?

I was still considering this nine and a half minutes later, when there was a knock on my door. I froze, clutching the envelope tightly in my hands and staring at the door as if it were the only thing standing between me and Armageddon.

There was another knock.

Lydia cracked her bedroom door, stuck her head out, and glanced from the entrance to me and back again. “Gonna get that?”

“I’m deciding.”

“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” She quirked an eyebrow at me. “ ’Cause you don’t look particularly decisive.”

Another knock, this one very insistent. Lydia rolled her eyes, crossed to the door, and opened it wide…and in they came, brushing right past a bemused Lydia and surrounding me.

I couldn’t tell how many there were—at least, not before they swept me up in their arms and hustled me out the door, their black cloaks flapping in their wake. It was every bit as exciting as I’d always hoped it would be. But the trip ended abruptly about ten seconds later when we entered another dark room (they really go in for dark rooms) somewhere in my building. They deposited me right-side up and backed off.

After a second, I caught my breath. The room was lit by a single black taper candle, behind which I could see a man with his black hood pulled low over his eyes. I obviously hadn’t been eating my carrots, because I couldn’t see anything beyond the glow of the candle. There was an odd smell in the air, something familiar but unidentifiable, and definitely incongruous with the sight before me.

“Amy Maureen Haskel?”

“Yes,” I said in a rather breathless voice.

“Rose & Grave: Accept or reject.”

Here it was. No more time. And I had no idea what to think.

And then, Brandon’s words came back to me: Promise me, just once in your life, just for kicks, don’t overthink.

I opened my mouth. “Accept.”

As soon as I spoke the words, the light was extinguished, and judging by the bustle that followed, they weren’t waiting around to relight it. Someone leaned in and hissed in my ear, “Remember well, but keep silent, concerning what you have heard here.”

By the time I stumbled to the wall and felt cool tile beneath my fingers, everyone was gone. I flipped on the light. I was standing in a bathroom, alone, with nothing but condom dispensers and mildewy grout to keep me company. So that was the smell. And it wasn’t even my entryway.

Um, hello? Weren’t they supposed to spirit me off to their stone tomb and introduce me to a life beyond my wildest dreams? I frowned, opened the bathroom door, and stepped outside.

About half a dozen students milled around the hall, watching me. One of those guys—there’s one in every dorm—who never did get used to the idea of Eli’s unisex bathrooms hopped up and down on the balls of his feet as if waiting for the girl to leave before he braved the toilet. “You done, or is there gonna be another party in there?”

I schooled my features into a neutral expression. “Anyone have a roll of toilet paper?”

See? I would be an expert at this secret stuff yet.

Ignoring the onlookers, I made my way back to my suite, where I assumed Lydia would be waiting to receive her blow-by-blow of the whole (truncated) experience. But Lydia was gone—tapped, perhaps, by another society in my absence. She wouldn’t have left for any other reason, right? Not tonight.

I waited in the common room for fifteen minutes, figuring that if her tap worked the way mine had, she’d be back in no time. I drank a Coke and tried to read a three-month-old copy of Cosmo that was lying on the coffee table. Brandon was right; the taglines were much more intriguing than yet another recycled article explaining that women have G-spots. I didn’t make it past the third perfume ad (none of which, I was chuffed to see, hawked anything called “Ambition”).

I got up and went to the window, but there was no sign of Lydia or of a bunch of robed figures. Half an hour later, I decided to calm my nerves by taking a nice stroll—down to High Street.

Now, aside from being home to the English department and the Art History lecture hall, High Street is also known for hosting the Rose & Grave tomb. (These “tombs” dotted the campus, their huge, mausoleum-like facades hiding interiors that were supposedly more like mansions. Remember, the Egyptian pyramids were tombs as well. But no one knew if the society tombs held actual…bodies.) According to rumor, there’s an intricate code for members that can tell them exactly what is going on inside the tomb based on the position of the low, wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance. I didn’t know what the code was, but I assumed that I’d find out. Sometime.

I walked past the entrance to two residential colleges, and then, as was common amongst all students, crossed to the other side of the street so I wouldn’t be seen walking in front of the Rose & Grave tomb. It was an unwritten rule on campus—the college equivalent of refusing to walk in front of a haunted house in our childhood neighborhoods.

The tomb was made of sandstone blocks and seemed somehow darker than the surrounding stone and slate buildings. A fence surrounded an unkempt yard spotted with patches of grass and a few late, struggling daffodils. Strange that the Diggers didn’t keep up the landscaping, though it added to the imposing nature of the property. The sodium streetlight nearest the tomb was perpetually out of order, meaning that the tomb itself stood in a pool of deep shade and long, sinister shadows. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they did it on purpose.

Maybe I didn’t know better. I sat down on the curb and rested my chin in my hands, regarding the building warily. The gate was half open. What did that mean? Someone was inside? Someone wasn’t? Someone was lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on me the second I came near? I looked both ways down the street, but it was deserted.

The niggling fear in the back of my mind rose up to taunt me. It wasn’t Rose & Grave who carried you into the bathroom. It was a prank, and you fell for it, hook, line, and hooded robe. Stupid Amy Haskel, you’ll be the laughingstock of Eli tomorrow.