Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  Meanwhile, the sisters have gestures to let the rest of the sorority know what they are thinking about the girl to whom they are talking. Some sororities cross their legs certain ways to indicate what they think of a rushee. Others put their hands behind their back in a silent plea for rescue, signaling, as one sorority girl explained, “Help—this girl can’t talk.”

  Before the semester begins, many sororities have their sisters memorize names, faces, and details about the girls who have already sent in recommendations. State U sisters receive photographs of each rushee at the start of the term. Sometimes the rushees have extra help. According to Ready for Rush, Kappa Kappa Gamma alumnae from Vanderbilt University one year sent “Goo-Goo Clusters” to University of Virginia Kappas. The candy bars were wrapped with ribbons reading, “Vandy alumnae are Goo-Goo over Laura Smith and Cheryl Wood!” The manual says, “This not only fed the actives a tasty treat but also made everyone remember these two rushees. Needless to say, both Laura and Cheryl pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma.”

  At the pre-rush meeting I attended, the sisters were sitting in their chapter room on the floor, chairs, and couches, some having arrived straight out of the shower, still in thin bathrobes, wet hair, and bare feet. As they waited for the meeting to commence, they engaged in important preliminary conversations.

  “I really need to change my underwear. Should I go change my underwear?” asked one.

  “Did you guys see me do my mermaid dance last year?” asked another.

  “Yeah, I have to change my underwear,” affirmed the first, who briefly left the room.

  The recruitment chair began to explain logistics. During the selection process, as the recruitment chair called each recruit’s name, the girls could voice opinions about the recruits before the sisters voted.

  The president interrupted. “Remember not to compliment them to their faces, like ‘Oh my God, you have such a cute bag,’ because then they think you’re judging them by their appearance,” she said. “But if their parents are generous and they fit the mold of this house, we want them. And if there’s a cool girl but you’re not sure what else to say about her and you want to get to know her better, call her an ‘NGB’: ‘Nice Girl But.’”

  “And if you really, really, really love a girl,” the recruitment chair said, “you say, ‘I would take her as my Little.’”

  “Remember,” the president interrupted again, “you want everyone to want you. You want everyone to want you.”

  A sign-in sheet was passed around the room as the meeting shifted to conversation practice. “You might think it’s really easy to talk to someone, but it’s really not and you could feel really stupid,” the recruitment chair said.

  “Girls are going to ask you the dumbest questions you’ve ever heard in your life,” added the chapter’s adviser.

  The recruitment chair offered a few tips before the practice began in earnest. “Memorize our philanthropy. Last year someone asked a sister what our philanthropy was and she said, ‘Uhhh . . . ’ And don’t talk about drugs.”

  “What if someone comes up to you and says, ‘I’m coked up out of my mind’?” asked a sister.

  A junior piped up, dramatizing the typical rush introduction: “Oh, then you say, ‘Oh, I have a sister who’s coked up out of her mind, too! Here, I’ll introduce you!’” The girls erupted with laughter.

  The sisters in the room were paired up and assigned scenarios for practice conversations. The first pair sat on a couch in front of the room, one of them perched on an armrest.

  “Okay, first, you should be sitting on the same level at all times,” the recruitment chair pointed out. The perched girl hopped down to the cushions.

  The girls introduced themselves and shook hands.

  “No touching!” the adviser exclaimed.

  “I thought there was just a ‘no massage’ rule,” a sister said.

  “No. Even if she’s your friend, don’t be stroking her head and stuff,” the adviser said.

  The girls resumed.

  “So, are you excited?” asked the girl pretending to be the rusher.

  “I’ve been waiting for this day my whole life!” said the sister who was acting as a rushee.

  “What kind of classes do you take?”

  “I’m an engineer and I’m trying out for band!” The room laughed.

  “Oh, that’s . . . nice. How many credits are you taking?”

  “Twenty-three!” The audience laughed again as the rushee turned to them to explain, “You get to talk to a lot of dorks.”

  “So,” the rushee turned back to her partner, “do you like veggie burgers?”

  An older sister addressed the room: “Even if this girl is the biggest tool, you still have to say hello and smile. You don’t know who she lives with, so you want her to go home and say we’re awesome, because her roommate might be like our number one choice.”

