Sisters in what now? I glanced at the package. Trust and pride.
That didn’t seem scary at all. I sat down on the bed and cautiously picked up the hefty package. Popping the first piece of tape didn’t result in an explosion of shrapnel, so I tore the rest of it open. Inside was an old, worn, leather-bound book with the BLS crest etched into the cover. Carefully, I opened the book. Its spine creaked with age. The pages were heavy yellow parchment, brown and ragged at the edges. The words on the first page were handwritten in gorgeous black script.
The Billings Literary Society. Founded December 3,
A.D.
1915.
For a long moment I couldn’t move. Then I looked around at the four blank, off-white walls of my room as if someone was going to be sitting there, waiting to pounce. Satisfied that I was alone, I slowly turned the page, touching only the very corner, not wanting to mar what was obviously a very old and precious book. On the second page, handwritten again, was a creed.
We, the undersigned, do hereby pledge our hearts and minds to the purposes of the Billings Literary Society. We promise to be loyal, steadfast, and true to all who join our circle. We vow never to reveal the secrets of our society, but to uphold its values and standards in the face of tyranny. Blood to blood, ashes to ashes, sister to sister, we make this sacred vow.
Under the creed, eleven names were signed in various handwriting styles, some loopy and large, some tiny and tight—all perfectly legible. My eyes scanned the names. Jane Barton, Marilyn DeMeers, Lavender Lewis-Tarrington, Catherine White, Elizabeth Williams, Theresa Billings.
Theresa Billings? As in
Billings
Billings?
I checked the date at the bottom of the list. It had been signed on December 3, 1915.
A door slammed in the hallway and my heart all but stopped. I took a breath, my eyes snagging on the plastic basket full of shower supplies on top of my dresser. Had this dorm even been here back then?
Probably not. In 1915, Easton Academy had been an all boys’ school. The Billings School for Girls had been established just up the road, and the two facilities had been kind of like sister/brother schools, one grooming boys to be captains of industry, leaders of the free world, and artists, musicians, or authors; the other grooming girls to be their wives. Back in the 1970s, Easton had absorbed the Billings students and Billings had been shut down. As far as I knew, Billings House had been named by the Easton administration as their nod to the old girls’ school.
In 1915, Billings School for Girls had been a functioning academy for the daughters of the elite. But what was the Billings Literary Society? Who had left this precious book for me and why?
Instantly I thought of Susan Llewellyn, the Billings alumni I knew better than any other—and also one of the coolest women on earth. Suzel had helped us out last semester when we’d been banned from leaving the campus for the Legacy—the most exclusive party of the year—by showing us a secret tunnel that led from campus to the outside world. Obviously whoever put this book in my room had to be a Billings alum. Was Suzel trying to pass on this bit of the Billings legacy now that it appeared the house was gone for good?
I quickly turned the page and was greeted by the words
Requirements for Admission into the Society.
The list included qualities such as “intelligence,” “progressive thinking,” “eloquence,” “industry,” and “loyalty.” Apparently the members talked about literature as well as current events, poetry, science, religion, and all kinds of things. But above all, they were friends. Loyal, steadfast, and true.
“Oh my God,” I whispered as I finished paging through the first half of the book and realized with a jolt exactly what the Billings Literary Society was: a progressive, secret club for hardworking, forward-thinking women, disguised as a literary group.
My thoughts instantly turned to Ivy. She’d looked so wistful when she’d mentioned that she’d never found a true group of friends at Easton. Ivy would love the language, the camaraderie, the very idea of swearing loyalty to a group of girls who wanted nothing more than to be themselves—to learn what they wanted to learn rather than what their teachers decided they should.
The whole thing was so incredibly cool.
I took a deep breath and kept reading. The book outlined three specific group tasks that each girl would have to participate in and pass in order to qualify for membership in the sisterhood. The first would prove the prospective member’s intelligence by requiring her to answer five questions on the history of Billings within a finite space of time. The book described holding a candle at an angle over the potential sister’s hand and making her answer before the hot wax dripped over her skin.
