Chapter Twenty-One Maya

Chapter Twenty-One

Maya

November 2011

It was the day of my initiation into Sterling Club, and outside our window, downy flakes of snow drifted from a starless sky. Since Lila’s warning, anxiety had grown steadily within me. What was she warning me away from? And why didn’t Daisy want me to talk about it?

I’d shown Daisy the note when we were getting ready.

“Who wrote that?” Daisy’s eyes had narrowed as she’d read it a second time.

I’d shrugged. “It was tucked into my book.”

“You sure no one else was around?”

I’d shaken my head. For some reason, I hadn’t wanted to tell her it was Lila. Daisy had stared at me with a strange look in her eyes, and I’d been torn as to whether to laugh or feel unsettled. But before I could ask anything else, she’d torn the paper and told me not to bring it up again.

—

Now, as moonlight pooled against the snow-covered grounds on our way to Sterling Club, Daisy’s strange reaction surfaced in my thoughts again. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

Daisy was walking quickly. Though I was the one being initiated tonight, she’d been on edge all day. “Of course!”

“All of you talk about Sterling like it’s perfect…but it can’t be, right? I mean, nothing is ever really perfect.”

She slowed her pace to a walk and glanced at me as if deciding whether to tell me the truth. Eventually she spoke. “Well, like anything, there are pros and cons. Once you’re in, you’re in for life…and that can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. Nothing is free, and the life Sterling gives to its alumni has a price too. We get all this: connections, jobs…Think of it as an early favor you spend the rest of your life repaying. That’s what makes the whole thing so successful.” There was something dark about her expression, but in an instant, it was gone.

My apprehension rose as the eating clubs came into view. I got the strange sensation of eyes on me and glanced up to find a monkey gargoyle staring down at us. “That note…whoever wrote it seemed like they were warning me not to join.”

“It was probably just a stupid joke, some idiot that’s jealous you’re getting initiated into Sterling and they’re not,” she replied, but there was a quality to her voice that made me think she was withholding something.

When we paused at the last stoplight, Daisy turned to me. She checked to make sure no one was around before leaning in close. “Okay, so there’s something you need to know before we go in. Greystone Society operates from within Sterling Club.”

I stared at her, the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I’d heard whispers about Greystone Society ever since I came to campus, that it held the same level of prestige that Skull and Bones did at Yale. But I thought it was an urban legend. I thought Princeton didn’t have secret societies.

“I thought they dissolved when the university banned them?”

She shook her head. “Maya, what do you think eating clubs are if not just rebranded secret societies? They were banned like a hundred and fifty years ago when one of them set fire to Nassau Hall, but as always, someone’s daddy got involved—and his friends, powerful alumni—and got the school to approve a group of students who wanted to form an eating club, with known membership. That first club was Ivy.” The light had changed and Daisy surged across the street. “Since then, eating clubs have been sanctioned and supported by the university. But a few secret societies never disbanded. They still operate, sheltered within the clubs.”

She explained the rest as we hurried toward Sterling initiation, her words swirling between us along with the snow the rest of the way there.

—

“You excited?” Daisy asked, when we finally arrived. She removed her snow-covered gloves as we stepped across the threshold into Sterling. It was like stepping into a warm embrace, melting the snow from our coats.

Was I excited? I pushed what Daisy had just told me from my mind and came back to myself. I should be excited. I’d wanted this so badly, and now I was here. When I saw the members gathered in the front hall, on the leather couches, spilling up the stairs, I began to wonder…which of them could be in the society? What qualified you to be in the innermost circle of this already exclusive space?

Outside was below freezing, and by contrast, the front hall of the club felt like a furnace. There were at least a hundred of us packed in the space as flickering taper candles tossed shadows across the walls. The intensity in the room felt like a held breath, and I was immediately put on edge. Perhaps it was the members’ glowing faces, their unblemished skin and unnatural symmetry.

Lila’s warning surfaced in my thoughts again. A whisper, louder this time: Get out while you can. GET OUT! Did I really understand what I was signing up for with Sterling? Nearly everyone else around me was a legacy. They knew what to expect, but did I?

The candles shuddered as an icy draft sneaked in through the door.

