Rush

by Sara Bennett Wealer

  Then it all fell apart.

  Rachel fingered a scrap of material from Logan’s baseball uniform that Maddy had stolen after a long slide into home ripped his jersey. “Maddy and Logan,” she cooed. “That’s so cute!”

  “So where’s he now?” asked Imogen.

  “At State. He pledged Pi Kappa Zeta.”

  “You’re doing this long distance? Wow. No wonder it’s hard.”

  “Well,” Maddy bit her lip. “I don’t know if we’re actually still in a relationship, seeing how I caught him kissing my twin sister.”

  Imogen bolted upright. “You’re kidding. Did he really? I was joking when I said that this afternoon. Now I feel like a jerk!”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

  “But what happened?” Rachel asked. “I mean, besides the obvious. How did you catch them?”

  Maddy closed the scrapbook. She couldn’t look at pictures of the good times while she talked about the bad stuff.

  “He took me to a party at the country club. It was supposed to be for everybody going off to college, which was a joke since, like, ninety percent of the people in Chesterfield just stick around and go to State. He’d been acting funny for a couple of weeks, but I thought it was just because he was freaked out about the long distance thing.”

  She stopped for a minute, remembering how loud and apparently drunk Miranda had been when she’d showed up with all of her friends. Maddy’d kept losing Logan in the crowd until, at one point, she realized she’d been sitting alone by the pool for almost a half-hour. She’d gone looking for him, wandering through the party and then into the halls of the club, peeking into dark ballrooms and smoking nooks until, in an empty banquet room, she saw something move against the back corner.

  “Hello?” she’d said. “Is somebody there?”

  As her eyes got used to the dim lighting she could see two bodies close together. “Shit!” came a whisper as one of them stumbled backward.

  “Hey—Miranda!” This voice was male and sickeningly familiar.

  “Logan?” Maddy had stepped farther into the room, to where the light from a side door cast a bit of a glow, and there they were: her sister and her boyfriend. Maddy didn’t see them actually kiss, but everything about the situation told her that’s what they had been doing.

  “How long had they been messing around behind your back?” Rachel asked. “Did you think something was going on with them before that?”

  “No!” said Maddy. “Miranda had her own friends and her own stuff going on. I didn’t think she even liked Logan.”

  “Maybe he thought she was really you,” said Imogen. “You know, the twin thing? Maybe he got confused.”

  “There’s no way to get me and Miranda mixed up. Her hair is shorter for one thing. She’s also . . .” Maddy searched for the right words. Miranda had great style; despite their family’s tight budget she made it look easy to look awesome. Maddy, on the other hand, had always had to work at her appearance, and even her best days were more preppy than Project Runway.

  “. . . also a complete witch, obviously,” said Imogen. “I’m sorry, but that just sucks. You do not steal your twin sister’s boyfriend.”

  “So what did you do when you found them?” Rachel asked. “Did you hand them their asses on a plate?”

  “No,” said Maddy, embarrassed. “I ran away. I actually hid in the bushes and called my dad to come pick me up. Can you believe that? I just couldn’t face them.”

  That was the worst part of the story—the fact that she hadn’t had the guts to confront her sister. People who knew them well marveled at the fact that Maddy and Miranda rarely fought. Everybody assumed it was because they got along so well. No one realized it was mostly because Maddy shied from conflict whenever Miranda turned the drama her way. More often than not, she ended up tongue-tied while people walked all over her.

  But she’d never dreamed she’d find herself in that position with Logan.

  “So now you don’t know if you guys are broken up?” Imogen asked.

  “He hasn’t called me and I’m not really talking to my sister,” said Maddy. “I left the next morning to come here and we’ve been so busy with rush that . . .”

  She trailed off, realizing how wishy-washy the whole thing sounded but also not wanting to squash the little spark inside her that said it couldn’t really be over. She was dying to at least check his Instagram for some hint of what he was up to, but she’d been avoiding social media like the plague because it might take away that tiny bit of hope. Even now she had an image of herself with him at his initiation formal in a month. She would walk in on his arm, the Sigma star around her neck, and everyone would see that Logan really belonged with her.

