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 clues 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.