I jumped as, a few seconds later, the heavy wooden door slammed shut and another new member scampered in. Her cheeks were red from the cold, and her hair was pulled back in a plaid headband that matched her dress. She pressed her lips together when she passed me, her eyes running over my outfit.

We had Romanticism together, and she’d never spoken to me until yesterday, when she’d looked over at me and asked, “So where are you from?”

I smiled. “The Bay Area,” I said, though I knew from the way she was looking at me that she was asking about my race. I got this question all the time and didn’t mind—people were curious, it could be a conversation starter—and I believed that we all experienced some form of bias in our lives. To be human was to categorize, wasn’t it? Was bias inherent to being human?

“Hm.” She’d squinted her eyes in an expression I soon realized was curiosity mixed with distrust. “I mean, what are you?” And I’d hesitated. Was she genuinely curious or did I sense something else? Or was this conversation colored by my own scars—being called oreo and mutt and token Black girl, and not whatever enough, part but never whole.

“I’m Black and Chinese,” I’d said, casual, guarded.

She stared at me in wonder. “I never thought of you as Black Black…but I see it now. The hair. The nose.” Okay…a bit problematic…but whatever.

“Yeah, well.” I’d tried a laugh, but it caught in my throat. The truth was, I too was tired of trying to figure out what I was. I’d met a girl named Ayana sophomore year a month or so after the beer incident. She’d taken me under her wing, introduced me to her friends.

But when I went out with them, I couldn’t keep up. While they danced to songs they knew by heart, I drifted off to the side.

Then there was Kai, whose family was from Hong Kong, but because she had grown up in Manhattan, her high school, clothes, and address seemed to matter more to her than being Chinese.

Still, she spoke Cantonese, visited her aunt in Shanghai every summer, and belonged to the AAPI student union—so what did I know?

The girl shrugged. “It’s just, we’re past all this, aren’t we? Where I’m from, we consider Puerto Ricans and East Asians to be basically white.”

Okay, wow, that was more problematic. Basically white? What did it mean to be basically white ? Did she just dismiss my identity, my family’s struggles, and my personal experiences in one breath?

She tilted her head, studying me. “Your dad’s the Black one, right? Is he still around?”

“New members come forward.” Cecily’s voice yanked me back to the front hall, and I moved forward from the crowd with the other new members. Cecily was not only Sterling Club’s incoming president, Daisy had explained, but also head of Greystone Society. I’d had no idea.

As I stood in the center of the hall, I studied their faces. Daisy had explained that they chose seven new Greystone members each year to join the existing fourteen, voted in by committee. And new members would be tapped tonight, from among the new initiates.

Suddenly, Lila’s warning sounded again— get out, get out, get out! —and my stomach roiled. Something was off about the way they were staring at us, their eyes boring into my skin, or maybe it was the eyes of the men in the nineteenth-century portraits, aware I did not belong.

Before long, a man entered the room, dressed in a blazer and khaki slacks. To my surprise, it was Professor DuPont.

“Welcome, new Sterling members. We are honored to have you join us.” He greeted some of the members, shaking their hands, and I could tell he was just as well-respected and well-liked in Sterling as he was on the rest of campus. “As a member of the Sterling Club board of trustees, I am your link to the outside world. As you may have guessed, you’ve been vetted extensively. You were chosen from your peers because we think you will be able to contribute something meaningful to this club.”

He stopped in front of me, and my palms began to sweat.

“There is a reason the most successful choose to work with their oldest friends,” he said. “It’s about trust. And confidence. Sterling Club was founded in 1879 by a group of friends, and since then we’ve built a far-reaching web. Look around. The people in this room will become your allies. Your chosen family.

“What do you think? How long will we stay?” he called out.

The crowd responded. “ Usque ad finem. ”

Professor DuPont opened both palms in welcome. “ To the very end. ”

A tall athletic-looking guy handed him a shot of whiskey, which he took with them. Then the members began to chant. It started low and rose, growing louder and more fervent. The tension that had snaked its way through the room now pulled taut as a string.

My breath grew shallow as the men hit their fists against the tables, the walls. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Maybe something in Latin. It didn’t matter—it all felt strange and surreal.

