Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  When Brooke was a junior, Eta Gamma Nationals sent a regional director to stay at the house for several weeks because, as Brooke put it, “our girls were just hellions.” The director “turned the house around.” She instituted mandatory study hours, streamlined the financial system, made sure meetings were run efficiently and with the proper rituals, and influenced executive board nominations so that the candidates for the administrative positions were known more for their responsibility than for their popularity. “If you’re going to be a vice president, you have to work,” the director told the chapter. “It’s not all about smiles.” The Ten, therefore, stuck to fun, prestigious positions such as social chair and rush chair.

  This is how Brooke found herself on her chapter’s Disciplinary Board. Many sororities have similar committees, also called “Standards,” “Judicial Board,” “Hearing,” or “Council,” which are comprised of a specific number of girls from each pledge class in the chapter. The responsibility of enforcing Nationals’ vague moral standards usually falls to these few sisters. The Disciplinary Board, which the girls called “D.B.,” could call up a sister for anything from failure to pay a fine to wearing “slutty” clothing. D.B. met after every weekly chapter meeting and conducted its business in secret. During chapter meeting, a girl who was to “sit in front of D.B.” would be surreptitiously handed a sealed note saying, “The Disciplinary Board asks that you meet with them at [such and such] time.” The recipient would wait nervously outside the D.B. room without knowing why she had been “called.” The D.B. could request to see a girl because she had committed an infraction, because she might have had information that could help the board’s investigation of one of her sisters, or because she herself had requested a meeting in order, essentially, to rat on a sister.

  “I saw Susie doing a line of cocaine at a party,” Brooke heard at one D.B. meeting. The board then investigated by calling in other sisters who were at the party, including Susie’s good friends in the house, who would be expected to confess to the board if they knew that Susie had indeed done a line of cocaine. The Disciplinary Board was expected to compile a sufficient amount of evidence before it was allowed to impose a penalty. Many girls referred to D.B. as “the goody-goody group,” but Brooke told me it was a useful way to get rid of “bad seeds.” The year that Brooke was on the board, one sister didn’t attend chapter meetings and allegedly did drugs. The board couldn’t obtain enough evidence to disaffiliate the girl on the basis of a drug habit. Instead, the committee members kept a close eye on the girl, waiting for her to do something egregious. A few months into the year, they found what they were looking for: a D.B. member spotted the girl, late at night, having sex on the lawn behind a fraternity house. She was called in front of the committee. “We couldn’t get her on the drugs,” Brooke said, “so we told her she was giving the house a really bad name and had her disaffiliated.” Forced disaffiliation, Brooke explained to me, is a sorority mark of shame. Once a girl has been initiated into a national sorority, even if she is disaffiliated, she is barred from joining another for the rest of her life.

  In other groups, sisters who aren’t on the Disciplinary Board take it upon themselves to rein in girls who aren’t properly representing their letters. At an Alpha Phi house in Virginia, the sisters devised a way to let sisters or pledges know when they were out of line in public. When a sister drank too much and made a fool of herself, an older Alpha Phi sister walked by and loudly hissed, “TNP!” When a pledge hooked up with five other girls at one party, a few sisters angrily took the pledge aside and whispered, “TNP!” And continually, whenever a sister isn’t behaving up to the sorority par, other sisters make sure to look her in the eye and say emphatically, “TNP!” That’s Not Phi.

  Breaking the Rules

  DECEMBER 19

  CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  When’s it my turn to be the priority? Could ya throw me a frickin’ bone please?

  • Sorority girls do not dress inappropriately.

  Amy, Sabrina, Caitlin, and René were hanging out in Amy’s room as Beth helped Amy and Caitlin get ready for Formal. It was the first time this semester that René had ventured into the sorority house that had rejected her.

  Professor Stone called Sabrina’s cell. As the other girls chatted, Sabrina kept a furtive eye on them to make sure they weren’t listening to her conversation.

