The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  For ten days leading up to rush, before the semester began, sisters returned to Gainesville early to put in mandatory fourteen-hour days rehearsing songs and skits and building sets for the song-and-dance numbers they’d put on during rush “parties,” crafting a convincingly ridiculous front to conceal the evil-genius mechanism at work behind it. This is what Betsy had come to witness now, to see the evidence that it was real, and was all still happening without her.

  It was impossible to watch them file into the house and not let a flood of memories come rushing back.

  Betsy first met Ginny and Caroline on Bid Day, the afternoon when rushees learned which house they pledged and then sprinted to the sorority with mascara-stained tears of joy streaming down their faces. The three of them had run down the sidewalk to the steps in front of the house searching for the signs with their names. Betsy had noticed both of them during rush and marveled at how confident they were, how entirely at ease. Only later did she learn that Ginny had been visiting her older sister, M.J., who graduated in 1987, at the house since she’d been an awkward seventh-grader in a Snoopy T-shirt and braces. Caroline also knew the security code on the front door before rush even started. Her mother, Viv Finnerty, pledge class of 1968, was a successful real estate agent in Miami and, because of her gold Kieselstein-Cord belts, St. John jackets, and icy blonde bob, Viv was the most glamorous woman Betsy had ever met. Ginny and Caroline were both “legacies,” which meant that they had a family member, a sister, mother, or even grandmother, who was a member of the sorority. Viv left school to get married in the middle of her sophomore year and had Caroline six months later. But the sorority was nothing if not loyal. Once you were in, you were in for as long as you wanted to be, as long as you paid your dues and you weren’t asked to resign. So Viv rarely missed an alumni weekend, and a stack of recommendations from her most socially prominent peers were stapled to Caroline’s rush application.

  During those first weeks, when they took Betsy under their wings and showed her the ropes, the two of them together were pure magic. Ginny was the sparkly, impish sidekick to the deviously charming Caroline. Betsy soon learned that they could talk their way into any party, walk past the velvet rope to the front of any line, or drive past security guards onto restricted areas of campus with a wink and a wave. Their appeal went beyond that of a pretty girl who could cry her way out of a speeding ticket. On that first night out, after Caroline introduced Betsy to every guy at the bar as her cousin Ruta from Latvia, Betsy would follow them anywhere.

  “She barely speaks English,” Caroline said, shaking her head. “I mean, the accent is impossible to understand. I get, like, every fifth word on a good day.”

  Betsy fumbled with a bad impression of Count von Count from Sesame Street.

  “I said Latvia, not Transylvania,” Caroline said, as they stumbled out of the bar. “Five! Five stupid boys, ah ah ah.”

  Ginny showed both of them M.J.’s secret spot where you could scale the wall of the football stadium for a midnight sprint down the fifty-yard line. They made it across and back and halfway over the fence before they heard the security guard shouting after them. When they made it to the car, Caroline waved at him and shout-sang the school fight song as they sped away. Just riding in their wake was enough to erase all of the infinite times Betsy didn’t feel special. She basked in their attention, their invincibility, their reflected glow, until she didn’t.

  Physically, Caroline and Betsy were more similar than Betsy and Ginny were. They were roughly the same height, with light hair and eyes, born just a few months apart. That’s where their similarities ended. Betsy was tall and lanky with dirty blonde hair. Objectively, she was pretty, but she did everything she could to not draw attention to it. She tried to fold herself like an origami bird into a smaller body to avoid standing above the crowd. She was funny and wry if you were standing close enough to hear the sly remarks. She noticed everything, examining her surroundings so carefully, paying special attention to the flaws that no one else caught. The fact that she noticed things proved problematic at times. At the most basic level, the whole social framework of sorority life hinged on the idea that everyone bought into it, that they sang the songs, and held hands, and flashed beaming smiles in photos with a total commitment to their sisterhood. Betsy had questions and doubts, and that made her more threatening than she realized.

