Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  “I know. What’s with these guys? They hardly ever slow down or do something lovey-dovey or in the moment.”

  “That’s never been the case with my guy,” Amy said. “I deflowered him!” This comment led to a debate over whether there were two or three classifications of intercourse.

  “There are three categories: making love, sex, and fucking,” said Caitlin.

  “There’s no difference between sex and fucking,” Amy argued. “They’re the same category.”

  “You are so sheltered,” Sabrina said.

  “The third one is just a yucky term for the second,” Amy said.

  “You live in your own little fantasy world,” Caitlin said, exchanging a knowing look with Sabrina before she left to go to an exec board meeting.

  An hour later, the exec board summoned the girls into the chapter room for the next session: “The Recruitment Runway,” a fashion show instructing the girls on what they could and could not wear during rush.

  Rush was a weeklong series of nightly events known as “rush parties,” during which sisters would have short blocks of time to get to know the hundreds of candidates. On Monday, the “open house” party would be open to everyone. About twenty-five candidates at a time would be led into each sorority house for a fifteen-minute rush party, over a period of slightly more than five hours. All of the sisters had to be present for the entire duration.

  A sister pranced in front of the room, wearing homemade letters on a tank top and a very short miniskirt. “This is an example of what you can’t wear to open house,” Elaine, the fashion-show emcee, said loudly. “No homemade letters. And you can’t wear miniskirts because you have to sit down and the skirt will ride up.”

  Charlotte walked across the makeshift stage. “This is the ideal outfit for open house. On that first night,” said Elaine, “you are to wear your letters on a nice shirt, neatly tucked into your cute khakis, which can’t be cut up. You must wear cute shoes.”

  On Tuesday would be the first round, a Teal and Jade party celebrating the sorority and its colors for the girls who had been selected to come back to the house. Each rushee could attend parties at up to ten houses if the sororities invited her. The sisters were expected to wear their sorority colors for the first round.

  Grace paraded across the front of the room wearing large blue sweatpants, sneakers, and a green sports bra. The girls laughed. “That is not how you wear our colors. Obviously, you are not to dress messily any night of rush week,” Elaine said. “And your clothes should fit right—get a seamstress.” Fiona strutted onstage wearing navy slacks and a crisp green J. Crew sweater. “That’s more like it.”

  Wednesday would be the second round, or “skit night,” during which some of the Alpha Rhos would perform a skit for the rushees, who could attend parties at four houses that night. The girls who were not in the skit were supposed to wear black capris and a brightly colored top.

  Thursday would be the third round, or “Preference Night,” the most solemn night of the week. The rushees, who could attend up to two Preference parties, would be told to dress up for the occasion. The sisters were supposed to wear white dresses. Bitsy walked onstage in a short white skirt, a tight white tube top, and flip-flops. “Notice how Bitsy isn’t wearing any stockings,” Elaine pointed out. “That’s unacceptable. Stockings look nicer.” Following Bitsy, another sister wore a long white linen dress with nude stockings and white heels. Amy took notes in her pink sorority binder.

  “Dress Checks”

  JANUARY 12

  VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  this is boooshit

  WHEN VICKI STEPPED OFF THE PLANE AT THE AIRPORT NEAR State U after Winter Break, Olivia and Ashleigh came running in their platform sandals to greet her, screaming her name as they careened through the crowd. The house in January seemed like a different place than it had been when Vicki first moved there in August. This time, instead of moving in with her parents’ help, Vicki moved back into the house with her sisters. This time, with many of the juniors studying abroad, the sophomores were the dominant class in the house. Vicki walked into the entry hall, got her new room key from the House Mom, and started unpacking in the double she now shared with Olivia. She was neither excited nor apprehensive about moving back in for second semester. But she felt much more comfortable than she had the semester before. This time, the house actually seemed like the place where she lived.

