Adrienne nodded. “That’s the way a sundae is supposed to be.” Barts served sundaes in cardboard bowls, and we agreed that this made their sundaes look like dog food. I said that the whole point of a sundae was its height. Its height, I said, making a wild, loose-wristed gesture, was supposed to intimidate you.
“Totally,” she said. The gesture she made when she said “totally” was also loose-wristed and wild. “It’s supposed to be so tall that you think you can’t finish it and then you do.” She grimaced. Out of sheer panic—I still feel bad about it—I put my hand up for a high five. We high-fived. After we had done it, we became quiet and ashamed.
We spent the rest of the orientation group tour of downtown exchanging information about our families—what our parents did for work, what our houses looked like, the ages of our siblings. We went back to my dorm room and I took cans of juice-flavored seltzer from the squat fridge. When I handed her one of the cans, she sipped some of it and reclined in the chair, though it was a desk chair and didn’t allow for deep reclining. I remained silent for a while in a standing position, shifting my weight back and forth. We looked at each other. Stooping, I lowered my face toward hers. I could tell, from the way we kissed, that the energy passing through us was shared desperation. Either of us would have kissed almost anybody that day.
We sat on my bed. It made my heart pound to run my hands through her languishing hair, and I felt intense gratitude and admiration, enough to numb the sting of secondariness. It was so good to kiss Adrienne, such an alleviation of sadness and anxiety, that my mind became more lucid than it had been in days, suddenly active, leaping manically from point to point. I wondered if it was the same for her, if she, too, was rehabilitated by the kiss, and was thinking with new clarity about how many of the required courses for an accounting major she should take in her first year, or of the regularity of her period, or of the new season of Atlanta. Thoughts were coming at me rapid-fire. Maybe the frat boys and sorority girls made her mad because she was jealous. Did she want to be Queen Cassiopeia of Kappa Gamma? Wasn’t that what love was? Taking an ordinary person and turning them into your queen or president? It would be good, I felt, for Adrienne and me to be rulers of our own insignificant mountain. I touched her face with both hands and put my tongue in her mouth. She’d looked regal in the van when she was angry.
She pulled away and tucked strands of hair behind her ears. “Let’s slow down,” she said. She was flushed, blinking, trying to hide her revulsion. I had gotten carried away. It had happened to me before, with girls. The moment I felt that we had made a breakthrough, that we had found a nonverbal language, that the barriers between us had fallen and we were unified in a single feeling, this turned out to be precisely the moment that I had left my partner behind and slipped away into a private euphoria. It was a lesson I could never remember when I needed to: that the moment of joy in which I believed I had become one with another person was in fact the fall into isolation. She collected her backpack and water bottle. I walked her down the hall to the elevator, for some reason, and the two of us waited side by side at the chrome doors, watching the numbers light up.
* * *
A couple of days later, I went home for Labor Day weekend. When I came back, I worked harder at school than I ever had before, sitting on the second floor of the library, where silence was required, highlighting half of the passages in my political science textbook, drinking Diet Coke, and copying and pasting paragraphs from articles into Google Docs that ran thirty pages long. In the aughts, the library had installed a black soundproof booth in the hallway, with the words CELL PHONE ZONE printed in yellow letters on the side. Sitting inside it on the little plastic chair, I delivered an oral presentation aloud.
The second weekend of September, the temperature dropped twenty degrees. There were blotches of red and orange in the trees, the sky spat rain for ten minutes at a time, and stiff winds ruffled the purple flowers in the pots that swayed from the lampposts downtown. The cafeteria workers spoke with satisfaction of the New England weather, and the chairs set out on the sidewalk in front of restaurants fell over. Finally, late Saturday night, I went looking for a party, anything to end my solitude. I followed the sound of music.
