Brimstone Read online

  The other seven pledges and I met with the active designated to teach us what we needed to know, congregating in the TV room of the SAXi house. Besides Holly and myself, there were Brittany, Ashley, Nikki, Kaylee, Alyssa, and Erica.

  Tara, the pledge trainer, had a pleasantly curvy figure and long, honey-colored hair that she wore parted in the middle, hippie-style. She handed us each a thick booklet. “These are your Sigma Alpha Xi handbooks. You will have to learn everything in here for the test, but don’t worry. We’ll help you.”

  I flipped through the pages. There were sections on the meaning of the colors, the symbols, the mascot. No chapter, however, on “How to Win Friends and Influence Fate.”

  “First we’ll go over the rules,” said Tara, settling into an armchair with a big, worn binder in her lap. The rest of us were on the sofa or the other chairs, forming a loose circle.

  For an hour, Tara read out of the handbook about what Sigmas could and couldn’t do. To summarize:

  Sigmas keep their grades up. (Self-explanatory.)

  Sigmas don’t dress inappropriately. (Some ambiguity here, but the gist was that “provocative” wasn’t nearly as big an issue as “tacky.”)

  Sigmas don’t drink alcohol. (Completely ignored in practice, until someone got caught by the authorities.)

  Sigmas don’t have sex. (See above re: get caught, comma, don’t.)

  Sigmas don’t talk about chapter business outside the chapter. (The first rule of Greek Club is don’t talk about Greek Club.)

  There was a Standards Board to enforce these rules, made up of the chapter officers, an alumnae adviser, and, if serious enough, a representative from the national office.

  Next there were rules specific to pledges:

  Stand up when an active enters the room.

  Do everything an active tells you, unless it’s hazing, but of course, hazing is against SAXi national policy.

  Pledges do not have serious boyfriends.

  At the general murmurs from the eight pledges, our trainer looked up from the binder. “We’re serious about this one,” Tara said. “Pledgeship is only ten weeks. You can hold out that long.”

  Brittany raised her hand, clearly appointing herself spokeswoman. “When you say hold out, you mean …”

  Tara leveled an unequivocal stare. “No sex.” The pledges giggled, maybe figuring the rule was as meaningful as the one for the actives, but she nixed that idea. “I’m totally serious this time. All your focus should be on learning about your sisters and your sorority. Sex will only get in the way of that. If you get caught, you’ll be brought before Standards.”

  Nikki raised her hand, her face bright red. “So when you say ‘no sex,’ you mean, like, nothing?”

  Tara rolled her eyes. “Do I have to draw you a diagram?”

  Brittany had a prim know-it-all tone at odds with the subject. “There’s a lot of room between the neck and the knees.”

  “And it doesn’t seem fair,” Ashley followed, “that the pledges from the other chapters will have a head start getting to know all the guys.”

  Tara’s earth-mother patience was slipping. “You can get to know them, you just can’t screw them.”

  “So making out is okay?” Brittany again. “I’m just trying to make sure we all understand the rules.”

  “Above the waist only? Or everything but … you know.” In case we didn’t, Nikki made a circle with two fingers and demonstrated with another one.

  “Eww!” Ashley screwed up her face. “Gross, Nikki!”

  “Oh, like you haven’t.”

  “Look, people,” Holly snapped. “Tab A, slot B. Don’t do it. How hard is that?”

  I started to laugh. What else could I do?

  Tara tried to get control of the group again, and steer them back on track. “You guys are way overthinking this.”

  Brittany got huffy; with her high, clipped voice, she sounded like Minnie Mouse in a snit. “I’m just saying, we all went through Rush because we wanted to meet guys.”

  “You should have done fraternity Rush then,” Holly said.

  Tara jumped in to prevent a catfight. “I know what you mean, Brittany. But trust me. Sigmas have their pick of the guys.”

  “Sigmas are hard to get but worth the trouble.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until they all looked at me. “That’s our reputation,” I explained, paraphrasing what I’d read on a chat board while working on my next Phantom article. “It does seem better than ‘Their pledges put out.’ ”

  Tara gave me a studying look, and I wished I’d remained under the radar. I’d spent Sunday reading Gran’s book and working on my deflector shields, but I ought to practice keeping my mouth shut.