  Maddy’s stomach lurched. Thinking about a few weeks from now brought her mind around to what would happen in just a few hours.

  “First-round invites come back at ten,” she said. “We’ve got time to kill and my nerves are shredded. Let’s go get dinner?”

  “Hallelujah, yes,” cried Imogen. She stood and pulled her purse from the pile of belongings on her side of the floor. “Come along?” she asked Rachel.

  Walking to the commons with her new friends, Maddy was struck again by how easy everything felt. With Imogen and Rachel, all she’d had to do was be herself. This was what she’d been hoping for, and it would only get better once she joined Sigma, Maddy was sure of it.

  Out in the commons there were rushees everywhere, lounging on the old furniture, watching the ancient TV, and munching on delivery pizza. Imogen snapped her fingers, remembering something. “I gotta stop by the J-School first. Got to drop off some stuff for the school paper. Wait right here—I forgot the packet.”

  She rushed back down the hall, leaving the other two by the elevator.

  “So,” Rachel asked Maddy, “do you have anybody back home who cares where you pledge?”

  “You mean am I a legacy? No.” That was Maddy’s one regret—that she didn’t have any other family members who’d gone Greek. Being a legacy was a great way to get a leg up in the recruitment process.

  “My aunt was a Delta Gamma, but that’s pretty much it,” said Rachel. “I’m on my own, too.” She cocked her head back toward their room. “What about her?”

  “Imogen?” Maddy thought about her roommate’s cluelessness. A legacy would know all about rush, plus she’d show more interest in the process instead of acting like it was all just a big joke. “I’m pretty sure no.”

  “Oh, well,” said Rachel. “It’s not like our grandmas or aunts can really help us anyway. We have to make a good impression on our own, right?”

  “Right,” said Maddy, pressing the elevator button. Rachel was right, of course. Still, Maddy couldn’t help wishing she had something to make her stand out a little more. She was determined to find sisters who would like and accept her for who she really was, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have loved just the tiniest bit of help.

  TEN

  Fresh air!

  Imogen stepped out of the stuffy dorm into the evening, savoring the smell of honeysuckle and hot pavement and chicken cooking on a grill someplace. She let Maddy and Rachel walk ahead while she trailed behind, listening to the cicadas. In the past, the sound always made her sad because it meant the summer was ending. Her family would have come back from Greece to spend a week in the Hamptons with her grandmother, and the whirring would follow her everywhere. It reminded her that in just a few days she’d be back in the city. Back to her super-competitive prep school and a schedule packed with extracurricular and society functions.

  Not that she’d really minded getting involved in all those activities. She did the horses, the science, and the academics because she actually liked them. Tippy used to call her Geek Girl because of the many nights she’d chosen to study instead of go out. But sometimes, Imogen yearned to ditch it all—leave behind the commitments and just hang out, do nothing, get lazily, blissfully lost.

  Imogen looked up at the sky. Where wa
s Tippy tonight? Probably not with the rest of the Sinclairs. The last time she’d joined them for a late-summer visit, she’d stripped naked in the middle of one of her mom’s parties and gone skinny-dipping with the caterer’s assistant, whom her mother had just fired for showing up stoned. The Sinclairs had basically disowned her after that, and Tippy had started her world tour of self-destruction. Don’t take this the wrong way, she’d said, but Imogen didn’t know how else to take it. When paparazzi shots go up online of you doing lines with some D-list former child star, and the entire world has seen your girly parts as you exit a limo on your way to the opening of a club owned by a wannabe rapper and his reality TV girlfriend, then you’ve gone beyond escaping and officially entered no-man’s land.

  On the bus back from their last rush party, Imogen had conducted her daily search of celebrity gossip sites and obituaries, looking for news about Tippy. Nothing. No emails, snaps, or texts, either. She’d stared up at the clouds, imagining what her friend would say if she could see her at college in the middle of the Midwest. Imogen could barely believe it herself. Here, she was just one of hundreds of anonymous freshmen. This time, instead of an ending, she felt like the cicadas were signaling a new beginning.