At the corner where the two fraternities stood side by side, bands of upperclassmen walked up and down the sidewalk, ten, twelve, fifteen strong. Different kinds of music blared from scattered speakers. Despite the cold, the girls wore shorts or miniskirts, halters or tube tops. They were bright-eyed and unshivering, lit from within. On the porch of Iota Gamma Epsilon, they danced to nineties R&B, took videos of one another, and played cards on a round table, all beneath a canopy of white Christmas lights. There were Christmas lights stapled or glued to three wooden letters propped against the front of their house, standing in the yard, five feet tall, the iota, the gamma, and the epsilon. A clutch of girls posed in front of them as another girl took pictures, and the letters periodically tipped over, forcing them to shove them upright with their shoulders. A blond boy in a white T-shirt walked up and shouted to the girls who were dancing on the porch, asking to come inside the sorority. When they shook their heads no, he screamed, “I’ll fuck you up, you cracker-ass bitches.” He strutted down the sidewalk with his shoulders thrown back, tossing his great white head like a horse, running his hands through his golden hair. “I’ll fuck you up for real, you hear me, you cracker-ass bitches?” He continued to issue the threat at the top of his lungs, over and over, and then he turned the corner down the hill and vanished into one of the smaller houses midway down the slope.
I followed his path down the hill, swerving around the roving groups, until finally they thickened into a mob. Someone shouted above the music, “They’re shutting it down, so we’re meeting in the parking lot.” Police SUVs rolled up and down the street, flashing their blue lights as the crowd flowed around them. “She sent me a video of her pussy and her ass, actually,” someone said. To my right, inches away, a boy had lifted his shirt to show his injuries to his friends: “Look at this bad boy here,” he said. “And look at this little bad boy, getting his bleed on.” Every house had a door flapping open to expose a blue or strobing light, every house had strands of Christmas lights blinking in the windows. “I’m not going to lie,” someone said. “I’m not going to front.” Cops walked up and down the hill with their hands on their belts. Boys fell and were picked up by the boys on either side of them. A fire truck trundled by, red lights flickering out of sync with the blue lights of the police, and firemen trooped single file into a house on the corner. The scene looked like a protest without the cardboard signs.
A dark-haired girl with sparkling eyeliner reached through the bodies, stumbling, and took my hand. “Hi,” she said, grave, and her friends peeled her away. A trio of girls greeted each other, and their screams were bloodcurdling. This crowd would never have been tolerated on the Common, even though the town tolerated all manner of demonstrations, drums, chants, dancing, singing, a hundred spectacles of nonconformity. The Greeks didn’t want to be in the right. Their screaming was only a way to say that they excited one another. That was rebellion here. They’d figured it out.
I went into the house to the left of the one with the fire in it, and some of the boys gave me hard looks but nobody stopped me. It was the beginning of the school year, everyone was back together, and the mood was celebratory.
A sheet bearing the yellow-and-black Ferrari stallion logo was hung over the front window. There were spinning green flowers projected on the wall. The music made the floor shake. A girl sat on the shoulders of two boys, pounding punch from a great white bowl. I lapped the floor a couple times, slipped through the dancers without speaking to anyone. People turned and flashed me looks from the safety of their circles. Finally, I leaned against a wall, wearing a bemused expression whose fraudulence I felt as a physical strain in my mouth and eyebrows.
After perhaps thirty seconds there was a tap on my shoulder. It was one of the Deltas—I knew from the lette
rs on his polo shirt—and he held a cup of beer in each hand. “Would you like one of these?” he asked.
The phrasing of the question was oddly formal. He sounded like a cater-waiter with a tray. His eye contact, too, was strange—unwavering but not challenging.
“Sure,” I said. He gave me one of the beers, and we raised our cups and drank. His Delta pledge name was Oprah, he said, and he’d had it for three years now. He still lived in Delta, even though he was a senior and some of the brothers in his class had moved farther from campus. He couldn’t imagine leaving, especially now that he had a single. He loved it there.
I thought I knew, then, what was going on: it was pledge season, and he wanted to recruit me. That would explain his manner. The techno on the stereo faded, and a melancholy slow jam began. The wounded singer denounced a lover who’d been untrue. The response from the crowd was immediate: girls who’d been crouched low to the ground unfurled themselves and swayed with their arms in the air; boys didn’t sway so much as wobble, flapping their arms mournfully like great endangered birds of prey.
