Secret Society (8 page)

T
he next morning, after waking up at a normal hour, Patch sat in his bedroom with another paused scene on his monitor. He thought about the branding of the ankh, the tattoos, the idea that his classmates—even worse, his best friend—were all stuck with this mark, and they didn't even know what they were getting into. He had thought he would be better than it all, that he would do a vlog posting about it on Monday morning, that it would be some kind of joke, the type of thing that would get tons of comments, a link on Gawker, and then everyone would forget about it in a few days.

He realized now that it was no joke, not even close. Even worse, he had upset Genie. She had refused to tell him anything more when he had pressed her, simply saying that he
didn't deserve to know about it if he couldn't act in a mature manner.

By mature, he understood what she meant: that silence was the price he would have to pay if he wanted more information.

Then again, maybe Genie had it wrong. Maybe it was all nothing more than a bunch of fraternity-style antics. Tattoos? Yeah, sort of extreme, but he knew at least ten people who had them, even though it was illegal to get one before you were eighteen. He didn't know what to think about it. He wanted to believe that if Nick was involved in something, it would be okay.

That was the most important thing to him: that Nick was safe.

Patch was pretty sure the Bells were in Southampton and that Nick would be alone in the apartment. Not wanting to disturb—or, for that matter, deal with—Genie, Patch crept out the back entrance near the kitchen that led up the building's service stairs. Ten flights up and he'd be at Nick's apartment. He was barely sweating, thanks to his on-and-off running habit, when he reached the top. He pulled a metal file from his back pocket. The service doors in the building were so easy to jimmy open, it was laughable. The building was the type that had such good security on the outside—closed-circuit cameras, two doormen and two porters, key-controlled floor access in the elevator—that no one ever thought it was
necessary to provide much protection on the inside. For as long as he could remember, he had visited Nick's apartment this way. It made no sense, after all, to go down to the lobby, buzz Nick's penthouse, get permission, and then go all the way up again—and Nick didn't seem to mind that Patch practiced his lock-picking skills whenever he could. He inserted the file and a thin screwdriver, felt the pins click, and turned the latch. He was in.

Nick's apartment was like a tomb. He wondered if his friend was still asleep. He looked around at the kitchen with its expensive appliances, inside the pantry, down the long hallway that led to the rest of the apartment. He spied a stack of mail sitting in a basket and stepped forward to see who the top envelope was from.

That was his problem, he thought. He was too damned nosy.

“Patchfield.”

Patch froze and looked up. Parker Bell, Nick's father, was standing at the entrance to the kitchen. He had come in as quietly as a slithering snake and now towered over Patch. He was an imposing man, tall with silvery gray hair. His history had always impressed Patch: He had served in Vietnam and then had taken part in antiwar protests after coming home. But since those days, he had turned into a typical Upper East Sider.

“I thought you were out at the house.”

“No, Georgiana and I decided to come back early this weekend. Just got in.”

“I was looking for Nick.”

“Of course you were. I believe he's still asleep.”

“Sure. Sorry to bother you.”

“Not a problem, son.” He flashed a smile, revealing his perfectly straight teeth. “But next time, I think the front entrance will suffice.”

 

As soon as she had arrived home, Phoebe collapsed into bed. This time, unlike the previous night, she had decided she wouldn't think about anything until she had slept, at least for a few hours. On Sunday morning, she woke at ten
A.M
, the previous night's events gnawing at her. It wasn't only her confusion about the Society's purpose and origins. It was Charles's comment about her doing anything to get ahead. She felt like she used to be a high achiever, before Chadwick, before high school. In eighth grade, she had won the spirit award for putting in the most hours on the school newspaper. But recently, all she had been was another good student, with no honors, no accolades, not even a perfect GPA to add to her name. Where did that put her in the college race? Nick was right about the way things were. Every teenager was doing something extraordinary; if you didn't, you fell in with the pack. It made her angry. It used to be good enough to have a normal childhood, to be happy. Now you had to start think
ing about college before you even started high school.

She looked at the light that was coming through her tall bedroom windows, refracted from the leafy trees outside. She reached to the glass on her bedside table and took a sip of water. The scroll that Anastasia had given her was sitting next to it.

