Secret Society Girl by Diana Peterfreund Read Free Book Online Page A

down at her plate. ―But that doesn‘t make it any less valid.‖

    Her subtext was clear: She wasn‘t going to tell me anything about her society. And it hurt me more than I expected. Lydia and I had always shared everything. We‘d lived together for three years. I‘d gone to visit her in London last summer. We‘d rented that room in the beach house in Myrtle Beach our sophomore spring. She knew I had been dabbling in novel writing, I knew she‘d had an affair with her sophomore year poli-sci T.A. Aside from the whole he‘s-her-teacher-eww factor, it‘s not as sketchy as it sounds. He was only twenty-four. Okay, you‘re right, it‘s sketchy, but I‘m not one to judge—remember Ben Somebody? When I‘d returned to our beach house the next morning, in equal parts mortified and terror-stricken—How could I have slept with someone I didn‘t know? What was wrong with me?—Lydia never lectured me, just encouraged me to remember as much as I could about the incident (like, for example, putting the condom on, thank God!) and for the rest of the week happily stayed home from the party scene and played sober and boy-free Scrabble with me on the beach. She was my best friend.

    But this was turning out to be bigger than ill-conceived one-night stands. It might even be bigger than our friendship.

    Lydia glanced at her watch and groaned. ―I‘ve got to get up to Rocks for Jocks lab.‖ (All of the science courses, even the loser ones designed for history majors like Lydia who can‘t tell a covalent bond from a computer chip, are located on the other end of campus. Does Eli have its priorities straight, or what?) ―If you go to the library, could you take back two books for me?
    They‘re sitting on the end of my bed.‖

    I nodded and Lydia departed, leaving me alone with my Frosted Flakes and a quickly dwindling appetite. Did I really want to spend my morning combing through the Stacks, only to find out that my whole Tap Night experience had been a hoax?

    I‘m evidently a sucker for punishment. On my way to Dwight Memorial Library, I swung by the suite to pick up Lydia‘s books, some dusty history tomes with titles I could barely make out on the disintegrating covers. A piece of paper stuck out from between the pages of one, covered in Lydia‘s careful, upright script. She‘d forgotten her notes.

    But when I pulled the paper out, I could see that it was a printout from the online card catalog, covered in check marks and other notations. I was about to drop it to the desk when one of the titles caught my eye:

    Kellogg, H. L. College Secret Societies: Their Customs, Character, and the Efforts for Their Suppression. Chicago: Ezra A. Cook, 1874.

    No wonder Lydia knew where to get the scoop.

    As if to convince myself that I wasn‘t obsessing about this whole secret society thing (after all, at least ninety percent of every Eli class never joins one!), I brought WAP with me to read in the library. It took me two hours to track down the five titles listed on Lydia‘s printout. Dwight Library Stacks are about twelve stories tall, with enough hidden nooks and crannies for half the student body to hide in. It‘s an old Eli tradition to have sex in the Stacks at least once before graduation. (And, no, I‘ve never done it, not even with the faux beatnik Galen Twilo.) I finally found one of the books tucked away in between the ceiling and the top of the bookcase where it was supposed to be shelved. Another old library trick: If you don‘t want anyone to take out the books you need, you hide them. I often wondered how many volumes were forever lost in the morass of the Stacks because some student had decided to play nut-storing squirrel and lost track of his hiding places—or never bothered to undo the damage once the semester was over.
    (See, you‘d think that Ivy League students were an honest, trustworthy bunch, but no. Some of the crap I‘ve seen pulled on this campus is practically criminal. But I never