“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s my first day here. My uncle was in this fraternity, but I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.”
“You and me both,” I said, smiling at him.
The heavyset upperclassman I’d seen on the porch suddenly appeared and pulled Frankie away from me by his earlobe, and he waved goodbye. I looked around for Jif. Not seeing her, I started to sway to the music like everyone else and watched Peter grab freshman boys and haul them up the stairwell. After what seemed like an hour of pretending to know people and nursing my unsavory beer, I finally made my way to the line for the bathroom in hopes of coming across someone I knew.
It took twenty minutes to get in there. A petite and fair-skinned black-haired girl in line before me was hardly able to stand up. She was a drunken Snow White, and when she finally made it into the bathroom, I could hear her getting sick behind the door.
“You think she’s okay?” I said to an upperclass girl waiting behind me.
“She’s road cheese,” the girl said, flapping her hand as if she were swatting away a fly. “Don’t concern yourself.”
Road cheese, I thought. What in the world did that mean?
Finally, the girl’s friend, a made-up blonde with big breasts and the largest diamond-stud earrings I’d ever seen, pushed through the door to help her friend. They barely made their way across the threshold, Snow White as green as the wicked stepmother now.
“Let’s hit the highway,” the blonde said. “Just hold on till we get to the car, Isabelle.”
I watched as they stumbled out onto the porch. No fraternity brother or NBU girl offered them any help as they made their way onto the dark lawn and toward a red, new-fangled Ford Explorer.
“Waiting for an invitation?” the upperclassman said to me as she pointed at the empty bathroom door.
“Oh, right,” I said as I hurried into the smelly room, locked the door, and turned on the light.
My stomach caught itself in my throat as I saw the pornography that lined the walls. Picture after picture of centerfolds bearing unnaturally large breasts and tight, round fannies were taped haphazardly to the walls. There was a stack of magazines on the back of the toilet, and the tile floor was covered in a layer of water and grime. The sour smell of vomit burned my nose, and though I really needed to urinate by this point, I didn’t know if I could do it.
I stuffed my blouse over my nose, loosened my white Keds from the sticky floor, and thought of President Schaeffer’s speech about honor and integrity. Had it fallen onto deaf ears at the Kappa Nu house? And though I really had to go, I couldn’t bring myself to sit on the toilet where Snow White’s puke and Lord knows what else had recently been expelled.
As I retied the knot on my blouse, I spotted a little floral bag on top of a roll of toilet paper by the sink. I opened it; inside was a fifty-dollar bill, a condom, a tube of fig-colored lipstick, and a Louisiana driver’s license with a picture of Snow White.
“All right then,” I said as I tucked the bag in my back pocket and walked back out into the foyer, my bladder about to burst.
“That was fast,” the upperclassman girl said.
“Have you been in there?” I asked, trying to warn her.
“Yates is my beau,” she asked. “I practically live here.” Then she grabbed my shoulder and added, “This is college, Wide-Eyed. Time to grow up. Boys will be boys and all that.”
“Ouch,” I said, too afraid to come up with a thought-provoking rebuttal about the danger of exploiting women.
As the girl slammed the bathroom door, I finally spotted Jif in the living room. She was trying to peel the Texan’s bulky arms off her.
“Help,” she mouthed to me, and I came over and made like I was sick.
“I’m not feeling so well. I need you to walk me home, Jif,” I said.
“Where’s Carpenter?” the boy said, tightening his grip on my friend.
“I don’t know. Fulfilling his rush duties, I suppose.”
“I’ve got to go, Derek,” Jif said, wriggling out of his arms. He pouted before taking another gulp from his green bottle. Then he bit his lip in frustration and narrowed his unibrow before adding, “Suit yourself, Fresh Meat.”
“Wow, you really know how to woo a girl,” Jif said sarcastically and turned from him so fast that I think she swatted his nose with her bouffy hair. I could hear him sneezing as I followed her speedy exit. We scurried down the porch steps and out onto the lawn, where Peter was conducting a belching contest with three rush candidates.