  “What’s a sorority girl’s mating call?” Holly asked, earning Tara’s glare. “ ‘I’m so wasted!’ ”

  “That’s not funny!” Brittany said, outraged. If she’d been standing, I think she’d have stamped her foot. Possibly the girls laughed at her as much as Holly’s awful joke. I know I did.

  Tara took the opportunity to move things along, and turned the page in her book. “We’ve spent so much time on this that we didn’t discuss officers. Any nominations for pledge class president?”

  “I nominate Brittany,” said Nikki, and Ashley seconded. That seemed to be Ashley’s major function, seconding things.

  “Anyone else?” Tara looked around the small circle, and her gaze rested on me. “Maggie? Victoria told me you might be interested in being pledge president.”

  After a shocked silence, of which a lot of the shock came from me, Brittany protested. “But Maggie never contributes anything to the discussion.”

  “That’s got my vote,” Holly drawled. “I nominate Maggie.”

  I shook off my frozen surprise. “I can’t be pledge president.”

  “She’s right. She doesn’t know anything about Greek tradition,” said Brittany. I suddenly realized who she reminded me of: Tracy Flick in Election. She even had the Reese Witherspoon haircut.

  “I second Maggie!” said Kaylee, clearly in favor of anything that didn’t involve Brittany ordering us around.

  “I decline.” But no one was listening to me except Brittany, who echoed, “She declines!”

  Tara looked at her watch. “Great. Next week we’ll vote for either Maggie or Brittany as president.”

  “But I don’t want to run.”

  “Line up outside the chapter room in ten minutes, girls.” She dismissed us, and the group scattered. I marched toward Tara, but Holly strong-armed me out of the room.

  “You cannot stick us with Brittany for ten weeks, Maggie.”

  “Why don’t you run?”

  She headed downstairs. “Because my mother wants me to.”

  “Of course.” We joined the steady trickle of girls on the central stairway that connected the three floors. “I don’t know why Victoria told Tara that I wanted to do it.”

  Holly glanced back, the steps putting us eye to eye. “Because she wants you to run. You’re obviously on the short track to the inner circle. Lucky you.”

  I would have felt a lot better about that if Holly had seemed at all jealous of my special treatment. Because the inner circle that came to my mind was the one in Dante’s Inferno, and that wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be.

  16

  Tuesday morning I woke up with an uneasy knot in my stomach. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and gazed around the room. All was normal in the bedroom—morning light diffused through blue and green pastel curtains, and the disorder was minimal, at least in the bedroom half of the room. The French doors were open to the study, which looked like a tornado had hit and dropped the contents of a library. Situation normal.

  I hadn’t dreamed, so that couldn’t be what was bugging me. Climbing out of bed, I shuffled to the bathroom, pulled the shower curtain closed, and turned on the water. Eight o’clock class today, but a hot shower always helped me think. Standing under the spray, I did an inventory. Calculus homework, check. Biology lab report,
check.

  I had dreamed. The realization hit while my hair was full of shampoo. It wasn’t simply that I couldn’t remember. There was an absence in my mind, a hole where the dream had been, as if it had been excised like my wisdom teeth. It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t help mentally poking at it.

  Weird. I rinsed off and thought about calling Gran, but as soon as I went into the bedroom and saw the clock, that impulse disappeared. I had just enough time to find some jeans that didn’t make my butt look too big, and get on my way.

  Downstairs, Mom was dressed for work, wolfing down a bowl of bran flakes. “It must be a good stomach day,” I said, making a beeline for the coffee pot.

  “So far.” She swallowed the last bite and rinsed out the bowl, putting it in the dishwasher. “Lisa called last night.”

  I stopped, midpour. “The home phone?”

  “She said she tried your cell.”

  “I must have turned it off for the meeting.”

  “Anyway,” said Mom. “She wanted to make sure you were okay. Something about the last time you talked.” Mom was busily gathering her purse and briefcase, making sure she had her saltines, just in case. “You didn’t have a fight, did you?”

