Delia pushed her plate away. “I have to go.”
“Don’t you want to eat?” Cass asked. She’d seen what had happened with Imogen Ash, and it looked like Delia had been backed into a corner—sort of like now with everybody hovering over her. “Should we have it boxed up?”
“No, it’s okay,” Delia said. “Maybe see if someone else wants it.”
Delia hurried out of the restaurant, leaving Cass to poke at her own salad. She had a weird feeling, like someone was staring at her. Sure enough, when she looked up, Courtney was eying her across the table.
“Thanks a lot,” said Courtney. “This wouldn’t have even happened if you hadn’t dumped your water in her lap.”
Cass’s cheeks went hot. “It was an accident.”
Courtney looked straight at Cass; her normally big eyes were mean little slits. “Yeah, well, a lot of things are accidents,” she said.
Courtney had worn this exact same expression last year, on those evenings when the actives would line the pledges up and yell. She’d looked at Cass this way when it was Cass’s turn for what the older sisters called a “one-on-one.” And she’d given everyone the same look when it was announced that Ananya, one of Cass’s pledge sisters, had left the Sigma house.
Even now, the way Ananya had appeared when she’d returned to the house after being out with the Killer Bees bothered Cass. The other girls from their pledge class were still up, working in the study lounge because the actives had threatened expulsion from the sorority if any one of them got less than 90 percent straight As. Ananya had come in like a ghost, her face a terrifying blank. She refused to speak, but when her pledge sisters pressed her about what was wrong, she’d dissolved into silent, racking sobs.
The next morning, she was gone.
The president at the time, a varsity cheerleader named Bridget Horvath, said Ananya had decided the stress of school and the sorority together were too much. It was an honorable decision, she’d told them, and the other actives had nodded along, the power of the group pulling everyone into the story. But Cass had always wondered why this particular girl had been singled out for what looked like harsher treatment than everybody else. She didn’t like to think it might be because of her dark skin. Ananya wasn’t the only non-white girl at Sigma. There was Aimee Wu, of course, and one of the actives was black, but she worked in a lab on campus and wasn’t around much. Then there was Ruby. Ananya was a big reason Cass worried about her roommate so much. If racism had played a role in what happened to one girl, who was to say it couldn’t harm another if the stars aligned just right?
Cass looked away from Courtney and scanned the rest of the table. The other girls were gossiping and eating, having apparently decided the meeting was over. If that was the case, then Cass had no reason to stick around. She decided not to provoke the Bees any more than she already had. Instead she texted Ruby that she was going back to Delaney’s, then made her way out of the restaurant.
Out on the curb she almost ran into Delia, who was leaving a message for someone on her phone. Cass thought about pretending she hadn’t seen her, but Delia’s shorts still had a wet spot and Cass couldn’t ignore the truth that she was responsible for putting it there.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m really sorry. About the water. I hope I didn’t ruin your night.”
Delia looked over with the tiniest of smiles. “I know it was an accident. It’s not the water that bothers me.”
“That stuff with Imogen Ash was an accident, too. I’m sure nobody will make a big deal out of it.”
Delia’s lavaliere glinted as she rubbed it between her fingers. “My father always told me to never assume anything. Last year when something like this happened, the president had to resign. Those are the rules.”
“Oh,” said Cass. She couldn’t think of anything better to say, because she hadn’t expected Delia to bring up her dad, and also because Delia was obviously really concerned.
Delia’s cell rang. “I’m out on the front walk,” she told the person on the other line. “No, don’t park. Just pull up and get me.”
A set of headlights veered out of the main traffic flow and cruised from the street over to the curb. Through the windshield, Cass could see the silhouette of a guy in glasses. Delia opened the passenger side door and slid in.
“Hey,” came a voice from the driver’s seat. “Are you okay?”
Cass saw Delia slump over and put her head on the guy’s shoulder. “It’s been a long day,” she said. “Can you take me home?”