“Don’t you love how everyone’s so much happier with a sad song on?” asked Oprah. He rubbed one of the buttons on his polo shirt with his thumb. “It makes me feel like the happy songs are just there to help the sad songs kill you.”
I asked him what he meant.
He squinted at the ceiling. “This song wouldn’t be so good if every song they played was sad. You need most of the music to be everybody-dance-now for the real songs to connect.” He made a loose fist and jabbed my solar plexus very gently, and then opened his hand, so that it evoked an explosive projectile connecting with its target, and so that his fingers stroked my chest. It was when he did this, and I laughed, that I first saw flickers of meanness on the faces of the boys on the dance floor.
He asked me questions. This was how he had earned his name, he said, asking questions. He seemed to find my answers, no matter how simple, profound. It made sense that I was from Long Island and had excellent taste in music, he said, because Long Island was next to New York City, where people were sophisticated. It was no wonder, he told me, that I’d been spending all my time in the library, given that I’d grown up so near to a center of learning. He’d never heard of any of my favorite movies, so he wrote down their titles in his phone, as the titles alone, he said, were intriguing. No one had ever offered me so much praise in such a short amount of time. It was possible, I decided, that, while some girls had welcomed my overtures, no girl had ever actively pursued me. This dizzy state was surely the state of being pursued. I felt that it was making me stupid, but in an interesting way. All I had to do was state a fact about myself, and he would labor to find specialness in it. It was like fetch, a game where you stood there feeling imperious and watched the other player work. It was also fetch-like in that I got tired of it before he did.
I was about to excuse myself and leave when one of the boys who’d been on the dance floor only seconds before passed us on the way to the keg and checked each of us with his shoulder, one after the other. He knocked us into the wall, spilling our beers down our shirts. We shouted after him for an explanation, but he only stopped when he reached the keg. He took a fresh cup from the stack and sneered at us as he pumped, his cup tilted 45 degrees to minimize the foam. He was broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest, with the kind of forearms that betokened participation in contact sports. Two other boys standing near the keg watched us and laughed, staring at us with open contempt. Fuck you, I thought, how dare you try to frighten me. My thoughts spiraled off into my usual fantasies of fistfights, retribution. Then it occurred to me that there was something I could do to prove that this subhuman giant had no say in my behavior, that his display of power meant nothing.
In this one quarter mile of town, I realized, this one three-block radius, running off with the boy beside me would be an act of defiance. I pawed the front of his shirt where the beer had soaked through, as if the flesh of my hand were absorbent. I looked up at him—Oprah was a little taller than I was—and ran my thumb over the button he’d rubbed with his own thumb.
“This place is a shithole,” I said. “Do you want to go to Delta and show me around?” I danced in place with my eyes closed, briefly. I had never done those two things at the same time, danced and closed my eyes. My voice sounded strange, musical. “Maybe you can show me your room.”
He turned and looked at our enemies, tapped his foot, folded his arms. Suddenly, he looked frightened. “Be patient with me,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ve only ever done this with girls.” We hurried across the dance floor to the door.
We didn’t do some of the things we could have done, because neither of us knew what he was doing. We were both clumsy, that night. And the fact is I’ve never really fallen for a boy. But in his cramped, overheated bedroom, with the pounding of the bad music outside, and the taste of bad beer in my mouth, and the knowledge that the beer on our clothes was there because someone had wanted us to know we were trash, and the violent idiocy of the chatter on the street, and the lawn below us covered with litter, I liked everything about him. He could do no wrong. I forgot who I was, and what I stood for, and I would have done anything he asked me to do.
