“Can it,” she said, and beckoned to me with the letter. “Come here.”
I started to trot over, then remembered that, whatever Clarissa might have said freshman year, I am not an obedient little puppy, stopped, and held out my hand. “Please give me back my letter.”
“As soon as we ascertain that it belongs to you.”
That brought me fully into the alcove. “It belongs to me and you know it,” I hissed.
She turned the envelope over in her hands, a look of serene innocence on her face. “No name on it.”
I clenched my jaw. “Then let me describe it to you.”
“Oh, please do!” She smiled sweetly. “Especially what’s on the inside.”
I sat down on the chair opposite her. “Clarissa, I’m not kidding around here. Give it back.”
She hesitated, frowned, and handed it over. I snatched it out of her claws and, after ensuring the seal remained unbroken, shoved it between the covers of WAP. Well, that was easier than I thought it would be. Dude, if it were me, I’d have put up a real fight to get a look inside her letter.
All business between us seemingly at an end, I rose to go.
“Wait, Amy.” She touched my arm, and I was quite proud of myself for not jerking away in revulsion. “We should talk.”
“About what?” I said haughtily.
“You know about what.” Her eyes softened for a second. “Please?”
What a crock. Like she’d be my friend now that I had won the approval of a group like Rose & Grave? I pulled out of her grip. “Sorry, Clarissa. I’m not into slumming.”
***
The inside of the letter had been burned in places, and large charred blotches left black streaks on my hands as I tried to unfold it and read the writing. Like before, the print was lopsided on the page, which was folded into an irregular hexagon. This time, it smelled like smoke.
This is what it said:
Neophyte Haskel,
At five minutes past eight this evening, wearing neither metal, nor sulfur, nor glass, leave the base of Whitney Tower and walk south on High Street. Look neither to the right nor to the left. Pass through the sacred pillars of Hercules and approach the Temple. Take the right Book in your left hand and knock thrice upon the sacred portals. Tell no one what you do.
— Rex Grave
Um, okaaaay. I knew what all those words meant, but the sum was still a mystery. Who wears sulfur? The glass restriction was okay, since I was blessed with 20/20 vision, but the metal thing would be a tough one. Jeans were out—what with all those copper rivets and the zipper and buttons. In fact, most of my pants had metal zippers in them, and even the button-fly ones had metal buttons. Was I supposed to wear a skirt? Sweatpants?
Lydia knocked on the door as I was ripping open the lining to one of my bras.
“What are you doing?” she asked, sticking her head in.
“Trying to find the underwire.” Aha! I yanked it out, only to discover that “wire” was a relative term, and that Victoria’s Secret apparently used some sort of hard, springy plastic. “Ruined that one for nothing,” I said, tossing the torn bra to the bed.
“What do you have against support?” Lydia sat down on the edge of the bed. I looked over in alarm, but the mountain of discarded clothes covered the Rose & Grave letter.
Shrugging, I pulled out another Vicky’s bra—they’re all plastic, right? — and shimmied into it. “Nothing. That one was just poking through.” I glanced in the mirror over my dresser and pulled off my silver earrings.
“So I was thinking of going over to see that Pinter play Carol’s putting up,” Lydia said. “Wanna come?”
About as much as I wanted to dress in head-to-toe sulfur. “Pass.” I made a face. “What would possess you to spend a beautiful Friday night watching something so depressing?”
“You have a better idea?”
I leaned against the counter, regarding my very best friend. Any other night, I would. We could pick up some smoothies and sneak them into the campus movie theater to avoid the overpriced refreshments they used to balance out the el cheapo entrance fees. We could order pizzas and spend the night watching the Meg Ryan oeuvre on Lydia’s twelve-inch set. We could run down to the CVS, stock up on nail polish, and have a pedicure party. We could grab that Finlandia Mango bottle and a bag of gumdrops, get drunk, drop the weird tension that had permeated our friendship since Tap Night, stop acting like children, and tell each other exactly what was going on with these secret societies we were joining.
But I wanted Lydia to go first.
“Not really,” I replied. And on a scale of 1 to maturity, I’d call that a 2.3.
Lydia held one of my shirts up to her chest and checked out her reflection. “Yellow does nothing for my complexion.”