—

Afterward, Daisy pulled me aside and led me upstairs and down the long hall that led to the library.

I looked at her. “What’s with the Latin?”

“ Ubi amici ibidem sunt opes. Where there are friends, there are riches,” she explained, pointing to where it had been carved into the marble fireplace.

When we entered, a guy I recognized from class was lighting a joint. He took a long drag before passing it to the girl at his shoulder. Daisy pinched my leg and did an excited dance. Soon the air was thick with wisps of smoke billowing around us. Daisy inhaled the joint and tilted her head back, exhaling a curtain of white.

“Tonight,” Daisy whispered, “is just the beginning.” The library felt strange, charged, electric, like a current was running through all of us. That was when what she’d said sank in: Once you’re in, you’re in for life.

With a loud thud, Professor DuPont pulled back the corner of an old Persian rug, revealing a trapdoor covered in what looked to be centuries-old gray stone, the kind you’d find in ancient ruins. My nerves pricked to attention as I looked around and realized there were only seven new members here. Seven.

He had us follow Lila—who must have been in Greystone too—down a spiral staircase, until we reached a black door at the bottom. After dialing a combination into the lock, she pushed open the door, revealing darkness behind it. Suddenly, I realized she had to have known I had been voted into Greystone. She was warning me away from the Society, not from Sterling. Fear flared across my chest as if my body knew it was a trap.

As we entered, Daisy revealed a small dried mushroom in her palm.

“Trust me, you’ll want it,” she whispered.

I hesitated. “What is it?”

“Psychedelic mushrooms, but don’t worry, it’s only a micro dose…” She smiled in that way she had. Her smile said These aren’t real drugs, not the kind people go to prison for. Not the kind people die from.

She ate an identical mushroom, raised her eyebrows. With a deep breath, I took it from her, placed the bitter mushroom on my tongue.

Maybe that was the moment I became someone I wasn’t. I knew it at the time, though I wasn’t prepared to admit it. And so, despite my instincts telling me to run in the other direction, I followed her inside.

—

The seven of us followed the dozen or so members as they fanned into the crypt and toward the bar. The room was windowless, with low ceilings and dim floor lamps that gave the space an unnatural glow. Someone turned up the music and soon a dark energy ran through the room, an animalistic hunger in the members’ eyes. They shouted and clanged cowbells and fed us champagne until my head swam.

At some point, Daisy pulled me forward. “Come here.” She wove her fingers through mine and led me down a narrow hallway. “As you’ve probably figured out, you’ve been tapped for Greystone Society.”

Tapped.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as she gave me a hug.

—

She led me into a small office and handed me a sweatshirt. It was cold, and the cement walls muted the noise of the party.

“Wait here,” she said, and before I could protest, she was gone. I looked around. The air reminded me of the air in a windowless basement. Cool, damp. This was definitely belowground. That hidden stairwell must have been built into the wall to descend down from the far side of the library and continue downward.

I put on Daisy’s sweatshirt and sat very still.

Fifteen minutes later, Professor DuPont entered the room and took a seat at the desk in front of me. He handed me what looked like an NDA.

As I looked down at the form and back to him, my head swam. I got the impression that signing wasn’t optional.

After I signed, he clasped his hands on the desk and fixed his gaze on me. “Congratulations. You’ve been formally invited to join Greystone Society. Do you accept?”

The room stretched behind him as I tried to focus on his face, which swayed like a moving target. It all suddenly felt so real. Greystone Society? Me? How had Daisy pulled this off?

I nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“Good.” Professor DuPont sat back, and I was relieved to feel a rush of cool air on my face. From behind the desk, he looked at me with an amused expression. “So, Maya…you’re from California?”

Professor DuPont, up until then, had, to me, been a sort of mythical figure—up on the McCosh stage, or behind an email—too distant to be real.

Up close, I could smell the woody oud of his cologne; I could see the faint stubble he’d missed along his jawline, the way his hair was slightly unkempt, a wavy, tawny lock escaping over his right eye, and the frown line between his brows that gave him a serious, intellectual, and gently resolute impression.