  “Use the analogy that this is a guy who you know likes you,” said a senior. “You’re flirting and you pretend there’s no one else in the room. Even if you’re obviously not going to hook up with him, you still want to make him want you.”

  “Just remember,” said the recruitment chair, “there should never be any more than two sisters on one potential new member and even two shouldn’t be there for long. It’s intimidating.”

  At the end of the meeting, the girls were handed a sheet entitled “Increase Your Rush Vocabulary” to help them think of words to describe candidates. Among the vocabulary words were “shy,” “attractive,” and “loud.”

  Bump Groups

  JANUARY 13

  CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  Oh man, at the house for-ev-er.

  OPEN HOUSE, CAITLIN’S FIRST RUSH EVENT AS A SISTER, was a disappointment. Eighteen times, a Rho Chi led a group of rushees past the beds of blue pansies and into the entry hall as the Alpha Rhos chanted, cheered, and clapped. Eighteen times, Elaine stepped forward from her position in the TV room and said, opening her arms wide, “Hi, I’m Elaine, the recruitment chair. Let me know if you have any questions. Welcome to Alpha Rho!” As the Rho Chi prodded the girls forward one by one, the next Alpha Rho in the long line snaked around the room stepped up to introduce herself and take the girl into either the dining room or the TV room to chat. For just over five hours (including four ten-minute breaks) Caitlin forced herself to have superficial conversations with girls who were “just okay.” The only girl she liked was someone she already knew: Traci, who lived with René.

  The sisters had decorated the TV room and the kitchen with posters, pictures, and T-shirts, as well as awards and trophies that Alpha Rho had won in recent years. The Greek Week trophy sat on a table in the center of the TV room. When girls weren’t talkative and Caitlin couldn’t think of anything to say beyond the usual trite questions she refused to ask (“Where are you from?” “Where do you live on campus?” “What’s your major?”), she led them on a tour of the decorations and told them about the events associated with the props.

  Caitlin couldn’t believe how overconfident some of the rushees acted, even when they discovered they were talking to the Alpha Rho vice president. Midway through the evening, Caitlin was assigned to speak to a sophomore from Beverly Hills who opened the conversation by saying arrogantly, “I went through rush last year and didn’t find a house I liked.” Caitlin noticed right away that the girl carried a Chanel bag and wore a Tiffany bracelet and necklace. During pre-rush weekend, the older sisters had emphasized how important it was to make note of designer labels. The benefits were twofold: if the rushee could afford expensive items, then she likely had the money to pay dues and house expenses; and memorizing details about a rushee’s outfit would help sisters to better remember her when they voted. Caitlin wasn’t used to paying attention to these kinds of details, but she had been reading the issues of Vogue that Amy left out for her and was beginning to recognize various designers’ logos. Her mother would be proud.

  The Beverly Hills girl seemed to have the idea of a
rush party backward: instead of trying to impress upon Caitlin that she would fit into Alpha Rho, she interrogated Caitlin, as if Caitlin had to sell Alpha Rho to her. “What sets your house apart from all the others?” she asked, eyeing Caitlin’s nondesigner preppy top.

  Surprised, Caitlin spoke carefully. “There isn’t only one thing that defines our house and that sets us apart—we’re not the blond house or the rich house or the smart house. A lot of our girls are really laid back and we have a lot of different personalities. We have people involved in all kinds of things.”

  The girl hardly seemed to listen before firing her next question. “What would you say is your greatest downfall as a house?”

  “Well, our diversity can be good but it can also be bad because we have so many different kinds of personalities, and they can clash. But it’s a house that lots of people can feel comfortable in,” Caitlin said, trying to spin the answer into a positive trait. She made a mental note to give the girl poor marks for self-importance.

