Diana Peterfreund - Under the Rose

I turned my face to the side, but he followed me. “George—” I pushed at his shoulders, and he leaned in, crushing me with his body weight, insinuating his knee between my legs. “George!” I shoved him away.

We stood there, two feet apart, panting and staring at each other. George’s hair was mussed, his glasses slightly askew on his face, his permasmile completely absent. But I recognized his expression. He was turned on. He was turned on because I was fighting with him.

I closed my eyes. Just like his parents. I couldn’t become that.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “And I don’t want to do this anymore.”

His voice was cool and calm. “I think you should stay.”

“No.” I held my arm out, as if warding him off. “This wasn’t foreplay, George. I’m angry at you. I don’t want to be with you when you act like this. We may only be having fun, but we’re not playing games.”

This time, he didn’t stop me when I opened the door and got my ass out of there. I made it all the way out of his suite, all the way down the stairs, all the way across the Prescott College courtyard, up the steps to my entryway, and inside. All I wanted was to get home, go to my room, and go to bed. All I wanted was to cry myself to sleep. All I wanted was to be alone.

I entered my suite, closed the door behind me, then slid down it until I sat on the floor, my knees bent in front of me. I leaned my head back against the wood, and felt the tears building up behind my eyes. I hated men. I hated all men.

I heard the sound of a throat clearing, and opened my eyes.

Josh stood at my whiteboard, uncapped marker in hand. “Is this a bad time?”

I hereby confess:

Politics is always personal.

It is a truth very rarely acknowledged that no matter how long you sleep, your issues are still there to smack you upside the head as soon as you get up. And so, ten hours later, I crawled my way up through oblivion to respond to the pounding on my door.

“What!”

“Amy, it’s Josh. Can I come in?”

“No.” He’d narrowly escaped having his face torn off last night, and only because I was too tired to do any tearing. I’d simply brushed past him on the way to my bed, closed the door behind me, and locked it. Mr. Phi Beta Kappa got the message.

But now he was back. “You’d better be decent,” he said, as he opened the door anyway and traipsed around the messy piles of my clothes. You’d think, after the stellar cleaning job the patriarchs did on Jenny’s room, they could have afforded me just a bit of the same treatment. Josh sat on the edge of my bed. “I brought you some orange juice.”

“I hate you mildly less.” I grabbed the proffered cup and went back to hiding under my duvet, drink and all.

“We need to talk.”

“I beg to differ.” I sipped at the juice. Wow. The first non-caffeinated beverage I’d had since I can’t remember when. And I was starved as well. “Unless, perchance, you also brought a bagel?”

I heard a wrapper crinkle. Okay, I hated all men sans Josh.

“Amy, it’s important.”

“It’s always important. It’s been important for weeks. I can’t take any more importance right now. I think I made that clear last night. What more do you want? I found the leak. I brought her to you. I uncovered a massive conspiracy. I brought you to that. I survived the fallout, even. I’m so done.”

“It’s about Lydia.”

I pulled the covers down. “What?”

“I got home really late, obviously,” Josh said. “But I had an e-mail from Lydia, and she asked to come over. I suppose all of the honesty about Rose & Grave opened the floodgates for her to talk about her own society experiences…. Amy, I’m really worried about her.”

“What do you mean?”

“How much has she talked to you about her society?”

I began wolfing the bagel. “Zilch. It’s verboten in the suite. Back last year, around tap, we argued about it a lot.”

“I’ve been getting the impression that whatever she’s involved in, it’s pretty intense.”

“More intense than Rose & Grave?” I asked, skeptical. “How is that possible?”

“I’m getting the idea she was hazed pretty badly.”

Oh. That. “I was a little worried about that after Initiation Night. When I came back, it looked like she’d been through a real ordeal. Her room was covered in feathers and cow blood. It was disgusting.” I wrinkled my nose, remembering. The whole common room had smelled like bile, and there was mud tracked all over the place. I thought the Rose & Grave initiation had been bad, what with all the being-shut-in-coffins and imminent-threat-of-drowning, but it was clearly nothing to whatever Lydia’s society had done to her. “It obviously wasn’t pleasant, but she seemed to weather it okay. Why the sudden concern?”

“The way she talked about her meetings—they’re brutal. Do you know she has to stand naked on a pedestal and recount her sexual experiences?”

I stopped chewing.

“Rules infractions are apparently repaid with corporal punishment.”

I blinked at him. “Like, she’s whipped?”

“Well, she must not have broken any rules, because I haven’t seen any marks on her. But can you imagine?”

“No! That’s terrible.” I’d dreamed up a lot of wild stories before I understood the truth about Rose & Grave, but I’d never imagined anything like that.

“She told me about one of the other members. He or she—she wouldn’t say—is on the swim team. They stick the society pin into their skin at practice.”

I put down my bagel. “Stop. This sounds horrible. Did you find out what society it is?”

“No, but I want to. I bet we have some sort of records on them in the tomb. I want to kick these guys’ asses.”

“I can’t believe she’d submit to stuff like that,” I said, but the truth was, I could. Lydia had always viewed society membership as a crowning achievement to her time at Eli.

“I bet it’s a newer society,” Josh said. “Maybe one of the reconstituted ones. They tend to be much more hard core because they want so badly to have the same sort of reputation as Rose & Grave.”

“That’s possible. Although really, who’d want Rose & Grave’s rep right now?”

He shrugged then became quiet for a moment. “I wanted to ask you last night why you disappeared.”

“Had to. I’d had enough. I was dead on my feet. What happened?”

“The room leads into a tunnel that empties out in a corner of the sculpture garden. So you were right all along when you said there was a secret entrance to the tomb.”

“Score!” I took a swig of orange juice.

“They’d basically scattered by the time we all made it out. Not that it matters. The confrontation was the important thing. I take it you had a couple of your own?”

I didn’t answer, and Josh, to his credit, didn’t spend any time saying “I told you so.” But I’d learned my lesson. Society incest is a bad, bad thing.

“The big question is who’s going to show up to the meeting tonight,” he said.

“You think they won’t show?”

“I’m afraid of what will happen either way,” Josh said. “Amy, you know it’s your turn to be Uncle Tony.”

I caught my breath. No, I’d forgotten.

“I talked to some of the others. I was surprised by the variety of opinions on the issue. Some of them thought we should simply forget the whole thing happened. Say it’s bygones and go on with our lives. Some think we should kick their asses out of the club for breaking the oath of fidelity.”