At the same time, he had a youthful quality to his movements that made it hard to believe he was in his midthirties. When he spoke to me, he felt familiar, as if we were old friends. And yet he was so ridiculously attractive that it was difficult to concentrate on anything else. My brain felt slow, my heart thudded loudly behind my ribs, and I didn’t trust my words…but maybe that was more a result of the champagne and the mushroom I’d taken earlier.

“The Bay Area,” I managed to say, after what felt like an hour-long pause.

He nodded. “I see you did well in high school.” His eyes stopped halfway down the page, and he raised his eyebrows. “Sacred Heart…I have a friend whose son went there. Are you Catholic?”

I shook my head. “They offered a good financial aid package and liked that my dad was a professor at San Jose State.”

“I hear it can be tough there, socially.”

I cringed inwardly, remembering all the times I’d eaten lunch alone. “It was fine.”

“How are you doing here? I hope you don’t feel it’s a challenge to make friends?”

I looked down at my hands. His directness was making me uncomfortable. “Not really…”

“Is that why you made up a story about a wealthy grandfather that doesn’t exist?”

I glanced up at him as heat rushed to my face. One corner of his mouth twitched as if he was trying very hard not to laugh. “I didn’t—”

“Don’t worry.” Professor DuPont smiled warmly, the blues of his irises shining. “Your secret’s safe with me.” He winked.

The flush lighting up my cheeks spread to my ears, shooting down my neck and tingling the skin on my chest. I must have looked like an overripe tomato.

Professor DuPont leaned back and let out a laugh. “I admire your tenacity. I read your application—a colleague in Admissions shared it with me, and”—his expression grew serious—“I know it couldn’t have been easy, what you went through. The essay on your mother was very moving.”

He’d read my application essay? I swallowed, thinking of how intimate it was. I’d written about my mother the day she died: her body hooked up to machines and tubes, too thin, too ashen. When I saw her, I remember thinking how ironic it was. Thinking she’d been so worried about the things that could hurt me—plastic, unfiltered water, wet hair—that she’d forgotten to worry about herself.

Professor DuPont’s smile faded, and he grew pensive, as if remembering his past. “I lost my mother at a young age too.”

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say, looking down at my hands. I thought of how I’d held my mother’s frail hand at the hospice, the first time I could remember holding her hand since I was a young child, and forced the tears down.

It was hard not to look at the black spots all over her body, visible because we’d pulled back the sheet—not bruises, though, cancer of the blood that had spread—and in that moment, I’d wondered whether it was my fault. My fault for causing her so much stress. My fault for pushing her away.

In the moments before my mother faded away she’d looked at me as if she could hear my thoughts and opened her mouth to say something. But then she’d grimaced and frowned her eyes shut. I’d squeezed her hand to let her know I understood.

To this day, I wonder what she’d wanted to say: it’s okay, maybe, or don’t cry, or what I wanted to hear the most— I’m proud of you —but I’ll never know.

The first thing I said to my sister when I got home was that I was sorry. Such an expected thing to say when a loved one dies, but for me it meant more than that. I was sorry that she’d been left with only me to take care of her. I was sorry that I’d been so selfish. My arms and legs were heavy as I sank down onto the floor of the house I knew we would soon lose. The house in which she’d spent her entire life. Gone. My mother’s fiery presence. Gone. I was scared for our future. At only eighteen, I had no idea how to raise an eight-year-old.

Naomi came over to where I knelt and put a loving arm around me, holding me as I fell apart. After I pulled myself together, I grabbed her small hand in mine and said, It’s you and me now. I’ll be here for you, no matter what.

Professor DuPont was waiting patiently as I quickly wiped away a tear. “I’m sorry you went through that. But these things make us strong. Daisy told me that you’re trying to support your sister, and I want you to know I’m here to help…in any way I can.”

I looked up at him, startled. He looked genuine, but why would he want to help me?

He must have read it on my face because he added, “Look, I was raised by a single mother too, before she passed. My father left when I was a kid. All I remember of him is how loud he was. How he’d get home late, after days of being gone sometimes, and the sound of him hurting her.” He exhaled, as if trying to expel the memory. “Anyway, we moved around. Spent a few years with her parents in the south of France, then upstate New York with her boyfriend at the time…” His voice trailed off, and I could tell it was a time he wanted to forget.