He looked up and ran over to me.
“You aren’t leaving?”
“Well,” I said, “that guy, Derek, kind of had an unwelcome death grip on Jif, and you seem pretty busy. We can catch up later.”
“I apologize for all of the craziness, Adelaide. The brothers are blowing off a little steam before classes start, you know? I’ll tell Derek to lay off. Why don’t y’all hang around a little longer?”
I felt the pulsing of my full bladder and added, “Also, um, the decor in the guest bathroom kind of made me ill.”
He looked perplexed for a moment. Then it dawned on him, and he gave a grin that was somewhere between guilt and empathy.
“Adelaide,” he said, gently taking my hand and lacing his fingers through mine, “I’ve always been attracted to your spunk.”
I liked that he took my hand, but I couldn’t stifle my opinion.
“And one more thing: it’s not exactly appealing to be referred to as a slab of flank steak or something.” I looked to Jif, and she nodded in agreement. “Am I wrong?”
“I don’t think y’all are flank steak,” he said, rubbing his thumb across my palm. He pinched my cheek with his other hand. “Filet mignon, I could accept. But definitely not flank steak.”
I pushed his chest, not knowing if I should be offended or flattered. He pulled me gently toward him. “Rush will be over at the end of this week,” he whispered into my ear. The stubble on his chin tickled my neck as he held me close. “Then I’d love to take you out for dinner. I’ve really been looking forward to having you here.”
“Get a room, Carpenter!” the heavyset guy called from the porch.
He threw his empty bottle into the shrubbery and demanded that a freshman boy get him another.
Through the window I could see Derek with his arms around another young girl. His big hand was under the back of her shirt, and he was pulling her closer.
“All right,” I said, pulling back to smile at Peter. He was my only male friend at this point, and I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was my geometry tutor and one of the finest boys ever to come out of Williamstown. So I had good reason to hope that he wasn’t the alcoholic-porn-gazing type that a portion of the KN brothers appeared to be.
“And, Jif,” he said before we stepped onto the sidewalk, “Derek’s your typical egomaniac Texan. His daddy’s some bigwig lawyer, and he thinks he can have whatever he wants. Forget about him. I’ll set you up with a gentleman, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, flipping her hair and correcting her posture.
As we walked up Main Street, we saw several freshman boys downing drinks on the green lawns of frat houses and upperclassmen with young girls on their arms, hollering at the rush candidates to continue.
“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure what to make of all this.”
“Yeah,” Jif said. “Derek was a creep. He must have asked me to walk upstairs to his room five times.”
“This can’t be the only social life at NBU. Surely there’s a lot more going on than just fraternities, right? I mean, who are those activists who put up that Tiananmen Square display? We’ve just scratched the surface.”
“Let’s hope so,” she said.
“And what is road cheese?” I asked, pulling the floral bag out of my pocket to show to her. “This girl was getting sick in this porn-laden bathroom, and no one was helping her. She left this behind. I didn’t exactly think that the KNs had a lost and fou
nd, so I thought I’d turn it in to campus security tomorrow.”
“Road cheese means they’re from one of the pricey women’s colleges,” she said. “There are three or four of them on the outskirts of Troutville, and NBU is where they go to meet guys. The hall counselor told me they were here to get their MRS degrees.”
“Ah,” I said. “The NBU girls snub them for staking out their territory.”
“And the guys just have more and more fresh meat to choose from,”
Jif said.
“Aren’t they fortunate?” I said.
When we returned to the dorm room, Ruthie was talking in loveydovey tones into the telephone receiver as she gazed longingly out the open third-floor window into the starry mountain sky.
Jif, a little freaked out by the Derek experience, pulled her mattress down the hall into ours, and we fell asleep to the distant sounds of music spilling out of the frat houses and shrieks of either laughter or horror. I couldn’t tell which.
Orientation. Ugh. All of the freshmen were instructed to meet in the gym for a series of icebreakers with Dean Atwood and her entourage of assistants and coaches.
