Frat Girl Read online

  I know a second too late what’s about to happen. Instead of pouring the liquor into my mouth, she splashes me with it, like this is the Real Housewives of Warren.

  My eyes burn, and I try not to scream, instead letting out a kind of whimpering sound through my clenched teeth.

  “Oops.” She walks away, swinging the bottle and almost skipping.

  My vision is blurry as we get back in line, but I manage to find my way. I end up next to Duncan. Perfect.

  Keeping my head down, I blink furiously and try to bring the sidewalk into focus.

  Little dark dots appear as teardrops fall to the pavement.

  “Are you crying?” he asks.

  “No, my eyes are just watering.”

  “Sure.” And I can hear it in his voice, the this is why we don’t let girls in tone.

  “She poured vodka in my eyes,” I say matter-of-factly.

  “On purpose?”

  “Not all the attention is good.”

  After three more sororities, they leave us drunk and bloody in the middle of the main quad. As far from my dorm as I could possibly be.

  “Be at the house tomorrow at six for move-in,” Marco says before they leave.

  “Do you want to walk back?” Duncan asks.

  I nod. It’s silent and awkward as we make our way across campus, but at least I’m not alone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Entry 6: Hazing

  Hazing is presented as necessary to turn the pledges “from boys to men” but seems to be more of an excuse for current members to exercise dominance. This pattern speaks to the toxic hypermasculinity of such organizations: associating dominance with masculinity and, in turn, submission with femininity.

  Most tasks involve drinking to extreme and dangerous amounts—often chugging beers or taking shots for punishment. Demonstrating an impossible alcohol tolerance seems to be seen as a show of strength. Other forms of punishment—such as push-ups or wall sits for an extended period of time—are examples of testosterone-fueled competition.

  Other pledge tasks emphasize humiliation, especially in front of women—such as crawling half-naked to every sorority on campus.

  Humiliation is also clear in the verbal abuse hurled at pledges during any interactions with actives. Most of these insults seem to imply the pledge is womanly and therefore weak. Examples include “don’t be a pussy,” “do you have a vagina?,” “don’t be a bitch,” “are you on your period?,” etc.

  I click Submit and check the time. I did my project entry and homework as soon as I could, worried that at any moment I would get an email summoning me to the house. But when my phone does buzz, it’s to say that the actives have an event with a sorority and only the top pledges are invited. I, of course, am not one.

  I check my syllabi and realize that for the first time since maybe my first night here I have neither homework nor rushing to do.

  I text Alex on my way out of the dorm.

  It almost caused a lot of problems when I told the Stevenson people about Alex. Especially since I had mentioned no one from my high school was at Warren and they had assumed that meant I wouldn’t know anyone, and therefore all my social interactions could be focused toward the project. They wanted me to pretend I didn’t know her. I argued that for my mental health I should be allowed to have at least one friend outside the experiment. That was not an adequate answer. It was actually Alex’s idea to bring up social media and the fact that there was no way to erase my friendship with her from my past.

  Even so, she had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about her knowledge of the project so far, and I was supposed to keep her separate from the project and spend as little time with her in public as possible.

  It sucks to live five minutes away from your best friend and not get to hang out with her all the time. But whatever, it’s more than I’d see her if I was at college on the other side of the country.

  The door to Dionysus is open, but I still knock once before I walk in. The main room is empty, all the furniture gone, though a gorgeous vintage chandelier hangs from the ceiling. A beautiful Indian girl in a knit crop top and high-waisted shorts is standing on a ladder and hanging string lights radiating out from the chandelier like rays from the sun.

  “Is Alex McNeely here?”

  The girl opens her mouth to answer, but another voice yells over her.

  “Cassandra Beatrice Davis, is that you?”

  “Not my middle name,” I say as Alex half hugs, half tackles me. She smells of flowers and cigarettes. Of course, she’s known my actual middle name for years, but she finds shit like this hilarious.

  “I like your hair,” I say. It’s back to blond. Short and full, but with a hint of darkness at the roots, and cut asymmetrically, like a punk rock Marilyn Monroe.

  “Thanks!” she says. “I miss the pink, but I’m glad I can wear red again.” She’s already taking advantage of that, clad in a maroon slip dress. She’s radiating energy, in full-on Happy Alex mode. The thing about Alex is that she’s either a walking party or a brooding, smart-but-cruel cloud, depending on the day.

  “How are you?” she says as she leads me toward the dark wood staircase.

  “I’m famous,” I say drily. I spent the day getting death glares from everyone in my FemGen classes. The kids in my dorm either refuse to talk to me or want to talk my ear off, which is almost worse, because it risks my cover.

  We reach the second floor. All the doors are open to what were bedrooms in the building’s past life as a frat house, before Kappa Sig got kicked off campus. Now they’re sitting rooms and studio spaces. The sound of an old record floats out into the hall. Some people are perched on couches poring over textbooks or staring at laptops, their faces illuminated in blue light. Others are sitting in the hallway drinking craft beers, having given up for today.

  Alex nods to them as we pass, and I give a shy wave. The staircase is bare but for a large poster of the original Moby Dick cover art. Someone has placed a Post-it note above the Moby and written “S my” in Sharpie.

