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him anything and he told Grandma, I’d be in deep trouble. Because, really, what was a secret society if not a social club—exactly the sort of club Double H had outlawed in his opening speech?
    No. Whomever I asked to work with me on the BLS was going to have to be fearless, creative, strong, and an expert secret-keeper.
    Suddenly, Ivy’s favorite alt-rock band started screaming through the wall right next to my head. I laughed and glanced at the clock. Guess that was my official wake-up call. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and paused. An excited thrill shot right through me.
    Ivy. Why not Ivy?
    Ivy had been there for me when no one else had. She’d helped me figure out that it was Sabine who’d been stalking me, when everyone else—including almost all of the Billings Girls—had written me off as a backstabbing loser.
    The door of Ivy’s room opened and slammed—Jillian leaving for her thrice-weekly, crack-of-dawn yoga group in the gym. I slipped out of my room, my heart jumping around erratically as if I were jacked up on ten cups of black coffee. I knocked on Ivy’s door hard, making sure she could hear me over the music. She threw the door open, half dressed in a white tank top and black wide-leg pants, her dark hair hanging over her eyes.
    “Do not tell me to turn down the music!” she shouted. “I barely slept last night and I need it. It’s my caffeine.”
    “I don’t care about the music!” I shouted back, shutting the door behind me. I walked into her room, made cozy by a ton of throw pillows and colorful scarves that were tacked to the ceiling to hide the ugly stucco. “I have two words for you: Secret society.”
    Her eyes narrowed even further. Then she turned and walked over to her iPod dock on her desk, dousing the music. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you. I thought you just said ‘secret society.’”
    “I did.” I placed the book on her desk next to her laptop, directly within her vision. She tilted her head, intrigued.
    “What’s this?” She ran her fingertips over the crest etched into the cover.
    “It’s kind of like a rule book, that was written in 1915,” I told her, the excitement evident in my voice. “By the original members of the Billings Literary Society.”
    Ivy’s fingers recoiled, as if the seal had shocked her. “Billings? You can’t be serious.”
    “Ivy, come on. Just hear me out.”
    She shoved her thick hair off her face and turned away from me, red blotches appearing on her milky cheeks. Storming over to her closet as best she could in the tiny room, she yanked a gray wool sweater off a hanger, as if every move she made were an exclamation point.
    “Let’s just do a little recap, shall we? When I was a Billings pledge, the sisters made me break into my grandmother’s house as a prank, which resulted in my grandma having a full-on stroke that eventually killed her,” Ivy said, whipping a black sweater down from the shelf and comparing it to the gray one. “I don’t want to have anything to do with Billings.”
    “But Ivy, this is different,” I said, picking up the book and hugging it. “This book explains what the original Billings Girls were all about. It talks about integrity, intelligence, activism. … Come on. Please just look at it? It’s amazing.”
    Ivy turned around and eyed the book. “Shouldn’t you be consulting the great and mighty Noelle Lange about this?” she said sarcastically. “Last time I checked, I wasn’t even in Billings.”
    “Noelle shot me down,” I said, knowing that Ivy would be more likely to work with me if Noelle was not going to be involved. She did, in fact, look up at me, her eyes wide with interest. “And besides, you were supposed to be in Billings. They invited you. You turned them down.” I walked over to her. “Look, someone left this book for me. An alumna or someone. Which means they’re trusting me to start this thing up again. Me. My decisions. And I want to include you. If this