So maybe we were more alike than it seemed, I thought.

This man had a life I’d never dreamed possible for someone like me. And yet he too had started with nothing…Maybe being close to Professor DuPont was the way to a better life for Naomi.

“Your mother was a nurse at St. John’s. Is that right?” He looked up from the page, and my heart fluttered. That wasn’t in my essay… But I forced myself to take a steadying breath. Everything was online these days.

“That’s right. And my dad taught African American studies.”

At that moment, someone knocked on the door and Professor DuPont set down his notepad. “Come in.”

Lila entered. She looked pale, hair spooling around her face. Her normally poised movements were jittery and nervous.

She bent over and whispered something into Professor DuPont’s ear, and he handed her a manila envelope. It reminded me of the time I’d seen her in his office. The way she’d laughed and the way he’d looked at her. The comfortable intimacy they’d shared.

Before she left now, he touched her arm and said something to her that I couldn’t make out. She nodded and glanced at me, worry in her eyes.

When she turned to leave, I managed to read the name written on the envelope— Marsden. The mushrooms had left my head feeling strange. Who is Marsden?

Once Lila had left, Professor DuPont turned to me and handed me a small velvet box with what I would later discover was a signet ring inside. “You’d better get back to it—they’re waiting for you. Welcome to Sterling, and to Greystone.”

—

By the time I made my way upstairs to rejoin the Sterling initiation, my vision had softened. I forgot my nerves, and everything after felt like a dream.

Everyone was lively, candles flickered against the wall, and the air smelled sweet. After being drenched in champagne, I stood in a line at the top of the stairs with the other new members in nothing but our underwear as confetti floated down around us. My hair dripped onto my shoulders as I hugged myself, shivering with anticipation.

This was the moment Daisy had hinted at. The tradition I’d been waiting for.

Self-conscious, I looked down at my boy shorts and plain bra for a moment, until someone shouted excitedly, “You’re next!”

One by one, members passed us over their heads as if we were queens and kings crowd-surfing through our palace, the rumble of a whole room cheering for us while we floated through the air.

A warm sensation spread through me, and every brush over my skin gave me goosebumps as they supported my body like the many hands of an otherworldly creature. I gazed up at the crystal chandelier as I drifted down the grand staircase ever so slowly, the edges of my vision soft, lights overhead glowing bright white and surreal.

Before I knew what was happening, a rush of wind and movement made me gasp. I was being tossed in the air by the strongest guys. They threw me up, up toward the ceiling. Time seemed to slow and the sparkling crystal chandelier rushed toward me as I rose higher until I was suspended in midair, the chandelier so close I could reach out and touch it. And I did. A soft tinkling of crystals like the sound of rain. Like a beckoning whisper.

I heard cheers below, and seconds later I was falling back toward the earth. Caught in their strong arms and set down on my feet. They whooped and high-fived me and someone handed me a full glass of champagne, which I was too excited and filled with adrenaline to drink. I couldn’t remember a time I felt so alive—so loved and welcomed and a part of something—ever before in my life.

—

Afterward, I found Daisy in the backyard. We sat with our feet in the heated pool as members partied. I twisted my new signet ring, admiring the engraved Greystone Society insignia, before glancing at the identical one on Daisy’s finger. I’d never noticed hers before.

Daisy raised her glass. “Congratulations. You’re in.”

Beyond her, movement in the shadows caught my eye. Two dark figures huddled close together on a love seat on the patio. I could barely make out Lila’s red hair, but I was sure the other was Professor DuPont. At first, the sight set off an alarm bell in my mind: He has a wife.

Daisy saw them too and said, teasingly, “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it; Matthew is handsome as hell.”

So I considered it again—thought of his smooth voice and full lips, the attraction I’d felt when his eyes met mine. I remembered how Cecily had spent a summer in London and said men in their thirties were better in bed, and that’s when I realized the feeling in my stomach, what I thought was alarm bells, was closer to jealousy, and if given the chance, I’d like to sleep with him too.

—

That week in class I noticed how Professor DuPont looked at me and smiled during his lecture, and the following week, when he handed back our exams, my heart nearly stopped. I had gotten an A, and along with the test was an envelope— with five thousand dollars in cash.