Greek: Best Frenemies

by Marsha Warner

“Hey, who’s almost flunking philosophy? And I can’t believe I’m using that to defend myself, but I am. You’re smart. You just want what’s best for the house, and Rebecca can be kind of hard to deal with some of the time.”

  “She is a woman of mystery.”

  “Yeah, and the point is, you’re going to figure her out. So get to it, Inspector Cartwright. I have a snotty TA to impress.” They stopped in front of the entrance to the lecture hall. “Kiss for good luck?”

  “Do I need a reason?” she asked and kissed him.

  Cappie did not find the teaching assistant in the office. Instead, Professor Izmaylov was hunched over the cheap, unstable desk in the cramped office, somewhat literally buried in paperwork, or at least papers. It was considerably more high tech than his office, with more anime action figures on the shelves. “Alex is sick. I’m filling in,” he said, motioning for Cappie to sit down on the only available seat, a rolling desk chair that squeaked when it moved. “Please try to look more disappointed about that. He is my son.”

  “Sorry, I thought—”

  “He’s tough, but he’s fair. And new at teaching,” the professor said. “We don’t all have a natural candor.” He held out his hand and Cappie put the proposal in it, which was in a plastic folder even if it wasn’t necessary and university professors were less likely to be dazzled than high-school teachers. Professor Izmaylov adjusted his glasses and read it quickly. It wasn’t particularly long, just an opening paragraph and an outline. “You haven’t said anything I don’t already know, but there isn’t a lot of chance of that happening. Especially about Aristotle.” He handed the proposal back to Cappie. “Aristotle’s views on animism aren’t enough for a paper. He rejected it. So even a reasoning robot isn’t human, even if only humans can reason. It’s not a solid syllogism. What is it with your generation and robots? Nobody’s been able to make one that can go up stairs. The allure of something that can be defeated by having a hiding place on the second floor escapes me. Computers are much more interesting.”

  “Computers aren’t trying to go anywhere.”

  The professor looked at the edge of the desk, which was shaky at best. There was a closed laptop on it. “Alex’s computer seems intent on toppling over as soon as I’m not looking.”

  “But that involves gravity, which Aristotle didn’t understand.”

  He grimaced. “No, he didn’t. You know quite a good deal about Greek philosophers, Mr. Cappie. Putting these ideas to paper seems to be your issue. Unfortunately, it’s a basic requirement for the class.”

  “Aristotle thought true philosophy was in experience. That’s why he did so much field work in ecology.”

  The professor looked up, interested. “A point often missed by armchair philosophers, though usually their chairs have better supports than this one. Why, are you building a robot?”

  “It so happens, I am. And the rest of Kappa Tau.”

  “I am quite mistaken about the nature of your fraternity. I thought it was known for other things, like destruction of police property.”

  “The Omega Chis were there, too, but they bailed.”

  “Then they fail to understand the meaning of the word fraternity, but they have a better understanding of politics and government—something Aristotle did not excel at, much as he might have tried.”

  “He bailed on Athens after he was charged with impiety.”

  “Yes, bring that up, why don’t you,” the professor said, with no particular malice, more amusement in his voice. “On the other hand I don’t see the Omega Chis building a robot and trying to get philosophy credits for it. They’re hosting some sort of beauty contest instead. This is what I get for bothering to read the campus paper.”

  “The sweetheart competition.” Cappie knew Professor Izmaylov was the kind of person who liked to chat, at least with him. Cappie was a chatty sort of guy so it didn’t bother him, especially when his grades were hurting and the professor potentially stood between him and graduation. “They pick a girl from one of the sororities as their favorite.”

  “Youth is fleeting, and therefore worthy of celebration, otherwise we might miss it entirely. It’s a shame we make such fools of ourselves while doing it. And you’re engaged in this contest in some fashion?”

  “My girlfriend is a ZBZ and they have their candidate and…they’re obsessing about it. So, peripherally, yes. Which is not to say I don’t plan to spend every waking moment of my time working on this paper.”