HELL
It was peak foliage, horned red leaves adrift on the duck pond, two-hand touch in the stadium’s shadow. It was the time of year for planning new debasements to perform on the pledges during Hell Week, the final test before their initiation. But we were short of ideas. Previous Delta upperclassmen had made their pledges do the elephant walk, in which they were marched through the house each holding the dick of the guy behind him, but we knew that that would no longer fly. It would be filmed on a phone and posted, drawing criticism. Previous upperclassmen had stripped the pledges to their underwear in the back of a van and dropped them off in what was thought to be gang territory in Springfield, but we considered that insensitive to the people who lived there. And the classic procedures—blindfolding the pledges and making them fellate cucumbers or eat bananas out of the toilet—had lost all power to surprise and deceive. The pledges had read online about any torment ever conceived by a pledge educator. The exec board convened at its round plywood table, trying to think who might have some suggestions, when Glines, who was older than the rest of us, having taken time off after junior year to stretch rubber bands over the claws of lobsters and pay down his loans, mentioned a guy we’d never heard of: Michael Poumakis. When Glines was a pledge, Poumakis had been house legend, spoken of in hushed tones by the seniors who remembered him. ROTC, rugby, Honors College, Young Democrats, religious but still brought girls to his room.
When Poumakis graduated, Glines said, he accepted a navy commission. He was Lieutenant Poumakis now; Glines showed us the alumni-database entry on his laptop. He lived in Crystal City, Virginia, a day’s drive south.
“If he’s an officer outside D.C., guy’s probably been through Navy Hell Week,” Glines said. “That’s SEAL Team Six shit. That’s state of the art. That, plus hazing in the navy is probably harsher than anything we would ever come up with. They’re preparing you for war.”
I was with Glines. A navy guy would know how to take an assortment of pledges and put them through something so strenuous it would bind them into brothers. They wouldn’t want to post a picture and get us all in trouble, because they’d be proud they got through it. They’d be proud to be one of us. That was Hell Week’s whole point.
We composed the Facebook message as a group, with Glines’s laptop on the table between us. We thanked the lieutenant for his service. Regretting that we couldn’t provide travel money or accommodations, only Chef Bill’s chili, no doubt the same as it had been back in the day, we invited him up for a weekend. Please consider helping us plan Hell Week this year, we wrote. We would be incredibly grateful to draw on the insights you have acquired in your military training as to how to make it an impactful experience for every pledge.
A response balloon with three dots appeared immediate
ly in the blue window. I would love to come.
We had seen full-body shots of him on Instagram, but he looked smaller in real life, stooped by eight hours at the wheel. Since the last picture, he’d grown a beard, and he petted the beard often, the way you would if your beard was new. He dressed like one of those hikers who strive always to be comfy: fleece pants and hoodie, canvas sneakers, moisture-repellent runner’s socks, all shades of dun and brown. He petted his upper arms the same way he petted the beard. He was on the cusp of old, about thirty, but he kept his hood up over his head and walked with his hands thrust in his sweatshirt’s front pocket, like someone our age.
There was nothing about him that resembled the ads we’d seen for the navy, buzz-cut sailors in starched whites, hands clasped behind their backs on the deck of a carrier, links in the World’s Strongest Chain. But his handshake was crushing. He didn’t seem to know how much force he applied; for the duration of the exercise his expression remained mild, even kind. All six of us in exec board showed him around the house, though our presence was unnecessary. We followed while Glines led the way, walking backward as he talked. Sometimes he prefaced his remarks with “Moving right along, as you might recall.” “Moving right along, as you might recall, these are the couches where you sleep if your roommate has a girl over.” “Moving right along, as you might recall, this is the table where the house manager and the president meet every Monday and Thursday.” But he spoke in a sarcastic tone, so that the tour was at once serious and self-deprecating. Sometimes he took off his baseball cap and raked his hands through his curls, as if to soothe himself with the feel of his fingernails on his scalp. When we reached the alumni lounge, on the third floor, he sat on the edge of the Ping-Pong table and asked Poumakis what it was like being an officer in the military.
Poumakis spoke in a high, quiet voice. His hood was still up. “The most important thing we do now,” he said, “is try to change people’s minds. Say, ‘Hey, we know it’s been hard in your country, we know you’ve been taught to view us as an enemy, but we want you on our side. We want you to help us create a world where people can vote, and there’s basic human rights, and some kind of economic opportunity for everyone. You don’t have to be like us, but please, join us.’”
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