The Illuminati Garden Club

Chapter 4: The Reaping

I finalized my college essays the first week of October. My counselor, Mr. Wong, said I had a good chance of getting into a good school, so I got to move on to the stage where you worry about how to pay for it all. Oh joy.

"Here," he said, "Take some of these brochures for loans, and PEL grants?"

"Thanks Mr. Wong. When do you think I'll hear back?"

"You've got a few months. Probably February, or March, but you need to get started now."

I had my heart set on Rutgers, but Mom was right. The cost would be insane. So I began to look at San Diego State. I always liked San Diego. It was a little more laid back than LA, and yet far enough away from Northern California that I'd feel away from home. But before anything could happen, I'd need Mom to co-sign for my loans, and that meant convincing her that distance was okay.

We went to Telegraph Avenue that Saturday to wander around bookstores like we had since I was little. Mom was in the self-help section. I was perusing the best sellers. The store had a Halloween display up front. Among the bazillions of Twilight knock-offs were books ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to ghost story anthologies, and the paranormal. There were even books on practicing Wicca, and Voodoo.

As I stood there judging covers, I noticed the use of symbols. Not a single book on the table just had text. The Voodoo book had a Voodoo doll; Twilight had its biblical red apple (I'm still trying to figure out that connection to vampires). I took my phone out and took a few pictures.

Later that night, I pulled my phone back out, and uploaded the pictures from the bookstore. I'd only recently discovered an image search tool, and really wanted to try it out. What I found was spectacular.

There were pentagrams, ankhs, and pyramids; symbols I recognized from Mom's horoscope charts & tealeaf books. There were mentions of a New World Order, and a number of fundamentalist groups that failed in their attempts to start a totalitarian regime. I had to laugh at the old message boards that talked about the Y2K threats, and the Mayan end of the world in 2012.

What surprised me most of all was how the same basic ancient symbol could mean vastly different things in today's world... like the Wicca Pentagram doubling for the Eastern Star's logo. I also came across all kinds of Secret Societies, from Skull and Bones, to the Cambridge Apostles. The more I read, the more I needed to read. And the more I realized Mrs. Cagwin was right. Not only was the Eastern Star more or less innocent, the conspiracy theorists that called it a cult came off as crazy. Mrs. Cagwin was right about another thing too. Other secrets fraternities were far more provocative than hers.

The next thing I knew it was midnight. Mom had gone to bed hours before, no doubt thinking her "nerd daughter" was doing homework. I liked to think that was exactly what I was doing. In a way.

I wanted to save the files I'd created, but I didn't want Mom to know what I was researching. Even my cool, open-minded mother wouldn't have understood. So I named the folder something dumb and threw it into my "Pre-Calculus" file. No way she'd click on that. Then I dug deep into our cloud to hide it even further. That's when I spotted a file Mom had put in the archive just a few years before. She wasn't very tech savvy, and didn't even try to hide her personal files under a false name.

Her folder was labeled: "The Illuminati."