Pledged (14 page)

Olivia and Vicki went to Olivia’s Big Sister for advice.

“We’re afraid Morgan and Laura-Ann are going to freak out when we tell them we want a double,” Vicki said.

“I don’t care.” Olivia threw up her hands. “Oh my God, I need to get out of that room. I can’t live with three other people and I think they know that.”

“If you want to make yourself happy, you should just do what you want to do. Don’t worry what other people say,” offered Olivia’s Big Sister, a junior. “If this is what’s going to be good for you guys, you can’t worry about hurting their feelings.”

“Maybe it’s not really that bad,” Vicki wavered. “It’s just a lot of, like, girls.” But she could tell it was getting to Olivia.

Cramped Quarters

NOT ALL SORORITIES HAVE ACTUAL HOUSES. BUT THOSE
that do add a fascinating variable to these all-girl groups. Imagine the estrogen-fueled stress and chaos of, say, three biological teenage sisters sharing a bathroom. Now imagine one hundred sisters sharing four. The sorority environment is one that can pack practically grown women in triple bunk beds, six to a room, one hundred to a house, as if they were ten-year-olds at sleepaway camp. At the University of Missouri, some sororities own mansions that lodge up to 120 girls, many in triple bunk beds. Most sorority houses at the University of Washington have “sleeping porches”: gigantic rooms in which all of the forty pledges must sleep. At half the houses at Purdue, girls are encouraged for bonding purposes to sleep in “Cold Air,” an open room—large enough to hold more than one hundred girls—that is kept dark and cold, with the windows left open at all times.

Everyday life in a sorority house generally goes unsupervised. The only adult who lives there is the “House Mom,” who usually has a private apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen. Depending on the sorority, the House Mom can be an alumna, a grad student, or, in some cases, a non-Greek woman from the local community. The degree to which she is involved with the house also varies by chapter. In State U’s Alpha Rho and Beta Pi, the House Moms were older women who were unaffiliated with any Greek organization. They took care of house maintenance—calling technicians to fix lagging Internet connections, for example—but played no role in anything specifically sorority-related unless they were needed for safety or disciplinary reasons, as happened later in the year with Alpha Rho. The girls didn’t want them to. They viewed them more as building administrators than as a part of the sorority.

Sororities with houses run them like a part of the business and often order members to live there a specific number of years. At Indiana University, sororities require sisters to live in the house for at least three years in order to be considered an active member. “Sororities have to make money,” one alumna explained. In order to maintain the house, the sorority needs a certain quota of girls who will pay extra for the room and board. If chapters don’t fill quota, Nationals have been known to shut them down. The houses are usually owned by a local House Corporation, a nonprofit board of local alumnae incorporated in the state. The House Corporation, which makes the financial decisions for the house, hires the cook, House Mom, and housekeepers out of the money the sisters pay in rent and a “parlor fee” charged to all members to help support the house. (This budget is separate from the chapter budget, which is run by an undergraduate sister acting as treasurer and covers parties and similar expenses.)

There is also a lighter, more innocuous side to life in a sorority house. In a houseful of dozens of young women, one of the most popular activities can be pulling pranks on the other sisters. One Sigma Delta Tau chapter had a house phone as well as individual lines for each bedroom. A common practice was what the girls called “double lining”—they would dial a number on the house phone, put the call on hold, dial someone else from a room phone, and then connect the two calls together so that each recipient thought the other placed the call—while the girls listened in on the conversation. “We liked to connect two people who used to date and didn’t talk anymore, just to see what would happen, or people who secretly liked each other but no one knew but us, or people who were in the middle of a huge fight. It was bad,” said a Sigma Delta Tau. At her house, SDT pledges were expected to pull pranks on the older sisters. One year they stole all of the underwear of the forty girls who lived in the house and replaced it with tiny diapers. Meanwhile, they brought a trash bag full of the underwear to the fraternity house around the corner. Within minutes, the fraternity boys came tearing back around the corner and into the house with underwear on their heads and tossing panties at every turn. It took the sisters six hours to sort through the underwear, and hours longer to fight over the washing machine because no one knew exactly where their underwear had been. Another pledge group placed ads in the
Daily Texan
that advertised all of the older sisters’ cars, exaggerating the amenities and reducing the price (“1997 black Toyota 4Runner, fully loaded, $3,000”). The house received more than 350 calls in twenty-four hours.

