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

thought Lydia was the type to engage in that type of behavior.)

    I trekked down to the nearest reading room and set up shop at one of the carved wooden tables that ran from end to end. Giant burgundy leather wingback chairs and elegant reading lamps with green shades rounded out the décor, and the Friday morning sun shone in from the lead-veined windows and highlighted the Gothic stone arches vaulting high above my head. The Dwight Memorial reading rooms just reeked of high-class academia.

    I immediately started to feel sleepy.

    Which had more in common with the caffeinating qualities of a mochacchino: 1,472 pages of Russian historic literature extolling the exploits of the Napoleonic invasion, or dusty essays about 19th century collegiate frats?

    Blecch. I decided to stave off boredom by switching back and forth on a regular basis. Natasha Rostov was up to her usual antics, but the society tome didn‘t gift me with any useful info.
    Seriously, do I care whether or not Phi Beta Kappa started at William & Mary? I want to know what‘s going on with Rose & Grave in the 21st century.

    ―Hi, Amy.‖

    I looked up to see Malcolm Cabot standing over my table. A senior, a popular party boy, and the son of a state governor, Malcolm Cabot and I didn‘t run in the same social circles. My friends stocked up on popcorn and had Sex and the City marathons, while his crowd liked to drive down to ―The City‖ for marathon sex weekends. He wasn‘t in my college, we‘d never been in the same class, and as far as I knew, we hadn‘t exchanged so much as three words in my years at Eli.
    ―Um, hi.‖

    Okay, four words.

    ―What‘s up?‖ Malcolm craned his neck toward my reading material, which, luckily, was currently opened to page 834 of WAP. He was dressed in a spring green polo shirt with the letters ―CC‖ printed in the corner, and a pair of very well-fitting blue jeans. His sandy hair looked like it had been ripped right out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. He wore his messenger bag slung across his chest and was thrumming his fingers against the strap. ―Russian Novel class, huh? Which one did you like best?‖

    “Crime and Punishment,” I said. ―It‘s only 500 pages long.‖

    He laughed, which earned him dirty looks from at least three other people at my table.

    Malcolm straightened then, but continued beating that tattoo on his shoulder strap. If you ask me, the rhythm, more than the whispered conversation, was what was distracting about his presence. And now we were up to two dozen words.

    ―The final‘s a breeze,‖ he went on. ―So don‘t worry about it.‖

    ―Thanks.‖ I guess. Thrum, thrum, thrum.

    ―Just don‘t work too hard. You‘ll need your energy.‖

    Huh? My eyes shot to his face. ―What are you talking about?‖

    He grinned then, showing me a set of gorgeous white teeth. ―Oh, I almost forgot.‖ He stopped thrumming for a second, reached into his messenger bag, pulled out three books, and set them down on my desk. ―This might help you out when you‘re stuck in class.‖ He pointed at each of them in turn. ―Said was a post-colonialist critic, Levi-Strauss advocated structuralism, and Aristotle…well, he‘s the oldest critic in the book. None of them is a New Critic. Get your facts straight, or I‘ll think you deserved that B–in Ethiopian Lit.‖

    I stared up at that all-too-familiar smile, then down to his hands, which had started tapping on his shoulder strap again. Right next to the little gold pin stuck through the canvas that showed a rose inside an elongated hexagon.

    Malcolm Cabot was the Shadow-Who-Smiles. And he was in Rose & Grave.

    Which meant…

    ―Hey!‖ I said. Loudly.

    ―Shh!‖ The harsh rebuke came from a girl at the next table. I craned my neck around Malcolm‘s torso to see Clarissa Cuthbert glaring at me over the rim of her Louis Vuitton bag. Clarissa‘s gaze ping-ponged from me to Malcolm and back again, and then her ice blue eyes