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 private 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.