Secret Society (3 page)

L
auren had arrived fashionably late to the party. She saw a few girls she knew, but did the nod and “I'll catch up with you later” wave and then headed for the bar. There wasn't anything she had to do the next day, a Saturday. Her mother was headed to East Hampton for a fall luncheon hosted by a family friend, so Lauren would have the apartment to herself. Her little sister, Allison, was a freshman at a boarding school in Connecticut, and she had moved back there a week ago. Lauren felt a twinge of loneliness, although she tried to swallow it down. She had never been one of those girls who clung to their boyfriends like a life raft, and yet, at times like this, she admitted that it would be nice to have someone in her life. She had planned on coming with a trio of girls from school, but had decided at the last moment against it. The three were
going to meet at a townhouse in the East Seventies to do shots beforehand, but Lauren didn't like showing up sloppy drunk at these things. Even though Diana Mortimer had been drinking more than usual lately, it was another thing her mother had taught her: Showing up somewhere sloshed was tacky. But now, as she sipped her first vodka and soda of the evening, she felt the cool crisp sense of isolation as the liquor warmed her chest. It was as if the party was happening around her, and she wasn't connected to it at all.
This is it. This is the beginning of my junior year. And I am completely, utterly alone, a princess dressed up for the ball with no one to escort me
.

Her boyfriend from last year, Robert, had graduated, gone to Dartmouth, one of the handful of schools where all nice boys from Park Avenue go, and Lauren was surprised to realize that she didn't miss him, a revelation that only saddened her more. She had lost her virginity to him, but now that he was gone, had moved on, would not be seeing or even talking to her, it was almost as if it had never happened at all. It was never right, even Lauren knew that. She wanted someone far more exciting that a cookie-cutter preppie, but still, within her his absence resonated. She thought with a groan about the kinds of people her mother wanted her to hang out with. Her mother was already lobbying for her to be part of a dreadful debutante ball called the International, even though it was more than two years away. What could be more miserable than being paired up with a guy she barely knew and being
dragged to a whirlwind of superficial parties? It was the kind of thing that sounded like a blast when she was thirteen, but now, it held very little appeal.

She stood behind a willowy, long-haired girl as she looked idly among the crowd for her friends. The girl was balancing a drink precariously near the edge of the bar while trying to pull out a dollar for a tip from one of those artsy-chic wallets made from duct tape and cardboard. The drink was on the verge of falling off the bar when Lauren grabbed it.

“Oh my God, I'm so sorry,” the girl said. “I am such a klutz.”

“No worries,” Lauren said coolly, handing it back to her. Lauren looked at the girl from head to toe, a terrible habit she had acquired from her mother. Really, it was just plain rude, but she couldn't help her desire to size other people up. “Are those ballet flats?” Lauren asked, feeling a shred of nostalgia for her long-lost days at Madame Pomeroy's studio on Third Avenue. She hadn't taken ballet since she was eleven.

“Oh, yeah,” the girl said. “I know, sort of stupid, I was actually unpacking, and they were the first thing I pulled out…”

“No, stop—I love them. They're
genius
. And in silver! Like Lanvin. But not. I mean, oh my God. You're tall enough, you can pull it off. Please don't hate me if I copy you.”

“Oh, I don't care.” Who was this girl?

“What's your name?”

“Oh, um, Phoebe Dowling.” The girl introduced herself
almost as if she didn't expect Lauren to offer her own name back, although Lauren did anyway.

“So you're new? Not bad to be invited to Nick Bell's party.”

“To be honest, I have no idea what I'm doing here.”

The girl was nothing if not candid. Lauren appreciated it. She grabbed Phoebe's hand and motioned to the other side of the room. “Come with me. We're sitting over there.”

This was an entirely new side of Lauren; she had always thrived on being a bit selfish. Now suddenly the idea of taking someone under her wing, of showing someone around, seemed strangely appealing.

 

The evening was flying by for Nick, as people kept grabbing him into clusters of conversation. Before he knew it, it was already half after midnight. He had posed for the requisite photographs and made sure everything was in order (the right people had indeed shown up, and save for the missing DJ and alcohol snafu, things were pretty much running themselves). He was finally able to pull himself away from a group that was doing shots and go up to the booth to check on Patch.

“Everything okay?” he asked. His friend was hunched over the mixing board, his blue Old Navy hoodie almost making him look like a real DJ.

Patch nodded. “I downloaded a few new tracks…It's going to kill.”

“People are texting me with all these requests,” Nick said. “Check it out.” Nick handed his phone to Patch, who copied down some of the songs that people wanted to hear. Nick saw his cell vibrating in Patch's hand.