  “What do you guys feel like eating?” Maddy asked after they’d been walking awhile. “Do we even know where we’re going?”

  “Hang on, I got an app for that this morning,” said Rachel. She scrolled through her phone and pulled up a map of Baldwin, with odd-looking icons marking different locations.

  “Ew,” said Maddy, looking over Rachel’s shoulder. “Are those what I think they are?”

  “Yep,” Rachel giggled. “It’s called Balls-Out Baldwin. It’s got inside information on the best places to go. The places that suck get the limp you-know-what. The harder they are, the cooler the place is.”

  Imogen pointed to the most pornographic icon on the screen. “So that place must be incredible. What is it?”

  Rachel clicked through and read. “Amigos. Don’t let the modest exterior fool you. This place is the best-kept secret in town. Awesome margaritas, great music, plus, if you’re looking to hook up, the scenery es muy bueno. Let the Freshmen and poseurs go to Aggie’s or The Eagle. Amigos is where the best of the best hang out, and they’d rather you didn’t know about it.”

  “That settles it, we’re getting Mexican!” said Imogen. “We’re the best of the best, right?”

  “Definitely,” said Rachel. She checked the phone again for directions, then put it away. “So! Which houses do you guys like?”

  “Sigma,” said Maddy without even stopping to think. Imogen admired how certain she was. Maddy was the kind of girl who should join a sorority. She would get all involved with the charities, she’d eat up the weird rituals, and she’d totally commit to the sisterhood thing. Anybody could see that Maddy would be, as the recruitment handbook put it, “an asset to the Greek system.”

  Whereas I, on the other hand, would merely be an ass.

  “What’s your second choice?” Imogen asked, kicking a stone up the sidewalk.

  “I don’t have a second choice,” Maddy replied. “I just want Sigma.”

  “I know a couple of girls there,” Rachel said. “Allison Reed, Courtney Mann . . .”

  “I met Courtney today!” said Maddy. “She seemed pretty nice.”

  “If you think piranhas are nice, then I guess she is.” Rachel walked faster, forcing Maddy and Imogen to scurry after her.

  “She didn’t seem like a piranha to me,” Maddy said.

  “Of course she’s not going to walk up to a stranger and say, ‘Hi, I’m a complete and utter nightmare,’” Rachel said.

  “But how do you know that about her?” Maddy asked.

  “She was two years ahead of me at State Future Leaders Intensive, and we both got nominated for Integrity Awards. Winning Integrity is a big deal because you get money for your student government, plus a scholarship for college. I found out she was basically buying votes, inviting people to this big party her rich parents were having.”

  Imogen glanced over at Maddy to see how she’d react to this news. Maddy shot Rachel an uncertain look. “Are you sure that’s what she was doing?”

  “Positive. It got so bad I had to report her, and when they looked into it they found enough evidence to withdraw the nomination. It was a mess.”

  “But the Sigmas are all about excellence,” Maddy protested. “I don’t think they’d allow in somebody who would do something like that.”

  “A couple of older girls from my delegation go to school here, too,” Rachel said. “They told me Sigmas are fakes and backstabbers.”

  “I don’t think so . . . ,” Maddy protested, and Imogen suddenly got the urge to smack her over the head. She considered telling both of them about how her mom and her Nana and great grandmother were all Sigmas and, from what she’d seen, it wasn’t really all that. But Maddy probably wouldn’t believe it.

  Plus, Imogen didn’t have time.

  “Whoops! Stop here!” She grabbed her friends’ arms and veered them off the main walk, toward a stone building with a turret sticking out of the middle like a medieval castle. This was the journalism school—she recognized it from the website. Inside, the main hallway was dark with just a red glow from the fire alarms to show the way. They walked through the darkness until they saw a light in a door. They followed it into a huge room filled with computers on desks that overflowed with notepads and fast-food containers. A band Imogen had never heard before played from one of the laptops. Everywhere she looked, there were stacks of old newspapers.

