Brimstone (36 page)

“Sure.” I reached into my little handbag and fished it out. She pulled the paper from her plastic holder. Under her name—Holly Russell—she wrote “ΣAΞ Legacy” while I peered shamelessly over her shoulder.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Efficient.” She grinned at me and folded the card back into its sleeve.

“Why efficient?” I asked. I knew from the interminable orientation that a legacy was someone whose close relative was a member of a certain sorority.

“Spares everyone the trouble of making nice when it’s a done deal.”

A legacy wasn’t supposed to be an automatic in, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. “I guess that explains why Zeta Theta Pi asked me back.”

“You’re a Zeta leg?” She handed me the pen. “Write it down. It’ll impress the other houses. Everyone loves the Zetas.”

“Really?” I glanced at the double front doors, emblazoned with Z??. I’d been there yesterday, of course, but those parties had been short and the houses pretty much blurred together. “Why?”

“Because they’re cool, why else?”

I tried to picture my mother in a cool sorority and failed
utterly. My mother is an accountant. “What about the Sigma Alpha Xis?” I pointed to Holly’s name badge. “Did you write that to impress people?”

She sighed. “No. I wrote it so they won’t feel they have to bother being nice to me. No SAXi leg goes anywhere but SAXi.”

“What are they, like the mafia?”

She barked an Irish setter laugh. “No. Not exactly.”

The Zeta doors opened before I could ask her anything else, and we flowed in, carried by the inexorable tide of Sisterhood with a capital
S
.

Our merry band left the Zeta house as the sun dropped low in the west.

“Didn’t I say?” Holly shortened her strides and we hung at the back of the pack along with Tricia, making our way toward the SAXi house near the center of the block.

“You did.” The Zeta Theta Pis exemplified cool: effortless, amiable, seemingly unconcerned with status or social hierarchy. That unforced confidence reminded me of my friend Lisa. She’d gotten tagged with the nickname D&D Lisa during the role-playing phase of her youth, but by the time she graduated summa cum laude, it had become more of a title. Uniquely beautiful (once she emerged from her Goth cocoon), smart, and sarcastic, she wasn’t part of any group at Avalon High, but she had an impressive network of minions and a small fiefdom of friends.

She’d be pissed to think she had anything in common with a sorority. Maybe I just missed her because there was so much on Greek Row worthy of mockery, and I had no one to
share it with. I hated that she was so far away, and hated even more that we’d argued before she left.

“I would totally pledge the Zetas if they gave me a bid.” Tricia bounced with excitement, which was a brave thing for a girl with her generous bosoms in a strapless dress.

“I thought your heart was set on Delta Delta Gamma.”

“Well, all my friends from home, who have already finished Rush at other schools, they went Delta.” She laughed, but there was a brittle edge to it. “I’d be the only one from the old squad who didn’t, and what fun would that be?”

“A lot more fun than doing something just because your old friends are doing it.” I’d gotten a fix on Tricia pretty quickly. Sweet and eager to be liked; girls like the Deltas would smell her insecurity the way sharks smell blood in the water.

Holly spoke from her other side, sounding very reasonable. “You should pledge where you have the most in common with the members here at this school.” I found myself liking her, and Tricia’s naïve good nature kind of grew on me, too. If we had met under different circumstances, or if I was who I said I was, I might be thinking of them as new friends, or at least potential ones.

“Maggie?”

I recognized that baritone voice instantly, though I’d last heard it distorted by a transatlantic phone connection.

Darn Gran and her stupid Sight.

Slowly I turned, conscious that Holly and Tricia had stopped, too, and were staring curiously at the tallish young man across the tree-shaded lane.

He wore running clothes, was flushed and sweaty. His
brown hair stood up in spikes and his T-shirt clung in dark blotches, which looked nicer than it sounds. Despite the utter lack of traffic, he looked both ways before he crossed the street, which was so very Justin that I felt a painful, twisty flip in the region of my heart.

I waited, feeling strangely tentative considering how much I’d missed him. A zillion questions hopped around in my brain, but something knotted my tongue. Maybe it was the way he smiled and moved as if to embrace me, but then stopped when he saw our audience.

Holly seemed to have some intuition of her own, because she grabbed Tricia’s arm, spun her around, and double-timed to catch up with the group. But the moment had passed, and Justin and I shuffled in that awkward way you do when you really want to touch a person but a hug might be too much and a handshake is definitely absurd. A kiss, which was how we had parted, seemed out of the question.

“I haven’t heard from you,” I blurted out, because a moment like that can always use more awkward.

He looked sheepish, apologetic. “I know. Jet lag, then getting my stuff out of storage, then I had to meet with my adviser about my thesis. The days got away from me.”

“Okay.” I didn’t point out that he’d found time for a run. I didn’t point out a lot of things because I didn’t want to be snide, and sarcasm is pretty much all I have when I feel this out of my depth.

His gaze took in my uncharacteristic dress, then narrowed on my name tag. “Are you going through
Rush
?”