Patch suddenly gave him an uncomfortable look. “You've got another message.” He quickly handed the phone back to Nick.

It wasn't a request. Nick frowned. It was from an unknown number.

Nick found his hands trembling. He had heard of messages like this, but he wasn't sure exactly what it meant. He frowned again.

“What's wrong?” Patch asked.

“Nothing,” Nick said quickly, hoping Patch hadn't seen the message. It was the type of thing you couldn't talk about. Patch's own cell phone was sitting next to the mixing board: no messages. Nick took a deep breath. He felt terrible lying to his best friend, but he had no choice. There were various things the message could mean, but he was pretty certain that this one was from the Society, a fabled secret group that supposedly recruited in early September each year, starting with the incoming class of New York private school juniors.
The little that he knew about the Society was that if you were invited to one of its gatherings, you went, no questions asked, and you didn't talk about it to anyone else. Besides, maybe Patch was going to be tapped. The only way Nick could find out would be to go.

Why did Nick want to be part of something like this? It was the kind of thing that said,
You matter. You are important. You belong
. Nick had pieced together rumors over the years; what he had gleaned was that the Society was a breeding ground for those who would go on to run the country, run the world. It was the kind of thing Nick had spent the past few years running away from, but now that he was in its midst, that he had received this strange invitation, he couldn't resist satisfying his curiosity. He felt like such a sellout, but he had to know what it was all about.

Nick checked the time on his phone. “I have to go,” he said.

“You're going to leave your own party?”

Nick sighed. He didn't know how he was going to explain this. “There's just something I have to take care of.”

He looked down at the crowd: they were oblivious, dancing, swaying to the music. They wouldn't miss him, not at all.

P
hoebe followed as Lauren deftly guided her across the club and over to her table. Phoebe was impressed by Lauren's social acumen. As they pushed their way across the dance floor, she made one-line quips and greetings to people she knew, ignored those she didn't with a steely gaze, and even exchanged barbs with a girl who stepped on her foot without apologizing. And all this while chattering on to Phoebe, asking her where she had moved from and what her interests were.

It gave Phoebe pause—wasn't Lauren Mortimer known as the bitchiest girl in school? A clotheshorse? The queen bee of Chadwick's popular crowd? Lately, though, people said that Lauren had become moody and introspective—Phoebe thought that sounded more like her friends. Still, she wanted
to be careful; within two days of arriving at Chadwick, Phoebe had already heard most of the stories about Lauren, although she didn't know if they were rumors or fact. How Lauren had stolen another girl's boyfriend. How Lauren had scored an internship at
Vogue
using her mother's connections. How Lauren's hand in marriage had already been promised to a twenty-year-old Italian count. How Lauren never flew commercial, only in her father's private plane. Phoebe had no idea which stories she could believe, so she decided she would take her at face value: as a pretty girl in very expensive clothes.

When it came to matters of fashion, Phoebe herself had felt painfully unprepared for the evening. All her LA clothes, even the cute ensembles she had splurged on from Fred Segal, didn't seem right. But she had apparently made the cut: a simple pair of skinny jeans, an empire-waist top, and then (what Lauren had deemed so
au courant
), a pair of ballet flats that had been spray-painted silver for a school play, now flaking in parts, but basically in decent shape. Adding to Phoebe's anxiety, she had decided to come alone. She had promised herself that she wasn't going to do this at Chadwick, that she wouldn't subject herself to the horrors of showing up solo, but she knew she didn't have a choice if she wanted to go to the party. Although she had met a handful of girls during the first few days of school, she didn't really know any of them well enough to call them up and
ask
—and the possibility that they might decline was too awful to consider. She figured that
if she was having a bad time, she could walk the five blocks back home. So screw it, she had thought. What did she have to lose?

They arrived at a table filled with well-dressed girls who looked bored. Lauren slid in with the confidence of someone who knew she belonged, and air kisses were exchanged. For a moment Phoebe had the horrifying feeling that she was going to have to introduce herself, but Lauren came to her rescue. “Guys, this is Phoebe—she's from LA. The cool part, not the nasty part.” Phoebe was introduced to Irina, a girl with dark, smoky eyes; Chloë, a blond girl who had what looked to be a pink Birken bag, although Phoebe couldn't be sure; and Victoria, who had the sharpest cheekbones Phoebe had ever seen on a sixteen-year-old.