  “No, it’s okay,” she reassured him. “They know. They don’t care . . . No, they’re not even listening . . . I know, I just can’t wait until the semester’s over.”

  After Sabrina hung up, Amy asked her what she planned to wear that night. Instead of going to Formal, Sabrina would join Beth and René for dinner at an upscale restaurant.

  “I don’t know, just some nice pants, I guess.”

  “You can borrow one of my dresses if you want, honey. René’s roommate, Traci, borrowed one last night for a fraternity formal,” said Amy, who was wearing a dress that plunged so low in back that her rear cleavage was easily visible. “And what about makeup?”

  “No makeup, thanks,” Sabrina said. She never wore makeup. Sabrina went upstairs to a sitting room for a quick smoke.

  Beth was flabbergasted. “She should have some makeup.”

  When Sabrina returned, Amy asked her, “Does Professor Stone know you smoke?”

  “No. He doesn’t know. Mike doesn’t even drink, so I’m not going to tell him about my little marijuana habit. But, hey—” Sabrina brightened. “I haven’t smoked in three weeks!”

  Amy was delighted at her sister’s breakthrough. “Sweetie, that’s fabulous!”

  Sabrina cocked her head, thinking. “Oh wait,” she muttered, “except yesterday I got some for free.”

  Amy shook her head, paged through Vogue, and sipped from a “40”—a large bottle of malt liquor—she had been storing underneath her bed. She stopped at a picture of Brittany Murphy. “Oooh, she’s emaciated now.” The other girls peered at the picture, which Amy held up so they could see. “She used to have boobs. She looked fine in Clueless.”

  “Traci’s boob popped out last night,” said René. The girls laughed.

  “Bless her heart, she fell out of my dress?!” Amy giggled and leaned forward, almost falling out of her own dress as Beth yelled at her to keep her head back.

  René fidgeted in the corner, as if working up the courage to speak. She took a deep breath. “Remember how we used to have breakfast in the mornings together to catch up?” she asked Amy and Caitlin, who were surrounded by makeup and hair appliances.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be up for breakfast tomorrow,” said Amy, missing the point as René, looking down, blinked quickly. “Anyway, can’t I please put makeup on you, Sabrina, please?” Amy implored, her speech lisped as she let a handful of breath mints dissolve on her tongue.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s fun!”

  “But I’m just going to wash it off.”

  “We all do that eventually. Please? Just eye makeup then?”

  “No way.” Sabrina changed the subject. “Your dress is so pretty!” Amy, tipsy, curtseyed repeatedly in her gravity-defying stilettos, her breasts halfway heaving out of her braless halter dress.

  Amy had waited months for Formal. She felt like a princess as Chad, who seemed like the perfect date, escorted her to the pre-game. She glanced at Caitlin in a two-piece ensemble that exposed her navel and much of her breasts. Amy thought Caitlin looked incredible, even if she didn’t know much about designers. Earlier in the week Amy had vowed to buy a subscription of Vogue and force Caitlin and Sabrina to read it regularly. Amy had been carrying her Fendi purse that day and Caitlin had asked what the “F” stood for.

  “Are you serious?” Amy had asked her. “You don’t know what the F means?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “It’s Fendi!”

  “Yeah, okay . . .” Caitlin looked at her skeptically. “Should I know that for some reason?”

  “Everybody knows that!”<
br />
  As they walked home, Amy stopped several friends on the way to ask them, “If you saw an F on a purse, what would it stand for?” They all answered correctly. But then, Caitlin hadn’t even known what Gucci was until freshman year. She usually wore Adidas.

  • Sorority girls do not have sex.

  At the pre-game, the girls drank as quickly as they could so that a buzz would set in by the time they headed to the house. The Alpha Rho entry hall was packed with drunk girls snapping photos and squealing, “I love your dress!” and “Oh my God, you look so cute!” While the sisters raved over each other’s dresses and makeup, the boys slapped each other fives in greeting. Chad looked around, mesmerized. “This is great!” he exclaimed. “A hundred drunk girls!”

