Under the Rose (5 page)

“Yes. Said the school was at its height before they sullied the student population with an excess of estrogen. Wonder what she thinks of breaking the gender barrier at our club?”

“I wonder why she even accepted the tap,” Clarissa said.

“You expect a hypocrite to act rationally?” Jenny asked. “She thinks women shouldn’t be at Eli, but she’s a student here. If she really believed we don’t belong here, wouldn’t she be cooling her heels at Wellesley or someplace?” She toyed with the end of her long, dark braid and tucked her chin into her chest, as if the outburst had sapped all of her socializing strength. “Sounds less as if she’s saying what she really means than that she’s parroting the words of her cronies.” And then she clammed up completely, as if afraid to say more on the subject.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t seem the submissive type in class today. Took on Professor Branch and everything.”

“Well, we’ll get the scoop tomorrow,” Clarissa said.

I twirled the glass in my hand. “Hey, guys?” I said, tentatively. “I have to tell you something. Before I came here tonight, I was checking my D-mail, and there was this message….”

They all froze. They all looked down at their drinks. And then Jenny said, “So, you got it, too?”

I hereby confess:

Paranoia loves company.

3.

Skulls and Drones

I’ll be the first to cop to a certain affinity for overthinking. Most of the time, it’s served me well. (Cf. academic success culminating in admittance to and continuing high GPA at Eli University.) Occasionally, it’s gotten me into trouble. (Cf. habit of constantly attributing mysterious occurrences to the shady machinations of misogynist Rose & Grave patriarchs. But sometimes, it really is their fault. After all, they tried to ruin my life last semester, so a little healthy wariness isn’t a bad thing.)

But if every girl in the club got a mysterious e-mail, I sat up and took notice. When the club convened before the straggler initiation a few days later, we discussed the bizarre rhyming e-mails and what they could mean. Each Diggirl had received a two-line message sent from her regular Eli account to her Digger-mail; the time stamps showed each e-mail had been sent two minutes apart. When assembled by order of the time stamps, the couplets formed the following ditty:

YOU THINK ITS OVER BUT ITS NOT
FROM WITHIN DOTH PERSEPHONE ROT
THEY WONT LOSE THAT FOR WHICH THEY FOUGHT
PRETTY SOON THEYLL SNATCH YOUR SLOT
TO SEE WHAT KIND OF DOOM YOUVE BROUGHT
CUT THROUGH THE WEB IN WHICH YOURE CAUGHT
LEARN OF THE THIEF WHO CAN BE BOUGHT
FOR THEY HAVE FOUND YOUR ONE WEAK SPOT
BEWARE OF POISON IN YOUR DRAUGHT
OR IGNOBLE DEATH SHALL BE YOUR LOT
^*2

“What do you think?” Thorndike asked, after pasting the lines together on her laptop.

“That whoever it is needs to brush up on diction,” I said. “‘Draught’ is pronounced like ‘draft.’ Totally wrecks the rhyme scheme. And don’t get me started on the lack of punctuation.”

“Plus,” Lil’ Demon added, pointing at line four, “this part sounds kind of dirty.”

Thorndike slapped Lil’ Demon’s hand away from the screen. “Can you get sex off your mind for one second?”

Lil’ Demon pursed her full lips and winked saucily down at Thorndike. “Oh, come on, you thought it, too.
Snatch?
Please.”

Lucky blushed. “Moving on, what do we think it means?” For the moment, at least, she’d dropped her derision in favor of helpful discourse.

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Angel said. She turned to me. “Really? Draft?”

I nodded. “Who could have sent this? It had to be another Digger, right? Someone who knows our society names and e-mail addresses?”

“Great,” Clarissa said. “That narrows it down to about 700 living patriarchs.”

“Well, probably fewer than that who know anything about computers,” Jenny said. “I wouldn’t credit this to anyone older than D150 or so. If it even
is
a Digger,” she added under her breath.

“Or it could be a patriarch willing to pay off some geek in the IT department,” I said. “Honestly? It could be anyone.”

It was a sobering thought, but Lil’ Demon was rarely one for sober. “All right, ladies. Let’s discuss this with the guys after the initiation. Costumes, places, let’s get moving.”

Little did we know that, post-ceremony, a badly written poem would be the last thing on any of our minds.

The tomb kitchen on the lower level had been converted into a makeup trailer, which had rendered our aged caretaker, Hale, a quivering mess. “Hollywood types invading the tomb,” he was muttering from his place outside the entrance to the kitchen. “Never would have stood for it in the good old days.”

“There, there, Hale,” I said, checking out my costume in the ancient, diamond-dust mirror hanging floor to ceiling at the dead end of the downstairs hall. The Rose & Grave tomb housed the coolest stuff. The mirror’s gorgeous carved wood frame featured various scenes from the tale of Persephone and was crowned at the top with a giant carving of a rose. Its reflection was a bit on the wavy side, but that was to be expected in such an antique. Almost a shame they kept it down here in the basement.

“They’ll be gone in an hour or so,” I said. “And plus, it’s not like they’re seeing anything important, just hanging in the kitch—” He glared at me from under his bushy gray eyebrows and I shut my lip. Probably wouldn’t do to characterize our caretaker’s main domain as the least important part of the tomb. Hale took extraordinary pride in being the Diggers’ caretaker, as his father had been before him. No one in the society knew who we would hire after he succumbed to the ravages of age, since Hale had no kids and the position wasn’t exactly one we wanted to advertise for on Craigslist.