  Caroline, on the other hand, was imperious. She had the strong, tan shoulders, sharp clavicles and perfectly streaked blonde hair of a girl who’d grown up playing country club sports, and a quicksilver quality that lent her humor, which was sharp and unrelenting, a kind of menacing, unpredictable edge. One minute, you were in on the joke and the next, you were stunned silent when you realized you were the joke.

  Ginny was petite and dark-haired with a gentler kind of confidence. Life was fantastically easy for her. Even the way she drove struck Betsy as simultaneously careless and graceful, her brown doe-like eyes saw everything but the road in front of her. Betsy would grip the sides of the passenger seat and wince, tensing her body for the impending car wrecks that somehow never materialized. Betsy had had close girlfriends before, but Ginny was her favorite. She saved her from Caroline’s mean streak, from a lonely summer, from herself.

  She felt a tinge of sympathy for the incoming sophomores, who were showing up newly SlimFasted and wide-eyed with anticipation. Since they’d been initiated only a semester earlier, this was their first glimpse behind the scenes at the production that had seduced them so completely just a year before. She guessed it wouldn’t take many of them long to connect the dots and realize how they’d all been duped, that their fate had practically been sealed before they even walked in the door. Betsy noticed a few people from her pledge class, who were entering their senior year, as the stragglers who were filing in last. They’d put in their time for three years and their numbers had dwindled, gradually. A few girls had transferred, a couple had been kicked out for not meeting the minimum grade-point average or for unbecoming behavior, and a handful just stopped showing up entirely and no one seemed to notice or care. All active members needed to be present for rush, and every day of pre-rush a sister missed there was a hefty fifty-dollar fine. Caroline wasn’t due to be back for two days, four days late in total. No one dared complain about her missing so much time because Caroline was a master at recruiting pledges, blinding the truly clueless with her singular magnetism. She was what they call a closer, in that Glengarry Glen Ross kind of way, and would do whatever it took to seal the deal and get the girl. Being rushed by Caroline was to experience the art of seduction at its best. She was a sly manipulator, skilled at reading people, matching the tone and volume of their voices; Betsy had watched as she focused that laser beam charm on any guileless girl they’d place in front of her, intuiting what she wanted to hear with stunning precision. Betsy saw what happened to the girls who had Caroline’s eyes locked on them. Her glow was as warm as the sun.

  AT FIRST, THE group of fifteen hundred is divided into ten groups of one hundred fifty, all organized alphabetically under the white tents pitched on the front lawns of the street known as Sorority Row. The five-day round robin started with each group spending twenty minutes at all of the sixteen prospective houses over two days. They’d arrive at their designated starting point, fanning themselves with the rush catalogue, which was printed with pictures of each of the houses carefully selected to convey the subtly coded messages of the communal “personality” of the house. The sisters of one house are studious, from good families with good reputations but—truth be told—a little staid. Theirs is a reputable house that a fraternity would partner with for homecoming if they had been especially naughty and needed to tidy their reputation with the school administration. The girls in the neighboring house are beautiful, but with slightly looser morals. They are game for not just a toga party, but a wet toga party, where entire rooms were sandbagged and filled with a foot of fetid water and spraying hoses for the occasion. The only discernible cl
ues that tipped you off to this distinction were that, in the pictures, their shorts were an inch shorter, their hair a little bigger. There is a sorority for the party girls, one for the Jewish girls who iron their T-shirts, and another for the Jewish girls who follow the Dead, worship Jerry, and hang tie-dyed tapestries on their dorm room walls. There are two black sororities, and a sort of unspoken assumption that the Asian girls are too focused on premed for such useless distractions. The process is surprisingly efficient. There is a sorority for the conservative Southern girls, the ones with tight bows tied to their ponytails who give blow jobs by the dozen but refuse to give up their virginity before marriage. The top three houses duked it out for the 10 percent at the highest end of the food chain and then would fill in the remaining slots with legacies and some dark horses who’d make it past the finish line by a nose. Once Betsy made it to the other side of the curtain, she’d determined she had been one of those.