  That night, Vicki sat through her first rush practice. The exec board read through a long, confusing list of appropriate and inappropriate rush behavior. The sisters were forbidden, for example, to initiate discussions with the recruits about drinking and smoking. They were allowed to talk about these subjects, however, if they flowed naturally from the conversation. The sisters practiced talking about the sorority’s philanthropy, so they wouldn’t “forget and look stupid” if a recruit asked them about it. The meeting ended after the recruitment chair informed the girls what they were expected to wear for the week.

  The night before rush began, the Beta Pi recruitment chair stopped in each sister’s room for “Dress Checks.” Every night this week, the Beta Pis were required to try on the clothes they planned to wear at the next day’s rush events. The recruitment chair would look over each girl’s outfit and veto it if she thought it was inappropriate. For open house, the Beta Pis were supposed to wear a shirt with their letters, khakis, and nice shoes or sandals.

  Vicki and Olivia could hear sisters complaining after the recruitment chair left their rooms. “That’s still not good enough,” she said repeatedly, even after the sisters had changed their outfits. “That shirt doesn’t look great. You need to change into something else.”

  Morgan came in and, without asking, tried on one of Olivia’s shirts. The shirt hung off her gaunt frame. “Ugh,” Morgan groaned as she twisted in front of the mirror, “I’m so fat.”

  “Leave now,” said Olivia. Morgan skipped out, still wearing the shirt.

  When the recruitment chair reached Vicki and Olivia’s room, she glanced down Vicki’s outfit and stared at her flip-flops.

  “You can’t wear those. You need to wear fancy shoes,” the recruitment chair said.

  “I don’t have fancy shoes.” Vicki owned only flats because she didn’t want to emphasize her height.

  “Vicki, you have to wear what you’d wear to an interview. Everyone has those kinds of shoes.”

  “I don’t.”

  “What about nice sandals?”

  “I don’t have those, either.”

  “Borrow from Olivia.”

  “The only ones she has that I can walk in are the ones she’s wearing.” Olivia parodied a model pose, pointing a sandaled toe and tossing her bleached hair.

  “Then borrow from someone else.”

  “But if I’m wearing shoes that I wouldn’t normally wear, then that isn’t my style and I’m not portraying the person I really am, right?”

  “Oh, all right.” The recruitment chair gave up. “Try to find something, but if you can’t, then wear your flip-flops. Just don’t tell anybody.”

  “Okay.”

  As the recruitment chair turned to leave the room she scrutinized Olivia, whose outfit she had already approved. “Get a belt, Olivia,” she said, and walked out.

  Practicing Conversations

  FOR MOST SORORITIES, “RUSH”—THE OFFICIAL RECRUITMENT period during which members and candidates get to know each other and narrow down the mutual selection process—is the most stressful time of the year. Never is the image of a sorority more important than when the girls are on display in an attempt to attract the best new members available. On the one hand, Vicki disliked the superficiality of the rush atmosphere; she said to me, “If this is the white shirt I’m comfortable in, then this is the white shirt I should be wearing, to reflect who I am.” On the other hand, she also understood her sorority’s perspective. “Beta Pi wants to portray a certain image,” she said, rationalizing Dress Checks. “The girls coming through rush w
ant to see you look put together.” Sororities are driven by fierce competition with the other chapters and pressure from Nationals to fill their new-member quota with the right kind of dues-paying girls. The quality of the girls who select their house (and whom the house selects) can drastically alter a sorority’s statistics, such as its average GPA, its image, and its relationship with fraternities, depending on the looks and affability of the girls. Rush is such a nerve-wracking experience, for both rushers and rushees, that whenever I asked sisters what they liked least about sorority life, rush inevitably was near the top of their lists.

  Rush, which generally lasts for a week or two, ends on Bid Day, when sororities give rushees “bids,” or formal offers to join. Many Greek systems run two rushes, a “formal” rush one semester—during which rules, quotas, and protocol are stringent—and an “informal” rush the other semester, with a more lenient structure and no quota. (Some sororities, especially those low on numbers, also have “open rush,” or “continuous bidding,” which allows them to induct new members throughout the year.) Several schools guarantee that every rushee will be assigned to a house. Depending on how many girls rush, the school divides that number by the number of sororities to determine a quota that every house must reach (in some sororities the quotas are derived by a more complex formula).

