Secret Society (5 page)

She was led to another room, where the initiates were being given what looked like a tattoo at the nape of their necks. Lauren shuddered for a moment. She had never gone for tattoos, always thought of them as a passing trend. “I don't believe in—”

Emily turned around and lifted up her beautiful chestnut locks. “Look closely.”

Lauren peered at Emily's neckline. “I don't see anything.”

Emily stood still. “Look again.”

Lauren looked more closely. Finally, she saw it in the dim light, a tattoo the size of a pinky fingernail, at the nape of Emily's neck. It was nearly invisible in this light and, during normal hours, would be hidden by Emily's hair or clothing.

“What is it?”

Emily pointed to the top of the page she had handed Lauren, where there was a symbol, a cross with a loop at the top of it. “It's an ankh. The Egyptian symbol for life. It bonds all of us together. Once you get it, you are initiated into the Society. I was scared, too, but now I think it's pretty.”

Lauren nodded. It was pretty, and besides, no one would ever see it unless they were standing right behind her. “Does it hurt?”

“No more than getting your ears pierced,” Emily said. “Come.”

There was an empty chair in front of them, and Lauren sat down. A figure, a man in a black leather mask, was handling the tattoo gun. Her hair was lifted up, and she felt a series of tiny pinpricks in the back of her neck. It didn't hurt at all; she wondered if the drink earlier had made her numb. The man, whom she realized was wearing latex gloves, took a bandage and applied it over the area where he had been working. Emily
then gently placed Lauren's hair back down her shoulders.

“It's all over now,” Emily said. “Welcome.”

 

Down the street, the party was still going on. Patch, however, wasn't in the DJ booth and hadn't been for hours. He had set the mix to play six hours of music, which was more than enough, and he had locked the door to the booth, labeling it with a hastily scribbled
No Entry
sign. He had seen Nick's cell phone while he had been copying down the song requests, and he knew what it meant. It was the Night of Rebirth, the Society's initiation night. His grandmother had dated a Society member in the 1940s, so she knew that this was the time of year when new initiates were tapped. Genie had warned him about this night, had warned him to be careful.

Five hours after escaping the DJ booth and crawling through an air duct that led into the next building, he was still being careful. Careful enough to have packed extra batteries and multiple memory cards for his camera. Careful enough to have brought an infrared night-vision filter, one he had specifically ordered online for tonight's shoot. And after it was all over, careful enough to guard the five hours of footage that he had in his backpack as he walked across town, the sun rising, to the Lexington Avenue Express, the train that would take him home.

P
hoebe was frantic as the fifteen of them—Lauren, Nick, and her, plus the other twelve initiates—filed out to the street. Lauren was giving her dirty looks and motioning for her to be quiet, but she didn't care. “I can't believe this,” Phoebe whispered. She couldn't control the words coming out of her mouth. “How dare they!” She reached around to the back of her neck and felt the bandaged spot where the tattoo had been placed. What had she been thinking? She would never get a tattoo! Had it been safe? Couldn't you get diseases from dirty needles? They were out on the street now, the three of them huddled in a group, apart from the others.

“Shh!” Nick hissed at her. “We'll talk about it later, okay?”

“I mean, you accepted, right?” Lauren said.

Phoebe nodded. “Yes, I did, but I drank that stuff—I mean, that's not the way these things are supposed to work, is it?”

“I think it's pretty much the way the Society works,” Nick said.

“What do you mean?”

The sun was starting to rise, a bluish-pink glow slowly washing over the streets. It was a little after six A.M. The light slowly revealed the area's grit, its true nature.

“Look, I can't talk about it now,” Nick said. Phoebe couldn't believe the next thing she heard, but the whole evening had been so incredible, she didn't know what to expect anymore.

Nick grabbed her arm. “Meet me later today, after you've gotten some sleep. At the Viand. It's a coffee shop. Across the street from Barneys.”

Phoebe nodded slowly.

“Oh my God,” Lauren said. “Those are for us.”

Phoebe looked up. There were fifteen black Mercedes sedans, lined up with drivers waiting, ready to take each of them home, their engines idling and sputtering fumes. There were a few people on the street at this hour, stragglers from nearby clubs, but no one paid the group or the cars much attention. The man hosing off the puke and cigarette butts on the sidewalk in front of Pastis didn't even notice. Phoebe wanted to forget the entire night, to rid herself of the memory
that it had ever happened.

“This is absurd. I'm walking.” Phoebe pulled away from the group before anyone could stop her, her ballet flats slapping against the sidewalk as she stepped over smatterings of broken glass, a beer bottle that had been smashed on the ground. There was no way she was letting a town car take her five blocks home; there was no way she was getting in any car at all. She took deep breaths of the chilly morning air, more confused than she had been in a long time.