Phoebe liked Lauren, but the rest of them—they looked like they had walked off the pages of a magazine. She found it tiresome while also oddly appealing. She wanted to shake Lauren and say,
Do you really like these people? Don't you think you could do better?
But instead she smiled blithely and tried to follow along with the conversation, although it wasn't easy with the blasting music and flashing lights. The girls asked her all about her time in LA, and her mother's photography, and the gallery that was showing her work. It was all pronounced as “incredibly cool,” which surprised Phoebe, who never thought of what her mother did as cool. She always thought of it as anguished, tortured, coming out of some kind of inner pain.
But maybe that was how it was with art. You suffered, and in the end, people thought it was cool.

She sipped her gin and tonic, lost in thought. She wanted so much for her mother, Maia, to be happy here, to meet someone. It wasn't easy to care for your mom when she went on crying jags during every free moment and didn't pick up her camera, the only thing she really loved (apart from Phoebe, of course), for months at a time. But now, her mother's career was on the rise again; she was dating. Phoebe too had the chance to remake her life, to mold it into anything she chose. It didn't matter that they weren't rich (the Bank Street townhouse was theirs temporarily thanks to a wealthy sculptor friend of her mother's); it didn't matter that they weren't famous. Phoebe's father, after all, was just another venture capitalist who had lost too much money in the last recession. When he had started to make money again, he and her mother had grown apart, and the prospect of dating a younger woman had come before their family. Now he was back in LA, and they were here, a year and a half after the initial separation, adrift on the island of Manhattan. She didn't know what to do with these feelings, and she found herself zoning out as she sat there with Lauren's friends, clutching her gin and tonic as if she hadn't had a drink in months.

These girls all seemed to have it so easy. Apart from the slightest hint of discontentedness that Phoebe sensed in Lauren, they didn't appear to be concerned with any of the things
Phoebe was: Would she get into a good college? Could she ever really succeed as an artist? Would she get a break early, or would she have to wait as long as her mom had? And if it was the former, could she hack it? Was her stuff really any good? Everything she had worked on in LA—mixed media collages combined with painting, mostly—was all packed up now, but maybe she should get them out and keep working on them—

“Hey.” Lauren poked her. “You okay?”

“Sorry,” Phoebe said. “I just got distracted. It's a lot to think about, moving to the city and all.” She bit her lip, embarrassed that she had revealed any vulnerability. These girls weren't the vulnerable types, at least not on the outside.

“Where do you live?”

“Bank Street.”

“Oh my God, I
love
that street. There's a place nearby that has the best cupcakes.”

Phoebe nodded and smiled. That was what most people said when she mentioned Bank Street. It was a lovely street full of lush greenery and prewar brownstones, but the only thing people ever mentioned were those damned cupcakes, as if nothing else mattered in the world.

Phoebe felt her phone buzz, and she reached to get it. A text message, probably from her mother. She had her mom's old Razr phone, which she hoped wasn't pathetically uncool. It was cool, like, several years ago, right?

It was an unknown number, with a weird message to meet
at an address that was probably nearby. Was it another party? Some kind of prank?

She showed it to Lauren, who was peering intently at her own cell.

“Oh my God,” Lauren whispered. “I got one of those, too.”

“We can't go, can we? We have no idea—”

“I think I know what it is. We have to go. I never thought that tonight—it seems so
random.
Are we dressed right? Well, you look great.” Lauren ran her fingers through her hair, letting it fall naturally over her shoulders. She looked fabulous, Phoebe thought, this uptown girl with gorgeous hair, glowing cheeks, and a perfectly straight nose, in a leather jacket and retro skirt. She wanted to tell Lauren, but that seemed, well, sort of pitiful. The other three girls were looking at Phoebe and Lauren strangely, as the two had been whispering. Lauren quickly went for a save. “There's this guy that Phoebe likes…I was just telling her what I know.”

Phoebe felt herself blush a little, but it didn't matter. The three girls nodded approvingly. Interesting, Phoebe thought, how they didn't ask any more questions. It was as if Lauren had the power to tell them when to speak and when to shut up.

“We're going to get some air,” Lauren said. “It's so stuffy in here, don't you think?”

“I'm fine,” Chloë said, and the others nodded.

Lauren grabbed Phoebe and pushed her out of the booth.
Phoebe wasn't quite sure what to make of it all. Lauren starting whispering to her again as they walked up the staircase to street level. “I can't really explain…it's like this club that people are asked to join, people in our year. I've only heard rumors about it. You're not supposed to know who's in it. I knew a girl, a really popular girl who was in it, supposedly. She moved out to Hollywood after college, and now she's in the movies.” Lauren named a rising twentysomething star.

Phoebe's eyes narrowed. “And this is the group that's sending us text messages? How did they even get our numbers?”