When she had glanced at it the night before, before bed, it seemed like more jargon, so she decided she would look at it later. According to Anastasia, the sheet explaining the Society's philosophy had been prepared by the class of Conscripts. Some of it sounded like language passed down from year to year, while some of it sounded newer. The gist of it was that the Society was started several hundred years ago in Ivy League universities—Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth—as a breeding ground for what they called the “sons of privilege.” It claimed ancient Egyptian roots, although the details were a little murky. In the 1950s, at the time of the “youth culture explosion” (as the scroll called it), the group decided to start recruiting in the junior year of high school, to give its younger offspring a chance to start earlier. But Society membership wasn't always transferred by blood; members could be recruited from the outside. Phoebe thought of some of the Initiates; surely they didn't all have parents who were rich or who had been Society members themselves. She thought about herself, of course—her mother and father were not members of any such group, as far as she knew.

She read over the page once again, but it was so vague, she didn't really know what to make of it. She went to her laptop and tried searching for all the possible combinations of words that might bring up information about the Society. Phoebe came up with a few sites, mostly makeshift pages of fact and fiction about the group. The rumors were all over the place: that there was a secret crypt under the Temple of Dendur at the Met, where meetings were held once you got to a certain level…that there was a Society trust composed of hundreds of millions of dollars, which supported the Society's activities…that the Society had been losing power and that was why it had started recruiting younger…that its methods were violent. She cringed at the last fact, but the webpage itself seemed so hysterical, red type on black, filled with misspellings, that she didn't want to believe it. The page had animation, which crashed her browser. After she restarted her laptop, she didn't return to it.

Phoebe knew what she had seen over the past two nights. She liked the people who were there. She would have to decide for herself.

 

Nick woke up just before noon on Sunday. He had forgotten to let down his room's fabric shades the night before, so the midday light was streaming in. He looked around his bedroom, at its high ceiling, at the blue striped wallpaper he had been allowed to pick out when he was ten. This morning, unlike the
past two nights, he felt comfortable, safe, as if nothing could touch him—until he heard someone walking down the hall outside his door. He popped his head out to see that it was his mom and dad, back early from their trip to the beach house. He wondered if he would have to tell his dad about the Society stuff—or maybe his dad already knew? It was so confusing.

He was hungry, not having eaten in nearly sixteen hours. Nick threw on some sweatpants and a T-shirt and wandered down the hall to the breakfast nook off the kitchen, the one with the fantastic view of the apartment's wraparound deck. His mother, Gigi, had done the decor to look like they were in the South of France, which Nick always thought was a bit absurd in the middle of Manhattan. But today, he enjoyed it, the idyllic sunlight-spattered patterns on the Pierre Deux tablecloth, the Provençal ceramic dishes, the topiary plants on the deck. His parents were having brunch together, as if they did this every Sunday. In reality, most weekends they were in the country; if they were in the city, they were usually attending some sort of function or his father was working.

“Sweetie, do you want some lunch?” his mother asked. She was wearing skintight jeans, a white blouse, and very little makeup, because she didn't need it. Her fiery red hair spilled down her back.

Nick nodded and started filling his plate.

“You must have been out late last night,” she said.

Nick grunted an acknowledgment. “Yeah, me and, you
know, some friends, we went out.”

“With some new people, I hope?” his mother asked. “Not, you know…”

“Mom, why do you care about how much time I spend with Patch?”

“I just think that a friendship with him is somewhat…well, somewhat limiting. You need friends who are on your own level.”

His father seemed eager to change the subject. “We want you to have a good time. Enjoy it while you can,” his dad said. “With school and college plans and everything starting to heat up, I don't want you getting too stressed out.”

This was so unlike his parents. All they ever used to do was get on his case to be someone different, to achieve, to accomplish whatever they had in mind for him. And now suddenly they were being so easygoing. Except, of course, for the Patch thing. His mother had never liked Patch, although he couldn't figure out why. Nick took a bite of his bagel after piling it with lettuce, tomato, and Gertie's famous tuna salad. His mother smiled at him, and his father continued reading the paper, tortoiseshell glasses perched on his nose, as if it were any other Sunday.

Nick ate his bagel, staring at the Manhattan skyline beyond the deck. He wasn't sure if something wasn't right, or if maybe, just maybe, things were finally turning out the way he had always imagined they should.

O
n Sunday afternoon, Lauren and Phoebe met up at Giroux New York. Lauren wanted Phoebe to see her favorite store, but more important, she wanted to find out who had given her the purse. She and Phoebe gushed over the shoe department—the styles were gorgeous, spot-lit, and displayed on Lucite shelves as if they were works of art. Even Lauren didn't find them terribly practical—but, oh, if only to look…she loved that part of it. She was showing Phoebe a snakeskin stiletto when she heard a voice behind her.

“Miss Mortimer?”

She started before turning around. It was Sebastian Giroux himself; she recognized him from numerous articles in the
Times
Style section and
Women's Wear Daily
.