“Find everyone born the same month as you,” the dean would holler in her perfectly pressed pin-striped suit. Or “Find everyone with the same color eyes.”
I scurried through the crowd, trying to follow the rules that she called out from the microphone. I had never felt so short. What was in the water across the rest of the country that was creating this tall, earthy race of natural blonds? Seventy-five percent of the class was a head taller than me, and very few chose to duck down to ask the brunette with the poodle hair when she was born.
Many of the boys looked green from the fraternity rush. After an hour, Frankie Wells excused himself from the gym, which was hot from all of our nervous energy, and went outside to get some fresh air. I could see him lying back on the emerald lawn, holding his head.
“You all right?” I asked stealing away for a moment to bring him a sip of water in a paper cone from the gym cooler.
He lifted his head and said, “Am I in hell?”
“Just college,” I said. He laughed and said, “Go on back in. If a KN sees me talking to you, he’ll get me good tonight.”
Another freshman boy came out of the gym, put his head between his knees, and took deep breaths.
“That guy’s on my hall,” said Frankie. “He’s going for KN too. Hey, what’s your name, bub?” he called over.
The boy wiped his watery eyes. “Brother,” he said. He picked at the sculpted green shrubs beneath the gym windows and spit. Then he kicked some wood chips over his mess and sucked on his teeth before coming over to lie down next to Frankie. “Brother Benton. I’m from Tuscaloosa. What about you?”
“Frankie Wells from Milledgeville, Georgia, bub. And this is Adelaide from South Carolina.”
I waved and offered him the last of the water as Frankie continued, “This rush is something, huh?”
“Tough,” he said with eyes to the ground. “But the KNs aren’t as bad as the Sigma Alpha house. Those guys are from up north, and they really whip your tail. My roommate’s still in bed. He couldn’t even stand up this morning.”
“Man!” Frankie said. And as he said this, a coach from the athletic department knocked on the gym window with his fist and said, “The dean wants you all back inside.”
“Do y’all not find this such a cliché?” I asked, shaking my head and reaching out to Frankie Wells to help him up. “So, like, Animal House passé, you know?”
“I guess so, Miss Adelaide,” Frankie said, patting me on the back and chuckling at my Southern twist on a French word. “You’re a philosophy major, right?”
Brother Benton sat up and looked at me for the first time and smiled. He looked like five miles of bad road, but he had dark curly hair and the greatest smile I think I’d ever seen. White teeth and a dimple on the right side of his cheek. His brown eyes were alive, and they glistened in the white light of this mountain morning.
“I’m just here to get my journalism degree,” Frankie said to both of us. “My uncle says if I make it here, he’ll let me write for his newspaper in Atlanta.”
“Will you publish my poems?”
“Why not?” he said.
“What about you?” I said to Brother. “Are you prelaw like the rest of the frat boys?”
“Nah,” Brother said, shaking his brown curly hair. “Literature, my lady. Guess we’re all left-brain folks. I’m going to write a novel and camp out in front of a publishing house until someone notices me.
But mostly I want to get out of Alabama.”
“If you survive rush,” I said, walking back to the watercooler to fill up the cone. “And if you want out of Alabama, I wonder why you’re choosing to join the Southern fraternity.”
When I brought the water over to him, he flashed me that smile again.
“Same reason you were there the other night,” he said. “It’s the only place I know someone from home.”
I blushed, glad to have been noticed by this handsome, literary freshman. Yes, this is what I’d expected from college—sailing out of the Williamstown Harbor and into the sea where the fish were bigger and brighter. At last!
As he took a sip, the coach tapped on the window again, and I said, “See y’all later.”
Before I opened the gym door, I overheard Brother say to Frankie, “I’m going to marry that poet, Wells. You wait and see.”
I smiled with my back to him and bit my bottom lip. How nice it was to be wanted!
Then I heard Frankie’s reply. “Carpenter’s got dibs on her. You’d better lay off for now.”
“I’ll bide my time,” Brother Benton said. “We won’t always be freshmen.”