  The idea that Betsy would pledge sort of began with her mom. While she didn’t actually come right out and tell her daughter that she wanted her to be a part of the Greek system, because Kathy didn’t come right out and say anything directly, it was strongly implied over the years that Kathy craved a kind of social acceptance for her only daughter, her only child, that she herself had never experienced. Kathy never went to college. She was popular and pretty and met Betsy’s father in high school in Connecticut. She took a job in a typing pool after graduation, passing her time while he was away at Amherst. They married in the summer after his senior year and Betsy was born in the spring. Betsy was barely a year old when Kathy discovered that her husband was having an affair with a girl he’d met in school. Threats were made. Plates were thrown. It went on for years, until Betsy’s durable memory was intact, until he finally made a decision. Later, when Betsy struggled to imagine what had happened between her parents, it occurred to her that he bailed when he realized the “other woman” wouldn’t wait forever. Kathy packed their suitcases, scraped together whatever cash she could, and let Betsy play on the floor of the backseat of their Oldsmobile during their long drive down I-95 to Florida, the land of eternal sunshine and fresh starts. She got a job as an office manager for a hotel chain. It was made clear that Kathy was filled with remorse about her choices, and that, deep down beneath all of that anger, she felt that Betsy’s father had chosen the better woman, the kind of woman who went to college and, she could only assume, was in a sorority. Kathy was the kind of woman who collected the September issues of Vogue and dreamed of a better life. She beamed when Betsy’s rush application arrived in the mail from the National Pan-Hellenic Council. It was a life she wanted her daughter to be a part of, and what Betsy wanted was beside the point.

  Yet the more Betsy discovered about herself, the more she found the myth of the only child baffling. Betsy’s experience was different. She was supposed to be competent, self-reliant, and possess life skills acquired from attentive parents that her peers with siblings did not. But she couldn’t shake the loneliness, the connection she was missing with her own detached mother, and the mystery of her father, who would reappear for awkward annual visits during her childhood, but vanished altogether by the time she was fourteen. Betsy understood that the reason she had attached herself to the sorority was because she’d never had a sister. At first, she wanted to be a part of it to please her mother, to prove that she belonged somewhere, that she had a hundred sisters, despite the fact that, even from the beginning, she felt like a fraud.

  Once you were inside the system and assigned to one of the three houses you selected as your favorites, ranked in order—assuming that at least one of the three houses wanted you back—the Greek letters you wore emblazoned on your chest determined your entire life. At first, it was just where and with whom you partied and which fraternity socials you would attend, and which ones you considered beneath you. The letters were social shorthand, a way of communicating to everyone else on campus that you had been deemed the most beautiful, the most popular, the most desirable. Betsy didn’t realize it until she was on the other side of the wizard’s curtain, but she learned soon enough that a great many of these women would forever identify themselves by which sorority they’d joined when they were eighteen or nineteen, like Viv, or Ginny’s sister, M.J. When they stood up for the first time to introduce themselves at a school committee or a local charity board, they wouldn’t say, “I’m a marketing manager” or “I’m passionate about ocean conservancy.” They’d say, “I was an ADPi at Florida State,” or a “Tri Delt at Bama,” or a “Kappa at Georgia,” or a “Pi Phi at UT.” That said it all.

  But in that moment, the future is unthinkable. As these unsuspecting girls are shuttled through plush, carpeted halls amid all of those beaming smiles, all anyone can worry about is whether she has lipstick on her teeth.

  When the ceremonies began, a row of perfectly coiffed smiling girls would trot out on the long sidewalks that led to the imposing front doors to line up and greet their pretty prey with a song, typically a show tune with the words altered slightly to reflect their near-maniacal enthusiasm for their bonds of sisterhood. They’d laugh and wink, because everyone knew it was embarrassing schlock. And when they were finished singing, the sisters would lock eyes with one girl under the tent, make introductions, and offer her a glimpse into her future, showing her the possibilities of what may be awaiting them behind door number one, two, or three, if only they came up with the right answer before the buzzer sounded.