  Caitlin dreaded Tuesday’s first-round Teal and Jade party. Rush parties were choreographed practically down to the minute. The sisters were divided, according to a common sorority custom, into “bump groups” of three. Caitlin, as sister #1 in her group, would have to greet a rushee, give her a full tour of the house, and then take her to sit down and talk in the dining room. Sister #2 escorted a rushee in front of the fireplace to chat. Sister #3 gave a rushee a tour of the house and then led her to the chapter room to talk. After ten minutes, Caitlin would find #2 and “bump” her: she would take over the conversation with the rushee and then lead her on a tour of the house. Then #2 would find #3’s girl and continue chatting with her in the chapter room. And #3 would find Caitlin’s rushee and converse in the dining room. It disgusted Caitlin that the rushees, who rarely knew the nights were choreographed, would believe that they were randomly entering into a series of natural conversations.

  In between each rush party, the sisters had five minutes to get to their designated spot in the house (Caitlin’s spot was in one of the second-floor showers, for privacy) and write in their notebooks everything they could remember about the girls. The rushees didn’t realize that anything they mentioned that the sisters remembered would form the basis of how they were “scored” in the voting process. Meanwhile, Caitlin and her Big Sister kept an eye out for potential new additions to their family, because Caitlin knew she wanted to take a Little Sister this semester. They joked that they were going “Little Hunting,” as they discreetly appraised the rushees who walked by. But as the rounds went on they grew increasingly discouraged.

  Skit Night

  JANUARY 15

  VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  vicki=rock star??

  RUSH WAS TAKING OVER VICKI’S LIFE, ALTHOUGH AT FIRST she wanted nothing to do with it. She hadn’t had a chance to open a textbook or to see William, who was still trying to convince Vicki to be his girlfriend exclusively. On Tuesday night, Vicki spent the first-round party giving the same speech over and over again to the girls whom her bump group met. “I didn’t want to rush in the beginning, but as I went through it and met more people, I got more into it,” she would tell the rushees. “When I got in and started pledging, I still wasn’t even sure if Beta Pi was, like, something I wanted to do. It wasn’t until I actually moved into the house and became a part of it that I realized I had made a good decision to join. It made the school smaller, but at the same time it made it bigger because I got to meet so many new people!” [She inserted a wide, welcoming smile here.] The girls seemed to believe her.

  Several rushees tried to impress the Beta Pis by telling them how close they were with the brothers of Iota, the fraternity that the informed candidates knew was generally paired with Beta Pis.

  “Oh, I’m like best friends with them!” several girls separately effused to Vicki.

  “Really? Like who?” Vicki pressed.

  “All of them!” The girls didn’t realize that Vicki was dating William, the Iota president—and when they found out, they feigned nonchalance. But Vicki noticed that they treated her with more respect.

  With some girls, Vicki had to work hard to move a conversation. When she saw that one rushee wore a shirt bearing a picture of a horse, she talked about how much she had loved horseback riding as a child. “Oh, no, I don’t like horses,” the girl said. “I just like the way it looks on my shirt.” One of the longest conversations Vicki had with a rushee revolved entirely around the products they used to straighten their hair. But Vicki didn’t make the “help signal”—putting a hand on her hip—until she met an overweight girl who was sweet but had terrible breath. A sister immediately came to bump Vicki, who left to find another rushee.

  After the first-round parties, the Beta Pis scored the girls and announced their “rush crushes,” the girls they most wanted to be their sisters. Then the recruitment chair told the sisters how they needed to improve their rush. “First of all, if you know you’re not funny, don’t make a joke,” she said. “Also, don’t slouch.” Vicki blushed. “And don’t give anyone dirty looks, because I saw some girls were doing that.” During the first two parties, the recruitment chair greeted the rushees as they entered the house while the rest of the Beta Pis stood in lines behind her. “I don’t know if you guys noticed, but when a girl who was ugly, fat, had no style, seemed dorky, or her clothes didn’t fit her came up, instead of moving forward, you guys stepped backward. You can’t be that obvious about it.”

  The recruitment chair also told the girls they needed to be more opinionated when they scored the rushees. After each rush party, the Beta Pis had to score all of the girls on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 as the worst rating. Only executive board members were allowed to give 6s. Candidates given mostly 4s and 5s were automatically cut. “A lot of you gave threes to girls who were cute but you didn’t know what to do with them,” the recruitment chair said. “You need more ones and fives and fewer threes.”