“Sure.” He reached over to pull her door shut, and as their bodies shifted, Delia’s foot hit a stack of Baldwin Beacons that were sitting on the floor of the car. They slid to the side and several spilled out into the gutter.
“Oh! Let me get those!” Cass scrambled to gather up the newspapers. She pulled them into a stack, then placed them in Delia’s lap.
“Hey thanks!” said Delia’s boyfriend. He took the papers and tossed them into the backseat. “Sorry ’bout that, Dee. We’re going digital. Cleaning out the archives.”
FOURTEEN
All through the rest of the evening, Maddy expected someone to text or call and tell her she’d been disqualified from rush for talking with Delia Danforth. Even when dinner went by without any more drama she still couldn’t bring herself to speak to Imogen or Rachel, mostly because she was afraid she would cry. The run-in with Delia played in her head all the way back to the dorm. After all the work she’d done, this was how it was going to end—before she’d even had a chance to get through her first day.
But 11:00 p.m. came and nobody had e-mailed or knocked on her door. With no visit from her recruitment counselor and no calls from Greek Council, Maddy began to feel better. She couldn’t imagine they’d let her move on to the next round if they were planning on kicking her out. She went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, then went out to the commons, where Imogen and Rachel were already waiting. The room smelled like popcorn and all the girls wore T-shirts and yoga pants. She perched on a beat-up orange couch that looked like it had been sitting in that exact same spot since the ’70s. Rachel sat on the worn-out carpet, and Imogen stood behind them, against the wall.
At 11:05, Alex got off the elevator carrying a stack of papers. Bodies rustled with excitement. This was it!
“Now don’t take it personally if you don’t receive an invitation back to every house,” Alex told them. “The whole point of recruitment is to find a good match. So if a house cuts you, just assume it wasn’t meant to be. Trust me, everything happens for a reason, and these types of things have a way of working out in the end.”
Then, without saying anything else, Alex started calling names in alphabetical order. She handed each girl a computer printout with a list of the sororities that had invited her back and little ovals next to each house for filling in—one for “accept” and one for “decline.” Maddy’s name came soon, thank goodness. She grabbed her printout and rushed back to her spot on the couch. She scanned quickly, her breath catching for a second when she saw that two houses had cut her. But there, third down, was the house that really mattered: Sigma.
Thank God.
Maddy had read on the message boards that it wasn’t unusual to have a couple of houses not extend return invitations. Very few people had “perfect rushes,” meaning they didn’t get cut anywhere. She still had ten houses, which was more than respectable, and as long as she still had Sigma she’d be fine.
“How’d you do?” asked Rachel. Maddy handed over her card for Rachel to examine. “I got cut from Zeta, too,” Rachel said. “And Gamma Rho Epsilon, but the sister who interviewed me there picked her nose the whole time, so I guess I’m sort of relieved they don’t think I’m their type.”
Imogen came to sit beside them, squinting at her invitation card. “Did they make a mistake here?” she said. “This looks just like the list I got this morning.”
Maddy checked out Imogen’s card and suddenly her respectable ten houses looked
pretty unrespectable. Clueless Imogen hadn’t been cut from any houses at all.
How was that possible?
Heat began at Maddy’s scalp and worked its way down her neck. She was pretty sure she had a better résumé. She certainly had a better idea of what belonging to a sorority was all about. She’d gotten along great with everybody she’d met that day.
So why had they liked Imogen better than her?
“You have all of the same houses because all of the houses asked you back,” Maddy explained. “Looks like you’ve got some choices to make.”
Imogen leaned over, trying for a peek at Maddy’s card. “Who are you going back to?”
Maddy flipped her card over, suddenly irritated. “I don’t have any choices. We go to ten houses tomorrow, and ten asked me back.”
“So I have to sort through all of these myself?” Imogen groaned. “Half of them I can’t even remember.”
