Diana Peterfreund - Under the Rose

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“What do you think?” he replied.

I leaned back on my pillows. “I say fuck ’em all. I can’t deal with it anymore.”

He was very quiet. “Some people say they should be allowed to go on as they have been. That their little faction is no different than the Diggirls.”

I sat up. “That’s bullshit.”

“I’m just saying some people have said this.”

“‘Some people’ named Mara?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “So we can talk more later about Lydia?”

“Sure. I’ll see what I can get from her. But I’m warning you, she’s pretty tight-lipped about stuff like this.”

He nodded. “And a bunch of the, uh, ‘good’ Diggers are getting together before dinner to discuss the situation. Will you be there?”

I considered this, then started scooching back beneath the covers. “I’ll be there for the meeting,” I said at last. “I think I’ve devoted enough of my time to the Order of Rose & Grave for one week.”

“Ah, you forget.” Josh stood. “It’s Sunday now. Whole new week.”

Curses.

When I finally did arrive at the tomb, shortly before dinner, I was greeted almost as you’d expect: as a conquering hero by the “good” Diggers and with cold silence by the disgraced Elysians. Fortunately, I only had to bear a moment or two of the juxtaposition before Lucky showed up. The reaction she provoked was unanimous.

“Wow, so you do have the cojones to show your face,” said Angel, raising her glass. “I salute such extraordinary chutzpah.”

I was busy saluting such an extraordinary combination of foreign tongues. We convened in the dining room for the most awkward meal I’ve ever attended. Actually, “awkward” isn’t the word. Neither is “uncomfortable,” “intolerable,” “ill-at-ease,” “strained,” or even “torturous,” though really, dinner was defined by all of the above and more. It was tough to eat, what with the giant woolly mammoth of issues arm-wrestling the enormous King Kong of unresolved tension right there in the room with us. Hale had cooked salmon in what I’m sure was a scrumptious creamy dill sauce, but I couldn’t swallow a bite. Nobody met the eyes of anyone else, the room remained more silent than the Stacks at exam time, and Puck appeared to have been body-snatched, to judge by his utter inability to crack anything resembling a joke.

Not that I would have laughed.

Twenty-nine painful minutes later, I gave a little cough to get everyone’s attention. “Shall we get this show on the road?” I said. Murmurs of assent replaced the choked stillness, and we adjourned to the Temple. I started the meeting with the usual rituals, but skipped right past the song-singing and hair-ruffling part. Who were we kidding, really?

“Tonight, in lieu of the usual discussion of fines for minor rule transgressions, let us skip straight to the real issue.” I paused for effect. “What the fuck, people?”

Everyone looked at me. I shoved back the hood of my robe.

“Seriously. I spent the last few days running around this campus and a good portion of the tri-state area, trying very hard to hold this society together. I’m tired. I’m angry. And I want to know why I should keep bothering, other than the obvious reason that I swore I would. From what anyone with the sense God gave a goldfish has been able to gather, some of you aren’t happy with the current incarnation of the society—and some of you aren’t happy with the society, full stop. So what we’re going to do now, if it’s okay with everyone, is let each knight speak in turn on the following topics.” I counted them off on my fingers. “The existence of Elysion, the perceived failings of this year’s club, the recent leaks, and what, if anything, should be done about these things. Right to left. Go.”

I sat on the throne, folded my arms across my chest, and waited.

And one by one, people began to speak.

According to Thorndike and Angel—who, stop the presses, actually agreed with each other about something—we should ride the lot of them out of the tomb on a rail, including Lucky. Oath-breaking is oath-breaking, and they’d each committed some serious oath-breaking.

Bond’s stance was that we should give the lot of them a “right good titching.” Being a bit behind on Eton slang, it wasn’t until Soze gave me a meaningful glance that I realized that whatever it meant, it was the kind of behavior more often practiced by Lydia’s society than the Diggers. Bond also suggested we follow that up with several months of probation. Except he didn’t say “probation.” He said we should “gate them.” Same thing, apparently.

Juno said we should accept the new status quo (but still kick Lucky out). As Soze had intimated earlier, she saw Elysion as not materially different from the informal gatherings the Diggirls participated in. Others (and I include myself in that number), however, argued that the Diggirls weren’t keeping any secrets—especially about our existence—from the rest of the club, nor had we formed any kind of formal parameters or rituals for the group, like the Elysions’ red robes, nor would we exclude any knight who wished to join us at whatever pizza place/coffee shop/bar we were frequenting, nor were we doing anything that could be remotely interpreted as “skimming from the top” of the Tobias Trust, so that argument didn’t hold much water. Juno merely retorted that our tattoos were rituals of the oldest and most traditional sort, and just because Elysion had thought of the dedicated meeting space and special subtrust first didn’t mean the girls wouldn’t have come up with it later. It was her recommendation that, henceforth, all Rose & Grave initiates, depending on gender, be granted simultaneous entry into either Diggirls or Elysion, much in the same way that, until recently, female students at Harvard received diplomas proclaiming them graduates of Harvard and Radcliffe.

In a move that shocked pretty much everyone, including perhaps herself, Lil’ Demon agreed with many of Juno’s points. “Not the stuff about the Diggirls and the tattoos,” she was quick to add, “but I don’t think Elysion is the harbinger of doom we’re making it out to be. Yeah, it was a bitch move to do it all behind our backs, but so what? We caught them; it’s out now. At the risk of sounding like a walking stereotype, can’t we all just get along?” She added that she thought Lucky should be punished for her actions, but she was certain we’d be able to find a suitable penalty without resorting to dissolving anyone’s membership. “We can try that titching thing Bond mentioned.” (Quoth Soze: “Um, no.”)

Graverobber reiterated his old chestnut of funding, expounding on his argument that Elysion was the last great hope of the Rose & Grave of the past. (At this point, Thorndike began to argue that the Elysion of the past was the last great hope of the Third Reich, at which point I pounded the gavel a few times to get her to shut up and let Graverobber finish his speech, when what I really wanted to do was shout “Hear, hear!” and fling said gavel at Graverobber’s head.) He finished up by saying he was in complete support of Juno’s suggestion as long as they contained a provision to keep Elysion money with Elysion, et cetera.

Big Demon begged off financial analysis in favor of focusing his discussion on the problems he’d been experiencing in the club. However, he admitted, since its inception, Elysion had, for his money, been spending too much time talking about Rose & Grave and not enough actually doing all the cool bonding stuff. “Just once,” he said, “I’d like to spend some time in this society not talking about the state of the society. This is like a bad relationship.”