“Y’all, I just think she’d be happier elsewhere,” someone would say, a handily coded euphemism for “not a chance.” The chapter president would call a name and open the floor for discussion and if the “scary balloon”—a helium balloon that Margie, a mean girl from Vero Beach, had scrawled a scowl on with a black Sharpie marker—rose above their heads like the Bat-Signal, they were doomed. Not everyone was in on the joke, but there were enough sisters who knew what it meant that their votes would add up, and, just like that, they tallied the raised hands and she was “happier elsewhere.” Margie once made a tearful speech at 2:00 a.m., after a blistering day of singing and talking trash about people, that revealed how her big-shot Daddy would not pay her annual dues if he knew that the biracial girl (Betsy would never forget: Shannon. Salutatorian. Macon.) had been offered a spot in his sweet angel’s sorority. Betsy was shocked by her own reaction, which was stunned silence by intimidation, and never forgave herself for not speaking up. Shannon eventually pledged a black sorority, and Betsy would find herself scanning the crowds between classes, searching for her face as she pedaled through campus, unsure of what she would say, if she’d say anything at all, if she found her. Their paths never crossed again.
Betsy couldn’t explain why she’d endured rush in the first place, and she often ran through every possible excuse she could think of to justify it. She had some kind of bizarre obligation to her competitive streak. She’d never been able to resist wanting something that was perceived as hard to get, whether it was an A, or a cute guy, or a position on the drill team, or one of fifty coveted spots in a sorority pledge class. She wanted to make her mother proud. The school itself was so immense that she figured she’d need a way to shrink it in order to find a manageable circle of friends. She wanted people to think she was OK, that she was likable and popular, even though most of the time she felt anything but. She wanted a little of the magic, of the Ginnys and the Carolines with their surplus of charm. By surrounding herself with so many rows of perfect teeth, a hundred overachieving young women with respectable GPAs in cotton floral sundresses, Betsy felt special by proxy. Befriending Ginny cemented her status and made her think, for a little while at least, that all of those feelings of acceptance were true and real. When she followed Ginny and Caroline at a party, Betsy would catch the looks that were first cast on them and then lingered on her, the way people would pause to remember her face, to wonder who she was or if they’d ever seen her somewhere before. Betsy noticed how everyone, busy bartenders, campus traffic cops, even the guy at the Taco Bell drive-thru, treated her differently when she was with them.
BUT DESPITE ALL of that, it wasn’t long before Betsy decided she wanted out. Like all secret societies, when a person is inducted into a fraternity or a sorority there is an unspoken agreement that comes along with the tiny gold pin. The system relies on people not looking too closely for flaws and, more specifically, not sharing the unsavory elements they may see with anyone on the outside. But it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Betsy wasn’t buying it, and that made her a sort of threat, someone who couldn’t be entirely trusted, despite her allegiance to Ginny and Caroline, who often dismissed the flaws that Betsy would point out with a shrug.
“It’s just how it is,” Ginny would say, when Betsy pointed out the complicated social hierarchy, the strange double standards. “You take the good with the bad, I guess.” Betsy realized it was the sorority that created her friendship with Ginny and Caroline in the first place, and that it felt wrong to doubt the very institution that shored her self-esteem enough to give her the nerve to walk out on it. But the whole situation was causing her more pain than pleasure, piling layers onto what was surely an existential crisis in the way that Joan Didion wrote about, that the beauty, and the torture, of being young is that you think that you’re the only one who’d ever felt those feelings or asked those questions or lived that life. Or something like that, since Betsy was never much good with quotes.
The fact was that once she got behind the scenes, there wasn’t much magic left at all. It just felt like one, big long obligation and an endless litany of fines, weekly fraternity mixers with sagging card tables covered with gallon bottles of Popov vodka and Ocean Spray cranberry juice, trashcans full of ominous grain alcohol and Kool-Aid hunch punch, and then the battery of chastising looks from the sisters when any female guest dared to drink it. There was only one Ginny, but there were ten others like Dana—a scowling senior from the Panhandle who paced the house holding a plastic pitcher of water and a cup, which she would fill and drink obsessively in an effort to lose weight while she barked at pledges to answer the phone. Caroline’s wicked but hysterical humor was drowned out by earnest Amy and snobby Shelly, who turned and left the room if they walked in and saw that Betsy, a known troublemaker, was in it. Betsy was used to feeling uneasy in her surroundings, like she was never quite of the place where she was from, but in that world, it was the stifling scrutiny that broke her. She decided that she wanted out. For one deluded instant, she thought maybe Ginny would leave the sorority with her. She was wrong.
Finally, by the end of summer, she felt settled in her new ostracized life. She’d had enough of Caroline, though Ginny would not give up her efforts to make peace between them. Betsy had one more semester, then she could put all of this behind her for good. In the blazing afternoon sun, her eyes stung with sweat and bad memories as she got back on the bike and rode to Ginny’s, undetected, to wait for the storm.
CHAPTER 3
WELCOME BACK