“Oh, Hale,” I said quickly, walking toward him and putting my hand on his shoulder in a gesture of comfort. “I meant to mention this to you: Apparently Lancelot, D176, got a huge catch of halibut in Alaska. He’s sending some down for our deep freeze.”

“You heard from him?” asked a voice behind me, and I turned to find myself face-to-face with Death.

Or Poe, in Grim Reaper makeup. Same diff, as far as I was concerned. Damn, where had he come from? He’s an Olympic-class lurker, this one.

“Yeah, the other day,” I said.

Poe frowned (or maybe it was just the spirit gum) and jammed his hand in his pockets. “Oh. How’s he doing?”

Poe hadn’t heard from him? “Good. He, um, told me to say hi.” Actually, that wasn’t what Malcolm had written at all, but I have my limits when it comes to Poe. After all, four short months ago, the guy standing before me had stuck me in a plywood coffin and threatened to dump me in a pool. (I don’t swim.) No love lost around here.

“He owes me an e-mail.” Now Poe crossed his arms over his chest. “So, how was your summer?”

“Good,” I said. “I was in D.C.”

“Yeah. Working for that patriarch.”

Oops, bad topic. Poe had lost his own patriarch-bestowed internship at the White House after (eventually and reluctantly) siding with me and the other active Diggers in our battle last spring. I wasn’t sure what he’d been up to this summer. (Though whatever it was, judging from his arms, he’d gotten a tan. Looked good on him, actually.)

“So, how’s…law school?” Last I heard, Poe had been scheduled to start as a 1L at Eli Law this fall, which meant this campus was stuck with him for three more years. Bummer.

“Fine.”

The conversation was going swimmingly. We stood in silence for a second or so, and then Poe, in a misguided attempt to jump-start the exchange, said, “Lil’ Demon asked me to play the Reaper tonight. Guess she couldn’t find anyone in the
current
class she liked enough to take on the role.”

Yeah, because insulting my club would definitely warm me up. “Or maybe she thought no one else had the requisite air of depression and desperation.” I smiled. “Planning on drowning anyone this evening?”

He matched my grim smile, and this time it wasn’t the makeup. “Only if you get close enough, Bugaboo.”

Asshole. I opened my mouth to respond, but Angel interrupted me. “Bugaboo, your turn in the chair,” she called, and I shot Poe one last, withering glare and departed.

“Who was that?” she asked me as the makeup artist started in with the airbrush. “I couldn’t tell under the goop.”

“Poe. Remember?”

She looked back at him. “Really? Jeez, what did he do over the summer? Take up bodybuilding?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. He should have spent the time getting a personality.”

“He’s got a personality,” Thorndike interrupted from the chair next to mine. Her artist gave her a warning glance and gestured dangerously with the palette knife. “It’s just not a pleasant one.”

The girls all laughed, and I noted Poe shrugging into his robe in the opposite corner of the kitchen, back turned. He hunched his shoulders at the sound.
Oh, damn.

Whatever, Amy. He’s a jerk. Save your sympathy for someone else.

Lucky dropped by as I was tying the hood on my robe. “Hey, Bugaboo, I already talked to Soze, but I wanted to tell you that my—um, friend…he didn’t mean what he said at the bazaar. It just came out wrong.” She looked down at her hands. “He sometimes doesn’t realize how it sounds. I hope you don’t think I—”

I put my hand over hers, my earlier annoyance for her lack of commitment vanishing. “Of course I don’t. You’re one of us. I trust you. And we can talk about it more if you want.” I checked the swiftly emptying kitchen. “After the initiation.” She was always so much friendlier inside the tomb than when I saw her in the barbarian world. Better take advantage of it while I could.

Half an hour later, we were at “places,” waiting for the show to start, which meant I was back to crouching in a dusty corner with my bag o’ glitter, wishing I’d done more thigh workouts at the gym.

“Yo, ’boo,” Puck whispered across the way. “See anything yet?” He’d had been given the role of Quetzalcoatl in the festivities, proving perhaps that Lil’ Demon’s true talent lay in casting choices, because the shirtless-loincloth outfit was an excellent look for the boy. Feathered headdress, scale makeup, and all.

“No,” I whispered back.

“Good.” He slithered over to my side of the hallway (and I say that literally, as those FX guys had somehow applied a long tail to his outfit—which was, no,
still
not a turnoff ) and slid down the wall next to me, crossing his legs beneath him. I spotted gym shorts beneath the loincloth. Damn. “About last night—”

Oh, no,
please
don’t ask about Brandon! “Yeah?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

Huh?

“For my mom. She’s not usually like that.” He fiddled with some of the beading on his ceremonial bracelets.

“Oh. That’s okay.” I cocked my head to one side. Was that the chanting in the Firefly Room starting up?

“We got some news.” He took a deep breath. “My dad’s pregnant. I mean, his wife. They’re having a baby. And let’s just say he’s known for a lot longer than he’s been acting like it where my mom’s concerned.”

I couldn’t even work up a token expression of surprise. Disdain, however, was available in surplus.