“You what?! What’s the professor’s name?” demanded Gloria.
I calmed her down. I told her Professor Macinhouser didn’t force me at all, and it wouldn’t count toward my GPA if I don’t want it to, though I’m pretty sure I scored well.
“I think it’s cute that you took a pop quiz,” said Meri softly. “What else did you do today?”
There was nothing else to tell them, except for strolling past the football field, seeing the cheerleaders, and wishing that I could be one, but other than that, there was nothing special about my day.
“You want to be a cheerleader?” asked Meri.
“Sure, in my dreams,” I chuckled.
Meri turned to Gloria, delicately asking, “Doreen Buchnar, right?”
“Mmm-hmm. She’s still the one.”
“Do we have enough?”
“Pff. We could write a book.”
“Let’s go. It’ll be fun.”
Gloria knocked firmly on the partition. “Driver. Football field. Now.”
And off we went to the stadium. I had no idea what was going on. The car stopped adjacent to the field, and Meri swung open her door.
“Do you want me to hold your martini for you?” I asked solicitously.
She looked at me askance. “Why?”
Off she went, holding her martini, gently sidestepping down the steep slope in four-inch heels to the cheerleaders. She pulled one girl aside, and it looked like they were having some sort of conference. Then they laughed and air-kissed, and Meri returned to the town car and shut the door. We were on our way back to the house. She put her arm around me.
“Okay. The girl I was talking to is Doreen Buchnar. She’s RU’s Cheer Squad coordinator.”
“Is she a friend of yours?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” barked Gloria.
“I’m—I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said Meri amiably. “Your first practice is tomorrow at three. There’s a home game this Friday. Gloria and I will try to come, but I doubt we’ll be able to stay the whole time.”
I was astounded. Did this mean what I thought it meant? I’m a cheerleader now? They want me? Doreen Buchnar wants me to be an RU cheerleader?
“It’s not a matter of want,” said Meri lightly. “It’s a matter of survival. For Doreen, at least.”
Boy, that Hoover File sure comes in handy. After dinner Lindsay and I painted each other’s nails in my room. I admitted to being a little concerned. Just a little. I mean, yes, thanks to Alpha Beta Delta and the Hoover File, I’m getting everything I’ve ever wanted: I don’t have to go to class if I don’t want to, I have an amazing new wardrobe, I’m popular, I have friends, I’m envied, and now I’m going to be a college cheerleader, which means a nice boyfriend can’t be too far behind. But is this ethical?
“No one’s being hurt,” offered Lindsay. “And we are being helped. It’s like Fantasy Island. What’s wrong with that?”
She had a point. A good one. Why shouldn’t I be helped? After everything I’ve had to endure in my stupid, pathetic life, why shouldn’t I be a college cheerleader? I ran my hands through my thick raven hair. A reassuring thought popped into my head. I deserve this. I deserve everything coming my way.
September 12
Dear Diary:
Fuckin’ A, man, I’m a cheerleader. Actually, it’s Doreen Buchnar who’s always saying, “Fuckin’ A, man.” She’s such a boisterous girl—a real city girl from New York City—and she was so completely welcoming when I showed up for my first RU cheerleader practice. The past few days have been so exciting: a whirlwind of cheer routines, cocktail parties at the house, dancing, and boys, boys, boys. Guess what? Lindsay has a boyfriend. Well, not a boyfriend-boyfriend, since they just met two nights ago at an Alpha Beta Delta fraternity reception, but a guy who really seems to like her and wants to go out with her. His name is Earl Fitzsimmons, and he’s a supersweet guy from Little Rock, Arkansas (his family knows the Clintons!). During the reception, I saw them walk off together for a stroll. Earl even held her umbrella for her, and I think he gave her a kiss on the cheek too. I didn’t see her for the rest of the night, and when I woke up in the morning, her Porsche was gone. An hour or so later she drove up to the house and I dashed out. I had to know everything.
“Let’s go somewhere for a coffee,” she squealed.
I climbed into the Porsche and we took off. Oh my God, she had a big hickey on her neck. I also noticed several footprints on the inside of the car’s roof, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me until she told me, “He has to share a room at his fraternity, so we slept in my car.”
“Why didn’t you bring him back to the house?”
She shot me a look. Didn’t I know? Shanna-Francine had told her all about all the mics and the surveillance, even though it’s supposed to be a secret. I’m so stupid. I had completely forgotten.
“It’s creepy,” said Lindsay, her mood darkening. “And totally unnecessary.”
“But it’s just until the election’s over next week,” I insisted.
“Uh-huh. So they say.”
Over lattes, Lindsay was brutally honest with me. She thinks Meri goes too far. Way too far. She doesn’t even like her anymore. In fact, she wouldn’t mind in the least if Meri lost the upcoming election. I had to laugh at that. Everyone loves Meri (including me). Who wouldn’t vote for her? They’re certainly not going to vote for me.