I smoothed the folds of my skirt. The evening air was cooling quickly as the sun disappeared. “I’m undercover.”

He had a crooked smile that always hit me in the gut. It turned his clean-cut, Boy Scout face into something subversively rakish. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee and hear about it?”

“I’d like that.” I said it in shamelessly eager haste. “But I have to finish this first. Why don’t we meet at F and J? About nine o’clock?”

He nodded, decisive. “Froth and Java, nine o’clock.”

“Maggie!” Jenna called back from the group, sounding impatient and a little annoyed.

“I’ve got to run.” I edged up the hill, reluctant to leave and break the tentative reconnection.

“See you then.” He smiled and gave me a little wave.

“Yeah. See you.” I lifted my fingers, too, and watched him return to his workout already in progress, wishing my psychic mojo extended to reading minds.

The Sigma Alpha Xi house was in the colonial revival style, popular when the university and its nearby neighborhoods were built in the late nineteenth, early-twentieth century. The lawn sloped down from the house and the rushee herd ranged there when Jenna and I arrived; the Rho Gamma climbed the steps to the columned portico, where she rapped on the door. Holly and Tricia waited for me at the back of the group, near the sidewalk. Night had fallen in earnest, but didn’t hide their avidly curious faces.

“
Who
was that?” Holly asked.

“A friend.” At her disbelieving look, I sighed and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “It’s complicated.”

She made an “I’m waiting” gesture. Tricia helpfully added, “I want to know, too. He’s adorable.”

Holly turned to her, her brows climbing. “Adorable does
not begin to describe a guy with thighs like that.” Then, swiveling her attention back to me: “So what gives?”

I looked toward the house, hoping for a reprieve. No dice. “We went out in the spring, a couple of times.” An oversimplification, but—taking all the world-saving and monster-hunting out of it—true enough. “Then he went to Ireland for a three-month internship.”

“So what’s so complicated?” Holly asked. “He’s back and obviously happy to see you—” Tricia snickered and Holly smacked her arm. “Not like that, pervert.”

I shrugged, looked away, needlessly smoothed my hair again. “We e-mailed over the summer. Great, chatty letters about nothing and everything.”

“That’s so sweet.” Tricia grinned. “Kind of like
You’ve Got Mail
.”

“Yeah. Only in reverse, because his letters started getting shorter, less personal, slower.” I lifted my hands helplessly. “It sounds lame, I guess. Hard to explain.”

They nodded, synchronized head bobs of sympathy. Holly summed it up nicely. “So now you have no idea where you stand.”

“He probably got really busy with his internship.” Tricia, clearly the eternal optimist. “You’ll see.”

“Maybe.” I studied the toes of my shoes, flecked with grass and bits of pine needle. There was no point in pretending that my heart wasn’t hanging in the balance; at least after meeting up tonight, I would—

Then the door to the sorority house opened, spilling light into the dusky shadows and bringing me back to the task at hand.

The Sigma Alpha Xi chapter room was nothing short of elegant. Hardwood floors shone beneath an oriental rug, and dark blue and deep red echoed through the décor. No one thing screamed money; it was the way everything fit together. If the Zetas had been intrinsically cool, then the Sigmas were fundamentally classy.

I had the dance down by now. The doors open and we rushees enter like cattle into a chute. One of the sorority members steps forward in a well-orchestrated move, takes a girl by the elbow, and leads her to a designated area of the room. It took me a few rounds to catch on to the architecture of the “random” party groupings and the carefully choreographed mingling.

The smiling girl who met me this time managed to make it look natural. “Hey!” she said, guiding me to an empty spot in the crowded sitting area. Like all the other SAXis, she wore a khaki skirt and a button-down blue oxford, very preppy but cute. She had short blond hair that flipped up at the ends, and freckles danced over her nose.

“I’m Devon. And you’re …” She read my name tag and laughed. “Yeah. You’d think that we could come up with better questions than that. But your brain goes kind of numb after a while.”

Her candor connected with me, and I found my cynicism—not slipping, exactly, but bending enough to concede, “I can totally see where that would happen.”

Her nose crinkled with her grin. “Right. Now I’m left with nothing to ask but if you’re enjoying Rush.”

“Don’t you mean Formal Recruitment?” I replied.

“Right. And are you?”

I hedged my answer. “It’s been very interesting.”

Another laugh. “How tactful of you.”

“How do you stand it?” I looked around the room at the blue and khaki members, the rushees in their sundresses and sandals. “Smiling and asking dumb questions all night?”

“Wait until tomorrow. It’s Skit Night.”

“Oh God.” The groan slipped out before I could catch it. I hadn’t meant to be that honest. This Devon was either genuinely disarming or very sneaky.

“
We
all had to go through it,” she said. “Think of it as a rite of passage.”

I could be sneaky, too, I guess. “What do you remember most from your Rush experience?”

She smiled. “The friends I made. How overwhelming everything seemed, when you go through that door and girls are swooping down at you. Those dumb songs all the houses sing.”