Kismet and Frodo both expressed dismay that they hadn’t been more well informed about the original incarnation of Elysion. “I’d probably have been loath to get involved had I known what the name stood for in Digger circles,” Frodo said.
Kismet concurred, but added that he felt their main sin had not been naming their subsociety after the earlier one, but rather, keeping their true purpose a secret. “Had we approached you openly,” he asked, “would we even be arguing about this now? What is your greatest complaint: that Elysion exists, or that it exists as a fait accompli?”
We all considered this in the silence that fell after his speech. Finally, Kismet elbowed Puck, who started as if he’d been dozing off. Perfect.
“Whatever you guys decide,” Puck said, still not meeting my eyes, “I’m cool.”
“That’s not sufficient,” I said.
And now, at last, he looked at me, his expression all casual and devil-may-care. “Of course it isn’t. ’Boo needs more. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s all I’ve got.”
I took a deep, calming breath. “You have nothing to say about your involvement in Elysion or your hopes for the future of the order?”
He tilted his head to the side, as if considering. “Nope. Can’t say I do. As you may recall, I’m not so involved that my heart will get broken if it all just…ceases to exist.”
Asshole. While I attempted to frame a calm response (not to mention keep an even expression), Jenny rose to her feet. The look she sent Puck bore the usual level of righteous hostility, but there was something noticeably different about its flavor. This time, she was angry on my behalf.
Jenny tugged on the hem of her shirt and began. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk during this, and judging from what most of you have said, I’m pretty sure how this is going to pan out where I’m concerned. To be honest, I can’t blame you. I made promises to Rose & Grave, and I broke them. And I’m very sorry. I’m sorry because I now realize how much it’s hurt you—not only due to what you’ve gone through this week, but also because I think all the concern over the last month has definitely contributed to the lack of…cohesiveness in this year’s club.” She turned to Big Demon. “I’m so sorry for usurping your C.B. night. I feel especially bad because you’re not only my brother, but before all of this, we were barbarian college mates. I should have made a point to become better friends with you.” She turned back to the group. “And I know this sounds selfish, but I’m mostly sorry because I know I’ll never have another chance like this. I should have realized it when, even as I was leaking info, I found myself picking and choosing what I’d let go of. I should have realized it meant that I didn’t want to do it. I loved Rose & Grave, even if I wasn’t willing to admit it. So now I am, and it’s too late.”
She sat down to resounding silence, and not the good kind, either. The Inner Temple began to feel every bit as uncomfortable as the dining room had. And then Tristram Shandy stood.
“I haven’t said anything yet. In fact, I haven’t really said much of anything all semester. I’ve felt pretty left out, to tell you the truth. Juno was the only other Straggler who actually made it into the society, and she was instantly gathered into the bosoms of the other Diggirls.”
Angel let out a little, snorting laugh. “Instantly?”
“Bosoms?” Thorndike added.
I raised my gavel in warning.
Shandy went on. “I’ve listened to you all make your arguments, and you’ve given me a lot of food for thought, especially about the idea that we can go on in this manner—Elysion for men, Diggirls for women. But in the end, I think it’s bullshit.” He crossed to the pedestal near where I sat and took down the book of oaths. “I don’t know if it was any different when I was initiated in Saudi Arabia, but I’m pretty sure my oath of fidelity said the same thing yours did: to place above all others the Order of Rose & Grave. As far as I’m concerned, that means above other societies as well. The very idea of subsocieties within the Order goes against the principles we swore to.
“Elysion does not represent me. Never has. And I won’t be a part of it, because as far as I’m concerned, its very existence is a mockery of the type of brotherhood we’re supposed to be creating. There’s not supposed to be a hierarchy within the club. That’s why we pick a new Uncle Tony every week. That’s why we vote on everything. We speak as one voice. It’s my understanding that our predecessors did the same when they chose to tap women. Why would we denigrate their efforts by splitting off into groups—the people who are girls, the people who are boys….” He trailed off. “What happens to the people like me who don’t want to be part of any subgroup?” He sat down, and once again, silence reigned. This time, however, I think it was because we were all shocked that Shandy, always so silent, had come up with the best argument of all.
Okay, then. “I suppose we all might want to take a few moments to think about—”
“Wait,” said Lil’ Demon. “You haven’t said what you think.”
What I think? What I think. Oh, where to start! All I’d been doing was thinking about this, all I’d been doing was fighting for it—for far too long—and I still had no answers. Hiding under my duvet began to seem like a permanent solution. “I think this club hasn’t been living up to expectations. I think I’ve devoted a ton of time and energy to it. I think we’ve all been hurt and disappointed by what’s happened ever since we joined. We lost jobs, we lost friends, we lost who knows what else. So there’s got to be something keeping us here anyway. It’s not the money, it’s not the networking, and it can’t only be Hale’s cooking. I think one hundred and seventy-six years’ worth of patriarchs would be devastated if we let it go to pot. But I think if we don’t, as a group, make a decision about the next step, then we’ll go down as the worst club—and possibly the last club—in all of Rose & Grave history.”
