Brimstone (43 page)

Then we all assembled in the Student Center ballroom to learn if we’d “matched.” The doors were closed and no one was allowed in or out until we’d all received our envelopes.

Holly and I stayed together in line—Quinn and Russell are reasonably close alphabetically—an island of dispassion in a sea of drama. There were many tears—of disappointment, joy, or simple relief. Mostly there was hugging and squealing. Lots and lots of squealing. It bounced from the wainscoted walls and the parquet floor. The chandelier tinkled an echo. But the noise was nothing compared to the way
the stratospheric emotion was scouring every psychic nerve in my body to a bloody, raw thread.

No story was worth a whole semester of this.

I had to do something; it figured it was desperation that made me put Gran’s imagery book to practical use. Closing my eyes, I pictured deflector shields, like on the
Millennium Falcon
. I visualized the laser beams of angst bouncing off my defenses, ricocheting harmlessly back into the throng.

Holy cow. It actually worked. The muscles of my shoulders began to unclench and the knot in my stomach …

“Maggie! Holly!” Tricia threw herself at me, wrapping an arm around my neck and drawing Holly into the embrace. “It worked!”

“That’s great, Trish!” Holly hugged her back.

Something
had worked, until I’d completely lost concentration. The noise and emotion surged past my fallen defenses.

“Beta Pi totally wants me!” Holly had talked her into putting down her next highest choices after the Deltas. The Betas were brunette and bubbly, so we’d figured she’d be a fit.

Tricia bounced off to find other Betas; Holly bent down to frown critically at my face. “Are you feeling all right?”

Clearly, I looked as bad as I felt. “It’s really hot in here.” Someone squealed nearby and my eye twitched in reaction.

“We’re almost done.” This was relative. There was still a lot of alphabet in line behind us. Darn those
S
s. The tradition was to release the rushees—now called pledges—all at once out into the quad, where our new sisterhood waited to greet us and escort us back to Greek Row.

I reached the front of the line; at least once I got my bid—I’d put down SAXi first, as I promised Holly, and the Zetas
second, because I was assured of an invite, since I was a legacy—the matter would be settled, and I could find a seat in one of the chairs that ringed the room and observe from a small distance.

“Quinn,” I told the Rho Gamma behind the table full of stationery boxes. “Maggie.”

“Here you are.” She held out a cream-colored envelope with a smile. “Good luck.”

If I’d been thinking clearly, maybe I would have expected it. But my brain thrummed in my skull, as if I’d had about fifty espresso shots. As soon as my fingers closed on the invitation, a gray-white light blossomed on my retinas, like when you press on your closed eyelids and make a ghostly impression in the black. Only the brightness kept streaming in on my optic nerve, carrying impressions and images too rapid and bewildering to interpret, a moiré pattern splitting and repeating; infinite variety of waking dreams, pushed into my brain like water through a fire hose.

Consciousness tripped like a fuse, and everything went black.

I woke up on the floor, with Jenna patting my hand and Holly leaning over me anxiously. “What happened?”

“You fainted,” Holly said as I struggled to sit up.

Surely not. How … girly. “Really?”

“Don’t worry about it,” the Rho Gamma said, correctly interpreting my reddening face. “Too much emotion, girls forget to eat. Happens all the time.”

“I never forget to eat.” They helped me to my feet; my thighs trembled, but it was better than lying there with the
S
s stepping over me to get their bids.

As if anyone would notice one more Drama Girl.

They walked with me to the chairs by the wall, and as I sat, Jenna turned to Holly. “There’s some bottled water in the coolers behind the tables. Would you grab one for Maggie?”

“Really, I’m fine—” But Holly was already headed over to where the other Rho Gammas were handing out the bids.

Jenna sat beside me and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s overwhelming.”

I sunk my head into my hands, rubbing my pounding temples. “Tell me about it.”

I didn’t expect her to take me literally. “We Sigmas have a hard time in the middle of all this excitement, though some of us are more sensitive than others.”

Her face conveyed nothing, and everything. She might have just been talking about a mundane sensitivity to emotional stress. But she met my gaze evenly, significantly. “I could tell you’re one of the more sensitive ones.”

“So …” I formed my next question carefully. “I’m not the only one?”

Jenna smiled, as if my ready acceptance pleased her. “Well, no one has ever fainted before.”

“Oh.” I had to wrap my head around that. Of all the things I thought I might hear today, that hadn’t been it.

She laid her hand on my knee, pressing lightly to weight her words. “I think you’re used to keeping your specialness a secret, Maggie, so I don’t have to tell you that we Sigmas don’t talk about this outside the house. You probably shouldn’t talk about it much with your pledge class. Most of them have no idea of the latent potential inside them.”

“I don’t understand.” I felt the way I had when Dr. Smyth explained fractal theory, as though there was some basic,
fundamental thing here that my mental fingertips could brush, but not quite grasp.

“You don’t need to understand it right now. That’s what pledge class is for. To get you ready for initiation, when everything will be clear.”

Holly returned and handed me a bottle, still dripping icy water from the cooler. I pressed it to the back of my neck, hoping the chill would shock my brain into motion. It also gave me an excuse to duck my head and let Holly and Jenna talk while I tried to align my scattered thoughts.

All this week, I’d taken secret pride in being what the sorority girls termed “Not One of Us.” Now I had found out that actually, I
was
one of them. Or they were a lot of me. Or … something.

I sat with my head resting in one hand, shielding my face. A cold prickle of worry spread through me, and I didn’t think it was just the icy water bottle, or the cracking of my illusion that I was special or unique.