“Yeah, but you look great in that blue silk blouse of mine that you’ve had for—what, five weeks?” It very much suited her Black Irish looks. I took off my watch, wondering if the Diggers were going to do something weird and magnetic to me. No metal? I was lucky I didn’t wear braces. I had half a mind to call Malcolm Cabot and ask him for wardrobe advice.
Lydia flopped back across my clothes. “Look who’s talking! I haven’t seen my red ankle boots since Spring Break.”
I ducked my head guiltily and unclasped my necklace. Those boots were at Brandon’s.
With all vestiges of metal removed, I headed back to my closet to find a pair of pants that didn’t need to fasten and still looked like something you’d wear outside the gym or the bedroom.
Lydia started rooting through my pile of discards. “What are you dressing for?”
Beats me. “I’m going out, and I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to end up, so I want to be prepared.”
She sat up. “Prepared? Are we talking society here?”
I rustled my clothes and pretended I didn’t hear her.
“Amy?”
Rustle, rustle, rustle. My velour loungewear? How come they never looked as good on me as they did on (a pre-pregnancy) Britney Spears?
“Amy?”
The corduroy skirt might work, but it was too short to do anything but sit or stand in. Somehow, I suspected the initiation would require a tad more.
“Neophyte Haskel?”
I snapped to attention and pulled out of the closet. Lydia had found my letter, and was reading it out loud. Appalled, I launched my body toward the bed. “Give me that!” Lydia rolled away and I landed with my face in a pile of winter sweaters.
She skipped across the room, giggling and reading in a creepy, Vincent Price—esque singsong. “ ‘Pass through the sacred pillars of Hercules and approach the Temple.’ Oooooh…This thing reads like an online Role-Playing Game.”
“Lydia, stop it!” I fought to untangle myself from the sleeves of my fleece.
Sighing, she tossed the letter in my direction. “Here, don’t have a coronary.”
I stuffed the letter in my desk and glared at her. “Are those like the instructions you got in your letter?” I asked with a sneer.
She looked away. “I can’t talk about that.”
“Oh, please! You’ve got to be joking!” I pointed at my desk drawer. “Is there any way on earth that your society could take things more seriously than mine?”
Oops. Her face turned hard. “And the true colors come out. Pardon me for intruding. I should have known a peon like me had no business invading the room of a high and mighty Digger.” She practically spat the word. At the door, she paused. “Don’t wear the velour,” she said coldly. “It makes your butt look huge.”
***
As luck would have it, I owned a pair of cargo pants with a drawstring waist and Velcro fastenings, and so, properly attired at last, I set forth to meet my destiny. At Whitney Tower, I hung out, periodically checking the time on the clock face and hoping I looked more casual than I felt. Five minutes after the Whitney Tower Carillon finished sounding off the eight o’clock hour, I did an about-face and marched toward the Rose & Grave tom
b. I was determined not to repeat the mistakes of my interview—I wasn’t going to be late for initiation.
As I approached the tomb, I caught sight of another figure walking toward me from the south side of the street. Dammit. I couldn’t enter the Rose & Grave yard with someone standing right there watching me, could I? How did the members keep their secrets without a private entrance?
The figure passed beneath a sodium streetlight, and I could see it was a man. He wore a shiny black jacket festooned with more zippers than one reasonably expected to see on the average overcoat. I knew that jacket. It belonged to George Harrison Prescott.
“Heya, Amy!” he said as we met on the sidewalk directly in front of that hated wrought-iron gate. George rested his hand on it (as if it were just any gate and not the entrance to the Diggers’ tomb) and planted his feet directly in my path. “Whatcha up to?”
“Um…” I flickered my eyes toward the tomb. “Not much. You?”
“Same.” He winked at me, his gorgeous copper-penny eyes glinting even more from behind the shiny bronze rims of his glasses.
I clamped my thighs together, then prayed fervently that he didn’t notice. George Harrison Prescott was not only the most beautiful man in my class in Prescott College (and no, that’s not a coincidence about the names), he was also a Player with a capital “P.” Remember Marissa Corrs, who played opposite Orlando Bloom in that costume drama last year? Well, she recently took a leave of absence from Eli to concentrate on her acting career, but while she was here, guess whose room she was seen exiting every Sunday morning?