It was at the class of ’93 orientation social the next afternoon on the front quadrangle that Jif, Ruthie, and I were officially relegated to country bumpkins amid the naturally beautiful girls from the Northeast with their nature-oriented, androgynous names: Heath, Rivers, and Park.
They all looked like J.Crew models in those cropped oatmeal sweaters, worn blue jeans, and sporty hiking boots. Was it possible to have legs so long and thin? It must have been. And what about the golden (untreated) hair that draped their backs? Dern Dizzy had been right—not another perm in sight!
Yes, we faced up to the fact that we were a sight that day on the green and handsome campus that surrounded us with its great history and wealth. We had attended the social all dressed up in bright pink and turquoise outfits with matching leather flats. I had tried to straighten my hair with Jif ’s iron, but all that did was make it frizzy and then stiff as a corpse in its thick coat of hair spray. And the hot-pink glittery lipstick covering Ruthie’s lips was like a sign that blinked Redneck with every smile she flashed.
Frankie and Brother were nowhere to be found. And the rest of the shabbishly preppy freshman boys gradually made their way to the fresh flock of earthy girls while a sophomore nerd named Ned Crater from Abingdon, Tennessee, cornered us with his inane tales of life on a tobacco farm and ended with a dinner invitation that extended only to Jif. Even in her bumpkin state, Jif ’s blonde and blue-eyed beauty could be recognized (and Ned would make numerous attempts to win her affection during our freshman year and beyond).
Except for my brief rendezvous with Peter earlier in the week, I felt virtually invisible. I had never known this feeling back in Williamstown, and it stung my heart more than I could admit. Didn’t anyone know that I was a published poet? That I gave the valedictorian address, attended Governor’s School, and pondered the meaning of life in my journal late at night? I had thought that I was too good for the back-home set to pay them much attention, but now I was low man on the totem pole at NBU—Geechee and gaudy, with big brown hair and stubby legs.
At the end of the social, I ducked back into Tully, stopped to check myself in the hall bathroom, and for the first time in my life, looked in the mirror and experienced shame. I was horrified by my jewel, as if it were
a final blow from the ugly stick, and from that day on I vowed to conceal it by coating it with makeup and fashioning my bangs just so until I could save enough money for Jif ’s daddy (the only surgeon in town) to snip it off.
The next day I woke up early, showered, made another attempt to straighten my hair and tone down my makeup, and went straight over to the English department to a meeting that was set up with my preordained adviser, Dr. McSweeney. I had heard through the grapevine that he was elderly, formal, and had never quite gotten over the fact that NBU had decided to admit girls, so I wore a skirt and wrote my questions in as concise a manner as possible. I wanted to ask him about the creative writing workshop with Josiah Dirkas and where to begin with my literature studies. I had outlined all that I was interested in, from Shakespeare’s theater to modern poetry, and I had already thumbed through the books in the college store, devouring the Emily Dickinson poems and one by Sylvia Plath in which a panther stalks her mind.
I didn’t want to be late for my appointment, so I took a few sips of Diet Coke from the dorm kitchen and ate the remnants of a leftover bag of popcorn before I scurried over to the Humboldt Humanities Building on the colonnade. I sat on the bench of the quiet hall for whole minutes, daydreaming about Peter Carpenter, before I looked around at the quotes by C. S. Lewis and a photo of a large man named Chesterton. There were applications for a mission trip to Honduras on the bulletin board and a listing of all the chapel services as well as a student-run study of the book of John in the main hall on Monday nights.
Wait a minute. A look of panic came over my face as a man in a green bow tie posted a course description titled “Religion and Social Justice” on the bulletin board. Then he turned around to greet me and said, “I’m Dr. Shaw. Can I help you?”
“Is this not the English department?” I asked, realizing that I was now five minutes late for my appointment with McSweeney.
He grimaced. “You went one floor too high. This is the third floor. English is on the second.”
“I’m late for my appointment with Dr. McSweeney.”
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