  Spooning sugar into my travel mug, I tried to remember. When was the last time we’d talked? Was it the fight?

  “Time to go,” Mom said. “You’d better scoot, too.”

  I looked at the clock and said a word that made Mom protest. It was going to be a long, busy day. I’d find time to call Lisa tonight. And Gran, I reminded myself. Don’t forget.

  After calculus, I put in an hour at the editor’s desk, hurried to the science building, dissected an earthworm, then came back to work straight through the afternoon. I didn’t mind skipping lunch, because frankly the only thing grosser than the outside of an earthworm is the inside of one.

  By the time I had to leave for history class, I’d entered all the corrections for the next day’s edition and uploaded them to the server. Cole was hard at work at his own computer when I stopped by to tell him I was leaving.

  “Thanks, Mags.” He didn’t look up from the screen.

  “Hey, Cole.” I waited until he made eye contact, and I knew I had his attention. His face had always been long and thin, but there were dusky shadows under his eyes, and furrows of fatigue around his mouth. “Don’t forget to sleep occasionally, okay?”

  “Sure thing.” He said it absently, and went back to work. I turned to go, but stopped when he said, “Hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  He picked up the day’s edition of the Report. “Good job today.”

  I smiled and one knot of my tension slipped loose. “Thanks.”

  Handing me the paper, he waved me off. “Now go to class.”

  I dashed out the door, into the brisk September air. The leaves were starting to turn, mottling the green with yellow, and I hurried to the history building. It should be an intramural event: the cross-campus sprint.

  The only thing I cared about was beating Dad there, and I managed that. I burst into the lecture hall, red-faced and puffing like a steam engine, but I’d made it five minutes before the hour.

  “Maggie!”

  I scanned the tiers of desks and saw Ashley pointing to an empty seat beside her. Great. As if the Sigmas weren’t encroaching on my life enough already.

  Unfortunately, everyone else had figured out to come early, so it was the closest empty seat. It was also surrounded by Greeks. I slid down the row and dropped into the desk, pulling out my notebook. A lot of the students took notes on their laptops, but I was a traditionalist. I also knew shorthand.

  “I saved you a seat,” said Ashley, unnecessarily, since I was already occupying it. “Will was just reading today’s Phantom Pledge report.”

  “The phantom is a pledge now?” I asked, not ingenuous at all.

  “Seems so,” said the guy I assumed was Will. He was wearing the fraternity uniform—cargo khakis, letter jersey, beat-up athletic shoes—and slouched so far down in his chair that his butt was almost hanging off. Not that I was looking at his butt or anything.

  “Listen to this: ‘As I reached out to take my own envelope,’ ” Will quoted, “ ‘stark fear took over, welling up from my nonconformist heart. When I took that bid I would be subsumed, assimilated. Resistance was futile, but my real terror came from knowing that part of me didn’t want to resist.

  “ ‘What is more potent than the temptation of belonging? It’s a Faustian lure—acceptance, superiority. All you have to do is hand over the soul of your individuality.

  “ ‘Any sane person would end the experiment here. Yet here I go, into the social jungle, upriver to the heart of darkness. My reports from this point on may be few, carried out by pontoon boat. Wish me luck. I love the smell of beer keg in the morning.’ ”

  Victoria might yet turn me into a frog.

  I thought they might laugh, but the clump of fraternity guys was quiet, contemplative. It was Ashley who spoke first. “Well, that’s a little harsh.”

  “Not really,” said a shaggy-haired boy in a purple shirt. He sat beside the reader, Will, on the row above us. “You girls are scary when you get your Rush game on.” The guys laughed, breaking the pensive tension. “I can totally see you going all Francis Ford Coppola.”

  “Come on,” she protested, twisting in her seat to glare at him.

  I took the paper from Will and had a surreal moment, talking about myself in the third person. “Do you think she’ll go native, like Martin Sheen?”

  “Whatever makes a better story,” said Purple Shirt. “It’s all a gimmick anyway.”

  “You think so?” Will looked right at me, making me nervous. “I think she got it at least a little right. I mean, I admit that part of the reason I pledged was to feel like a big deal on campus.”