“Don’t be too sure of that,” she said evenly.
Uh-oh. It seems Lindsay’s been leading some sort of supersecret grassroots campaign to convince the girls to cast their vote for me, which is such a dumb idea. What the heck do I know about running a sorority?
“Well, for one, I bet you’d let us watch movies in English,” bellowed Lindsay. “And you wouldn’t have some stupid list of forbidden words, and I doubt someone as nice as you would blackmail people either, or try to ruin them if they didn’t do what you told them to do.”
Now I was really confused. Wasn’t it Lindsay who said living at Alpha Beta Delta was like living on Fantasy Island? I was the one who had ethical problems, not her (though I don’t anymore).
“I should have told you about this,” she whispered anxiously. “But I was afraid.”
She leaned in close. When I was away at practice yesterday, none other than Patty Camp had come to the house looking for me. Lindsay was the one who answered the door, and right away she told her that I was, like, so not available, and wouldn’t be available ever, period (Patty’s NOKD). But then Patty started crying. I was her only friend, she insisted, and she was very concerned about my mental well-being, and she promised to go away and leave me alone forever if she could just have one conversation with me—just to make sure I was holding up okay. Lindsay took pity on her and invited her in, and they went to my room to wait until I came home. A few seconds later Gloria charged in.
“You. Get out,” she barked at Patty.
Lindsay thought this was pretty rude, and she attempted to intervene—no one on the street had seen Patty come inside, and she would only be waiting for a few minutes—but it was too late. Patty was off like a gazelle. She practically ran out of the house. Lindsay was outraged.
“What was that about?” she screamed. “There’s no party going on. No one knew she was here. What? Is it against the rules? More dumb-ass rules?” Then she bitch-snapped her fingers in Gloria’s face. “That’s totally wack. I am so not down for that.”
In a huff, she stomped down the stairs, drove straight to the video store, came back, slumped on the couch, and popped a DVD in the player: Far from Heaven.
“I know, I know, it’s a stupid movie, but I was trying to make a point,” insisted Lindsay. “A sorority is not a fascist state.”
Meri made her point too. A few moments later she stepped into the living room and sat right next to Lindsay, calmly sipping an apple martini, watching the movie with her.
“They do get th
e look of Sirk right, don’t they?” she whispered delicately. “Not the emotions, but the look.”
“I like all of it,” responded Lindsay harshly. “I think it’s deep. And original.”
That’s when Meri told Lindsay a little story. A true story. Meri’s dad is the chairman and chief operating officer of Versalink, this superhuge conglomerate that Lindsay says is bigger than even Viacom or AOL Time-Warner. I guess that’s pretty big. As it turns out, Lindsay’s dad works for Tallyride, the biomedical and pharmaceutical research division of Versalink. Uh-oh. Meri also told her how “saddened” she was to learn that Lindsay’s been attempting to “coerce” girls to vote against her in the upcoming house election. That really knocked the wind out of Lindsay, since all along she’d thought her grassroots campaign was secret, and she hadn’t yet learned about the surveillance from Shanna-Francine, so she naturally thought that the other girls must have turned against her. But more than anything, she was completely freaked out for her dad.
“Brother, can you spare a dime?” asked Meri gently.
Then she stepped up to the TV, pressed the DVD eject button, and handed her the disc. Completely rattled, Lindsay tossed it into the fireplace and turned on the gas. Poof. Far from Heaven. Up in flames. Again.
“My hot tub needs to be drained and cleaned,” said Meri sweetly. Then she was off, leaving Lindsay trembling and terrified.
“She must have been having a bad day,” I asserted firmly. “Meri would never do anything to hurt your dad. That’s just silly.”
Lindsay looked up at me from her latte and smiled. I was so nice, she said, and so willing to see the good in everyone, which is why it’s been so easy for her to convince the other girls to vote for me.
“Stop doing that!”
I was adamant. I do feel bad for Lindsay, but at the same time, I think she’s way overdramatizing. She’s even decided not to see Earl anymore, since she’s afraid that Meri will blackmail him, too (which makes no sense at all). True, bugging and surveillance isn’t exactly normal—but I doubt shielding yourself with an umbrella 24/7 is high on anyone’s hit parade of “normal” behavior either. We all have our idiosyncrasies. Look at me. I was a total and complete loser, but thanks to Meri, I have everything now.
I didn’t go to class later. I just didn’t feel like it. At cheer practice, I did a little better than the day before, even though I made a total fool out of myself when I slipped and fell off the pyramid. I hit the ground hard, face forward. Then I heard a sudden, piercing whistle, and suddenly I was levitated. I was being carried in the air and back to the locker room by three totally handsome football players. I was dazed at first. Did I smell a cigar? Whoosh. I was carried right past Keith Ryder. Oh my God. He winked. At me! The players set me down gently in the locker room and I assured them that I was okay, nothing was broken, I wasn’t even bruised. But one of the players insisted on massaging my calf, and I have to say, it did make me feel a little better, though all I could think about was Keith. He winked!
