“I don’t think so. He didn’t say it was.”
I went to the party, and I went alone. Eric was there, behind the bar when I first arrived, and he made me a vodka tonic without asking me what I wanted first. Then he took me by the arm and introduced me to several St. Dunstan’s members before returning to his bartending duties. He said it was a rotating Thursday night job and he’d drawn the short straw. I was slightly disappointed with the interior of the Manor, expecting something that more closely matched its Gothic exterior. I don’t know what exactly. Persian rugs and leather chairs? Instead, it was a slightly nicer version of the other fraternities I’d been to my freshman year. Low-ceilinged rooms, tatty furniture, and the ubiquitous smell of Marlboro Lights and cheap beer. I wandered its first-floor rooms, talking to several members, many of whom asked me about my father. After drinking my third vodka I went to the bar to say good-bye to Eric and thank him for inviting me.
“Come next week,” he said, and dug out another skull invite for me from his pocket. “I won’t be bartending.”
When I got home, Jessica pressed me for every detail. I told the truth, that there was nothing particularly interesting about St. Dunstan’s, and that everyone there seemed nice while not being wildly fascinating. I told her there were no secret passageways, or initiation rituals. I told her that there wasn’t a room lined with the skulls of freshman girls.
“Gross, Lily. You didn’t meet Matthew Ford, did you?”
“I met a Matthew. He was short with long bangs.”
“God, he’s hot.”
For better or for worse, St. Dunstan’s became my primary social life that winter and spring. I went to all their Thursday night parties, and an occasional dinner party as one of the members’ date. I wasn’t sure why I was invited as often as I was. Eric seemed to have a girlfriend, a fellow junior named Faith who tended to hang around him toward the end of most parties. One night, I walked into the billiard room at the Manor and saw them kissing. They were pressed up against a built-in bookshelf. Faith was on the tips of her toes, and even so, Eric had to stoop to kiss her. One of his hands was tangled in her hair and the other was pressed against the small of her back. Eric was facing me and we made brief eye contact as I backed out of the room.
Other members of the society (St. Dunstan’s was technically not a fraternity, and they didn’t refer to themselves as brothers) would occasionally make a pass at me, but never in the groping, sweaty way that I had experienced at fraternity houses the few times I had gone with Jessica my fall semester. No, the passes at Thursday night parties were usually slurred compliments about my looks, followed by clumsy offers of another drink, or some other recreational drug, in their dorm room. I always refused, not because the boys who made the offers were particularly repellent but because, despite the presence of beautiful, dark-haired Faith, I was in love with Eric Washburn, and had been, since the first party at the Manor, when he had slipped from behind the bar to guide me around the rooms, introducing me to his friends. It was the way he had held my arm, just above the elbow, as though he were telling me, and others, that I belonged to him, if only slightly. Eric was the reason I kept going to St. Dunstan’s, although I enjoyed talking to other members, even when they were making drunken passes. The boys I met there could easily have been classified as preppy snobs, boys who had been born on third base and thought they hit a triple (as my mother often quoted), but they were also usually polite, and made conversation in which the main point was not how wasted they had been the night before, or how wasted they planned on getting tonight. They were boys pretending to be men, so they tried a little harder to impress me with thoughts on politics, and ideas about literature. And even if it was all a ruse, I appreciated the effort.