  “You should if you want it done by Monday morning. Which is when I want it done,” the professor said. “I’ll give you my tentative permission to write about your robot, Mr. Cappie, but focus on how it relates to the four causes and don’t spend too much time with animism. Plastic and wires don’t have a soul, not in Aristotle’s opinion and not in mine. But I’m intrigued by the novelty of it, I confess. I’m old. New and shiny things delight me. Do a very good job of that and we’ll see about your grade average. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have papers to grade before those terribly addictive soap operas come back on the television and I shamelessly let my brain cells die.”

  Cappie returned to the Kappa Tau house to find it more of a mess than it normally was, and that was saying something. In addition to the usual food and beer detritus, it appeared as if Home Depot had come by and dumped spare parts into the living room by way of conveyer belt. Cappie had to climb over things he couldn’t recognize but seemed to be devices for plumbing before he made it to the backyard, where Rusty and the pledges were working hard on two remarkably manlike robots, even if they were made of tubing and wiring covered by boxes. Beaver was off in the corner, painting some of the smaller packing boxes blue, along with a lot of their lawn in the process.

  “Things look…good.” Cappie looked around. “Sort of.” When Rusty finally picked his head up from the other side of the hastily constructed ring, he had two black eyes and an ice pack strapped to his head. “Spitter, you know these robots are supposed to hit each other, right?”

  “They’re supposed to,” Rusty said, looking sort of sad about it, but he was putting on a brave face for the pledges. He had certainly been through worse, physically, during his own rush period. “Are we insured?”

  “Wow, there’s a question I didn’t want to be asked. For your life? What kind of guy do you take me for? H. H. Holmes?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who murdered like a ton of people during the Chicago World’s Fair. The Onion Av Club said The Devil in the White City was one of the best nonfiction books of the last decade. And book clubs are notorious chick parties, if you’re ever looking for one.”

  “And there’s no cover,” Anthony Hopkins pointed out. “What? I liked Snow Falling on Cedars anyway. Which is what we read.”

  “So what does this have to do with insurance?”

  Cappie continued. “One of the things Holmes did in, like, the 1890s was to take out insurance polices on all of the women he married and their family members, then he killed them, claimed they had moved to Europe and kept their stuff. Which I would never do to you no matter how bad our beer money fund was, even if you were actually planning on moving to Europe and this was just insurance fraud.” He watched Rusty wince. “Okay, let’s get off the topic of murdering Spitter for the insurance money, though I will leave the topic open when we’re discussing Omega Chis.”

  “Who are not Calvin.”

  “Who are not Spitter’s friend.”

  “Yeah, because I meant house insurance.” Rusty was exasperated, or maybe he was just in pain. “Because, there’s an issue with a window which may or may not have been intact, like, half an hour ago.”

  Cappie couldn’t see any windows in arm’s reach of the battle bots. “Are we making fighting robots or a slow-pitch softball league? And to answer your question, no one will insure us, something which should not come as a huge surprise.”

  The pledge Anthony Hopkins snapped something off, and one of the robot arms went flying, narrowly missing Cappie and l
anding in the uninflated inflatable pool normally used for mud wrestling.

  “Sorry,” the pledge squeaked.

  “For the record, there’s no life insurance policy on me that in any way benefits the house,” Cappie said. “In fact, I don’t know if there’s any life insurance policy on me. My parents don’t trust giant corporations or the government. So, maybe we can do something about the aim?”

  Dale entered from indoors, where he had gone to collect a juice box. “Hey, Cappie.” He sucked on his drink with gusto. “How did the meeting with the TA go?”

  “It was with Professor Izmaylov, who is for some reason going easy on me. If writing a fifteen-page paper on robotics and Aristotle is ‘going easy.’”

  “The robotics part should be easy.”

  Another part went flying, this time not of anyone’s meddling as far as they could tell. What should have been a chest component popped out and hit the other robot’s headpiece, which was a box, and knocked the whole thing over.

