Diana Peterfreund
Under the Rose
Dedication
For Jacki, who has always treated me like a daughter
I hereby confess:
I didn’t understand what it
meant to be a Digger.
When you picture the secret society of Rose & Grave, I know what you see. Commanding statesmen, wealthy entrepreneurs, sly spies. Shadowy, secretive, and always in control. Those who have sought to infiltrate our brotherhood have vanished without a trace. Those who have dared to reveal our clandestine ways have learned the true meaning of the term “cloak-and-dagger.” We have suffered much to cultivate our image, and we will stop at nothing to maintain it.
From the first years of our existence, our order has been protected by a massive network of the rich and powerful across the country and around the globe. Now, those who displease us are quick to discover how deeply our tentacles have stretched, and those upon whom we shower goodwill live as one of the elect. Indeed, our detractors say favorites of Rose & Grave have made a deal with the devil—and we don’t proclaim them wrong.
As far as the outside world is concerned, there is no history of Rose & Grave. We are eternal and unchanging, a centuries-long line of monolithic and omnipotent clubs. Each has sought to continue the work and uphold the traditions, the prejudices, and the champions of the one before. There has never been dissent. There has never been attrition. There has never been…a traitor.
No, really, there hasn’t. Honest. I swear.
Don’t believe me? Then step inside for a moment, and witness the truth. Grab a taste of absolute power. Steal a kiss from your wildest fantasies. Take a gander upon that which few eyes have seen.
But be careful. You’ve heard what we like to do to outsiders….
The Rose & Grave Club of D177
1) Clarissa Cuthbert: Angel
2) Gregory Dorian: Bond
3) Odile Dumas: Little Demon
4) Benjamin Edwards: Big Demon
5) Howard First: Number Two
6) Amy Haskel: Bugaboo
7) Nikolos Dmitri Kandes IV: Graverobber
8) Kevin Lee: Frodo
9) Omar Mathabane: Kismet
10) George Harrison Prescott: Puck
11) Demetria Robinson: Thorndike
12) Jennifer Santos: Lucky
13) Harun Sarmast: Tristram Shandy
14) Joshua Silver: Keyser Soze
15) Mara Taserati: Juno
1. Stragglers
I hereby confess:
We aren’t like other
college students.
It was shopping period at Eli University, and lest you think this is one of those books about fashion, let me enlighten you. The students at Eli were not shopping for Prada, but for Proust; they weren’t hunting for good bargains, but rather, for gut classes; and they would happily surrender Fendi at forty percent off to secure a Fractals section that wasn’t all the way up on Science Hill.
As a senior, I found this shopping period especially poignant. It was my penultimate chance to discover the hidden gem seminar, the one I’d look back on in the cold, post-Eli future as being one of those bright college days the song[1] speaks of. My last chance, in many cases, to take the famous lectures given by the college’s most notorious luminaries.
“What? You didn’t take Herbert Branch’s Shakespeare class?” future employers will say with incredulity. “Why, Amy Haskel, what were you doing there at Eli?”
And I will not be able to tell them, because I swore an oath never to reveal the truth: that while other Literature majors were shopping the Branch class, I was crouching in the shadows on a cold stone floor, garbed in a long black hooded robe and a skull-shaped mask, rehearsing an esoteric initiation ritual that required me to lie in wait for an innocent classmate to wander by so I could leap out, pelt his face with phosphorescent dust, and yell “Boo.”
As if I’d admit to something like that anyway.
“Hey, Lil’ Demon!” I called down the stairs. “I sort of wanted to shop a seminar this afternoon, so can we non-speaking parts adjourn for the day?”
Keyser Soze, a.k.a. Joshua Silver, popped up from behind a tower of human remains. “The Branch class? I wanted to take that, too.” Figures. Branch was a brand-name professor at Eli, and it would suit Josh’s political aspirations to add the scholar’s reputation to his C.V.
Lil’ Demon, currently levitating over a pool of blood, raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow and blew a strand of chestnut brown hair (she’d had it dyed over the summer) out of her eyes. “I should have gone union,” she said with a sniff. “You people just don’t understand show business.”
(By the way, that thing in Us Weekly about Lil’ Demon over the Fourth of July weekend is categorically untrue. Odile Dumas wasn’t “servicing” any ex—boy-band members in Tijuana; she was with me and the other Diggers at a patriarch’s pool party on Fire Island. And, say what you will about the starlet, she has better taste than to get down with a bunch of scrawny tenors. If that were her style, we had more than enough singing groups right here on campus.)
Thorndike, poised below her and wielding a wicked-looking pitchfork, tapped Lil’ Demon on her Pilates-honed and designer jeans—encrusted behind. “Can’t let the Teamsters in the tomb,” she reminded her. Demetria “Thorndike” Robinson was our resident power-to-the-people expert, so she’d know. “But I’m with them anyway,” she continued. “There’s this Racial Strata of the 21st Century symposium I wanted to hit at three.”
A chorus of voices erupted from the other costumed participants about classes they were missing. Bond, our club’s British contingent, wanted to ensure his seniors-first spot in a college poetry seminar, Frodo needed to go to a board meeting of the Eli Film Society, Big Demon had scheduled some physical therapy at the gym, Kismet was tutoring Swahili, and Graverobber, who I don’t think I’d ever witnessed in an Eli classroom, needed to see a man about a horse. Which he owned.
Lil’ Demon sighed, unhooked herself from her safety harness, and dropped to the floor. “Fine, but don’t blame me if the new initiates think they’re getting shafted on their ceremony.”
“With these special effects, I doubt it,” I replied. Lil’ Demon had somehow managed to cajole some FX guy at her studio into lending us a bunch of old monster-movie stuff for the initiation we were holding tomorrow for the Rose & Grave taps who had been abroad during our junior year. No offense to previous clubs—society jargon for each year’s class—and their sublime efforts at scaring the pants off the neophytes, but there was something about stuffing the taps into the same coffin that had once housed Bela Lugosi that added a certain air of authenticity to the proceedings. It would be one hell of a night, rehearsal or not.
I shoved the mask off my face and breathed in cool air. Acting was so not my thing. Some might say I lacked the basic requirement: the ability to conceal my true emotions at any given time. Others would argue I didn’t have the necessary charisma.
1
Cole Porter. Keep up.