RULE ONE: Post at least one secret a week to keep your membership active.
RULE TWO: Assignments will be given for every secret. Assignments must be completed within twenty-four hours to keep membership active.
RULE THREE: An active membership is the only way to protect your secrets.
The rules didn’t appear until after my secret was posted, which is sort of not the best. It’s also too late to ponder them, and besides, according to everything I’m skimming, these Assignments are intended to better people’s lives, and I’m nothing if not in need of some betterment. So I swallow down the little instant of worry, remember they don’t have any of my identifying information, and decide that it’s fine. And anonymous. So I can stay calm. All Zen-like. Paul and Cate would be so proud.
Also, Joe often talks about taking risks. He wants to go skydiving for his eighteenth birthday and likes snowboarding and meeting new people and really spicy foods. And, of course, weed. He typed fast when he was telling me about all of these passions, and I just reread that conversation earlier today. I think Joe would like Life by Committee, and that makes me less scared of it.
Sort of.
Agnes is one of the more active members, so I zero in on her profile and her secrets. One of her knee-down pictures has her in black leggings that stop with a ribbon of lace just past her knees, no socks, and beat-up, possibly ironic penny loafers. Judging from her collection of faceless photos, she’s from somewhere sunny and silly. Everything in the background is usually too green or too blue or too yellow. Never snow. Never the shadows of mountains. I wonder what living in a mountainless world would be like.
Nice, I think.
I’m so happy to be transported out of my head, I actually smile, which is a ridiculous thing to do when you’re all by yourself. I can’t help it: Cate says it’s the mountains that make me feel trapped. Sometimes it’s cozy, like the perfect nook in the expanse of the world, but right now, when everyone hates me, it’s more like a crawl space I can’t properly stretch in.
Poking around LBC makes me feel like I found a trapdoor, Tabitha-sized, to let me out of here.
I click through a bunch of the secrets the Agnes girl shared, then Roxie and someone going by Elfboy, and the leader, Zed, who always gives the official assignments. It’s like reading someone’s diary, except other members can comment on each secret.
Agnes has this strange, lonely, squirrely life that I pity so much, it’s almost uncomfortable to keep reading.
Secret: I like my father more than my mother.
Secret: My mother keeps calling her doctor’s office and leaving messages. I listen in as often as I can.
Secret: I know my mother is snooping in my room and taking things, so I’m snooping in hers.
Secret: My mother told me to go on a diet.
Secret: I lie to my boyfriend. Often.
Secret: I picked up a pamphlet on depression and another on birth control and a third on anorexia when the school nurse stepped out of the room.
After every one of the secrets, there’s a discussion with all the other members, a list of comments ranging from the brief (smiley face) to the lengthy (an in-depth retelling of Roxie lying to her boyfriend about her age when she was fifteen and he was twenty). After the comments, there’s always a silver-fonted post from Zed titled ASSIGNMENT. He seems to take the conversation of the members into consideration, then construct an Assignment that addresses the secret and the members’ feelings about the secret.
Zed posts secrets too, but he lets the community discuss his options and come up with an Assignment. If a majority of members agree, he’ll do what they’ve come up with.
I guess that’s what Life by Committee is. And with a mother like Agnes’s, who steals her books and her journals and anything she decides is “too troubling” or “informative about her emotional state” and takes them to Agnes’s doctor, it’s obvious LBC is a serious safe haven.
SECRET: I don’t want to go to college.
ASSIGNMENT: Apply to do a year of volunteering before college in Africa or Honduras or Romania. There’s more to life than the path everyone is told to take. Do it differently.
I wonder if Agnes will do it. If she’ll work in an orphanage in Romania and become a bigger, better person before college. I wonder how seriously they take these Assignments.
It must be pretty serious. She posts a link to a service program and says she’s filling it out immediately. I am watching someone change her life, just like that.