  On Wednesday, Vicki skipped all her classes to rehearse and help build the sets for Skit Night. Beta Pi’s skit was “Total Recruitment Pi,” a play on the MTV show Total Request Live. The girls changed the lyrics to four songs so that they were about the Beta Pi sisters. The recruitment chair had asked Vicki and Olivia if they would sing a version of Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” (with lyrics changed to “It’s about time for Pi arrival”). Initially, Vicki had been horrified at the thought of singing in front of four groups of rushees. But Olivia put together a funny dance routine and Vicki warmed to the idea. She convinced herself that because she didn’t personally know any of the rushees, she didn’t care about the impression she made.

  Vicki was self-conscious when she and Olivia ran out onto the makeshift stage wearing hot pants, bikini tops, and kneepads. But when she started slithering on the floor and mocking Christina Aguilera’s lewd dance moves, it dawned on her that the crowd thought she was hilarious. By the final rush party, Vicki had lost all inhibitions, pouring the contents of a water bottle on her head as Olivia spanked her, while the rest of the rushees and the sisters doubled over in laughter and cheered uproariously for Vicki.

  Rush Rules

  MANY CAMPUS PANHELLENIC ASSOCIATIONS HAVE ENTIRE books full of rush rules with which sorority sisters are expected to familiarize themselves. For example, rush parties cannot go over their allotted time limit, and rushees cannot knock on a sorority house door, even when arriving for a rush party (Rho Chis must knock). During rush week, many schools put rushees “on silence,” meaning rushees can speak only with each other and are discouraged from speaking even to their friends and families. This rule was established so that few people could influence a rushee’s decision. At some schools, rushees aren’t even allowed to speak with their biological sisters outside of rush events. In the 1980s, at schools that imposed silence rules, fraternities often harassed rushees on their way to rush parties—and occasionally, according to Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success, kidnapped them “just for fun. But this isn’t al
ways fun for the rushees, especially if they are late for a party or if frat boys vomit on their dresses. Friendlier girls write their phone numbers on the backs of their name tags and flash them at good-looking fraternity boys who pester them.”

  At Brooke’s school, though the official rush week wasn’t until second semester, sisters began lobbying the freshmen two or three weeks after they arrived on campus in the fall. Conversations were limited to twenty-five minutes with freshmen, who weren’t allowed to enter a sorority house until rush week. At the first college football game Brooke attended as a freshman, she was shocked to see the reception waiting for rush candidates. As soon as she walked into the concession stand area, sorority sisters, wearing their pins and positioned in strategic places, immediately approached her as if they wanted her to be their best friend. Even if the girls merely had a friendly conversation about the weather, “they made you feel like you were a superstar and they were the paparazzi,” Brooke told me. “You’d meet them at fraternity parties and they’d say, ‘Oh my gosh! Can I get you a beer?’”

  Because rush was so competitive, sisters would watch members of other houses intently to try to catch them in a rush infraction; they worked almost as hard to get other houses in trouble as they did to woo the recruits. Sisters carefully timed any rival sisters they saw talking to potential recruits. “This is so bad—you’d time somebody on a girl so you could turn that other house in, that’s how petty we were,” Brooke said. “I did it to my best friend once, because I wasn’t best friends with her then. I was like, ‘Mallory Jenkins has been talking to Christina for, oh my Lord, thirty minutes. I’m turning her in.’”

  The sister would write down the details of the infraction and turn the document in to her sorority’s rush chair, saying something like, “I saw Mallory Jenkins talking to a freshman for thirty minutes; I want to bring her up on charges.” The rush chair would collect and save the violations. When she had enough ammunition to turn in to Panhellenic, the Panhellenic president and vice president of rush would hold a mediation session with the “rush teams” of both sororities: the rush chair and the rush adviser (an older alumna who would represent the house). “They would sit there as if at the U.N. and talk about it and try to come up with some kind of adequate punishment, like banning a sister from a rush party or lowering the number of girls a chapter could take,” Brooke told me. “One house would say, ‘Well, this is what I have on your house.’ And the other would answer, ‘Well, this is what I have on your house.’ And then you’d say, ‘Well, this is what I have on your house again.’ It was like a poker game. They would show a card that had a written report of a violation and when they had decided on a resolution, that card would get crossed off so things wouldn’t get regurgitated fifty thousand times.”