  Someone blonde and smiling would lead Jenn (two Ns, recently dropped Y) from Tuscaloosa into the great room and kneel on the pale peach carpet beside her. Jenn would tuck her hands into the folds of her Laura Ashley dress and listen, as Ginny or Betsy or Caroline or any of the other sisters would start the mind-blender, nimbly steering the conversation to a topic, like a recent family vacation to Paris and a visit to the Louvre, that felt like an eerily familiar, nearly Psychic Friends moment.

  “That’s so strange,” Jenn would say, astonished, “because I plan to double major in French and Art History!” She never suspected, of course, that the sisters had seen her photo at least a dozen times. It was flashed against a white sheet tacked to the wall in a slideshow of this year’s pledge class dream team, also known as “board girls,” so named because their photos were also glue-sticked onto poster boards hung around the house. All of the rushees had been vetted by their application, which always included a photo, a brief bio, their high school GPA, and three references, or “recs.” The rush committee would spend hours sifting through the paperwork and select the fifty most desirable incoming freshmen for that year. Then they’d run lunchtime drills, quizzing everyone about the details of Jenn’s high school résumé over salads drowned in ranch dressing. Her picture would appear on the screen in the chapter room. “Jenn! Alabama! Dance team captain! Volleyball! French! Painter!”

  In the back of the room, lying under the piano and flipping through a fashion magazine written in a language she couldn’t read, Caroline nudged Betsy and said, “Oh my God, did you notice? Man hands.”

  It didn’t matter what Caroline actually thought of the board girls. She would captivate them. What made her particularly ruthless was that she’d also bond with the unsuspecting anonymous ones, the ones who didn’t stand a chance, in an expertly insouciant “isn’t this all just a waste of time?” way. After Caroline deposited her victim back under the tent, she’d turn away, maybe she’d roll her eyes just the tiniest bit, and then grab a red felt-tip marker to cross the name off of the list, swiftly, when she was barely through the door. “Spotters,” sisters in charge of identifying the MVPs under the crowded tent through parted blinds, had the job of procuring the rarest specimens and getting them into the hands of the sister they’d relate to the most. By the third round, Caroline had worked her magic on Jenn. She’d grabbed her vascular man hand, even when rush guidelines strictly forbade any physical contact, and led her into her room upstairs for a lip gloss touch-up. Meeting behind closed doors in a priva
te room was an even more egregiously illegal maneuver than touching. Then, she invited her to a keg party later that night, and made a “you completely know that your picture’s going to be on that wall next year” well-outside-the-guidelines confession. Caroline was a dirty rusher, and she’d been reported to the “authorities” that monitor these proceedings and reprimanded more than once. Never in the long history of sororities and sorority rush had anyone given less of a shit about that.

  The way Betsy’s former sisters saw it, there were three top sororities (though theirs was the best, of course) and four respectable second-tier houses. There was always serious attrition after the first round, dropouts who were either smart enough to rise above it or to realize they were about to be eaten alive. The ones who stuck it out were divvied out to the remaining nine houses.

  Rush got particularly ugly during the debates about who among the young women who attended the “parties” that day would be invited back for the next round, thus narrowing the field from fifteen hundred to five hundred to one hundred fifty and then the final fifty, who’d receive bids. Names were brought up individually for discussion, and the process was agonizing and endless. Sisters would flee the room in tears so the rest of the house could discuss the fate of their biological, as in genetic sister, who was criticized for wearing pleather flats, or who made the mistake of admitting she slept at her boyfriend’s house the night before. Officially, the sorority discouraged catty comments of all kinds, so there was a shorthand among the most ruthless sisters to avoid being reprimanded. To be fair, Betsy knew that other people struggled with the process, but they seemed content just to keep their heads down and stay out of it. But that was the part that Betsy remembered most vividly, as she stood straddling that bike in the parking lot. She couldn’t ignore it.