“What a terrible problem to have,” Maddy said. “Congratulations.” She stretched her arms over her head and pretended to yawn. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”
Back in their room, she tried to calm down by laying out her clothes for the next day’s parties. Being bitter wasn’t her style, and even after everything that had happened at the restaurant, Imogen was still her friend. Maddy just hadn’t prepared herself for the possibility that a friend might have a better rush than she would.
Her phone lay on her bed and she found herself wanting to pick it up and call Miranda. Her first instinct whenever things got hard had always been to seek out her sister, and she still felt that connection, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it. But Maddy knew she could no longer trust her instincts—at least not where this was concerned. Her next thought was to call Logan. Whenever she’d needed a boost, he could lift her spirits. But even if things weren’t weird between them, she knew she’d never be able to talk about what was really going on. Part of the reason she’d come to Baldwin was to show everyone how desirable she was, and now two houses had found her totally undesirable.
She grabbed the phone anyway; maybe they could FaceTime for a few minutes, just so she could see his face and hear his voice. But before she could pull him up, Imogen came in.
“Hey.”
Maddy put the phone down. “Hey.”
“I’m sorry about all that back there. I didn’t even think about you getting cut. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Maddy tossed her phone in her purse and pulled her pajamas out of her dresser, telling herself to get over it. “Everything works out for the best anyway. Neither of the houses that cut me were ones I was really interested in.”
“If they don’t want you, then you don’t want them, right?”
“Right.”
Maddy checked that her alarm had been set with plenty of time to get ready in the morning. Then, she climbed under the covers. Imogen kept her light on and started unpacking a few clothes. Maddy listened to her moving around the room for a while before lifting onto her elbow.
“So are you really skipping rush tomorrow afternoon?”
“Have to.” Imogen pulled a dress out of her duffel and hung it from her closet door. “I can’t miss Beacon orientation. I’ve been wanting to work in news for years. Plus, I need this for my major.”
Maddy watched her roommate change into a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Imogen was so easy and natural, which made her hard not to like, and which probably explained why she’d done so well that day.
It was okay.
Because after skipping out tomorrow, Imogen would probably get cut from a lot of places—at least from all of the houses that had parties in the afternoon—and then Maddy wouldn’t have to worry about feeling jealous or negative because the problem would pretty much have been taken care of. She felt bad thinking that way, but if Imogen didn’t care about rush, then what was the harm?
“Night, Maddy,” Imogen said, getting into bed and turning off her lamp.
“Good night.” Maddy rolled onto her back. Moonlight shown into the room through the window blinds, just enough to light the glow-in-the-dark stars that had been stuck on the ceiling by a different girl in a previous year.
It was another sign: Maddy still had a chance to wear the Sigma star, and tomorrow was a fresh new day. Sigma hadn’t cut her; that was all that mattered.
Day 2
Morning
FIFTEEN
“Did you guys hear footsteps last night?” Megan Fitch raised an eyebrow over the rim of her orange juice glass. “Somebody was walking around on the third floor. Or something.”
Cass leaned against one of the big planters on the front porch of the sorority, a bagel with cream cheese perched on her knee. This was where her pledge class hung out most mornings when the weather was nice. It was their refuge, and most of her sisters were lounging in the sun now, catching a few rays before the day’s parties got under way. Out on the main walk, girls in khaki were bustling around getting ready for the safari-themed house tours. The decorating committee had just lined the bushes with tiki torches, and now they were draping the foyer in palm fronds. With the red door flung wide open, Cass could hear someone testing the intercom system at the front desk, sending jungle noises out onto the porch.
Holly Restrepo nudged Megan with her toe. “What do you mean, something? It was probably somebody going to the bathroom.”
“I don’t know,” said Megan. “It was really late—like around two thirty in the morning. And it was around that room.”
All heads turned to look up at the third-story window of the room no one ever entered anymore. Whatever had happened to Marianne McCourt, the sorority had taken it seriously enough to seal off where she’d lived, either out of respect or out of concern about safety; the roof really was dangerously steep just outside that window.
