Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  Saving Privacy

  NOVEMBER 2

  VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  absolutely miserable

  BY NOVEMBER, VICKI HAD BEGUN TO DISTINGUISH WHICH girls she could be comfortable with and which girls she was better off avoiding; the problem was that one of the girls she was learning to dodge happened to be one of her roommates. She was still too shy, however, to wander into the television room to catch up with the sisters who lounged there. When she walked into the Beta Pi dining room, Vicki wouldn’t sit with the older girls, who continued to intimidate her, but she was secure enough to eat alone rather than do what seemed like the loser takeout—scurrying away to her room with her food. The more Vicki went out to bars and parties with her sisters, the more her confidence within the group grew. In settings outside the house, the sisters seemed to feel more protective of each other—it was sorority versus sorority, us versus them, rather than the sisters against sisters controversies and cliques that often split the house. At Louie’s, the Greeks’ bar of choice, each sorority usually gathered in a different corner, where they eyed and gossiped about the other sororities across the room. Even though the comments were usually catty, those nights were the times when Vicki most felt like she belonged in Beta Pi, as if she were on a par with her sisters. Not to mention that the girls tended to be much friendlier to each other when they were drunk.

  There were six juniors in particular whom Vicki had learned to steer clear of. The six rarely deigned to talk to the sophomores. Only when the seniors were watching did the juniors suddenly ooze kindness and cordiality to younger sisters. Once in a campus quad, Olivia had run into one of these juniors, who stopped to chat with her for fifteen minutes. But the next day, when Olivia and Vicki saw her in the kitchen, the girl didn’t say a word to them. Vicki’s strategy was simply to be as “sweet and cute” as possible to the juniors who openly snubbed her pledge class, so that even if they didn’t like her, at least they wouldn’t drastically turn against her and spark a new house drama.

  For Vicki, the patterns of tension had flip-flopped since the beginning of the year. Now Vicki dreaded returning to her room in the house, while before it had been the closest thing she had to a sanctuary. She had started to notice that Laura-Ann, a legacy, was acting strangely (a legacy is a daughter, granddaughter, or sister of a sorority member). Laura-Ann constantly talked about how pretty the older sisters were. She had been telling the older sisters that she was a twin—but she wasn’t. She had even managed to convince half the house that she had diabetes—but she didn’t. And she was constantly snapping at her sisters. One night in the bathroom, Laura-Ann was rubbing lotion on her legs, and Vicki said sweetly, “Laura-Ann, that smells really good.” Laura-Ann turned and gave her a nasty look, shook her red curls, and continued to rub in silence. Five minutes later, Laura-Ann huffed, “Thanks,” as if she were furious at Vicki. Vicki couldn’t understand her roommate’s mood swings, which came without warning or apology. When Olivia was in a bad mood, by contrast, she would inform her sisters loudly, “I’m in a bad mood today, so if I’m bitchy, I’m sorry and I warned you.”

  The next night, when Vicki went to take a shower, she couldn’t find her new bath towel. About half the sisters in the house—including Vicki, Olivia, and Morgan—had ordered extra-long, extra-fluffy, luxurious designer bath towels with the Beta Pi monogram. On warm days, the girls planned to take them out to the hill behind their house to sunbathe. But Vicki’s was no longer hanging on the hook in her closet where she had left it.

  “Um, this is so weird,” Vicki whispered to Olivia and Morgan, who were giving each other French manicures on Morgan’s bed. “My towel is gone.”

  The girls immediately glanced at Laura-Ann’s empty bed. She had gone home for the weekend.

  “What if Laura-Ann took my towel?”

  “Oh my God,” Olivia said, “she did say she was taking her towel home with her this weekend. She said she wanted to get it monogrammed at a less expensive store.”

  The next night, when Laura-Ann was back and all the girls were in bed, Vicki asked no one in particular, “Did something happen to my Beta Pi towel? Because, I mean, I can’t find mine?”

  “Geez, why would you think that?” Laura-Ann immediately sniped. Vicki didn’t have a tactful answer, so she didn’t say anything further.