  On the short limousine ride to the hotel, Amy and Chad shared her thermos of Absolut and Seven-Up. The adjacent ballrooms rented out for the evening offered several banquet tables of food and a well-stocked bar that nicely complimented the Alpha Rho Winter Formal shot glass souvenirs. But Chad and Amy spent most of the night dancing alone, drinks in hand. She wasn’t interested in paying attention to anybody but Chad. So Amy didn’t notice when a crowd formed around the women’s bathroom as girls laughed about a sophomore who was having sex in one of the stalls. And she didn’t realize that before the night was over, a third of the girls had disappeared to take Ecstasy and have sex with their dates upstairs.

  On the limousine ride home, Chris and Caitlin began kissing, foreplay to what they would finish once they returned to Chris’s apartment. Amy, tired from the drinking and the dancing, leaned into Chad, who kissed her gently. Then he flipped out, for no discernible reason.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “What?” Amy forced herself to wake up a bit. “You kissed me and I kissed you back.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” He seemed to be patronizing her because she was so drunk, but he was drunker; Amy was sure of it.

  “Yes, honey, I kissed you back.” Annoyed that Chad was being so huffy, Amy fell asleep.

  When they got off the bus, she tried to storm away, but it was a challenge to storm on four-inch heels. Chad helped her home, keeping her at arm’s length. When Chad said he was going back to his dorm instead of staying over, Amy was surprised. She had expected to sleep with him that night. “You’re drunk,” she said. “At least just eat something before you go.”

  “No, I just want to go home,” he slurred, and drove away.

  A week later, when Amy still hadn’t heard from Chad, she noticed his IM away message: “@ Louie’s with a hottie, maybe somethin more.” Amy was crushed. Things had been going so well. “What’s wrong with me?” she wept to her Big Sister, who was friendly with Chad. “Why does it work for everyone else but me?” All of her sisters fell into relationships so easily, she told her friend. Why couldn’t she?

  “I think it’s because you’re too accommodating and guys are afraid of getting too comfortable,” said her Big Sister. “Chad freaked out because he thought that if he started a relationship with you, it would get serious really fast.”

  Friends and sisters tried to console her but they weren’t nearly as helpful as her twin would have been. Amy missed her terribly. These were exactly the kinds of issues she would have confided to her sister. As much as she wanted to treat her Alpha Rho sisters like real sisters, it wasn’t the same—her sorority sisters weren’t actually related and didn’t offer unconditional love.

  Amy vowed to get back on the Atkins diet and start a regular gym schedule immediately. If she could just lose five pounds, she told herself, that would make a difference. Maybe then someone would stick around long enough to like her.

  • Sorority girls don’t do drugs.

  The day after the end of the semester, the House Mom, following national sorority rules, closed and dead-bolted the house, taking all of the sisters’ keys until she returned from Winter Break. Sabrina and Caitlin, who were staying at a friend’s apartment on campus for another day before going home, decided they wanted to spend the night tripping on mushrooms—the slight difficulty being that the mushrooms happened to be in Sabrina’s dresser in the Penthouse. Accompanied by two non-Greek male friends, the sisters crept around outside the house, looking for a window inadvertently left unlatched. Undeterred by the police car that kept circling the block, the group lurked in the shadows while one of the boys jimmied the lock on the side door of Alpha Rho. After several minutes, he pried the door open and the group sneaked into the house, bumping into furniture on their way to Sabrina’s room. When they found the mushrooms, they crept back out of the house. After a couple of hours at the apartment, where the group waited for the mushrooms to take effect, they returned to the house and smoked marijuana for hours on the back porch. “It was the most fun night ever,” Caitlin told me later. Though she knew her mother would impose her regular 11 p.m. curfew when she returned home for Winter Break, she no longer believed that her mother was sending minions to monitor her behavior at school. Caitlin relished the way the drugs made her feel freed from her mother’s influence. “It was like when you’re a little kid and you’re sneaking downstairs on Christmas Eve to see if Santa came yet. You’re nervous but excited at the same time.” She grinned and lay back on the floor, dreamily folding her hands behind her head. “That,” she said, “was one of the greatest nights of my life.”

