Diana Peterfreund: Secret Society Girl

For the sons and daughters of Eli

You’ve heard the legends, I’m sure. We’re the Ivy League’s dirty little secret. We run the country, even the states you wouldn’t think we’d care about, like Nebraska. We start wars, we coordinate coups, and we have a hand in writing the constitution of every new nation. Every presidential candidate is a member—that way, whoever wins, they’ll always be under our thumb.

The media fears us, which is silly, since the CEO of every newspaper and television network in the country is already a member of our brotherhood. We’ve been controlling every aspect of the media for more than a century, from deciding which movies get greenlighted to choosing the next American Idol. (Do you actually think your text-message votes count?)

We own most of the buildings of the university, as well as most of the land in the city, and we’ve got a good proportion of it bugged. The local police work for us. The mayor lives in our pocket. There’s not a student on campus who isn’t afraid to walk past our imposing stone tomb.

Election to our society is a ticket into a life beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Success is our birthright from the moment we emerge from our initiation coffins into our new lives as members of the society. Any job we want is within our reach, and any job we don’t want our enemies to have is out of theirs. We are given enormous monetary gifts upon graduation, as well as sports cars, valuable antiques, and a mansion on a private luxury island. We will never be arrested. We will never be impoverished. The society will see to that.

Our loyalty to the society supercedes everything else in our life—our families, our friendships, even our love lives. If anyone, even someone we care about with all our heart, mentions the name of our society in our presence, we must leave the room immediately and never speak to them again.

We can never tell anyone that we are members. We can never let anyone who is not a member into our tomb, or they’ll be killed.

We can never quit the society or reveal any of its secrets, or we’ll be killed.

______

Which of these rumors are true and which are overblown conspiracy theories?

I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Don’t believe me? Fine, then turn the page. But don’t say I didn’t warn you….

It all began on a day in late April of my junior year. I was in my dorm room, for once, trying to squeeze in a load of laundry between a tuna salad sandwich in the dining hall and my afternoon lecture on War and Peace, or as I like to think of it, WAP. (That’s not an acronym, by the way, but onomatopoeia. It’s the sound the hefty volume makes when I drop it on my desk.) Professor Muravcek’s [1] Names of people, places, and organizations have been changed to protect the confessor from litigation or, you know, assassination. lectures tended toward the impenetrable side and I wanted to spend some time brushing up on my notes. I was tilting toward a B in that class, which was unacceptable if I wanted to graduate with honors in the major. However, it was either laundry or rushing out that night to buy a new package of underwear. You know you’re desperate when trekking downtown to GAP Body is easier than waiting for a free dryer.

But neither Tide nor Tolstoy was in the cards for me that afternoon. I’d just finished disentangling my fuchsia lace thong (Friday night date panties) from the legs of my “going out jeans” and was on my way out the door with a load of darks when the phone rang.

Crap. It was probably my mom. She seemed to have a divine sense of when I’d be in my room.

I balanced the basket on my hip and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Amy Maureen Haskel?”

“You got her,” I said, shaking one of my balled-up gym socks free.

“Your presence is required at 75 °College Street, room 400, at two o’clock this afternoon.”

Two o’clock was in fifteen minutes. “Who is this?”

“75 °College Street, room 400. Two P.M.” And then the line went dead.

I plopped back onto the faded couch, strewing tank tops and pj bottoms across the floor. Talk about rotten timing.

There was no question in my mind who it was on the other end of the phone. Quill & Ink was the “literary” senior society on campus, the usual refuge for scribblers of all varieties. It boasted several well-known writers amongst its alumni, and as the current editor-in-chief of the campus literary magazine, I knew I was a shoo-in, just like my predecessor Glenda Foster had been before me. That is, I would be if I made it to the afternoon’s impromptu interview.

I was going to have to have a long talk with Glenda. She was in the Russian Novel class, too, and knew I was struggling, yet still scheduled my society interview during lecture time!

Society interviews were always arranged on super-short notice. Part of the test was to see if you could get there. I hadn’t yet figured out what they did if the prospective tap didn’t answer her phone—if she was busy, for example, enduring both the crime and the punishment of Professor Muravcek’s soporific speaking voice.

Laundry all but forgotten, I hurried back into my room. Though the interview would be merely a formality, I fully intended to follow along with society pomp and circumstance and dress up. (Societies are all about the spectacle.) My suit was crammed in the back of my closet behind my ski jacket and the flared velvet getup I’d worn to February’s seventies-themed Boogie Night. I hadn’t worn my suit since January’s spate of internship interviews, during which I’d landed a posh (insert eye roll here) summer job xeroxing form rejections at Horton. It needed a good lint brushing, but otherwise, it was okay. I paired it with a fresh cotton shell, and went spelunking for a pair of panty hose sans runs. On the third dip into my underwear drawer, I found one. When, oh, when will I learn to throw away unusable nylons? (Not today, apparently.) I stuffed the other two pairs back in the drawer and wrestled the third onto my legs. I needed to shave, but the nylons would cover that.

In January, I’d gotten my light brown hair cut into one of those shoulder-length, multilayered bobs I was positive was the height of fashion for the Manhattan literati. (It wasn’t.) The downside of the cut was that, even with three months’ growth, it took twenty minutes with a blow dryer and a big round brush to make it look halfway decent. I didn’t have that kind of time right now, so I was relegated to ponytail-ville.

I slipped into my black pumps and clopped through my suite’s early Gothic—complete with lead-veined windows—common room. We have one of the sweetest setups in the whole residential college—two sizeable singles connected by a wood-lined common room that featured a non-working, but darn pretty, fireplace. Only downside is the slightly pockmarked hardwood floor. Have I mentioned how much I hate heels?

The door to the suite opened before I could turn the knob. My suitemate and best friend, Lydia Travinecek, entered, balancing an armload of dusty library books, a travel mug of coffee, and her dry cleaning. Lydia is always more organized than I am. She has time for lunch, homework, and trouser pleats. It’s like she’s a lawyer already.