  We reach the third floor, and I follow Alex down the hall and out onto a large balcony full of students smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. This may very well be the only place on campus where you’ll find people drinking out of glasses and not red plastic cups. There’s a cluster of bottles on a wrought iron table. Probably not some of Napa Valley’s finest, but, honestly, I’m just impressed it’s not boxed.

  A cute boy with dark-rimmed glasses plays Arctic Monkeys from a Jambox, and a few people chatter in French.

  “This is my best friend from home, Cassie. She visited last year,” Alex says to the group.

  I kind of recognize some of them, but others are complete strangers. They all turn. Some nod, while others wave or say a quiet “hey.” Many speak with varying degrees of European accents.

  Someone hands me a glass of red wine, and I sip as Alex lights up a cigarette. She once told me she had so many international friends because the only kids who smoked actual cigarettes on campus were “trailer trash” like her and the kids who grew up “somewhere between Heathrow and JFK.” I replied by telling her she’d just quoted something someone said to Jessa, who I think is the Girls character she would be, if this was a Buzzfeed quiz. She looked at me like I had three heads.

  I sip the bitter liquid and look out over the lake. On the other side, the lights from Delta Tau are barely visible through the trees. My new home. I purse my lips and look away.

  The moon reflects off the water, a wavy mirror image of itself.

  “So you’re a freshman, then?” a skinny boy with sleeve tattoos asks.

  “Yeah.” I clear my throat. I sound nervous. I hope no one recognizes me, or asks if I’m that Cassie, the one who’s all over social media.

  “Well, we don’t support underage drinking here at Dionysus,” a black girl with violet hai
r and a slight British accent says.

  I go to set down my glass, but she shakes her head no and winks, flashing a dazzling smile at me.

  “God, I love first semester,” the boy playing the music says. “Groups of thirty freshmen walking down The Row.”

  “And they all wear those lanyards,” a blond French dude says. “No matter where they’re going.”

  “All wearing Warren T-shirts, just in case they forget where they are.”

  “Blackout drunk at Delta Tau, probably.”

  They laugh, and I wait for someone to bring up, well, me. Not me, the girl they just met, but me, the girl who, did you hear, rushed a frat.

  “Lining up at the bookstore, like they haven’t heard of Amazon.”

  Everyone laughs, and I make myself smile, feeling like there’s a spotlight on me. Or maybe a neon sign above my head that says, “I’m New Here,” with a flashing arrow pointing down.

  “Classic McNeely, letting all the riffraff in,” the tattooed boy says.

  Alex flips him off; she’s laughing, though.

  “Don’t listen to them,” the guy playing the music says. “They just give you shit because they’re jealous they only have two years left and you have four.”

  A lanky boy with a bow tie nods. “It’s the best. It will go by really fast, so enjoy it.”

  The purple-haired girl shakes her head. “It’s not the best—you sound like a football player.”

  The tattooed boy bows his head and snaps his fingers in agreement.

  “Everyone here acts happy because that’s what they’re supposed to be.” Alex pauses to light a second cigarette with her first. “It’s sunny, and we’re the smartest and will make the most money. How could you not want to blow rainbows out your asshole?”

  “Oh, shut up, like this isn’t still amazing,” music boy says.

  Alex shrugs. “I love some things. But I don’t love others, and I’m sick of feeling like I have to pretend I do.”

  “Amen!” someone yells from the other side of the balcony.

  Alex blows them a kiss. We’re both silent for a bit, looking out over the lake.

  “How are you really feeling about the...move?” she asks quietly.

  I close my eyes and shake my head. “I’m just glad I’m here at all. I’m that much closer to doing the work I really want to.”

  “Yeah?” Alex takes a last drag of her cigarette and puts it out on the balcony ledge. “What exactly is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Honestly, there are so many problems in the world for women, and I don’t know how to solve any of them. I guess I kind of trust that I’ll know when I graduate, but maybe that’s putting too much faith in a school with a fancy name and huge tuition.” I trace the edge of my glass with my finger. “All I do know is that you and me put up with a lot of sexist bullshit growing up, and we had it light-years better than most girls in this world. So I have to do something. That something right now happens to be stopping frat boys.”

  She shakes her head. “If the so-called brightest minds in the most liberal pocket of America can’t get their shit together, God help us.” She turns around and calls across the balcony, “Hey, Poppy, if I leave ten bucks on your desk, can I take a bottle of rosé?”

  “Yeah, for sure.” The purple-haired girl laughs. “It only cost two, so that’s a pretty great deal for me.”

  We stop in the kitchen to open the bottle and then head outside to one of the hammocks in the backyard.

  I lie down, and she takes a long pull before climbing in next to me. “If it’s too full, we’d spill,” she says.

  I nod knowingly. She cuddles up next to me and hands me the bottle. The wine is sweet; it tastes like spring.

  The hammock sags and squishes us both toward the middle, which might be uncomfortable with someone else, but Alex and I don’t have many boundaries anymore.

  “Your boob is comfy,” she says.