  “This place is a fire hazard,” said Maddy. She picked up a paper from on top of one of the stacks, then let it fall in a cloud of dust.

  “We’re cleaning out our archives,” came a voice that made the three of them jump. “We’re going all-digital in order to avoid said fire hazard.”

  Imogen turned to see a guy in the doorway of an office she hadn’t noticed because it was crammed into the back corner of the room. He had a bag of chips in his hand and an amused expression on his face. He stood there, looking at them, which gave her time to appreciate his gorgeous green eyes and mop-top hair.

  Then Rachel poked her in the back, and she realized that she’d been expecting him to greet her like everybody else had that day. Except now, she didn’t have a name tag on.

  “Oh!” she said. “Hey! I’m Imogen.”

  “Who?”

  “Imogen Ash?” She wished she’d put on something dressier. What if this guy’s, like, the boss?

  “Ben Sherman.” He wiped his free hand on the leg of his jeans, then he held it out for her to shake. “Editor of the Baldwin Beacon.”

  Crap. He is the boss.

  “Crap,” said Imogen. “I mean great!” She fished in her bag for her paperwork. “I’m applying to be a reporter. I tried to do it online, but your servers kept going down, and then I figured I could just drop off the packet, since I was going to be here a week early anyway.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t recognize the name.”

  He went back to the office and returned with a clipboard. He took her application, wrote a note on it that she wished she could read, then fastened it with a stack of other papers. “So we’ll see you tomorrow at orientation?”

  “Excuse me?” Imogen glanced at Maddy and Rachel, who stared back at her with wide eyes. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow at one p.m. You didn’t get the e-mail because we didn’t have you registered.”

  “You can’t go, Im,” Maddy whispered. “She can’t,” Maddy told Ben.

  “I can’t,” Imogen confirmed. “I’m going through rush. I’ve got parties to go to. Many, many parties . . .”

  He looked at her blankly. “Well, you can’t do the paper if you don’t do orientation.”

  Imogen heard Maddy suck air through her teeth and thought, What am I supposed to do? It’s only my freaking major.

  Maddy was standing so close th
at Imogen could actually feel her take another breath, getting ready to say something. She stepped backward, catching Maddy’s toe under her heel.

  “Ouch!” said Maddy.

  “Look,” said Ben. He put the clipboard under his arm. “They have to let you out of recruitment for academic conflicts. I was the rush chair for my fraternity last year, so I know.”

  Imogen felt a flicker of hope and intrigue. This totally hot journalist guy was in a fraternity? Maybe going Greek wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  “I’ll even write you a note,” he said, his eyes crinkling adorably at the corners. “Wait here.”

  He disappeared into the office again, and as soon as he was gone Maddy and Rachel pounced.

  “Imogen, you can’t,” Maddy repeated. “Technically the Greek Council does have to let you out for school stuff, but the actual houses can still cut you.”

  “What if you get cut from every house?” said Rachel.

  For a second, Imogen had a vision of her mom, livid that she’d gotten herself blackballed. It wasn’t that she wanted to be cut, but the idea of getting out of an afternoon of rush parties sounded great.

  Ben came back with a piece of paper which he folded in half and handed to her. “Give that to your recruitment counselor. She’ll notify Greek Council and they’ll give you a pass. Beacon orientation starts at one. I’ll see you there?”

  “Yeah,” said Imogen. “See you there.”

  “He’s hot,” said Rachel as they stumbled back into the hallway.

  “Fully,” Imogen agreed. She looked behind her for Maddy, who was lagging, trying to pretend like she wasn’t angry. After a few minutes Imogen let herself fall back, too.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry I smashed your foot.”

  “It didn’t hurt that bad.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me. You’re the one who’s committing Greek suicide.”

  Imogen didn’t answer because she didn’t know what to say. The image of Ben’s amazing green eyes had gotten stuck in her brain and it sort of had her distracted.