As many sisters told me, there is at least one undeniable benefit to life in a sorority house: “The clothes sharing was the best part,” said Jordan, a midwestern Pi Phi. “There were so many different girls, you could always find something to wear.”

Costumes and Masks

NOVEMBER 4

SABRINA’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

I will seduce and date Professor Stone and then he will fall in love with me and ask me to marry him. That is the plan.

ONE NIGHT IN EARLY NOVEMBER, SABRINA LOUNGED IN
the P
enthouse as the Pents got ready for an Alpha Rho “Masquerade Mixer.” Aside from the costumes, it was a typical night in the house. Fiona pondered whether she would look better in a nurse costume or a French maid’s outfit, both of which, for some reason, she owned. She pulled on the French maid dress, which barely covered her behind, and leaned forward in front of the mirror to pop her breasts slightly out of the low-cut top.

Two sisters at her side watched in the mirror. “Wait,” one of them said, “I can see your bra through that.” The dark bra showed easily through the practically transparent white top.

“I know.” Fiona cupped a breast and pushed it up some more. “It’s supposed to be that way.”

“Um, it looks slutty,” the other sister said.

“I know!” Fiona exclaimed happily.

Sabrina, absentmindedly twirling a braid, didn’t pay much attention to the sisters. She was busy daydreaming about Professor Stone. Their office-hour meeting this week had extended into a coffee break, first to talk about academics and then to chat about anything that came to mind. He was a good listener and seemed truly to care about what she had to say. Sometimes she sent him e-mails, ostensibly to ask questions about class, but also just to say hello. He always responded, always professionally, but occasionally Sabrina noticed an extra line or two that seemed more like something from a friend than a teacher. Sabrina had already signed up for the class Professor Stone was teaching next semester. She was sure the course would be interesting anyway, but she also guessed that staring at Professor Stone’s flecked hazel eyes and large biceps would make class time fly by. Because of him, Sabrina decided she wouldn’t go to Alpha Rho’s Date Party. She wasn’t interested in college boys anymore.

IN HER PENTHOUSE AREA, BITSY WRIGGLED INTO A
little red dress with a pitchfork pattern that was high on the bottom and low on top. She drew pointed arches on her eyebrows, lined her eyes with smoky shadow, and stuck on a two-pronged tail and horns. Then she came out into the middle of the Penthouse and struck a pose for no one in particular. No one noticed.

“I need boots!” she shouted. The sisters in the Penthouse turned and looked at her as she struck another pose. Sabrina rolled her eyes and continued talking to Amy, who had come upstairs for a rare Penthouse visit. Bitsy had been prancing around in the devil dress now for two days in anticipation of the Masquerade Mixer.

When no one responded to her, Bitsy turned to Amy. “Your boobs are looking good today,” she said.

“Er.” Amy didn’t know how to react. “Thanks.” She would later ask Sabrina if that meant on other days they didn’t look so good.

“Now, my boobs,” Bitsy continued, “they don’t look right.”

“Honey, that’s because you don’t wear a bra and your tops are too small.”

Bitsy gazed down at her chest. “I’ll take you to Victoria’s Secret,” Amy said to Bitsy, “and we’ll buy you the right size bra and then you can wear shirts one size bigger.”

“Oh yeah, I didn’t think about that,” Bitsy said. She put on a padded bra.

Bitsy reappeared in her devil costume downstairs, where some Alpha Rhos and fraternity brothers were watching television. At a commercial, she model-walked into the TV room and posed in front of the sisters until people noticed her.

“Nice, Bitsy!”

“Woohoo!”

“You working tonight . . . on the corner?” Bitsy seemed one exhale away from bursting out of her dress.

“Bitsy’s not going to have to buy any drinks tonight because her boobs are going to be in everybody’s face!” The room erupted into howls. The fraternity boys, embarrassed, tried very hard not to look at Bitsy’s breasts.

Bitsy, oblivious, extended a leg and pointed her foot. “How do I look? I’m not sure about the boots.”

“You need the hooker boots!”