  “And he’s down! Anyone want to count?” Cappie said with feigned enthusiasm. “What did you say about the robot part being easy?”

  “Maybe we should install the controls by radio command,” Rusty said. “You know, for distance.”

  “So we can be in some kind of bomb shelter when these things go at each other and take out the rest of the lawn?” Pickles asked. “I vote yes.”

  “Which, thank you for your efforts, Beaver, is not supposed to be blue,” Cappie said. “Anthony Hopkins, get him some newspaper.”

  The others went to their various tasks, and Rusty approached Cappie as Dale sorted the equipment. “I’m sorry for destroying the house.”

  “Spitter, one window does not a destroyed house make. Rome—and a set of robots—wasn’t built in a day. And speaking of days, if you could finish by Monday, that would really help me out.”

  “The robots are your paper?”

  “The robots would make interesting graphic additions to my paper if I could have decent pictures of them working, or at least looking like they’re working. And color pictures wow older people with poor eyesight and kill space on the page of a very long paper. Which I have to write.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I’ll flunk philosophy, have to take a credit over the summer to graduate and be dumped by your sister again. So the stakes are astronomically high.”

  “For you.”

  “And for you, sadly, if you want to put up with one upset biological sibling and a moody Big-Brother-in-Fraternity.” He put a hand on Rusty’s shoulder. “I only ask these things of you because I believe in you. And because you’ll probably do them even if I don’t and drive us all crazy anyway. It’s the Zen of Rusty Cartwright.”

  “I don’t think Zen is the right word.”

  “Okay, confession time. I came quite close to flunking Asian religions freshman year. My Big Brother, Egyptian Joe, got me through it.”

  “By helping you with an extra-credit problem?”

  “No, he got the answers for the final exam because he was sleeping with the TA. Something I’m not going to ask of you. I don’t think Alex Izmaylov is your type.”

  chapter eight

  The next morning, Casey was late to class after over-sleeping, a consequence of a long night of staring at the ceiling and wondering what she was doing and what she should do. Ashleigh, having said her piece, slept like the dead. The girl could sleep through the house burning down, though hopefully neither the house would burn down in retaliation nor would Ashleigh sleep through it. Although the prospect of fire and death did put things into perspective, at least for a little while, before Casey went back to being frustrated and obsessed with Rebecca becoming sweetheart.

  When Casey was nominated sweetheart, it was a very different experience. The nomination process was the most nerve-wracking as they sat and waited for Omega Chi to come to the house. Then Evan arrived and gave her the rose while the others serenaded her, and it was like a fairy tale coming true.

  She had gone on to win the title with dignity, not crass displays of popularity or bribery. That was the key to everything, at least last year. It was how a sweetheart acted.

  Halfway through the liberal arts class she wasn’t paying much attention to, she realized there was someone she needed to speak to before confronting Rebecca. Someone who knew a heck of a lot about picking sweethearts, maybe more than anyone. But she couldn’t go to his house, because that might be misconstrued, even if she wasn’t campaigning. Fortunately, she knew he would be at the Panhellenic Council meeting that afternoon.

  There was no discussion or even mention of the sweetheart competition during the meeting. Even though Katherine, the president of the Panhellenic Council, openly despised ridiculous and what she deemed demeaning acts performed by sororities, she had a stake in the contest like almost everyone else in the room, excluding the other fraternities. She was a Gamma Psi, and her sorority sister Natalie was a front- runner for sweetheart. She knew all about discretion, so it never came up, not even in a passing, passive-aggressive comment, which Casey thought was an impressive display of fortitude on Katherine’s part. Instead, the topics were fundraising, not all of them related to rebuilding the Gamma Psi house. The sorority was hoping to break ground before graduation. In the meantime, the university was making promises to place all the Gamma Psis in their own section of one of the upperclassmen dorms the following semester. The normal issues were raised with community service and how no one was doing enough of it or finding creative ways to do it that were more than just working at a soup kitchen. Everything had to be “dynamic,” such as mentoring kids and working with the disabled, though Casey didn’t see precisely how those were dynamic. The Inter-Fraternity Council just nodded their heads and came up with some lame excuses as to why they were behind on their community service and what they would do to make it up, and the meeting was called.