The bid envelope lay in my lap. Opening it was a formality now, but I did it anyway:

In the words of Han Solo, right before the
Millennium Falcon
got sucked into the Death Star: I had a
bad
feeling about this.

I
stood in the foyer of the Sigma Alpha Xi house with seven other girls. Other houses had thirty or forty new members—pledges, in the Greek vernacular. We had eight. No wonder SAXis had a reputation for being in a class of their own.

By their nature, the members of a house run together. They chose for type, and Sigma Alpha Xi did, too, if Jenna was to be believed—and I had no reason not to. Their criteria was definitely not physical similarity. At one end was lanky Holly, with her hair the color of autumn mums. At the other was me: short, too curvy on the bottom and not curvy enough on the top, with disobedient short dark hair. The
other girls fell in the middle and had yet to differentiate themselves.

We, the pledge class, waited as a collective. Nervous, giggling, or silent, according to nature. The gigglers were Ashley, Kaylee, and Nikki. On the quiet, sober side were Holly, Alyssa, and Erica. A girl named Brittany had appointed herself pledge wrangler, and kept admonishing the gigglers to shut up and be serious.

The chapter room doors swung partially open and one of the Sigmas greeted us, wearing some kind of stole or wrap over her street clothes. We all shut up.

“Sigma Alpha Xi invites Ashley Adams to join our circle.”

Ashley, a blond girl with a California tan, looked suddenly intimidated, and I wondered if she didn’t have some Spidey Sense after all. She wiped her palms on her jeans, took the older girl’s offered hand, and followed her into the room as another active member appeared in the doorway.

“Sigma Alpha Xi invites Kaylee Carson to join our circle.” A dark-haired girl with a ballerina’s build went in eagerly.

They continued alphabetically, until only Holly and I were left. Then Jenna appeared, a crimson stole hanging, Roman senator—fashion, over her elbows. “Sigma Alpha Xi invites Magdalena Quinn to join our circle.”

My full name was on my school records, though I’d made it clear I preferred Maggie. We were too careless with names in modern culture, and I wasn’t just talking about identity theft. Names have power, and calling things by their proper names can evoke it, or diminish it. Why else don’t we call private body parts by their anatomical terms?

I followed Jenna into the chapter room, which had been transformed once again. The lights were dim; the air was cool, almost clammy on my bare arms. The rug had been rolled back, and inlaid on the hardwood floor was a spiral, like a nautilus shell or a galaxy.

Nothing in the universe is truly random
.

Jenna led me inward along the loop, and I joined the ring of pledges in the center. Holly completed our group, and the doors closed.

At the north end of the room stood Victoria Abbott. Was it normal for an alumnae adviser to always be around? Something about her presence struck a wrong note with me.

In front of her was a cloth-covered table with several items on it: an oil lamp—think Aladdin and the genie—and an enormous book. Gutenberg Bible enormous, and possibly that old. A spiral of fragrant smoke rose from a small silver bowl—incense, exotic and spicy, making my head feel stuffy and strange.

Victoria spoke, in a soft but carrying voice. “We move through life in a series of patterns: family, friends, school classes and clubs.”

One Sigma handed each pledge an unlit white candle as the alumna continued. “Today you will form the first of the new patterns in your life in Sigma Alpha Xi: your pledge class, a circle of sisterhood.

“Later you’ll make new patterns as you get a big sister, find roommates, take offices. All of these will mean new roles, new positions in the design.”

The actives moved into place along the spiral as Victoria lit a candle from the lamp. She handed it to Kirby, who stood
beside her, a sober acolyte. “Like lightning, we branch out into the world, but no matter how far we get from the beginning, here is where the flame is begun.”

The chapter president passed on the flame. Each girl in turn touched tapers with those next to her, and flickering lights spread inward along the spiral, toward the pledges in the center. Someone beside me sniffled, and I fought the urge to squirm at the seriousness of it all.

Then the flames reached us, and we passed them among our candles. The circle closed like a circuit, and I felt a rush of electricity along my skin. It flowed—a tangible energy potential—outward along the spiral, humming like a magnetic field in the room.

Whoa.

Eight of the girls handed off their candles and moved toward the center, making eddies and currents in the energy field, like turbulence in water. Jenna stopped in front of me with a small smile of encouragement.

“Our pledge emblem is the North Star,” said Victoria. “The guide of adventurers and explorers.”

Jenna held up a small, lacquered gold pin, like a tiny brooch. “This is mine,” she whispered, opening the clasp. “And my big sister’s, and her big sister’s. So I hope you keep better track of it than you did your name tag.”

She held the point to the flame of my candle, only for a few seconds. Around the circle, others did the same. Jenna reached for my hand and, stupid me, I thought she was going to place the pin in my palm. Instead she pricked my finger, and I hissed in pain and some alarm. A tingle raced up my arm, settled at the base of my skull, then dissipated.

A small drop of blood glimmered garnet on the sharp tip. After Jenna carefully fastened it on my shirt, I reached up and touched the warm gold. Images, quick and fast: Jenna, on the Panhellenic Council; a woman in her early twenties, rising star of real estate in Houston; an assistant DA in Chicago, on the board of governors of the school. All of them had worn this pin.

No fuzziness followed the vision this time. As quickly as the images came, I was able to mentally catch them, instead of feeling assaulted by each. The song the Sigmas had been singing—I hadn’t heard them start—ended, hanging resonant in the room, like a chant in a cathedral.

Into the charged air, Victoria spoke. “The compass marks the path to our destination.”

From directly opposite her, Kirby said, “The flame is knowledge and power shared.”

A quarter of the way around the circle from the president, Jenna spoke. “Indigo for depth of feeling and depth of passion.”