Yep. Chick could have had Orlando, but she chose George Harrison Prescott. Of course, if you squint your eyes a tad, George and Orlando could be twins, but for George’s glasses, which, as far as I’m concerned, make him ten times hotter.
Marissa was just one of many on what I’m sure is more like George Prescott’s Hit Dictionary. From what I’ve heard, George has slept with half of the straight and/or available women in Prescott College, and from what I know, the other half are impatiently waiting their turn.
Not me, of course! George and I are just friends. Acquaintances. The kind that nod in recognition when we pass each other on the street, or sit together in the Prescott dining hall when none of our other friends are around, chitchatting with each other in honor of class- and college-affiliation solidarity.
And if a girl indulges in the occasional sexual fantasy about accidentally stumbling into George Harrison Prescott’s bathroom while he’s in the shower—well, that’s no big deal, right?
“Headed home?” he asked, and I tried not to fixate on his mouth.
Since I was walking in the precise opposite direction of Prescott College, it struck me as a rather unusual question. “Nope.”
“Okay.” He smiled genially and neither of us moved an inch. At last, giving up, I sidestepped him and walked a few paces down the street.
George waved, but didn’t budge. By the time I reached the far corner and turned around, he’d taken a book of matches from his pocket and began striking them, one by one, and letting them burn down to his fingers before flicking the nubs to the curb.
I shook my head. Boys! Is it like a caveman thing to have to play with fire every chance they get? He looked ready to stand there doing his Prometheus act all night. How many times was I going to have to walk around the block before I got a clear shot at the tomb?
At last, George seemed to come to a decision. He turned and loped off toward Prescott College. I wasted no time scurrying back to the gate. So what if I wasn’t following the precise directions in the letter? I’d done every step, despite the delay, and I couldn’t risk being late again. Who knew how many atomic clocks they had in there?
The giant double doors at the threshold of the Rose & Grave tomb were weathered to a dull bronze sheen. A large brass knocker shaped like an open book hung at face height; its aged brass pages were engraved with an “R” and a “G.” I took a breath.
Here goes nothing.
No sooner had I lifted the knocker than the door flew open. I glimpsed a shadowed face, maybe a pair of hands, then someone threw a burlap hood over my head, grabbed me by both of my arms, and pulled me inside.
I screamed. Of course.
“Silence, Neophyte.” More hands surrounded me and I was lifted off my feet. “You are treading on sacred ground,” a man intoned from somewhere in the vicinity of my right knee.
I wiggled my useless legs. “I’m not treading on anything,” I mumbled through the hood.
Someone actually had the gall to slap me on my butt. “Shush.”
“That had better be someone I know, or I’m suing for harass—”
“I said, ‘Shush!’ ”
“Hands off, hood hound.” I bucked my body as my captors carried me down a short flight of stairs with a series of bone-jarring bumps.
I heard a chuckle near my left shoulder blade. “Tapped a live one here, Lancelot.”
Lancelot?
All talk ceased as the team turned left, halted, then flipped me right-side-up and set me on my (understandably) unsteady feet. Two hands on my shoulders shoved me down onto what felt like a wooden bench, and a third whipped the hood off my head.
I opened my eyes and gasped.
Not from shock, I’d like to point out. The room was still too dark to see much of anything, but what it lacked in illumination, it more than made up for in choking clouds of smoke. I coughed and spluttered, recognizing on my second or third wheeze that the tiny orange sparks invading my field of vision were the lit ends of cigarettes. There were dozens of them. My eyes began to water and I heard a few muffled coughs at my back. Okay, so I was not alone here.
You indoor-smoking bans, look upon that which you have wrought: a generation of twenty-somethings with zero tolerance for secondhand smoke.
“Neophyte!” The sparks trembled for a second, then seemed to freeze in air. “You seek to be Initiated into the Sacred Mysteries of Rose & Grave, to devote the Resolve of your Bone, the Passion of your Blood, and the Power of your Mind”—
And the patience of my ears, I thought, to listen to this cheesy crap. Who writes this stuff?