Lauren shrugged. “I don't know. That info is easy to get.”

“I just, I don't know—it sounds kind of strange, like a cult or something.” Now they were on the sidewalk.

“I wouldn't say it's a cult,” Lauren said, still whispering.

Then why all the secrecy?
Phoebe wondered.

“It's more like a group,” Lauren continued. “Think of it like a private club, like the Union Club or the New York Racquet Club or Soho House or something—it's just something people don't talk about as much.”

Phoebe looked at who was on the street, a pack of girls and guys who were smoking, flirting, exchanging taunts and jabs. It was as if Chadwick's beautiful crowd had been transported south of Fourteenth Street and, instead of looking out of place, had claimed it as their own for the night. The boy who had talked to her earlier was making his way through the throng of people. Phoebe glanced away,
suddenly shy. It was too late.

“Lauren! What are you doing out here?” the boy asked her new friend.

“We have to go somewhere,” Lauren said. “Another party. A friend of Phoebe's.”

“Ah, so you have a name.” He grinned, and stuck out his hand. “It's good to finally meet you. Officially, that is. I'm Nick.”

“You, too,” Phoebe said. She suddenly had this image of projecting her best self. This was what she would do—she would be the best person she could imagine herself to be. It was what she had read that New York always did to people: You became the ideal version of yourself.

Despite her reservations, her best self was following her two new friends to a strange address.

“I'll walk with you,” Nick said. “I just need to, um, pick something up next door. Costa left something for the…” Phoebe noticed Nick stumbling on his words.

“Sure,” Lauren said.

 

They started walking and then stopped, rather awkwardly, twenty paces later on the filthy sidewalk. They were shielded from the crowd's view by a Dumpster.

“It's right here,” Nick said.

Lauren pulled out her cell and examined the address. 53 G
ANSEVOORT
. This was it, two enormous double doors,
covered with stickers and graffiti, locked with a deadbolt. There was a shoddy, dirty buzzer on the right-hand side.

“Um, we have to go here, too,” Lauren said. She reached forward and pushed the buzzer, looking back at Phoebe for reassurance. She was a little scared, although she felt this was the right thing to do. Sometimes things in Manhattan were simply strange; she wasn't going to let some late-night meeting in the Meatpacking District freak her out. She looked back at Nick, who for the first time in all the years she had known him, seemed unsure of himself.

There was no sound, but the door opened. Before the three of them had a chance to compare notes on what was going on and what they were doing, they were ushered inside by a man wearing a bespoke suit, a monocle hanging from his lapel.

Inside was an enormous, cavernous space, much larger than the underground club next door. Everything was pitch-black except for a pathway lit by candles, wax dripping onto the concrete. Ahead of them, bathed in several pools of light, a party was in progress. The men were in black tie and the women wore evening gowns, and everyone had a mask on. A waiter appeared, bearing a tray of drinks in martini glasses. Lauren accepted one and sipped it carefully. It tasted like a lemon drop.

The music filling the air was big band swing. A black woman in a white sequined dress and a white fur stole was singing on a small stage in front of a band, shimmying along to
the music. Lauren recognized the song; it was something her mother used to play when she was feeling nostalgic: “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” A song about being stuck in love.

Lauren looked at the twelve others who had entered with them, identifiable because they weren't dressed up or wearing masks. She knew a few kids from other schools. She recognized Alejandro Calleja, who was the son of an Argentinean billionaire, and Claire Chilton, whose mother was the head of the New York Junior League. Lauren wasn't particularly close to either of them. Alejandro was known to be a total player, and Claire was so uptight that Lauren suspected her ever-present headband was permanently affixed to her skull. Everyone looked apprehensive about where they were and what they were doing. After surveying the room, Lauren realized she and Nick and Phoebe were the only ones from Chadwick.

“Lauren!”

She heard her name and looked up. A woman not much older than she was and wearing a dress trimmed in feathers and a matching mask motioned her over. Lauren stepped forward, although she was starting to feel a bit woozy.

She recognized, as she looked more closely, who it was. It was a girl a year older than her who had also grown up in the city, Emily van Piper, someone who had never said more than a few words to her at a time. They embraced, and Lauren smiled.

“I'm so glad you're here,” Emily said. “Isn't this exciting?”

Lauren nodded, although she didn't know exactly
what
was so exciting. It was, of course, all terribly glamorous: It was as if they were on the pages of a 1940s fashion spread or at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. Women smoked from long black cigarette holders; men drank champagne from coupe glasses or martinis brought by waiters on silver trays. If only she were wearing something more interesting…