“Yes?” she said.

Mr. Giroux looked down at Lauren's bag. “I see you received my message,” he said.

Of course—it was starting to make sense. “Yes, thank you so much. It's so generous of you. You didn't really have to—I mean, my God, I don't buy
that
much here! I mean, I wish I did, but you know, the prices are a little bit…” Her voice trailed off. She didn't even know what she was saying.

“Sometimes you have to pay for quality,” he said.

“Oh, I didn't mean to imply—” Lauren blushed a little.

“Not to worry. The bag was a gift, but it was also an invitation.”

Lauren raised an eyebrow at him.

He looked at her outfit, the way she was wearing a sweater dress over tight jeans, the Hermès scarf of her mother's that she had tied around the handle of the bag. “You, my dear, have style. I can tell. Just like your mother. How would you feel about working as an intern for me?”

Lauren gasped. “Oh my God, I'd love to. I mean, you know I'm still in school, right?” What was she thinking? She would skip school for this, if she had to.

“Of course, we'll work something out. You can work in the afternoons. How does that sound?”

Lauren grinned. “It sounds amazing.” She turned to Phoebe. “Oh, this is my friend Phoebe, by the way. I can't—I can't believe this. Thank you so much!”

“My pleasure,” he said. “You deserve this.”

 

“Okay,” Lauren said to Phoebe, as the two of them sat over coffee nearby at Pastis. “What on earth just happened there? I've never met the man in my life, never told anyone that I—okay, wait, that's not true. I posted on my Facebook page like a million years ago how much I'd love to work at that store. I told Emily last night that I'd like to be in fashion someday, but I didn't think it would happen so quickly.”

Phoebe nodded. She wasn't creeped out by it; she was actually feeling a terrible sense of jealousy. God, could she be happy for someone else for once? It wasn't only that, though—it was this feeling that even if she were part of the Society, she would always be the underdog. Lauren hadn't even been a member for two days, and she had already gotten an internship. Nick had been offered a club night by his mentor, Jared, right on the spot. What had she gotten? She had mentioned to Anastasia that she would love to put together a gallery show, but Anastasia (who, Phoebe had to admit, seemed like a bit of a flake) hadn't done anything or offered her any advice. Maybe she was being silly. It had been fewer than forty-eight hours. Success wasn't supposed to happen that quickly. Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that however quickly it might happen for her, everyone else's ascent would be speedier. Earlier that day, she had rifled through the college catalogs she had started receiving in the mail, based on her PSAT scores, which, while good, were not amazing. She had unpacked her
mixed media pieces from their boxes. She needed to get to work on them. What was she so afraid of?

“It's great,” Phoebe said, hoping her lack of enthusiasm wasn't overly apparent.

“You don't seem so sure,” Lauren said, taking a sip of her espresso.

“No, I just—well, I'm still a bit confused by it all. Some of it seems clear. It's like that perfect job interview that we all imagine, where someone says, ‘You're great, we love you, we want you.' But then there are these strange things about it. Like, they haven't really spelled out to us what
we're
supposed to be doing. I mean, I seriously doubt that all this comes for free. It's like, at what point do we have to start paying them back for all these privileges—the majority of which are still unclear to me.”

“The feeling I got was that first we get to take advantage of being part of it,” Lauren said. “I mean, it's not like we can really do anything for anyone anyway, right? I don't have any real connections, I can't get someone a job or whatever. I think the idea is that you succeed and then you help the next group, as payback for the older classes who helped you. Which is kind of the way life works anyway, right?”

Phoebe corrected her. “Life for some people. I mean, whatever happened to just doing things on your own?”

“We still have to do stuff on our own. The Society can help open some doors for us. It's not like I won't have to fold
clothes in the backroom for the next six months, but the point is, that's what I want to be doing. And no one would have ever known if they hadn't told Mr. Giroux.”

Lauren's clear-eyed view of everything calmed Phoebe a bit. Her dreams would come through; she had to give them time. Right now, she should be enjoying herself: no dues, no real responsibilities. Show up to a few meetings, be pleasant, and doors would open, right?

“Emily gave me this little speech last night,” Lauren said. “It was basically like, ‘We're hard workers, we're the ones who make things happen, we pull the strings.' You know, all that stuff.”

“They're certainly quite proud of themselves, aren't they?” Phoebe sat back in her chair.

Lauren smirked. “God, and I thought I was the cynical one!”

“I know, I'm awful,” Phoebe said.