—“to our Order. This be your wish?”
“You bet!”
Someone poked me. “Say ‘Aye.’ ”
“Aye,” I repeated, hoping I didn’t sound like a pirate.
The sparks began dancing again. “Do not speak in haste, Neophyte. For after this night, there is no turning away from the Path of Rose & Grave. Your mere admittance into our Tomb, your presence here in the Firefly Room”—
So that’s what those cigarettes were supposed to represent. Cute.
—“has shown you more than is permitted to any Barbarian, but even these Mysteries are but tiny sparks alongside the Lamp of Knowledge. Are you willing to Witness this Light and be brought into its Flame, though it may blind you?” (You could totally hear the capital letters in his voice, by the way.) “Choose carefully, Neophyte, for there is no turning back.”
Um, okay, Morpheus…“Yeah, I’ll take the red pill.”
“Huh?” said the voice. Someone else sniggered.
“Sorry,” I said. “I mean, ‘Aye.’ ”
The fireflies all did a nosedive and were extinguished, and for a second, impossibly, the smoke in the room became thicker. Then a light bloomed in the room and an old-fashioned oil lamp floated toward me. “Then come with us, Neophyte Haskel, and be Reborn.”
I stood up and walked toward the light. As I got closer, I saw it was being held by a figure entirely shrouded in his long black cape and hood, looking for all the world like the Ghost of Christmas Future. He withdrew his fist from his robe, and in slow motion opened his hand to reveal a shiny golden key lying in his palm. I reached for it.
Suddenly, several people grabbed me at once and dragged me away from the robed figure. I heard a door open, felt a blast of icy wind, and then I was being propelled roughly up a flight of stairs.
“Not for you!” they
cried, following it up with an uneven chorus of, “You’re not worthy! You’re not ready! You can’t come in! Get out, get out, get out!”
“What the hell…?” I kicked my legs furiously and wrenched out of their grip, flailing through the darkness until I fell to my knees on hardwood floor. Ow! Was this part of the initiation? If so, then I think I must have missed a step. I heard shuffling behind me, and then, as if from far away, a voice sounding the alarm.
“Quick, quick, catch her! She mustn’t infiltrate the Inner Temple.”
I blinked furiously and peered through the darkness, hoping to discern some shape, some path, some giant lit-up sign saying EXIT in large red letters. Inner Temple, huh? How about a nice, relaxing Outer Veranda?
No luck. I pushed to my feet and began walking, hands out in front of me so I didn’t break my nose. A few faltering steps later I hit a wall. I kept my fingertips along the edge as I moved forward, feeling the delicate texture of silk wallpaper, the edge of carved picture frames, and then, at last, a hinge. A door, but did it lead out, or farther in? Carefully, I ran my hand along the inside wall, past the threshold, hoping to discover a light switch.
But instead, my fingers touched something smooth and round affixed to the wall. It felt like a ceramic ball beneath my palm. I let my hand glide down, over the front of the object, and felt a few bumps, some indentations, three holes, and a jagged edge—
Oh. My. God. A human skull.
A hand clamped down over my wrist.
I tried to scream, but before I drew breath, someone covered my mouth and dragged me into the room.
“Be quiet, Amy! Or they’ll catch you.”
He released me and I spun around to see my captor. Like the others, he wore a dark robe with a hood pulled low over his eyes. He carried a tiny penlight, which he was shining up to his face like kids do to tell ghost stories. I couldn’t have recognized him, even if I’d been trying.
“Nice costume. Who are you?”
“You screwed up in there, Amy, and they aren’t going to let you in.”
What? Whoa! Why didn’t Malcolm warn me about this? And what had I done to screw up? This whole Rose & Grave thing was turning into a bona fide fiasco. I didn’t know who these people were, what was happening to me, or why. Quill would have been infinitely easier than this. Did the Diggers have anything to do with my failure to get tapped by the literary society? I hadn’t considered it earlier. I was too excited by the prospect of Rose & Grave. But if the Diggers were going to spend the evening screwing with my head before kicking me out, then I’d want some answers from Glenda Foster about why I was wandering through a drafty stone tomb rather than sitting pretty right now in Quill & Ink’s one-bedroom.
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