Kind of fishy, but these ancient secret organizations were into that kind of stuff, right?
The second task tested her loyalty by playing a game in which the potentials were rewarded for saying positive things about one another, and penalized for saying anything negative. The third task involved “working together to beautify or improve some particular aspect of our school.” During each of these tasks, the potentials would be observed by their “pledge mistress” and evaluated for membership based on their performance.
I smiled to myself. I’d never been involved in vetting Easton students for invitations into Billings House, but from what I’d heard and experienced, getting in had been more of a matter of proving your ability to take a dare than proving your work ethic.
I turned the page and found an entire section on initiation, complete with intricate drawings of white robes, black and white candles, and formations delineating where each member and initiate should stand during the ceremony. My heart gave a flutter at the beautifully rendered portraits of the girls in black, facing the girls in white. It looked almost exactly the way our initiations had looked. Some of this ritual had clearly trickled down to the current—well, former—Billings House.
Suddenly, I felt like part of something big—bigger than I’d ever truly realized.
These first few chapters of text had all been written in the same hand. I flipped to the original list of signatures to compare the handwriting and concluded that Elizabeth Williams had been the mastermind
behind the Billings Literary Society. All the rituals and tasks had been written out in her tight script. I felt like she was reading over my shoulder, urging me on, encouraging me to keep reading. So I did.
With each new page, my heart beat faster and faster. There was a secret handshake. A secret whistle. A whispered question and answer to recite before admission into secret meetings. There was even a list of excuses to recite should a faculty member happen to stumble upon one of said meetings. I raced ahead, speed-reading and skimming, my smile widening slowly.
This was it.
This was the key to bringing the Billings Girls back together—and maybe even getting Ivy the circle of friends she’d always wanted. A secret society. The Billings Literary Society, to be exact. We could reconstitute it. We could reclaim our history. We could be the sort of society the original Billings Girls wanted us to be. Forget adherence to fashion codes and backbiting gossip and snarky texts. We could be the fine, upstanding, intelligent, world-leading women of tomorrow.
With a secret handshake and everything.
I slammed the book closed and hopped off my bed. Noelle had to see this ASAP. If this book didn’t awaken her inner Billings Girl, nothing would.
“They cover everything in here, Noelle.” I dropped down on the bed next to her, so hard we both bounced.
Noelle’s Pemberly single was just two floors above mine and completely barren. She hadn’t hung up any of the framed photographs of her family and friends, or the black-and-white reproductions of classic
Vogue
covers that had lined the walls in her Billings room. Usually her desk and dresser were covered with crap—scarves, necklaces, iPods, books, ticket stubs, flyers, makeup, mementos—but she hadn’t unpacked a thing other than the clothes and makeup she’d worn that day.
I hugged the book to my chest like it was the Holy Grail. “Initiation rites, mission statements, proper conduct when meeting with a sister in public. It’s a guidebook
and
a diary of everything these girls ever did. There are entries dating all the way up until the 1970s!”
“It
is
an intriguing little piece of history,” Noelle said, giving
a cursory glance over my shoulder. “Let me see that list of original members again.”
I handed her the book, open to the second page. She quickly scanned the names. For a moment I saw her pause and her lips flicked into a smile, but then her eyes narrowed and the smile was gone.
“What? Do you recognize a name?” I asked.
Noelle slapped the book closed and handed it back to me. “Nope.”
She got up and walked over to her trunk, unsnapping the lid and throwing it open. In big armfuls, she started to remove her clothes, most of them already on hangers, and shoved them into her teeny closet at random. Silk blouses shimmied to the floor. Designer dresses crowded and wrinkled. She tossed a stack of three-hundred-dollar jeans on the shelf above the hanging rod; four pairs tumbled back down onto her head. She groaned and flung them onto the floor.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she told the pile of jeans.
“Noelle—”
“Why would someone give that to you?” Noelle blurted, throwing a hand out at me.