There was a big surprise in store for me when I returned to the house. Two small helicopters were landing, one on our front lawn and the other on the lawn of the adjacent house, and Meri and Gloria were escorting the girls inside them, along with many of the girls’ boyfriends.
“You’ve got two seconds to change,” snapped Gloria.
Then off we went, soaring into the sky. We were on our way to Le Loup, a superfancy restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper three towns over.
“I hear the room rotates!” squealed Shanna-Francine.
I’d never been in a helicopter before. I was a little nervous, and I tried not to look out the window, but then I figured, that’s silly, this is fun, I should look. I gazed out tentatively. Whoa. We were high in the air already. I could see the top of our house, the front lawn, and a small figure hunched on the patio in the back of the house. I gasped.
“Lindsay?”
Shanna-Francine shrugged. “Handsies-kneesies.”
Boy, these girls know how to party. We had the entire restaurant to ourselves (it really rotates!). I was a little sad, though. It seemed like practically everyone there had a boyfriend except for me. After dessert (it was flaming!), we had cordials, and Meri sat down next to me and lit a cigarette.
“How’s my little bow-wow?” she inquired softly. “How’s practice going?”
I told her everything was fantastic, more than fantastic, more than I ever could have hoped for, and it was all thanks to her. The only thing missing from my life was a nice boyfriend, but since I’ve never really had one before, it wasn’t like it was actually “missing” from my life, just absent, as usual.
“Hmm, I can’t help you there,” she mused. “I mean, I suppose I could, but I’m not worried. I have faith in you. You’ll find a boyfriend.”
Meri has faith in me. Wow. As Doreen Buchnar would say, “Fuckin’ A, man.” It turns out she was right, too. This morning I woke up completely optimistic and decided to go to my classes. Why not? It was game day, the day when RU cheerleaders are required to wear their outfits from dawn till dusk. As if they could stop me. I felt like a movie star. People stopped to chat with me—it seemed like everyone was planning on going to the game tonight—and Professor Scott said I had “nice gams,” which is complimentary, I guess, though coming from him it was kind of skeevy. I hadn’t bothered to read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities for his class today (I’ve been way too busy), but he didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, I had to leave class early, since it was time to go to the football stadium and prep for tonight’s game.
I’m not really much for sports, and I never really knew what was going on when I watched football on TV with Dad, but the game tonight was unbelievably exciting. In between cheers, I couldn’t take my eyes off Keith. He made one touchdown after another with the help of Jesse “Pigboy” Washington, this really huge black guy who ran ahead of Keith to protect him whenever he was running for the goal line. Unfortunately, Meri and Gloria didn’t come, but I did see Shanna-Francine and a couple of the other girls in the stands, and farther up in the bleachers, I thought I saw Lindsay sitting with Patty, but I must have been imagining things. Lindsay may be in the doghouse with Meri right now, but I seriously doubt she’d risk making things worse by going to a football game with Patty. Poor Patty. Maybe I’ll sneak her a note or an e-mail sometime and let her know everything’s okay. It’s sweet of her to be concerned—and kind of annoying, too. She’s seen me around campus, she knows I have new friends, and if that really was her in the bleachers, she knows I’m an RU cheerleader, too. What does she think? I’m depressed?
RU won the game, and right after, Doreen and the cheerleaders invited me to go to a kegger at the Kappa Kappa Kappa frat house, but I was exhausted. I’ve partied so much this week, and truthfully, I wanted to find Meri and tell her all about the game and thank her, too, for making so many of my dreams come true. I also wanted to look for Lindsay and see if there was anything I could do to help her out of the fix she was in with Meri. Maybe I can negotiate some sort of truce. Boy, am I glad I didn’t go to that kegger. After I changed out of my outfit, I walked out of the stadium and strolled through the parking lot. It was pretty empty and beer cans were everywhere. One by one, the parking lot streetlights started to go out. Great, I thought, I’ll be walking in complete darkness. Car lights suddenly swept past—aiming right in my face. Blinded, I held my hand up, and I heard a bark, then I was knocked backward to the ground. It was Rags.
“Need a ride to the kegger?” asked Keith.
My heart did a billion somersaults. Before I knew it, he was picking me up off the ground. I was standing right before him—he was holding my hand, he was staring into my eyes, he was smiling. I could barely talk. Somehow I managed to communicate that I was going straight home to Alpha Beta Delta. I gasped. His hand was running through my hair.
Hazing Meri Sugarman Page 11