I lifted my shoulders and then let them drop as the words sank in my own ears as well as those of everyone else in the Inner Temple. “And I think I’m tired of having this argument. I’ve been tired of it for at least a month, and I’m not the only one. If we can’t get past trying to figure out where this society is going and actually start taking it there, then we might as well give up. Right now—and this may be my sleep deprivation talking—I’d almost be willing to take the position of Puck over there. ‘Fuck it. I don’t care what happens.’” He looked up at me, and actual surprise registered on his features. “But I do care. I just don’t have an answer. I suppose I think we should do whatever is best for the society we’ve been swearing to uphold. But I can’t decide that on my own, and I don’t know if we’re ready to decide it as a group.” I stood. “So I propose the following: We adjourn this meeting and go home. We all know what our options are, and where each person stands on the issue. For the next few days, we’ll try to come to some sort of agreement about where to go from here. And if we can’t, then I say we make Thursday’s meeting a time to admit we’re hung. At which point, we’ll vote to disband, and the Club of D177 will be no more.”
There’s something to be said for a dramatic exit. And actually speaking the words aloud added an especially nice touch, in my opinion. You thought the silence was pretty intense before, you should have heard it after my little decree. Or not, as the case may be.
We’d been pussyfooting around the issue all evening. I was just the one who actually put words to our worst-case scenario. Figure out how to make this work or be the ones responsible for waving good-bye to two centuries of tradition. Boom.
Plus, it’s the truth. I’d devoted enough time and energy to the dramas of Rose & Grave. If we couldn’t get it together, maybe we should give up. Even if it meant going on hiatus and letting the patriarchs pick a new class (who, I’m cynical enough to predict, would undoubtedly be all male) for D178.
I closed down the meeting and vamoosed, disrobing and departing the Inner Temple before I could be roped into any more conversations or debate. And I wasn’t going to sign into my Phimalarlico account ton
ight, either. I’d given plenty to the society in the last few days. If it couldn’t stand without me for a few hours, then maybe it didn’t deserve to stand.
This time, as I left the tomb, no one followed me back to my college. (As if George wanted to get anywhere near me!) I anticipated a blissfully peaceful Sunday evening. Even Lydia would be busy with her own society meeting.
But as I turned onto York Street and Prescott College came into view, I caught sight of a familiar figure passing through the gate and turning toward College Street. It was Lydia, carrying her bag. What was she doing out here? She must be way late for her society meeting.
I began walking after her, keeping a safe distance. This was the perfect opportunity to discover what society she’d actually joined. I’d simply follow her right to the door of her tomb.
But instead of leading me to any tomb I knew of, she turned into Cross Campus and headed for the library. I followed her into the building and watched her make a beeline for the elevators in the back. As soon as the doors closed behind her, I rushed up and watched the number display. Floor seven. Freshman year, I’d heard rumors of a society that actually met in a secret room in the library stacks, though I’d never learned which one it was. I hopped in the next elevator. How hard would it be to find the entrance to the tomb in the Stacks? There wasn’t anything up there but reading rooms and bookshelves. Of course, I’d recently been taught a lesson about how well a society could hide its rooms, if necessary. I’d have to keep an eye out for any suspicious-looking mirrors.
The elevator reached the seventh floor and opened onto a hall lined with doorways. Most were inset with panes of frosted glass, though a few of those panes had been covered up by layers of paint or even, in one case, pieces of wood. I held my ear against each door. Nothing. I touched the metal doorknobs. Still cold.
Maybe the entrance was actually in the Stacks.
At Eli, there are two different types of people: those who study in the Stacks, and those who don’t. I’ve been known to do a bit of reading or even a problem set or two in the public reading rooms on the ground floor, but hang out for hours in the Stacks? Not on your life. Endless, silent rows of bookshelves, each illuminated by fluorescent bulbs controlled by individual electric timers. Going into the Stacks meant turning the dial, waiting until the light flickered into sickly life, and then rushing down the row, hoping to find the book you needed before the clock stopped ticking and the light went out. There was nothing freakier than wandering through these dusty rows and wondering, if something was to happen to you up here, how long it would be until someone needed a copy of The Passion of Perpetua or was interested in a little light reading on the life of Hildegard of Bingen. For instance. There were indeed study carrels to be found in this bibliographic wasteland, though I couldn’t imagine the type of person who would frequent them. There’s a decided difference between peace and quiet and fearing you’re the only person left on Earth.
Or maybe I’d just been traumatized at an early age by the poltergeist librarian in Ghostbusters.
Whatever the cause, I remained on high alert as I picked my way through the abandoned floor. Most of the rows were dim, and I didn’t turn on any lights, fearing discovery. When I reached the end of the row of shelves, I turned right and headed toward the interior wall. Any secret room would likely be found along that end. Of course, all I could see before me was a row of study carrels, each as abandoned and forlorn as everything else in this desolate fortress of learning.
“Amy?”
I froze. There, seated behind one of the tall wooden dividers of a cubicle, sat Lydia. Her bag was open on her lap, and she hadn’t even gotten out her highlighter yet.
