“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 connections to the Nazis? (This goes on the top of my new list, Things to Find Out About Your Secret Society Before Taking an Oath of Fidelity. #1: Are we in league with any organized hate groups?)

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—winning crew boats and the like. Some of the treasures we’ve raided from other societies. Some decently valuable and butt-ugly art. More med school skeletons than you can shake a femur at.

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Out-of-date since the Cold War, but yeah.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 pinned the little gold hexagon to a belt loop and pulled the hem of my shirt back down. “If no one is supposed to know it’s there, why bother wearing it at all?”

“You’ll know it’s there,” he replied. He crossed to the door and peeked out. “Just checking for Brandon Weare,” he said, grinning. “We wouldn’t want him thinking you’re cheating.”

“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 sunny Calvin College courtyard. Brandon’s entryway was on the other side of the building, so it was unlikely that I might have run into him while leaving Malcolm’s room. And from what I could see, he wasn’t in the courtyard, either. I glanced up at Brandon’s suite window, wondering if I should drop by while I was on his side of the campus. No, I’d see him at the office later this weekend anyway, and there was a strong possibility that any aggressive move on my part (e.g., showing up unannounced at his dorm) would be taken as a signal to launch into The Talk. Or maybe Number Seven.

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 fanning in a current with the help of Lydia’s Rocks for Jocks binder. As soon as I could breathe again, I picked my way across the floor and peeked in her room. Her lavender duvet lay in a poufy heap on her bed, but Lydia herself was nowhere to be seen. There were more smeared, rust-colored fingerprints on her desk chair and closet door.

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 banner first day as a Digger. I thought about what Malcolm had said.

It’s no accident that all my closest buds are society members now.