  For some sororities, a rushee must provide a photograph and a wealth of paperwork, including recommendations from sorority members in her home state. To get these recommendations, rush guides recommend that girls wishing to join a sorority call or write the Panhellenic office at their college or university during the spring of their senior year in high school. “Any sorority alumna can send a letter to any chapter of her sorority or to a rec board, recommending that the sorority pledge a particular rushee,” says Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success. “However, a letter of recommendation is not the same as the formal recommendation, which is a rec.” Sorority alumnae associations in cities and counties appoint official recommendation boards, though some sororities allow any alumna to write a formal recommendation.

  These subjective evaluations, often written by complete strangers, carry great weight in the rush process. An alumna who knows that a rushee “has a bad reputation” can write a “no recommendation,” or no rec, which outweighs a formal rec even if the no rec doesn’t come from a rec board. “In some cities,” says Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success, “board members drive by a rushee’s home or run a check on her father’s occupation to decide whether or not she should receive a recommendation.” The guide further advises, “Knowing a member of a recommendation board helps you receive a recommendation. By the same token, if a rec board member does not like you, even for a silly reason (maybe you hurt her daughter’s feelings last year) you may be denied a recommendation.”

  If a rushee doesn’t know a rec board member, she is advised to prepare a résumé for the rec board and the sorority alumnae she will ask to write recommendations. The résumé is expected to include grades, honors, and activities, as well as talents, interests, and travel—to give sorority sisters material for rush party conversations. “Travel, especially abroad, indicates affluence and sophistication, which are always positive factors in the evaluation process,” states the rush guide, which emphasizes the importance of presenting as upper-crust an image as possible. It stresses, “You should not list previous blue-collar employment on your resume unless it is very exotic. If you served food at McDonald’s don’t mention it. If you served food at a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, do.”

  One of Brooke’s friends was pressured to get into Eta Gamma by her mother, who lined up a staggering twenty recommendations from Eta Gammas. As domineering as stage mothers and as pushy as beauty pageant mothers, sorority mothers can be a strange breed. Perhaps because their sisterhood was a product of a different time, sorority mothers often pin their hopes for their daughters’ future achievement both in college and in adulthood on their success or failure at rush. At one school in the mid-1990s, for example, a girl was courted by two houses; the campus considered one superior to the other. The girl phoned her mother to inform her that she had chosen the inferior one. The mother, appalled, hissed, “You just ruined your life,” and drove down to see her daughter right away. After a heated conversation, the sobbing girl went to the campus’s Panhellenic office at two in the morning to change her bid, but the officers still working there said it was too late. When a Texas sorority girl told her mother that she didn’t get into Tri-Delt, her mother cried and moaned, “Now how are you going to meet a husband?” This incident also happened in the mid-1990s.

  In Brooke’s Texas hometown, mothers practically courted each other to lobby sorority daughters to help their own children. “Oh yeah, moms talked. They would get together for tea and go, ‘What is Susie thinking?’ ‘Well, Cindy’s just so happy in EtaGam.’ ‘We really wish Susie would go EtaGam,’” Brooke said. “They’d have lunch over it; it’s a huge deal in Texas. Moms were definitely like, ‘Oh, Susie really likes EtaGam; do we think she has a chance? Can Cindy help? Could you ask Cindy to get back to me on that? I’d like to know if Susie really has a chance.’”

  According to author Maryln Schwartz, at universities in the South, mothers and grandmothers of rushees start sending sorority houses cakes, cupcakes, flowers, and other tokens in time for rush. They send pencils engraved with the rushee’s name so sisters will remember to vote for her. Iced letters on the baked goods read versions of, “Just remember my daughter Jane Smith.” Schwartz wrote, “This practice got so out of hand at the University of Mississippi that the dean of students . . . put an end to it, saying sororities would no longer accept these pre-Rush gifts.” But an Ole Miss Kappa Kappa Gamma told Schwartz, “Those cakes still keep coming.”

