“Bets? You OK?”
“You’ve got to pull over, now.”
Ginny pulled the car to the curb so Betsy could open the passenger door, hang her head out of the side, and launch a river of orange ick into the gutter off of Archer Road.
CHAPTER 2
DIRTY RUSHERS
August 23, 1990
On her way home from work, Betsy took the pink bike on a detour along the southern edge of campus, past Norman Hall, which was directly behind Sorority Row. She stopped in the parking lot under a shady tree, a couple of hundred yards away from the rear entrance of her former sorority house. She felt an urgent, morbid curiosity, and wanted proof that the world continued to revolve without her. She watched from a distance as people hurried up and down the back stairwell, shuttling suitcases and boxes. She’d lost touch with most of the friends she’d made during her two and a half years there, though their faces were all still so familiar. Ginny was the only one who didn’t stop calling after she turned in her pin. Caroline stuck around, but Betsy was convinced it was only for the entertainment value. She liked to watch Betsy suffer.
It was the last Friday in August, and fifteen hundred freshmen girls in linen sundresses were about to emerge from their newly assigned dorm rooms, with their stiff sheets just out of the package and freshly stocked mini-fridges, to participate in the ritual of sorority rush, which had been happening on campus since 1948. In Florida, securing a bid from one of the university’s sixteen houses also involved wrestling with a perpetually sweaty upper lip, oppressive humidity, and a caste system so complicated that it left everyone involved baffled and a little bruised.
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.