 

Lauren woke up late that afternoon in her apartment, in her blue birdcage of a room: iron canopy bed, Pratesi linens she was afraid to spill anything on, French toile wallpaper with its sparrows staring at her in mock glee. Today, she felt the most amazing sense of contentment, as if everything was going to be fine. After such a late night, she would usually mope around the apartment, nursing her hangover with orange juice and a greasy omelet. But today she was fine, despite the three vodka-and-sodas she had drunk, not to mention whatever they had given her at the initiation. She wanted to go out, to enjoy the last hour or so of real daylight before the sun went down. She dressed quickly, throwing on a long sweater coat over jeans and a T-shirt. She hurried to the elevator, passing the gorgeous flower arrangement that sat in her mother's front hall and was refreshed weekly, although it was currently dropping petals onto the polished Biedermeier side table. The building was
strangely silent as she rode downstairs in the wood-paneled elevator. She said hello to Rory, her favorite cute young doorman, who was manning the desk in the black and white lobby. Lauren looked around, as if it were all new to her, the standard-issue Park Avenue botanical prints and gilt mirrors.

“Package for you, miss,” he said, in his Irish brogue. He went into the package room that was to the left of the doorman station. Lauren's heart skipped when she saw the signature aqua and chocolate brown shopping bag, tied in satin ribbon. It was Giroux New York's fall look; the store was renowned for changing its bags' color scheme each season. People in Japan collected and sold the bags on eBay, fetching hundreds of dollars for them.

Lauren looked inside. Wrapped in tissue was a black Chloé handbag she had briefly admired in the window the previous day, before buying the skirt. It was a classic bag, with its gorgeous stitching, its buckles and padlock, and they were known to be nearly impossible to obtain; although there had been one in the window, Lauren had heard that there was a long waiting list for certain colors, particularly black.

It also retailed for more than twelve thousand dollars.

A card was included with the package, on the Giroux stationery, which simply read,
With compliments
.

“Thank you,” Lauren said to Rory, in an attempt to act as if this were a package she had been expecting. She didn't quite know what to do. Take the bag upstairs? Leave it at the
doorman station and pick it up later? No, there was only one thing to do: She took out the bag, pocketed the card, and asked Rory to dispose of the wrapping. She swung it casually over her shoulder in the late afternoon light as she noticed the weekend nannies with their charges, families with children, young couples out on Park Avenue. As she passed awning after awning, all flanked by doormen standing in front of the iron or brass double doors, she decided she would walk over to the park. There was something bright in the air, not the usual weekend haziness, a crispness that belied the Indian summer. The bag made her happy, and for a few moments she felt simple, material satisfaction.

As she walked through the park, though, past the various monuments and landmarks she remembered from her childhood—the Angel of the Waters fountain, the Bandshell, the Lennon memorial at Strawberry Fields—she felt sad. Her mother would be coming home tomorrow afternoon from the Hamptons, and her dad—well, who knew where he was? Probably on business somewhere, if not in his apartment on Central Park West with his nasty new girlfriend. Lauren had no plans tonight. The girls were going out to a Yorkville bar that evening to flirt with college boys and procure free drinks, but she didn't feel like going. For one thing, she would have to explain her mysterious disappearance the night before. She would see them in school on Monday anyway; by then, they might have forgotten. Lauren thought about this new girl,
Phoebe, the one whose mother was an up-and-coming photographer. That made her Society material, Lauren assumed. It was sweet of Nick to take her out; she had overheard his offer that morning. Lauren had known Nick forever, and they had always been friendly, but never close. Although Nick was cute, she had never really liked dating guys her own age.

She looked down at the bag. It was pretty; it felt nice hanging on her shoulder. But she had done nothing to earn it. It wouldn't answer any of her questions. Still, she clutched it tightly as she wondered who exactly had sent it to her, what she had done to receive it, and, most important, what was expected of her in return.

T
hat afternoon, Phoebe sat with Nick over Cokes—regular for him, diet for her—at the Viand Coffee Shop, which was bustling with Madison Avenue shoppers: families with kids, teens, old ladies with dyed hair, who looked like they'd been coming here for years. She had agreed to meet him after he had texted her a reminder. (Did the entire world have her number? She was starting to wonder.) It wasn't the best place to talk about everything, but they were keeping their voices low.

“Okay, you've got to tell me what happened last night,” she said, as she crunched her straw wrapper into a ball. “It seems more like a dream than a series of cohesive memories. Like, I don't know, a Kubrick movie or something. You seem so cool with it. Is it just me?”

He paused for a moment. In this light, she could see his fine features, the little bits of hair between his eyebrows, his handsome Roman nose, the scruff on his cheeks.

“I know what you mean,” he finally said. “It was surreal. It's just that I've heard stories through the years and so, well, I wasn't terribly surprised.”

“‘Stories' meaning…”

“The Society is something that has been connected to New York life for hundreds of years. Most people think it's an urban legend, like the baby crocodile that got flushed down the toilet and lives in the sewer, or the Loch Ness monster or something. Anyway, the Society exists for the good. I know it was creepy and weird last night, but you've just got to believe.” He leaned forward, speaking quietly. “You see, people haven't been taking it too seriously in recent years. It used to be the kind of secret you kept until you died. But now some people think it's a joke. People have even said no to it. There was an artist, one of those renegade types—people said he was the new Damien Hirst. Was in the Whitney Biennial at seventeen, galleries were dying to rep him. The Society tapped him. He showed up, out of curiosity, but once he was inside, he bolted.”

