Diana Peterfreund - Rites of Spring (Break)

For all that we were secret, we remained one of the constants of your college career. You could hardly get to your dorm freshman year without passing our tomb. And you wondered, even if you wouldn’t admit it to your roommates or your singing group friends or your lab partner, what it would be like to be one of us. What we did at our weekly meetings—sequestered, sacrosanct, silent except for the occasional scream.

You hoped that someday you’d find out.

The season is upon us. We, the members of Rose & Grave D177, are graduating and are thusly charged with the tapping of new souls to fill our robes, take up the torch of our traditions, and stand beside us as members of this illustrious, rarefied order. It is a lofty invitation and one that no man (or woman) should accept lightly. We are the standard bearers of a New World Order. We are the key that will unlock the life you’ve only imagined.

You will be judged. Will you be found worthy?

For this is what you’ve always wanted.

Isn’t it?

I hereby confess:

I like being his.

1

Pledges

As many of my friends (and a few of my enemies) will tell you, I have a tendency to overanalyze. I’m aware of this characteristic within myself, and I do my level best to overcome it. As a result, I have occasionally been known to make snap decisions that, in retrospect, were probably mistakes.

But here’s what I think now. Life is a bit like a standardized test. Not putting down an answer because you fear it could be wrong will lower your overall score. So remember what those nice folks at the Princeton Review told you: Make an educated guess. But be careful. You never know where that decision is going to take you.

Almost a year ago, I accepted the tap from Rose & Grave, Eli University’s most powerful, exclusive, and notorious secret society. I knew my life would change. What I didn’t realize was how. I figured my induction into their order would net me some contacts in my preferred field of business, add an extra oomph to my résumé, and provide an insurance plan for the future that loomed just beyond the next set of final exams.

What I didn’t expect was that it would open my eyes to a whole world of my own potential. I no longer even wanted the job I’d once hoped Rose & Grave would help me get. I also didn’t know that I’d have a host of new friends, some of whom I’d never dreamed of associating with before—a few of whom I’d actively disliked. But now I’d move mountains for any of them. I certainly never knew how much danger one little club membership could net me, though I’d spent the last year being threatened, thwarted, chased, conspired against, and even once—bizarrely—kidnapped.

But most of all, I didn’t realize that the following March, I’d be sitting on a couch that looked like it had been fished out of the trash, staring at a guy I’d never even have looked twice at, and wondering if I dared take a risk answering the following:

AMY HASKEL, ARE YOU IN LOVE?

a)Yes

b)No

c)Insufficient data to answer this question

Oh, hell, it’s c, which is why there was no way I was going to let our Spring Break fling end. He couldn’t do the secret hooking-up thing anymore? Fine. Let’s try something new.

“I’m really sick of secrets,” I said, and kissed him.

Brilliant as Jamie Orcutt is, it took him several seconds to parse the meaning of my statement. And when he did, the kiss turned from hesitant to heated in no time at all.

Somehow, we shifted on the couch, from a relatively decent and G-rated side-to-side to something that rated the sort of parental supervision we had zero interest in at the moment. And, say what you will about how the couch looked, it certainly felt comfortable once I was sandwiched deeply between the cushions and Jamie. I clung to his shoulders as if I were drowning and he knotted his fists into my shirt, sliding the material away from my skin as his mouth moved south over my throat.

“Ja…” I said on a sigh, and then, as his tongue flicked over my collarbone, “Puh…”

He lifted his head. “You are never going to get it straight, are you?”

“Unlikely.” I slid my hands down his back, to where his sweatshirt ended and his skin was bare. “It’s already a tough enough effort to think of you as Jamie and not as—” Poe . I stopped myself in time to avoid a fine.

“This is troublesome,” he said. “But then again, that’s your society name.” He tapped my nose.

Bugaboo . Yes, and he’d probably chosen it, too, now that I thought about it. “You want to know what’s even more troublesome?” I scooted up. “Our real names rhyme.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, they do. I never thought of that.”

“People are going to laugh whenever they say things like, ‘We should invite Amy and Jamie to the party next weekend’ or ‘Let’s go on a double date with Amy and Jamie.’”

He frowned. “I’m now required to go on double dates with your friends? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

Neither was bringing up my friends, the majority of whom had no particular love for him. “I’m just saying, ‘Amy and Jamie’ sounds a bit lame.”

But he was smiling. “I was just thinking how nice it sounds.”

I blushed, and just as quickly, the concerns started crowding into my head. What kind of person gets into a relationship less than two months before graduating from college? Was I mad? Jamie was in law school, here, at Eli, for the next two years. I had no idea where I’d be. When I left town at the end of May, there’s no way our relationship would be ready for the long-distance thing (if it even lasted until then), and I had no intentions of sticking around New Haven for a boyfriend I’d just started dating. This was silly. I was setting myself up for an even worse heartbreak come commencement.

“I should go,” I said.

“What?” he shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t think so. You can’t just show up on my doorstep, drop this bombshell on me, then disappear.”

“I have work to do….” I began vaguely.

“You just got off a twenty-hour car trip.” He caught my hands in his. “You have relaxing to do.” His thumbs slid over the scabs on my wrists and we both winced. He looked down. “I’m glad I wasn’t there that night,” he said softly. “I don’t think I would have trusted myself.”

“You? Mr. In-Control Poe?” Crap.

He wagged his finger at me. “See? And yeah. I might have killed that kid.”

“You wouldn’t have been alone.” Half my club had wanted to kill Darren Gehry for drugging me and dragging me off in a twisted, dangerous version of what the teenager had convinced himself was a society prank. I was the only person who understood that we might have been to blame for giving him that impression. [15] And some of my friends were still muttering the word “Stockholm” in my vicinity.

My hands had somehow escaped Jamie’s and become balled in my lap. He noticed, in that way he had of noticing everything.

“Stay here for a while,” he said. “I’ll cook something for you, and we can talk. You can ask me all those personal questions you’ve been so relentlessly curious about, and I can…” He trailed off.

He could what? Give me a foot massage? Seduce me? Lecture me about the importance of tofu in cuisine? He knew everything about me already. He had researched my past exhaustively when they’d tapped me into Rose & Grave. Scary thought. I’d never before dated a guy who could name all my elementary school teachers, who knew every one of my worst fears and how best to exploit them.