  I laugh, and she reaches for the bottle.

  “This sucks,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Lying my way through my college experience.”

  She rolls her eyes while drinking the wine. “Oh, shut up,” she says, the bottle still inches from her lips. “You get to go to Warren for free, and you’ll be a published scholar before you graduate. So quit whining.”

  I exhale and look up at the stars. “That was a bit harsh,” I say, then turn to her and steal the bottle back like a little kid fighting for a toy.

  She shrugs. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “I know I’m lucky, but...but also it’s like I don’t get to have genuine interactions with people. A school like this is stressful enough with a support system. I don’t get to have friendships. I get to have social experiments.”

  “Yeah, but I mean, that’s kinda the price of living in a place like this for people like you and me. You’re living a more literal lie, but do you think my friends here are the type I can talk to about money or about my mom? I mean sure, I have fun, but I learned to drink in a trailer park, not the kiddie clubs of New York. Last year I kept telling myself it was fine, you know, people to drink with are people to drink with. I have you and Jay to have meaningful talks with, and the rest of these guys are just for fun while I learn enough to take their corporate baby asses down in court.”

  She looks up at me. “Did I tell you I picked a major? I’m doing this interdisciplinary program thing in philosophy and law for social justice. Which is what I think of when I have to listen to kids talk about how annoying it is that ISIS is too involved in the Maldives now, so they have to vacation in Hawaii instead. Sometimes learning how to fight the good fight means I have to be the pink-haired girl in the land of Vineyard Vines. Bring it on.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  My alarm rips through the room, and I want to kill everyone associated with DTC because they scheduled us to move into the house at 6:00 a.m.

  The games don’t stop.

  Peeling myself off the bed, I slip on a shirt and athletic shorts. The hot dude-like dream girl is dead; time for them to live with a real woman.

  My stuff is piled in bags and boxes on the floor, but I decide to just bring one bag now, show my face at this ungodly hour to avoid the shot list, but do the real grunt work later.

  I step over the rest and glance at Leighton, who is still sleeping soundly. It’s been real.

  I grab my phone, and it lights up like a fireworks show. There are more alerts than I would’ve thought possible. Texts, tweets, Facebook messages, Snapchats. From my friends, family, acquaintances, unsaved numbers.

  I scan a few but decide to answer them later.

  The only one I open is from Sebastian. It’s the official pledge ranking, deciding who has to do extra pledge tasks and who’s excused or even invited to actives-only parties. I scroll down, and down and down. There I am, number twenty-five out of twenty-five. Lovely.

  I pause in front of Jackie’s door, shifting my weight. I could knock, but she’s probably still sleeping and wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway. Even if she was willing, what would I say?

  * * *

  When I get to the house, everyone looks about as happy for me to be there as I feel.

  “Let’s go, pledges! You need to be moved in before housecleaning at nine. Your names are on your doors.”

  The first two doors I pass feature nomenclatures like Bambi and Man Tits, so I doubt I will find “Cassandra” on any of them.

  Most of the pledges are placed three or four to a room clearly meant to be a double, but when I find the door with “Title IX” written in large letters, it leads to a single.

  It takes me only fifteen minutes to unpack my first bag, and the bare mattress looks tempting. But no level of tired would convince me to sleep on this frat house bed before I douse it with disinfectant and get at least a mat
tress pad and my own clean sheets as a barrier.

  As I close my door I notice the room across from me has a real name: Sebastian Elliot. Perfect. Clearly I’ll be getting special attention when it comes to terrorizing the pledges.

  After five short trips, everything I own is officially in the frat house that is now my frat home. What a joke.

  When I went to the room for the last load, Leighton was awake, if still in her silk pajamas.

  She kind of just stood there for a minute and then wrapped her arms around me. I slowly raised my arms to hug her back, disoriented.

  “I’ll visit soon!” she promises.

  I just nod and grab the last box.

  As it turns out, my room in the frat used to be a storage closet. I have a twin bed with a set of drawers underneath, and a simple desk and wooden chair. There’s a whole foot between the desk and the bed, so the chair can’t come out fully and I have to kind of slip in from the side. Luxurious.

  But at least this room doesn’t come with a Leighton.

  The desk has one drawer that locks, presumably for my computer, phone, headphones, cash and other valuables.

  I fill it almost completely with all my paperwork for Stevenson, books about Greek culture and reports on fraternities.

  I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, unpacking my clothes, when someone knocks lightly on my open door.

  “Hey, neighbor.” I look up to see Jordan leaning on the door frame. “Can I come in?”

  I smile. “Sure.”

  He steps inside, and due simply to its shoe-box size, we end up standing pretty close together.

  “I see you’ve unpacked the essentials,” he says, picking up the bottle of tequila from my desk.

  It’s the only thing besides my clothes that’s not still in a bag or box.

  “I didn’t want the glass to break.”

  “Of course.” He smiles, and his eyes sparkle. “We should break into it later,” he says, sitting down on my desk.

  “Yeah, definitely,” I say. I stare at him for a second, trying to discern if the invitation was to join the guys in a classic night of drunkenness and brotherhood, or something more intimate.