“What's he doing now?”

Nick scratched his chin. “I don't know. It was maybe two years ago, something like that. He would be in college now. I
guess that's where he is. Wait, I remember: He was supposed to go to Brown, but they rejected him. Said his grades weren't good enough. Guy had been on the front page of the
Times
Arts section, and he gets dissed from an Ivy. He was supposed to be world famous. And then, just like that: He turned the Society down, and he became a nobody.”

Phoebe cringed. “How on earth do you know all this? I thought it was all so
secret
.” She detected the sneer in her voice.

Nick grinned. “Come on, you're from LA, you know how these things go. Like how everyone knows who's going to get nominated for an Oscar before it happens. Or how everyone knows which TV star is gay. It's one of those secrets that people can't keep. If you're in the Society, you have to keep it. But people have talked. There was a journalist a few years ago; he was writing a book on the whole thing, although I think it never went anywhere. So it's not like it's
that
secret. The truth, though, is that no one
really
knows what goes on inside it, at least no one who's on the outside. I mean, what happened last night: No one knows about that.”

“But you seem like you have some kind of inside knowledge about it all.”

Nick shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He looked like he'd been caught. “My father got drunk over the summer, when we were out at the beach. He didn't give me the whole picture, but
he helped fill in some of the blanks for me. Only in the broadest terms. At that time, I didn't even think I'd be asked. It didn't sound like it was for me. But last night—I was surprised.”

“So what does it all mean?”

Nick looked at her intently, and she shivered. She couldn't remember the last time someone, not to mention a guy, had looked at her with such incredible intensity, his pale blue eyes boring into her. “It was made very clear to me last night, Phoebe, that I shouldn't turn this down. Just by piecing together what my dad had said and what I saw. And I don't think you should, either. I'm sure there's so much that you want from Chadwick, from life, from your junior year. And they can help you get it.”

“But that's ridiculous—we should be doing that stuff on our own.”

“We do have to do it on our own. I mean, they can't get you into college or whatever for sitting on your ass. But they can help open doors for us. And think of the competition. Every teenager these days seems to be writing a novel or making a film or posting an award-winning blog. Don't you want to be one of the ones who gets noticed?”

“I guess so,” Phoebe said. It still creeped her out. She couldn't help it. Maybe she was old-fashioned. But there was something about Nick that she trusted. The army jacket, the wavy curls that grazed his neckline: She could see it was all a
pose. She could see that underneath it there was something deeper.

She didn't know what she was saying, but the words started coming out. “Okay. I'll do it. But I can't do this alone. I need, like, a partner, to be there with me. Someone I can rely on. Someone I can go to if things aren't working out. And you seem to know the most about it all. You promise you'll be there for me?”

At that moment, a little boy in the booth behind Nick spilled his chocolate milkshake all over the table. A busboy ran over with a rag, and Nick was temporarily distracted by the commotion. Phoebe couldn't ignore the sinking feeling that she had committed a major faux pas; she suddenly felt pathetic. It was as if she were asking him to be her best friend or, even more horrifyingly, her boyfriend. She meant nothing of the sort. All she wanted was to know that someone would watch her back.

Nick didn't seem fazed by any of this, not by her request nor by the screaming kid behind him. He continued looking right back at her, stirred his ice with a straw, took a sip of his soda, and smiled.

“Of course I will,” he said.

At that moment, Phoebe's cell phone buzzed with a text message. She noticed Nick squirming to pull out his as well. She flipped open her phone, a nervous feeling in her stomach.

Phoebe showed it to Nick and frowned. He had received the same message.

“Any idea what this means?” she asked.

Nick shrugged and thought about it for a moment. “South of Dendur. That's the temple in the Met. So it's south of the museum. But ‘games are played'? That could be anywhere in the park.”

Phoebe glanced over at the floor's scuffed black and white linoleum tiles. “Black and white, Nick. A game that's played on black and white.”

Nick slapped the table. “It's obvious,” he said. “The chess tables in Central Park.”

“So you're going to go?” Phoebe asked.

Nick pulled out a five for their sodas and looked at her with amusement in his eyes.

“You're not getting it yet, are you, Phoebe?” he said. “We don't have a choice.”

 

Patch had been holed up in his bedroom since returning home at six A.M. He had worried about Nick spotting him in the lobby, and so he asked the doorman not to say anything about his whereabouts. Once he was safely in his bedroom,
Patch still couldn't sleep. He looked at himself in the mirror after taking off his filthy jeans and T-shirt. He was a mess: bags under the eyes, glasses smudged, his hair a rat's nest, his forehead breaking out into an angry rash of zits. He would have taken a shower, but he was afraid of waking up Genie. It was like the worst kind of caffeine high, when you want to sleep but you can't, and so you spend the night or morning tossing and turning, every sound, every thought, every glimmer of light a provocation.

He knew he had no other option.

He put the first memory card in, and started to watch.