  Casey caught up with Evan in the elevator. “Can we talk?”

  “Is it about the sweetheart competition?”

  “Kind of. But in a good way. Well, not necessarily good, but not in a promotional or campaigning way.” She smiled. “Trust me?”

  He smiled hesitantly. “Okay.” Instead of at the lobby, they got off at the second floor, where there was a student lounge designated for use by social activist societies. Years ago the Marxists had taken it over, so the walls were mostly filled with posters on dowels about workers’ rights. Unfortunately, the Marxist Union was far less organized than concerned about the rights of university workers, so the room was always empty and there were plenty of suspiciously unwashed couches to sit on.

  “I can’t tell you about Rebecca’s standing, but you already know that,” Evan said to Casey. Their relationship as friends had been a shaky one since their disastrous breakup last year, but now that she was dating Cappie again, Casey wasn’t sure where she stood. Nonetheless he seemed open to at least the discussion. “Can we at least agree that things have gotten crazy this year?”

  “I was just going to say that! What is wrong with everyone?”

  Evan smirked. “I’ll distribute the blame equally. We haven’t exactly made it a policy to turn away the gift baskets. So what’s up?”

  “Okay, can what we say here, like, totally stay here, forever and ever?”

  “I’m bad at those sorts of promises, but since we’re not, er, medicated this time, maybe I’ll be better at keeping it,” Evan said. The last time Casey and Evan really bonded, it was during dry weekend, when they were supposed to be chaperones for the different houses. Unfortunately (or fortunately) at one of the first houses, they were served what they didn’t know were “special” brownies and wound up in the bathtub at ZBZ, surrounded by candles and spilling everything that maybe shouldn’t have been said and some things that should have. “Let me guess. Rebecca doesn’t want to be sweetheart.”

  “Not that I was— Yes! How did you know?”

  “A feeling.” But his voice and expression indicated that it was more
than a feeling. Maybe Rebecca had confessed something to him, something she hadn’t trusted Casey with or felt comfortable discussing with Casey. “A good feeling, it turns out. Not that I’m shocked.”

  “But she should want it!”

  “Should?”

  “She has to want to be sweetheart. It’s sort of the principle of the thing.”

  “Not technically,” Evan said. “The principle of the sweetheart competition is that we pick a girl we think is sweet and throw a gala in her honor. Or that’s how it’s supposed to work. I guess in the days before feminism, the blushing girl wouldn’t dream of saying no, and there weren’t such forward bribes for our votes. We pick a girl, we honor her. That’s all that’s on the books.”

  “And it doesn’t matter if she’s unwilling?”

  He shrugged. “I suspect our esteemed founders saw no reason why she would say no.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Our esteemed founders also lived in a time when women looked forward to push-button microwave ovens and vacuum cleaners to free up their afternoons for white wine and romance novels. And that you should wear a tie everywhere you go.” Evan was, in fact, wearing a tie. “The last part isn’t too bad.”

  “You do look good in a tie.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “The point is, things have changed, the contest has changed. And the houses have changed. It’s a house-status thing now. Did you know we could originally nominate multiple girls in one sorority and none from another? Especially if it was an ethnically mixed sorority.” He shrugged. “I had to memorize a lot of Omega Chi history when I was a pledge. Not all of it is pretty, or maybe it just reflects the times they lived in. The point is, the way we have it now, it’s supposed to be fair to everyone, in that we nominate a girl per sorority, even if there’s a sorority where there are no girls we like.”

  “Making it even more political.”

  “Especially since you guys started ranking your sororities in social standing and having contests to prove it instead of just avoiding each other and each house separately considering itself superior all the time. In a way, you control the contest more than we do.” He leaned back, accidentally knocking over a papier-mâché Che Guevara head, which he set back up on its altar on the table with an awkward grin. “So, Rebecca.”