  Not long afterward, Olivia and Vicki decided to try to switch to a double room for the spring semester. There were simply too many girls around. When one roommate was trying to nap, everyone else had to be quiet. When one wanted to be alone with a guy, she had to go to his place. And there was no way to get any studying done in that room. Vicki ached for a place of privacy, beyond the prying sisters who asked her things she didn’t want to tell anybody about besides Olivia. To be part of a sorority, Vicki was learning, meant that sisters were constantly in her business. On the occasions when she managed to muster the courage to venture downstairs to the television room, she would get annoyed by the immediate inundation of inquiries from girls who asked her questions not because they cared but because they just wanted to know. She would be sitting in the den talking to a friend when a herd of sisters would rumble in, bellowing things like “Who are you talking about? Who, who, who?” “Is this about William?” “Does he know about Dan?” “Oh, are you still seeing Dan?” All Vicki wanted to tell them was “Shut up and go away,” but she couldn’t openly snub sisters like that, just as she couldn’t say anything rude to the strange sister who seemed to live in the television room, where she would wait on the periphery for sisters to start conversing and then quietly repeat everything they said.

  Olivia and Vicki went to Olivia’s Big Sister for advice.

  “We’re afraid Morgan and Laura-Ann are going to freak out when we tell them we want a double,” Vicki said.

  “I don’t care.” Olivia threw up her hands. “Oh my God, I need to get out of that room. I can’t live with three other people and I think they know that.”

  “If you want to make yourself happy, you should just do what you want to do. Don’t worry what other people say,” offered Olivia’s Big Sister, a junior. “If this is what’s going to be good for you guys, you can’t worry about hurting their feelings.”

  “Maybe it’s not really that bad,” Vicki wavered. “It’s just a lot of, like, girls.” But she could tell it was getting to Olivia.

  Cramped Quarters

  NOT ALL SORORITIES HAVE ACTUAL HOUSES. BUT THOSE that do add a fascinating variable to these all-girl groups. Imagine the estrogen-fueled stress and chaos of, say, three biological teenage sisters sharing a bathroom. Now imagine one hundred sisters sharing four. The sorority environment is one that can pack practically grown women in triple bunk beds, six to a room, one hundred to a house, as if they were ten-year-olds at sleepaway camp. At the University of Missouri, some sororities own mansions that lodge up to 120 girls, many in triple bunk beds. Most sorority houses at the University of Washington have “sleeping porches”: gigantic rooms in which all of the forty pledges must sleep. At half the houses at Purdue, girls are encouraged for bonding purposes to sleep in “Cold Air,” an open room—large enough to hold more than one hundred girls—that is kept dark and cold, with the windows left open at all times.

  Everyday life in a sorority house generally goes unsupervised. The only adult who lives there is the “House Mom,” who usually has a private apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen. Depending on the sorority, the House Mom can be an alumna, a grad student, or, in some cases, a non-Greek woman from the local community. The degree to which she is involved with the house also varies by chapter. In State U’s Alpha Rho and Beta Pi, the House Moms were older women who were unaffiliated with any Greek organization. They took care of house maintenance—calling technicians to fix lagging Internet connections, for example—but played no role in anything specifically sorority-related unless they were needed for safety or disciplinary reasons, as happened later in the year with Alpha Rho. The girls didn’t want them to. They view
ed them more as building administrators than as a part of the sorority.

  Sororities with houses run them like a part of the business and often order members to live there a specific number of years. At Indiana University, sororities require sisters to live in the house for at least three years in order to be considered an active member. “Sororities have to make money,” one alumna explained. In order to maintain the house, the sorority needs a certain quota of girls who will pay extra for the room and board. If chapters don’t fill quota, Nationals have been known to shut them down. The houses are usually owned by a local House Corporation, a nonprofit board of local alumnae incorporated in the state. The House Corporation, which makes the financial decisions for the house, hires the cook, House Mom, and housekeepers out of the money the sisters pay in rent and a “parlor fee” charged to all members to help support the house. (This budget is separate from the chapter budget, which is run by an undergraduate sister acting as treasurer and covers parties and similar expenses.)

