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“Come on!” I batted my eyes. “I’m a Digger. We have no secrets.”
He named a name.
“No!”
“Yes.”
“How was he?”
Malcolm thought about it for a minute. “Not bad. Intense.”
Figured. And closeted, just like Malcolm. But, as curious as I was about my big brother’s Hit List, there were other, more pressing questions that took precedence. So I started asking, rapid-fire, like we were on a TV show and I had thirty seconds to find out everything there was to know about Rose & Grave.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MALCOLM
“LANCELOT” CABOT, DIGGER
by Amy “Bugaboo” Haskel
Do you really give us grandfather clocks?
When you marry—to our liking.
So I guess that leaves you out.
In most states.
How about the twenty thousand bucks upon graduation?
Negatory. To keep TTA in the black, that’s more like what you’ll end up contributing.
Wait. I’ve got dues?
Call them “Donations.” Post-grad, of course.
Fuck. (Probably have to edit that bit out for prime time.) But I guess membership has its benefits, right?
Lots of them.
Like what?
Like you’re going to ace that Russian Novel final, Amy. Even if you don’t finish the book. We have every exam on file since they stopped giving them in Latin.
And that’s not cheating?
Why? The profs let you have the exams afterward. They should know that Elis are smart enough to catalog them for the benefit of future generations.
What else do we have squirreled away in that little tomb? I’ve heard a lot of rumors.
Let me debunk them.
Geronimo’s skull?
Check.
Hitler’s silverware?
Gross! No! (leaning in to whisper) But we’ve got some other weird Nazi paraphernalia.
(faltering) Does that mean we have co
I hope not! I think some of our boys brought the junk back from World War II like battle spoils or something.
What else?
Some great first editions. A Shakespeare folio. A lot of swiped Eli memorabilia—wi
Nuclear codes?
Out-of-date since the Cold War, but yeah.
On and on it went, until I’d amassed the kind of knowledge about my new secret society that conspiracy theorists from here to Addis Ababa would have killed to discover. But eventually, we each realized that, stockpiled exams or not, we had some work to do before the end of the semester. Besides, I don’t think you get a free pass to lounge around in bed all day with a guy unless there’s sex involved.
Before I left, Malcolm handed me my Rose & Grave pin. “You have to keep this on you at all times,” he said. “Pick someplace discreet.”
“What’s the point?” I asked, as I pi
“You’ll know it’s there,” he replied. He crossed to the door and peeked out. “Just checking for Brandon Weare,” he said, gri
“Maybe you would,” I said. “It would add to the ruse.” Malcolm merely shrugged a response with a sort of world-weariness that made me wonder how much longer he’d be able to keep it up.
I gave him a quick hug and headed out. Like most of the entryways in an Eli dorm, this one had only one or two suites on each floor. We didn’t have “halls” like most university dorms, but rather, many-storied entryways. Camaraderie due to geographical proximity was arranged on a vertical—instead of sharing bathrooms with the people next door, you shared it with the people upstairs. Malcolm’s digs were on the fourth floor—a “garret” that when built had probably been home to a poorer student who couldn’t afford a “sitting room,” but in modern times would be a highly coveted “single” with a heap of privacy. The landing was basically deserted—just a sophomore smoking out the second-story window and chatting on his cell phone, and a junior girl with a long brown ponytail who opened her door and peeked out as I passed. I felt the Rose & Grave pin burning like a brand against my hip. Malcolm was right. I did feel the difference.
I pushed open the heavy wooden doors guarding the entryway and emerged into the su
From the entrance of Calvin College, I could see the brown sandstone walls of the Rose & Grave tomb. My tomb. I fingered the little gold pin, and resisted the urge to head over and test out my memory of all the secret combinations and tricks it took to get inside (like, if you twist the knob the wrong way, you accidentally set off the doorbell, alerting anyone within that there’s a non-member on the property). But there’d be plenty of time to play Digger. I was pretty sure Lydia was waiting for me back at the suite, just dying to see what a fully initiated member of Rose & Grave looked like.
Boy, was I wrong.
The doorknob to our suite had been smeared with a dark, reddish-brown substance. I opened it gingerly, only to see more of the liquid had dribbled a path across our thrift-store area rug and straight into Lydia’s bedroom. Her torn wind-breaker lay in a heap by the entrance to her bedroom, and a pair of mud-caked shoes were overturned on the threshold. There were feathers everywhere, and the air smelled like burnt hair and bile. I immediately cracked a window and started fa
I swallowed. Was it blood?
One thing was certain: Whatever her society’s initiation ritual, it made the staining power of pomegranate juice look pretty pale by comparison. At least Poe’s coffin hadn’t left any marks.
And where was Lydia? Her abandoned clothes made it clear that she wasn’t napping the day away on her society big sibling’s futon. Either she was out buying a can of Lysol, or…I dipped a finger in the puddle by the floor and took a whiff. An acrid, sour scent assaulted my nostrils. Yep, blood. Those bastards made my best friend bleed.
Maybe she’d gone to the health center to get…stitched up? I hoped she hadn’t been forced to limp all the way out to the Department of University Health (DUH, and again, not so much an acronym as a philosophy, since whether you enter with the Hama virus or a hangnail, the first test they administer is invariably for pregnancy) while her roommate of three years had tickle fights in Calvin College with some guy she hadn’t known before yesterday. Altogether, not a ba
It’s no accident that all my closest buds are society members now.