  JANUARY

  When does Rush begin? You might not know it, but Rush begins during your freshman year in high school! Your grades, activities, and interests combine to make you the rushee of the future.

  —Ready for Rush: The Must-Have Manual for Sorority Rushees! 1999

  A smile is the sorority girl’s most important accessory . . . In fact, actives put Vaseline on their teeth (just like beauty contestants) to make smiling easier. Rushees go home at the end of the day with sore muscles from smiling. But it’s worth it . . . Some girls . . . should practice smiling in front of a mirror before rush.

  —Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success, 1985

  JANUARY 10

  AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  some people confuse the heck outta me . . .

  AMY RETURNED FROM WINTER Break refreshed, relaxed, and excited for rush. All sororities at State U were required to come back from vacation a few days early to prepare for the formally structured process of recruiting and selecting new members. Alpha Rho held an annual Pre-Rush Weekend, an in-house retreat intended to remind the sisters of rush protocol and to build a sense of solidarity.

  In between general sessions run by Charlotte, as president, and Elaine, the recruitment chair, during which the girls practiced “rush conversations” and learned rush songs, the chapter divided into smaller groups for team-building activities. During one of the general sessions, the girls discussed what the executive board considered the biggest weakness of the chapter: cliques.

  “We need to act more like one sisterhood than a lot of little sisterhoods,” one board member said. “We need to break down the cliques.” Most sisters agreed.

  “But there are always going to be cliques anyway,” said another. “We’re not all exactly alike—that’s one of the great things about Alpha Rho. We’re not the kind of sorority in which everyone’s the same and they’re all best friends but they’re also killing each other.”

  “Maybe if we stopped prioritizing people by their seniority, pledge class divisions wouldn’t be so much of an issue,” a sophomore sister offered. “Seniority is kind of petty anyway.”

  Whitney whipped around to face the girl. “I’ve been waiting four years to sit at the front of the meeting, so if you think that’s petty, then you’re mistaken,” she snapped. But by the end of the session, the sisters had come to a consensus that they would actively try to dissolve the subgroups within the house.

  After the meeting ended, the girls had a short break before the next session. They immediately dispersed into their usual cliques.

  Amy, Caitlin, and Sabrina met up in the kitche
n to catch up on their relationship gossip. Caitlin and Chris were stable. Sabrina was upset that Mike seemed to be making less and less time for her (though he did grade her the A she deserved). While at home over break, Amy had reconnected with her high school sweetheart, who proclaimed his love for her and asked her to try a long-distance relationship.

  “Ew, why him?” Sabrina asked. “He’s unattractive.” Sabrina had met him the year before and disliked him immediately.

  “I don’t care!” Amy said, her dimples fading. “He doesn’t have to be hot. He’s like a teddy bear, and he’s adorable to me. He’s the only person I’ve ever been able to see myself with forever.”

  “You’re just lovesick,” Caitlin dismissed. “You’re making him out to be perfect. No guy is perfect.”

  “He is!” Amy crossed her pale arms.

  “The only reason you think he’s perfect is because you only see him two weeks at a time,” Sabrina argued.

  Amy couldn’t believe it. Finally, she seemed to be having a healthy, serious relationship, and her sisters couldn’t be happy for her because the guy didn’t meet their aesthetic standards. Amy decided her sisters were misguided because they didn’t understand what a real relationship was. In her opinion, their boyfriends clearly didn’t treat them properly, while her high school sweetheart treated her the way a girl should be treated, sending her roses and calling her almost daily. But she kept her thoughts to herself as the conversation shifted.

  “Mike can’t kiss,” Sabrina complained.

  “Chris can’t appreciate sex the way it should be appreciated anymore,” said Caitlin.