“Because. Clearly they want us to restart this Billings Literary Society thing, and I—”
Noelle closed her eyes, shook her head, and let out that condescending laugh of hers that always got right under my skin. “No. No. Why would someone give it to
you
?”
Oh.
I got it. She wanted the book. She thought I didn’t deserve to have it and she did. I felt a flash of anger and clutched the book tighter. “What am I, not Billings Girl enough for you?”
So maybe I had been voted out of the house before Christmas break, but that had been personal—because I’d hooked up with her ex (at the time) Dash McCafferty. And we’d since learned that both of us had been drugged to within an inch of our lives by Sabine, so it wasn’t entirely our fault. Not to mention the fact that Noelle had already gotten back together with Dash and asked me to move back into Billings, which I’d be doing right now if it wasn’t leveled.
Noelle rolled her eyes. “No! It’s not that. It’s just—” She turned toward the closet again and brought her hand to her forehead. I’d never seen her this worked up. This was not the reaction I’d been expecting. “Forget it. It’s nothing.”
“Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . maybe they left it for me because I was the last elected president of Billings,” I said with a shrug. “These pages seem to be all about following rules and codes and laws. . . . Maybe whoever left it for me takes that kind of thing seriously.”
“Whatever,” Noelle said, bending to pick up the jeans. “I don’t care.”
I smiled. “Good! Because I think we should get started right away. There are all these supplies to get and we’ll probably have to set up a secret email account for—”
Noelle turned around to face me. “No. I mean, I don’t care,” she said firmly. “I’m not doing this.”
I paused as I flipped through the pages, holding the edge of one thick sheet. “Not doing what?”
“This secret society thing,” she said with a trace of a sneer. She yanked a few scarves from her trunk and tossed them onto the hooks in her closet.
“You’re kidding,” I said as she jammed a bevy of belts onto the hooks over the scarves.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” she asked, overturning her makeup bag atop her dresser. Tubes of mascara and eyeliner rolled in all directions and she scrambled to grab them before they hit the floor. “Is this entire dorm crooked?” she snapped, jamming her things back into the bag.
“Noelle. Come on,” I said. “This could be so cool. And it’s the perfect way to keep us all together. I mean, you were right this morning. It was crazy to think I could bring back Billings House, but maybe we can bring back the Billings
Girls
.”
“Not interested,” Noelle replied. Like she was turning down the last blueberry muffin at breakfast, rather than rejecting me and all of our friends in two short words. My blood boiled and I slammed the book closed just to keep from exploding.
“What do you mean, ‘not interested’?” I demanded. “Look, I know this could be a lot of work, but we need this, Noelle. We have to keep the Billings Girls together.”
“Why?” Noelle asked, her arms wide as she turned to me again. “Why do I have to do anything anymore?”
My face fell. This defeated, questioning, pleading person was not
the Noelle I knew. I felt like I’d just been told all over again that there was no Santa Claus. That Elmo was just a puppet. That reality TV was not, in actuality, real.
Noelle leaned back against the wall next to the closet and shook her head, staring off into space. For the first time I noticed that there were dark circles under her eyes—that her hair wasn’t perfectly parted and smooth, but unkempt and shoved haphazardly behind her ears. She slid down the wall slightly, so that her feet were pressed into the floor and her legs at a forty-five-degree angle—like she was trying to hold the wall up with her back. I’d never seen Noelle appear so spent.
“I’m not even supposed to be here,” she said quietly. “I should be starting my second semester at Yale, not doing time in freaking Pemberly.”
“I know,” I said, my heart and chest full.
“I didn’t get to finish my senior year when I should have, all because I made some seriously stupid choices,” she said.
I breathed in and out slowly, trying not to imagine Thomas tied up in the woods somewhere. Trying not to think about Ariana’s ice blue eyes as she threatened to throw me off the Billings roof. That was all over. This—this book I was holding—this was my future.
“So I need to make another choice now,” Noelle said, pushing herself away from the wall. “And my choice is to keep my head down and my nose clean, and graduate. End of story.”