The Drifter(10)
During those first weeks, when they took Betsy under their wings and showed her the ropes, the two of them together were pure magic. Ginny was the sparkly, impish sidekick to the deviously charming Caroline. Betsy soon learned that they could talk their way into any party, walk past the velvet rope to the front of any line, or drive past security guards onto restricted areas of campus with a wink and a wave. Their appeal went beyond that of a pretty girl who could cry her way out of a speeding ticket. On that first night out, after Caroline introduced Betsy to every guy at the bar as her cousin Ruta from Latvia, Betsy would follow them anywhere.
“She barely speaks English,” Caroline said, shaking her head. “I mean, the accent is impossible to understand. I get, like, every fifth word on a good day.”
Betsy fumbled with a bad impression of Count von Count from Sesame Street.
“I said Latvia, not Transylvania,” Caroline said, as they stumbled out of the bar. “Five! Five stupid boys, ah ah ah.”
Ginny showed both of them M.J.’s secret spot where you could scale the wall of the football stadium for a midnight sprint down the fifty-yard line. They made it across and back and halfway over the fence before they heard the security guard shouting after them. When they made it to the car, Caroline waved at him and shout-sang the school fight song as they sped away. Just riding in their wake was enough to erase all of the infinite times Betsy didn’t feel special. She basked in their attention, their invincibility, their reflected glow, until she didn’t.
Physically, Caroline and Betsy were more similar than Betsy and Ginny were. They were roughly the same height, with light hair and eyes, born just a few months apart. That’s where their similarities ended. Betsy was tall and lanky with dirty blonde hair. Objectively, she was pretty, but she did everything she could to not draw attention to it. She tried to fold herself like an origami bird into a smaller body to avoid standing above the crowd. She was funny and wry if you were standing close enough to hear the sly remarks. She noticed everything, examining her surroundings so carefully, paying special attention to the flaws that no one else caught. The fact that she noticed things proved problematic at times. At the most basic level, the whole social framework of sorority life hinged on the idea that everyone bought into it, that they sang the songs, and held hands, and flashed beaming smiles in photos with a total commitment to their sisterhood. Betsy had questions and doubts, and that made her more threatening than she realized.
Caroline, on the other hand, was imperious. She had the strong, tan shoulders, sharp clavicles and perfectly streaked blonde hair of a girl who’d grown up playing country club sports, and a quicksilver quality that lent her humor, which was sharp and unrelenting, a kind of menacing, unpredictable edge. One minute, you were in on the joke and the next, you were stunned silent when you realized you were the joke.
Ginny was petite and dark-haired with a gentler kind of confidence. Life was fantastically easy for her. Even the way she drove struck Betsy as simultaneously careless and graceful, her brown doe-like eyes saw everything but the road in front of her. Betsy would grip the sides of the passenger seat and wince, tensing her body for the impending car wrecks that somehow never materialized. Betsy had had close girlfriends before, but Ginny was her favorite. She saved her from Caroline’s mean streak, from a lonely summer, from herself.
She felt a tinge of sympathy for the incoming sophomores, who were showing up newly SlimFasted and wide-eyed with anticipation. Since they’d been initiated only a semester earlier, this was their first glimpse behind the scenes at the production that had seduced them so completely just a year before. She guessed it wouldn’t take many of them long to connect the dots and realize how they’d all been duped, that their fate had practically been sealed before they even walked in the door. Betsy noticed a few people from her pledge class, who were entering their senior year, as the stragglers who were filing in last. They’d put in their time for three years and their numbers had dwindled, gradually. A few girls had transferred, a couple had been kicked out for not meeting the minimum grade-point average or for unbecoming behavior, and a handful just stopped showing up entirely and no one seemed to notice or care. All active members needed to be present for rush, and every day of pre-rush a sister missed there was a hefty fifty-dollar fine. Caroline wasn’t due to be back for two days, four days late in total. No one dared complain about her missing so much time because Caroline was a master at recruiting pledges, blinding the truly clueless with her singular magnetism. She was what they call a closer, in that Glengarry Glen Ross kind of way, and would do whatever it took to seal the deal and get the girl. Being rushed by Caroline was to experience the art of seduction at its best. She was a sly manipulator, skilled at reading people, matching the tone and volume of their voices; Betsy had watched as she focused that laser beam charm on any guileless girl they’d place in front of her, intuiting what she wanted to hear with stunning precision. Betsy saw what happened to the girls who had Caroline’s eyes locked on them. Her glow was as warm as the sun.
AT FIRST, THE group of fifteen hundred is divided into ten groups of one hundred fifty, all organized alphabetically under the white tents pitched on the front lawns of the street known as Sorority Row. The five-day round robin started with each group spending twenty minutes at all of the sixteen prospective houses over two days. They’d arrive at their designated starting point, fanning themselves with the rush catalogue, which was printed with pictures of each of the houses carefully selected to convey the subtly coded messages of the communal “personality” of the house. The sisters of one house are studious, from good families with good reputations but—truth be told—a little staid. Theirs is a reputable house that a fraternity would partner with for homecoming if they had been especially naughty and needed to tidy their reputation with the school administration. The girls in the neighboring house are beautiful, but with slightly looser morals. They are game for not just a toga party, but a wet toga party, where entire rooms were sandbagged and filled with a foot of fetid water and spraying hoses for the occasion. The only discernible clues that tipped you off to this distinction were that, in the pictures, their shorts were an inch shorter, their hair a little bigger. There is a sorority for the party girls, one for the Jewish girls who iron their T-shirts, and another for the Jewish girls who follow the Dead, worship Jerry, and hang tie-dyed tapestries on their dorm room walls. There are two black sororities, and a sort of unspoken assumption that the Asian girls are too focused on premed for such useless distractions. The process is surprisingly efficient. There is a sorority for the conservative Southern girls, the ones with tight bows tied to their ponytails who give blow jobs by the dozen but refuse to give up their virginity before marriage. The top three houses duked it out for the 10 percent at the highest end of the food chain and then would fill in the remaining slots with legacies and some dark horses who’d make it past the finish line by a nose. Once Betsy made it to the other side of the curtain, she’d determined she had been one of those.