“But they make me so ta-all,” Bitsy whined. “The boys will come up to here!” She held her hand up to her chest.

“That’s what they
want,
Bitsy, you idiot!” Bitsy smiled sweetly and sauntered back upstairs.

Twenty minutes later, as the group dispersed, Bitsy came downstairs, this time in a brown sweater, khakis, and more subdued makeup. She had a masquerade-style mask in hand. “Look, here I am in normal clothes!” she announced. No one asked her why she bothered to wear the devil dress, horns, and tail only to take them off before she went out for the evening.

Gossip

NOVEMBER 6

AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

dancing with jake, my date of the month. don’t wait up!

AMY AND CAITLIN WERE IN THEIR COMMON ROOM, PREPARING
for the Alpha Rho Date Party. As Sabrina sat in a corner reading, Beth, their hairstyling friend, braided half of Amy’s hair into a crown.

“Shake your head, is it coming loose?” Beth said. Amy shook her head as Beth focused intently on the braid.

“Shake harder!” Amy shook her head so hard it looked like she was trying to mosh sideways. The crown fell out.

“Shit.” Beth retrieved the bobby pins that had fallen on the floor and started again.

Sabrina helped pick up the pins and headed back to her corner. “Oh Sabrina, I just realized you won’t be there to dance to the ass songs with me tonight!” Amy said. Sabrina planned to work the late shift at the restaurant.

“There will be plenty of other drunken bitches there to dance to the ass songs with you,” said Sabrina.

“But they don’t have our ghetto booty, sweetie. They just have fupas!” Amy said while strapping on a stiletto. The girls laughed. Fupa, in their sorority lingo, stood for “fat upper pussy area,” which the girls described as “the part that bulges over your pants when you sit down” (as opposed to the “food baby,” which described a belly).

The sisters gossiped about other girls in the chapter. More than two months into the school year, a definitive hierarchy had developed in the house. Caitlin, Amy, and Sabrina mingled among various groups. Half a dozen sisters were on the most popular tier, as the “pretty” girls—the party animals who knew the most fraternity boys and could usually be found at the bars. Bitsy and a few others formed the boy-crazy clique. Charlotte and another sister were the house prudes, known by the way they strictly adhered to sorority rules, who spent time together because they weren’t entirely accepted by the other cliques. One might have expected that as president, Charlotte would be accessible to every sister in the chapter, but Sabrina had discovered otherwise. Charlotte would say hello to some sisters, but never to Sabrina, whom she ignored completely. Other sisters flitted in and out of the house periphery, such as the three sophomore sisters who constantly flirted with each other. They liked to stalk each other throughout the house, lurking behind doors to scare and tickle each other. As far as the Alpha Rhos knew, however, the closest the girls had come to hooking up was their occasional wrestling bouts.

Fiona, Whitney, and Elaine were the bossiest sisters. Fiona, a junior with a superiority complex, wielded influence—or thought she did. Before a recent chapter meeting, Sabrina was in the Penthouse jotting down some homework assignments in her day planner before she headed downstairs to join the rest of the sisterhood. The other Pents had left just a minute before. Fiona came upstairs.

“Is someone up here?” she said.

“Me, I’ll be down in a second.”

“Are you going to Meeting?”

“Yes,” Sabrina said.

“It’s really important that you go down there
right now
,” Fiona said.

On another night, when Sabrina was out, Fiona was spotted going through Sabrina’s things and strewing them across the Penthouse, supposedly looking for something she had lost. When Sabrina returned, her bed had been moved, her sheets were loose, her furniture rearranged, and the pictures that she had been sorting for her sorority scrapbook were scattered on the floor. It took two days for Sabrina to put her area back together.

A few days before the Alpha Rho Date Party, Sabrina discovered that the bag of chocolates that Caitlin had given her for her birthday was empty. Watching her gasp in dismay, a nearby Pent confided to Sabrina that Fiona had eaten them. This time, Sabrina approached Fiona in the dining room.

“What happened to my chocolates?” Sabrina asked.

“Whitney ate them all,” Fiona said without hesitation. Another Pent later related to Sabrina the conversation that ensued as soon as Sabrina had left the room. Guffawing, Fiona had plopped onto a chair next to Whitney.