  There is also a lighter, more innocuous side to life in a sorority house. In a houseful of dozens of young women, one of the most popular activities can be pulling pranks on the other sisters. One Sigma Delta Tau chapter had a house phone as well as individual lines for each bedroom. A common practice was what the girls called “double lining”—they would dial a number on the house phone, put the call on hold, dial someone else from a room phone, and then connect the two calls together so that each recipient thought the other placed the call—while the girls listened in on the conversation. “We liked to connect two people who used to date and didn’t talk anymore, just to see what would happen, or people who secretly liked each other but no one knew but us, or people who were in the middle of a huge fight. It was bad,” said a Sigma Delta Tau. At her house, SDT pledges were expected to pull pranks on the older sisters. One year they stole all of the underwear of the forty girls who lived in the house and replaced it with tiny diapers. Meanwhile, they brought a trash bag full of the underwear to the fraternity house around the corner. Within minutes, the fraternity boys came tearing back around the corner and into the house with underwear on their heads and tossing panties at every turn. It took the sisters six hours to sort through the underwear, and hours longer to fight over the washing machine because no one knew exactly where their underwear had been. Another pledge group placed ads in the Daily Texan that advertised all of the older sisters’ cars, exaggerating the amenities and reducing the price (“1997 black Toyota 4Runner, fully loaded, $3,000”). The house received more than 350 calls in twenty-four hours.

  As many sisters told me, there is at least one undeniable benefit to life in a sorority house: “The clothes sharing was the best part,” said Jordan, a midwestern Pi Phi. “There were so many different girls, you could always find something to wear.”

  Costumes and Masks

  NOVEMBER 4

  SABRINA’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  I will seduce and date Professor Stone and then he will fall in love with me and ask me to marry him. That is the plan.

  ONE NIGHT IN EARLY NOVEMBER, SABRINA LOUNGED IN the Penthouse as the Pents got ready for an Alpha Rho “Masquerade Mixer.” Aside from the costumes, it was a typical night in the house. Fiona pondered whether she would look better in a nurse costume or a French maid’s outfit, both of which, for some reason, she owned. She pulled on the French maid dress, which barely covered her behind, and leaned forward in front of the mirror to pop her breasts slightly out of the low-cut top.

  Two sisters at her side watched in the mirror. “Wait,” one of them said, “I can see your bra through that.” The dark bra showed easily through the practically transparent white top.

  “I know.” Fiona cupped a breast and pushed it up some more. “It’s supposed to be that way.”

  “Um, it looks slutty,” the other sister said.

  “I know!” Fiona exclaimed happily.

  Sabrina, absentmindedly twirling a braid, didn’t pay much attention to the sisters. She was busy daydreaming about Professor Stone. Their office-hour meeting this week had extended into a coffee break, first to talk about academics and then to chat about anything that came to mind. He was a good listener and seemed truly to care about what she had to say. Sometimes she sent him e-mails, ostensibly to ask questions about class, but also just to say hello. He always responded, always professionally, but occasionally Sabrina noticed an extra line or two that seemed more like something from a friend than a teacher. Sabrina had already signed up for the class Professor Stone was teaching next semester. She was sure the course would be interesting anyway, but she also guessed that staring at Professor Stone’s flecked hazel eyes and large biceps would make class time fly by. Because of him, Sabrina decided she wouldn’t go to Alpha Rho’s Date Party. She wasn’t interested in college boys anymore.

  IN HER PENTHOUSE AREA, BITSY WRIGGLED INTO A little red dress with a pitchfork pattern that was high on the bottom and low on top. She drew pointed arches on her eyebrows, lined her eyes with smoky shadow, and stuck on a two-pronged tail and horns. Then she came out into the middle of the Penthouse and struck a pose for no one in particular. No one noticed.

  “I need boots!” she shouted. The sisters in the Penthouse turned and looked at her as she struck another pose. Sabrina rolled her eyes and continued talking to Amy, who had come upstairs for a rare Penthouse visit. Bitsy had been prancing around in the devil dress now for two days in anticipation of the Masquerade Mixer.

  When no one responded to her, Bitsy turned to Amy. “Your boobs are looking good today,” she said.