“One of the girls in biology lab was talking about this during finals last year,” said Isla Drew. “She heard Bloody Mary was actually murdered. One of the other sisters pushed her off the roof, and they just covered it up to look like an accident.”
“That’s awful,” said Ruby. “What do you think, Cass? Could this place be a crime scene?”
Cass thought about it. As much as it bugged her to be flip about what had happened, she had to admit that it didn’t seem too out-there to imagine somebody snapping and doing something drastic, especially after the stress of recruitment, which seemed to bring out the worst in a lot of people. The way the older girls looked at each other sometimes, like they were hiding a very big, very serious, secret, told Cass that Marianne’s death had been more than just an innocent accident.
But this time she had a better explanation for what had gone bump in the night.
“I actually think I know what you were hearing,” she told the group. “I went to Delaney’s after the officers’ meeting and didn’t get back until late. I used the printer up on the third floor to make copies of the songs we’re supposed to do today.”
“Ooh, Delaney’s! How was Leo?” Ruby’s eyes twinkled, and Cass would have made one of her usual self-deprecating comments, except it was the first time since they’d come back from summer break that she’d seen her friend looking so relaxed.
Cass wasn’t sure what to say, though. When she’d returned to the bar she’d found Leo reading out on the stoop, and they’d sat and talked until she’d checked her watch and realized she’d better get home if she wanted to get any sleep. Leo seemed different from the guy who’d left in June. That Leo was cocky, loud, and quick to laugh at anyone or anything that took themselves too seriously. This Leo was quieter, with an edge Cass couldn’t pin down. When she worked up the courage to ask if he’d hooked up with anybody over the summer, he blew the question off by inquiring whether she had hooked up with anyone. And when she’d laughingly asked who in the world he thought she might possibly hook up with in their quiet hometown, he’d just shrugged and changed the subject. Cass had been wondering what would happen if she told him—half-jokingly, just to test the waters—that he was
the one she really wanted to hook up with, but the entire topic had felt like a nonstarter. Leo, who usually lived for flirting, had all but straight up refused to talk about anything having to do with romance.
But if Leo seemed different about some things last night, he was exactly the same about others. In fact, he was more antagonistic than ever about Sigma. Cass had wanted to both kiss and kill him.
“Violet, what do you have there?” she asked, steering the conversation in a different direction.
Violet Coetzee took a thin stack of papers from the folder she was looking through and passed them around. “It’s Madeleine Christopher’s information,” she answered. “I feel like a dumb ass for leaving her with Courtney yesterday. Now they’re saying she’s not Sigma Material, but she totally is. Her Facebook’s full of . . .”
“Hey! Watch your head!”
A plastic coconut bounced off the edge of the planter near Cass’s temple. She looked up to see Allison Reed on a ladder, hanging a garland between the front porch pillars.
“Sorry!” Cass said. She stood along with the other girls and moved out of the way.
Allison scowled down at them. “Instead of sitting on your butts, why don’t you guys try helping once in a while?”
The other girls looked guiltily at each other, but Cass knew they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. None of them had even been asked to be on a committee. She did a quick count of the girls on the porch—there were seventeen, and each one had tons of amazing talent. Like Megan, who was an incredible graphic designer. And Holly, an oboist who subbed with the symphony. And Violet, who everybody in their class was convinced would write a bestselling novel someday. But any achievements Cass and her pledge sisters could claim were dwarfed by the spectacular feats of the Killer Bees, who made topping the Dean’s list, snagging prestigious international internships, and hosting the hottest parties on campus look as easy as blowing out their perfect hair every morning. Compared with their older Sigma sisters, the girls in Cass’s pledge class were nothing. They’d been told this in so many words. And now that rush was here, not only were they not trusted to handle preparations, they were being made to feel like it was all their fault.
Rush Page 8