The Drifter(12)

In the back of the room, lying under the piano and flipping through a fashion magazine written in a language she couldn’t read, Caroline nudged Betsy and said, “Oh my God, did you notice? Man hands.”

It didn’t matter what Caroline actually thought of the board girls. She would captivate them. What made her particularly ruthless was that she’d also bond with the unsuspecting anonymous ones, the ones who didn’t stand a chance, in an expertly insouciant “isn’t this all just a waste of time?” way. After Caroline deposited her victim back under the tent, she’d turn away, maybe she’d roll her eyes just the tiniest bit, and then grab a red felt-tip marker to cross the name off of the list, swiftly, when she was barely through the door. “Spotters,” sisters in charge of identifying the MVPs under the crowded tent through parted blinds, had the job of procuring the rarest specimens and getting them into the hands of the sister they’d relate to the most. By the third round, Caroline had worked her magic on Jenn. She’d grabbed her vascular man hand, even when rush guidelines strictly forbade any physical contact, and led her into her room upstairs for a lip gloss touch-up. Meeting behind closed doors in a private room was an even more egregiously illegal maneuver than touching. Then, she invited her to a keg party later that night, and made a “you completely know that your picture’s going to be on that wall next year” well-outside-the-guidelines confession. Caroline was a dirty rusher, and she’d been reported to the “authorities” that monitor these proceedings and reprimanded more than once. Never in the long history of sororities and sorority rush had anyone given less of a shit about that.

The way Betsy’s former sisters saw it, there were three top sororities (though theirs was the best, of course) and four respectable second-tier houses. There was always serious attrition after the first round, dropouts who were either smart enough to rise above it or to realize they were about to be eaten alive. The ones who stuck it out were divvied out to the remaining nine houses.

Rush got particularly ugly during the debates about who among the young women who attended the “parties” that day would be invited back for the next round, thus narrowing the field from fifteen hundred to five hundred to one hundred fifty and then the final fifty, who’d receive bids. Names were brought up individually for discussion, and the process was agonizing and endless. Sisters would flee the room in tears so the rest of the house could discuss the fate of their biological, as in genetic sister, who was criticized for wearing pleather flats, or who made the mistake of admitting she slept at her boyfriend’s house the night before. Officially, the sorority discouraged catty comments of all kinds, so there was a shorthand among the most ruthless sisters to avoid being reprimanded. To be fair, Betsy knew that other people struggled with the process, but they seemed content just to keep their heads down and stay out of it. But that was the part that Betsy remembered most vividly, as she stood straddling that bike in the parking lot. She couldn’t ignore it.

“Y’all, I just think she’d be happier elsewhere,” someone would say, a handily coded euphemism for “not a chance.” The chapter president would call a name and open the floor for discussion and if the “scary balloon”—a helium balloon that Margie, a mean girl from Vero Beach, had scrawled a scowl on with a black Sharpie marker—rose above their heads like the Bat-Signal, they were doomed. Not everyone was in on the joke, but there were enough sisters who knew what it meant that their votes would add up, and, just like that, they tallied the raised hands and she was “happier elsewhere.” Margie once made a tearful speech at 2:00 a.m., after a blistering day of singing and talking trash about people, that revealed how her big-shot Daddy would not pay her annual dues if he knew that the biracial girl (Betsy would never forget: Shannon. Salutatorian. Macon.) had been offered a spot in his sweet angel’s sorority. Betsy was shocked by her own reaction, which was stunned silence by intimidation, and never forgave herself for not speaking up. Shannon eventually pledged a black sorority, and Betsy would find herself scanning the crowds between classes, searching for her face as she pedaled through campus, unsure of what she would say, if she’d say anything at all, if she found her. Their paths never crossed again.

Betsy couldn’t explain why she’d endured rush in the first place, and she often ran through every possible excuse she could think of to justify it. She had some kind of bizarre obligation to her competitive streak. She’d never been able to resist wanting something that was perceived as hard to get, whether it was an A, or a cute guy, or a position on the drill team, or one of fifty coveted spots in a sorority pledge class. She wanted to make her mother proud. The school itself was so immense that she figured she’d need a way to shrink it in order to find a manageable circle of friends. She wanted people to think she was OK, that she was likable and popular, even though most of the time she felt anything but. She wanted a little of the magic, of the Ginnys and the Carolines with their surplus of charm. By surrounding herself with so many rows of perfect teeth, a hundred overachieving young women with respectable GPAs in cotton floral sundresses, Betsy felt special by proxy. Befriending Ginny cemented her status and made her think, for a little while at least, that all of those feelings of acceptance were true and real. When she followed Ginny and Caroline at a party, Betsy would catch the looks that were first cast on them and then lingered on her, the way people would pause to remember her face, to wonder who she was or if they’d ever seen her somewhere before. Betsy noticed how everyone, busy bartenders, campus traffic cops, even the guy at the Taco Bell drive-thru, treated her differently when she was with them.