  A snort from Purple Shirt. “Dude. You’re Gamma Phi Epsilon. You guys are the big swinging dick on campus.”

  Since Will didn’t hit him, I figured this was a term of respect. Guys are gross.

  “Eww,” said Ashley, and faced forward. Will exchanged a grin with me before I did the same. Just in time—in walked my dad.

  “Hey,” whispered Ashley while Dad settled in at the front of the hall. “I think Will is totally into you.”

  “How can you tell?” I hissed back. “We talked for five seconds.”

  “That personal admission to encourage intimacy … he was looking straight at you.” She nodded decisively. “Totally into you. You should go for him.”

  “Um …”

  “And he’s a Gamma Phi Ep! Perfect.”

  “Why’s that?” The name was familiar. SAXi’s brother fraternity—a redundant term.

  “Because all Sigmas date G Phi Eps. It’s tradition.”

  At least as far back as Victoria and Peter Abbott. I jotted a note in the margin of my paper: “Things to check out.”

  “Literally all, or figuratively all?” I asked, keeping an eye on Dad’s progress plugging in his laptop and getting the projector going.

  “Well,” Ashley hedged, “everyone I’ve interviewed for my pledge book.”

  Now she had my attention. “Your what?”

  She showed me the front of a binder, which was decorated with stickers and had “ΣAΞ=♥” written on it in paint pen. “Brittany said we’d better start doing our interviews of the actives now, so we’re not stuck doing all fifty right before Hell Week.”

  “Hell Week?”

  “The week before initiation. That’s when we have our pledge test, and have to turn in our pledge book with all the interviews complete. Weren’t you listening in class?”

  If Brittany had been talking, then chances were not.

  “We’re supposed to say Sisterhood Week,” Ashley continued. “There’s usually some fun quests and assignments and stuff to bond us all together.”

  “Sounds like a blast.”

  “I can’t wait,” she said, missing my irony entirely.

  The rest of the wee
k progressed the same way: class, paper, class, sisterhood, homework, fall into bed exhausted. I stopped worrying about my lack of dreams; my neurons had nothing left at the end of the day. Not only were the normal brain cells getting a workout, but the freakazoid ones, too. I didn’t get sick with them anymore—my deflector shields were becoming second nature to me now—but I still got flashes sometimes, still saw things in people’s expressions that I wasn’t sure anyone else could see. Maybe it was a trade-off—more waking weirdness for less nightmares. I couldn’t say I didn’t like it.

  Saturday I slept and caught up on my reading for history. Dad tended to call on me whenever he asked the class a question and got nothing but cricket-filled silence, so there was no slacking off with his assignments.

  Tara, the pledge trainer, had moved our class to Sunday evening so that we wouldn’t have the time constraint of the chapter meeting immediately following. I picked up Holly at her dorm; on the way to the Sigma house, she grumbled that this meant Brittany could talk as much as she wanted, and then realized that “when” I was president, I could shut her up. Which I had to admit was more tempting than anything Victoria Abbott had mentioned.

  We settled in the TV room, and Tara—looking more hippie than usual in a long bohemian skirt—started the meeting.

  “From now on, the president will call the class to order. So we need to decide who that’s going to be. Nominated, we have Brittany and Maggie. All those in favor of Maggie?”

  Holly raised her hand. So did Kaylee and Alyssa. I did not, even when my pledge sister kicked me in the ankle. “Ow! I’m abstaining.”

  “You can’t abstain,” said Tara.

  “I have a conflict of interest.” My tone was as unshakable as I could make it. “So I courteously decline to vote.”

  Her mouth turned down. “Fine. Those for Brittany.” Ashley, Erica, Nikki, and of course, the girl herself raised their hands.

  “Brittany should abstain, too,” Holly protested.

  “She doesn’t have to.” Tara’s voice was deep with disapproval, not of my opponent, but of me. “Brittany wins.”

  To halfhearted applause, Brittany beamed, put her hand on her heart, and made a face of embarrassed gratitude. “Thank you all for your support. I really appreciate the trust you’ve placed in me.”