  “Er.” Amy didn’t know how to react. “Thanks.” She would later ask Sabrina if that meant on other days they didn’t look so good.

  “Now, my boobs,” Bitsy continued, “they don’t look right.”

  “Honey, that’s because you don’t wear a bra and your tops are too small.”

  Bitsy gazed down at her chest. “I’ll take you to Victoria’s Secret,” Amy said to Bitsy, “and we’ll buy you the right size bra and then you can wear shirts one size bigger.”

  “Oh yeah, I didn’t think about that,” Bitsy said. She put on a padded bra.

  Bitsy reappeared in her devil costume downstairs, where some Alpha Rhos and fraternity brothers were watching television. At a commercial, she model-walked into the TV room and posed in front of the sisters until people noticed her.

  “Nice, Bitsy!”

  “Woohoo!”

  “You working tonight . . . on the corner?” Bitsy seemed one exhale away from bursting out of her dress.

  “Bitsy’s not going to have to buy any drinks tonight because her boobs are going to be in everybody’s face!” The room erupted into howls. The fraternity boys, embarrassed, tried very hard not to look at Bitsy’s breasts.

  Bitsy, oblivious, extended a leg and pointed her foot. “How do I look? I’m not sure about the boots.”

  “You need the hooker boots!”

  “But they make me so ta-all,” Bitsy whined. “The boys will come up to here!” She held her hand up to her chest.

  “That’s what they want, Bitsy, you idiot!” Bitsy smiled sweetly and sauntered back upstairs.

  Twenty minutes later, as the group dispersed, Bitsy came downstairs, this time in a brown sweater, khakis, and more subdued makeup. She had a masquerade-style mask in hand. “Look, here I am in normal clothes!” she announced. No one asked her why she bothered to wear the devil dress, horns, and tail only to take them off before she went out for the evening.

  Gossip

  NOVEMBER 6

  AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  dancing with jake, my date of the month. don’t wait up!

  AMY AND CAITLIN WERE IN THEIR COMMON ROOM, PREPARING for the Alpha Rho Date Party. As Sabrina sat in a corner reading, Beth, their hairstyling friend, braided half of Amy’s hair into a crown.

  “Shake your head, is it coming loose?” Beth said. Amy shook her head as Beth focused intently on the braid.

  “Shake harder!” Amy
shook her head so hard it looked like she was trying to mosh sideways. The crown fell out.

  “Shit.” Beth retrieved the bobby pins that had fallen on the floor and started again.

  Sabrina helped pick up the pins and headed back to her corner. “Oh Sabrina, I just realized you won’t be there to dance to the ass songs with me tonight!” Amy said. Sabrina planned to work the late shift at the restaurant.

  “There will be plenty of other drunken bitches there to dance to the ass songs with you,” said Sabrina.

  “But they don’t have our ghetto booty, sweetie. They just have fupas!” Amy said while strapping on a stiletto. The girls laughed. Fupa, in their sorority lingo, stood for “fat upper pussy area,” which the girls described as “the part that bulges over your pants when you sit down” (as opposed to the “food baby,” which described a belly).

  The sisters gossiped about other girls in the chapter. More than two months into the school year, a definitive hierarchy had developed in the house. Caitlin, Amy, and Sabrina mingled among various groups. Half a dozen sisters were on the most popular tier, as the “pretty” girls—the party animals who knew the most fraternity boys and could usually be found at the bars. Bitsy and a few others formed the boy-crazy clique. Charlotte and another sister were the house prudes, known by the way they strictly adhered to sorority rules, who spent time together because they weren’t entirely accepted by the other cliques. One might have expected that as president, Charlotte would be accessible to every sister in the chapter, but Sabrina had discovered otherwise. Charlotte would say hello to some sisters, but never to Sabrina, whom she ignored completely. Other sisters flitted in and out of the house periphery, such as the three sophomore sisters who constantly flirted with each other. They liked to stalk each other throughout the house, lurking behind doors to scare and tickle each other. As far as the Alpha Rhos knew, however, the closest the girls had come to hooking up was their occasional wrestling bouts.