“I think they can help you. If you want to do your art, that takes money, right? And you need to be noticed. You need to be the one that people pay attention to, not some sniveling, angst-ridden gallery groupie who prides herself on reading one-dollar bargain books from the Strand.” Lauren pulled a lip gloss from her bag and started applying it, as if the matter was clearly settled.

Phoebe laughed.
She
liked to read one-dollar bargain books from the Strand, but she wouldn't tell Lauren that.

 

That afternoon, Nick needed to clear his head, so he decided to go for a run. He bounded up Fifth Avenue to the Eighty-fifth Street entrance to the park, toward the Reservoir.

It was one of those runs when the same thoughts circled around in his head in an endless loop: the last two nights, Phoebe, lying to Patch, his parents, Phoebe, the school year starting….

There was no clarity to be had today.

On the way back, he was exiting the park to the north of the museum, when he saw Patch.

“Hey!” Nick shouted.

Patch waved to him, rather tentatively, Nick thought, as if he were a person he didn't know anymore.

Nick sprinted over, his Yale T-shirt soaked and his hair a greasy mess. “Hey,” he said again.

“What's up?” Patch said.

“You want to grab something to drink?”

The closest option was a hot dog stand in front of the Met, so they bought sodas there and sat on the steps. It was a familiar location for them; it felt as if they had spent half their childhood at the Met. They would play hide and go seek in the arms and armor wing and enjoy free hot chocolate in the Petrie Court Café.

“So what gives?” Nick asked. “You're so quiet.”

Patch was silent for a moment before finally speaking.
“Nick, I know what's going on. I know about it all.”

Nick felt a shiver. “Know about what?” he said carefully, as he moved closer to Patch on the steps.

“Everything that happened on Friday night.”

Nick knew that couldn't be true: There was no way Patch could know
everything
.

Patch continued, “I know about the Society. About you being in it. You and Lauren and that new girl at Chadwick. It's creepy stuff, Nick.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Come on, Nick, don't mess with me.”

Nick flipped up the tab on his soda can, breaking it and tossing it to the ground. “I'm not. I don't know what you're talking about.” How had it, once again, become so easy for him to lie to his friend?

“Nick, I have a video. And I'm, well, I'm really scared by it.”

Some tourists walked by them, so Nick lowered his voice, hissing at Patch. “How the hell did you get video of it?”

“I saw the address on your phone. I knew what was going on. I snuck in through an air duct and I taped the whole thing.”

Nick froze. This was bad. Really, really bad.

“I may have to run it at some point on the vlog.”

“Patch, you cannot do that. I don't think you understand. This isn't some little hijinks where you can blur out the faces
and show people partying or whatever. People could get really hurt here.”

“So why don't you tell me what it's really all about?”

Nick looked down. “Patch, I can't. You have to trust me on this. I need you not to run anything, not to tell anyone about it. Can you promise me that?”

“Why should I?”

“Because you're my friend.”

Patch scoffed. “A real friend would have told me what's going on.”

“Goddammit, Patch! Don't you get it? I can't talk about it. There are things…things I can't explain.” Nick didn't know what he was saying, but he needed some way to get Patch off his back. He couldn't tell him about what had happened, about what he knew—little as it was. The Society had made that much clear.

Patch stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“Screw you, Nick.”

Nick got up and followed him. “Come on, Patch, don't!”

Patch crossed the street in front of their building, running in front of traffic, and Nick followed him as two cabs blared their horns. Patch stopped under their building's awning. He sneered at Nick, who stood there, not knowing what to do.

Patch reached forward and flipped up the back of Nick's hair. “Did they give it to you? Do you have the mark?”

Nick looked nervously at one of their doormen, but he was busy helping a mother and her children out of a cab.

“Do you have it? Do you have the ankh?” Patch badgered him.

Nick shoved him away, and Patch shoved him back.

“Oh, is that how it's going to be?” Nick said, as he felt his face flush.

He heard a voice behind them. “Boys!” Nick's father stepped out of a black Mercedes that was idling at the curb. “Guys, cut it out! What are you, children?”

Patch spat the words at Nick. “You suck.” He turned and stormed back into the building.

Nick's father looked at him. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. He was fine, physically, but he was unnerved. He and Patch had experienced their tiffs over the years, but it had never been anything like this. This wasn't something that would be easy to smooth over.

Nick's father put his hand on Nick's shoulder. “These things will happen. You can't let it bother you. You're growing up. You're picking sides. You promise me you won't let this upset you?”

“I guess not.” Nick looked at his father begrudgingly.

“Good. You've got too much at stake to let something like a childhood friendship get in the way.” Nick's father looked intently at his son. “Friends come and go, but you will always be a member of the Society.”