“Amy, what are you doing here? Don’t you have your meeting?”
I just stared at her, openmouthed. “Don’t you have yours?”
I hereby confess:
I so knew it!
20.
Address and Redress
Lydia sat there for a moment, tapping her pen against her hand. “Does it look like I’m at a meeting?” she said at last.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Was yours over early, too?” I’d latch on to any explanation at this point.
“I’m glad this happened,” Lydia said. “I am.”
I shook my head. “This can’t be right.”
“Were you following me?” She leaned over and caught the leg of another chair, scraping it across the floor until it was positioned across from her. I collapsed onto the seat.
“Of course I was! I wanted to see what tomb you went into!” I shook my head again. “Don’t do this to me, Lydia. I honestly don’t think I can take anything else this week. What happened with your society?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not in one.”
“No shit!” I massaged my temples. If your cerebral cortex explodes before graduation, do your parents get a refund? “But what about everything you told Josh?”
“Lies.” She shrugged.
“What about everything you told me?”
“More lies.”
“What about all that crap that happened on Initiation Night? What about the fucking blood on our fucking floor?”
“Wow, language, Amy. And this is a library. Keep your voice down.”
“There’s no one around for miles, Lydia. Talk to me! I don’t believe this is happening. And if you knew anything at all about the kind of week I’ve been having, you’d know that’s saying a lot.” My best friend, a liar. My society brothers, my lover, and now my best friend. Any second now, my parents would call and tell me they were actually space aliens. Or European royalty. Or Republicans.
I considered scheduling a nice chat with the folks at Mental Hygiene. That’s what the DUH (Department of University Health, and a more accurate acronym has never been employed) calls their Psych department.
“I know, Amy. There have been so many times I wanted to confess the whole thing. But I didn’t even know how to start.”
“Just start,” I whispered. See? I can talk softly.
Another deep breath. “I didn’t get called back after interviews. I didn’t get tapped. And you did. By Rose & Grave, of all places. I didn’t even know they do women.”
“They didn’t.”
“And I was…jealous. You didn’t even want to be in a society. Not like I did. I was also a little embarrassed. So I started doing research on secret societies, and then I kind of…made one up.”
“You made up a secret society?” Maybe I wasn’t the one who needed Mental Hygiene after all.
“Yeah. I wanted you to think I’d gotten tapped, too. I figured it would be pretty easy to pretend. All I had to do was fake a couple of Initiation Night rituals and then disappear every Thursday and Sunday. And sometimes I didn’t even have to do that, since you weren’t in the suite on those nights anyway.”
“But, Lydia—the blood…the feathers…”
She ducked her head sheepishly. “Yeah, I think I went a little overboard. Still, you believed it. And it was kind of fun, having you think I was in an even more intense society than you were.”
“What I was thinking,” I corrected, “was that whoever those bastards were, they were hurting you. Nothing about it was fun.”
“That dawned on me pretty quickly. Also, the whole ruse became tiresome. Lying sucks because it’s much harder to remember. And it’s completely ruined my social life, too. All our friends go out on Thursday and I’m stuck at home because I’m terrified people will say something in front of you about how I was at a bar with Carol or something. I can’t even eat in the Prescott Dining Hall. I go someplace where no one knows me.” She laughed. “I was almost relieved when Josh and I started dating. It was pretty obvious he was in a society, so at least I didn’t have to come up with another excuse.”
Unbelievable.
“And I started to recognize that I’d been acting a little crazy.” (A little, she says.) “None of it seemed important after all the hype of Tap Night was over. But I’d bu
ilt such a story, I couldn’t just abandon it. It’s what I’d always imagined for myself. I’d go to Eli, get tapped by a society, graduate into the exalted ranks of the Bilderberg Group.”
“The who?”
She blinked at me. “You’re serious? What kind of Digger are you?”
I shrugged. The bugaboo kind.
Lydia went on. “This fall, after I got into Phi Beta Kappa, I realized exactly how foolish I’d been. Here I was, in a real honor society, the oldest in the country, and I was whining about some stupid frat.”
“They’re not stu-…” I shut my mouth. Well, who was I to speak on that subject tonight? Occasionally, they were incredibly stupid. “If you were so over it, then why did you get mad at Josh when you found out his society was Rose & Grave?”
“Because you two had been pretending you didn’t know each other. You played me so well.” She started doodling on the cover of one of her notebooks. “It’s fine, though. I understand now that you guys weren’t talking about me behind my back.”
This was crazy. We’d been so worried about her and all the time she was making shit up? “Last night, you told Josh about how your fake society had been beating you and sticking pins in your skin.”
“He told you about that?” She smirked. “I guess I spoke a little soon about all the not-talking-about-me-behind-my-back. And it wasn’t me. It was the fake swim team members in my fake society. But yeah, it got out of hand. It seemed like he wanted to talk about society stuff. Whatever hard time you guys were having, he just needed to vent a little. And I couldn’t let him do it without giving him something in return.”
“What did he tell you?”
Under the Rose Page 26