  A legacy isn’t necessarily automatically admitted to the sorority in which her relative was a member. But she will get special treatment. A chapter that doesn’t automatically admit legacies will usually decide by the second night of rush parties whether or not it plans to extend the legacy a bid; if it does not want her, the group will give her the courtesy of letting her know early enough so that she can connect with another house. Occasionally out of competitiveness, other sororities will try to “steal a legacy” simply to lord one over another house.

  Rush candidates are divided into groups and assigned a “rush counselor,” or “Rho Chi”: a sorority sister who, supposedly unbiased, cannot be involved with or disclose her sorority as she guides her group through the process. The Rho Chis are sometimes known to carry emergency packs including nail polish, mints, Band-Aids, and tampons. On the first night, the Rho Chis lead their groups to parties at every sorority on campus, where they mingle with the sisters. After open house, rush parties are by invitation only.

  The last party of rush, called Preference Night, usually involves emotional speeches by seniors about what the sorority has meant to them, as well as a ceremony intended to make the candidates feel as if they are already a part of the group. But mostly, the purpose of Preference Night is to make girls cry. This way, if the rushees are led to believe that the sisters are so close that the sorority moves them to tears, then they will conclude, “I want friends like that, too.” (Some sororities bring in a favorite rushee’s older sister or aunt, if she is an alumna, to help persuade her to join. Others distribute tiny cakes with the rushees’ names on them.) Between the parties, the sisters have five to ten minutes to write down anything they can remember about the girls they have met, in order to help them when they later vote to narrow the list of candidates.

  After the Pref parties and before a specified deadline (usually midnight), each rushee submits to the campus Panhellenic office a card on which she ranks her top few (usually two or three) choices. The sororities, meanwhile, submit their final bid list of girls in the order that they would accept them into the sorority. Panhellenic staff members then feed the lists into a computer, which matches the girls to the sororities, depending on how high the names a
ppear on each list.

  On the first few nights of rush, sorority sisters will be expected to meet several hundred, if not more than a thousand girls, who are herded around the house to have approximately three-minute conversations with as many sisters as possible. This brief impression, crucial for both rushers and rushees, is what causes sororities to begin to prepare their members for rush several days in advance. Many sororities return to school early to go on a pre-rush retreat or rush “workweek” before formal rush (Alpha Rho and Beta Pi stay on campus). At one mid-Atlantic school, I observed a sorority’s first pre-rush meeting of the year in order to observe its “practice conversations,” the superficial small talk that sisters will have with candidates. Essentially the older sisters train the younger ones in how to respond to most recruits’ questions with one goal in mind: “making every girl want us.” This can entail spinning, flattering, and outright lying. (“Will you take my best friend if I pick your sorority?” “We love her! She’ll probably get in anyway!”) During the pre-rush meeting I attended, the girls were specifically instructed to lie. If a rushee were to ask if she would have to live in the house, the sisters were told, “Don’t say yes because some girls get intimidated”—even though there was a one-year requirement. If a rushee asked how big the chapter was, a practice question-and-answer sheet suggested the sisters inflate the number.

  As sorority sisters from around the country have described to me, the conversations at these parties are all about the same. A rushee is ushered to a sister, who will engage in something akin to the following conversation:

  “So . . . where are you from?”

  “New York City!” [Candidate reminds herself to smile brightly.]

  “What’s your major?”

  “I’m a dance major!”

  “Oh, my sister Tiffany is a dance major, too!” [Sister reminds herself to find something the rushee has in common with a sister.] “Here, I’ll introduce you! Tiffany, come talk to [insert rushee’s name].” [Sister thrusts candidate toward Tiffany.]