Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  I asked her what sisterhood meant to her now, three years after college and nearly two years after her accident. “I gained four really great friends. Eta Gamma was a good experience for that time in my life. During college, while I was getting adjusted, I had a group of girls who would support me outside the house, even if they were destructive within it. If I argued with a girl from another sorority or got drunk and needed a ride home, my sisters were there for me. We kind of looked out for each other,” Brooke said. “But after school, life is different. Some women get very involved as adults and at football games they all go back to the Eta Gamma house to hang out. But not me. For me, Eta Gamma is just not a big thing anymore.”

  Becoming

  APRIL 19

  CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  It’s going to be a good summer

  WHEN CHRIS HAD ASKED CAITLIN IF IT WOULD BE ALL right if he went to another sorority’s Formal with a friend, Caitlin said that she wouldn’t forbid him to go but that she would be uncomfortable with it.

  “So it’s okay?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m not going to be the person who tells you no,” Caitlin replied, hoping he would reach his own conclusion that he shouldn’t go. He went.

  Two nights later, as they walked into the marble-columned reception hall for the Alpha Rho Formal, Chris wearily sunk into a chair near the buffet table, which displayed a lavish spread of vegetable and marinated steak brochettes, jumbo stuffed shrimp, and baked brie in phyllo with toasted almonds and raspberries.

  “I was up working last night,” Chris said, wrinkling his suit as he slouched.

  “Don’t fuck with me. You’re still tired from the other Formal,” said Caitlin.

  “Wait a minute, you told me it was okay, so I went.”

  “I only said it to be nice.”

  Caitlin dragged him to the dance floor teeming with stilettoed Alpha Rhos gyrating to the DJ’s fast-paced pop selections. Yawning, Chris remarked on the differences between this Formal and the one he had just attended.

  “At the other Formal, the newest sisters weren’t allowed to dance closely with guys because they were just initiated,” he said.

  “Can we please stop talking about that other Formal and enjoy ours?” Caitlin grumbled.

  “I was just telling you about it, that’s all,” Chris said, raising his voice.

  “This is my Formal and I don’t want to hear about the other one.”

  “I’ve been invited to a lot of other Formals and Date Parties, but I didn’t go,” said Chris.

  The blood rushed to Caitlin’s head. “You never told me that! It seems really sketchy that you didn’t tell me.”

  “It was just some people from class.”

  “Not telling me is like you were trying to hide something,” said Caitlin.

  “Well, I knew it would make you upset,” Chris said.

  “Then you shouldn’t have told me ever.” Caitlin stalked off. For the next two hours, she wandered around beneath the arches of teal and jade balloons, wondering if Chris had cheated on her. She tried to distract herself by dancing with Jake and by making fun of drunken sisters with Sabrina and Andrea. When she had cooled down, Caitlin returned to Chris, who was sitting alone in a corner with his arms crossed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Let’s just enjoy the rest of my Formal. There’s still an hour left.”

  Chris wasn’t appeased. “I didn’t come here to get walked away from. The girl at the other Formal didn’t leave me.”

  “Look, I’m sorry it’s a big deal to me, but I didn’t want to spend my Formal talking to you about other people’s Formals,” Caitlin said.

  “My other Formal date is my friend. Why should I have to put her on the back burner for you? Why should I put you in front of my friends?”

  Caitlin shook her head sadly. “You know what?” she said. “Just get out of my life.” She hurried out of the reception hall and sneaked into another sister’s limousine, where she hid until Formal ended and the driver took the girls back to the house.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER CAITLIN TOLD HER MOTHER THE relationship with Chris was over, Caitlin called again to tell her mother the fall semester classes she had preregistered for. When she informed her mother that she had signed up for two art classes instead of political science courses, her mother went ballistic.

  “That’s hardly worthwhile,” she yelled. “I’m not paying for those classes.”

  Later that night, Caitlin’s father e-mailed Caitlin to assure her that he would find a way to slip her the tuition money without her mother’s knowledge.

  Throughout the next several days, Caitlin’s sisters tried to distract her from her anguish. They praised her for how well she delivered her rape presentation and gave her high marks as vice president on their executive board evaluation forms when her term ended. Sabrina and other sisters took her out to the bars and tried to convince her that it was fun to be single. The other sisters told her that she shouldn’t be upset, that Chris wasn’t worth her energy. But that didn’t console her. Only Sabrina came up with something that finally made Caitlin start to feel better.

  “I like Chris as a person,” Sabrina said, “but as a boyfriend he needs a lot of work.”

  When one of Jake’s Mu Zeta Nu brothers asked Caitlin to go with him to the MuNu Formal, Caitlin’s sisters persuaded her to go. After double-checking with Jake, who assured her that his brother had only asked her as a friend, Caitlin decided the Formal would be a good opportunity to escape for the weekend. The fraternity Formal was at a hotel in a city a few hours away.

  Caitlin was dancing with her date and chatting with Jake and Amy when she spotted a familiar profile across the room. After not having seen Taylor since he had given her the tulip bouquet in November, Caitlin was surprised at her twinge of jealousy: he looked good, and he was with another girl. “Whatever,” Caitlin told herself, “I’m prettier than she is.” She vowed to make it seem like she was having the time of her life, in case he saw her. When Amy suggested the group go upstairs to their hotel room to do some shots, Caitlin quickly agreed.

  Jake and Amy lined up their alcohol on an ironing board, setting up an impromptu bar. After a few Kamikazes, Caitlin cut herself off. She had already pre-gamed with her date in their hotel room before the dance and had finished a whiskey sour downstairs. Back in the ballroom, Caitlin was feeling the effects of the alcohol when she spotted Taylor again. She turned to Amy. “You gotta help me seduce Taylor,” Caitlin said.

  “Really?!” Amy beamed, excited about her sister’s unexpected interest. “That is so great. You should totally go for it! I’ll go distract your date.” She disappeared. Caitlin didn’t know how Amy engineered it, but all of a sudden, Amy was dancing flirtatiously with Caitlin’s date across the room, and Taylor and Caitlin were face-to-face on the dance floor.

  “Hey,” said Caitlin, “long time no see.” She lightly punched his shoulder.

  Taylor grinned. He gestured toward her date. “Why are you here with him?”

  “Chris and I broke up. Who’s your date?” Caitlin asked.

  “Just a friend.” They danced for a few minutes before he kissed her. This, Caitlin realized, felt right.

  “Do you want to go upstairs?” Taylor asked. They tried to slide off the dance floor and out of the room without other people noticing. In Taylor’s hotel room, as they fooled around, Taylor acted tentatively. When Caitlin began unbuttoning his shirt, he hesitated.

  “We’re in a hotel room,” Caitlin whispered. “What did you expect?”

  An hour later, as they put their clothes back on, Caitlin suggested they see what everyone else was doing. But when they got downstairs, Formal was over. Caitlin spotted her date at the bar and went to join him while Taylor left to find his friend. Caitlin acted as if nothing had happened. When her date fell asleep in their hotel room, Caitlin returned to the bar, where a few people suggested they change into their swimsuits and reconvene in the hot tub. As Caitlin sat in a lobby chair and waited for
the elevator, Taylor walked by.

  “What are you up to?” he asked.

  “We were going to go hot-tubbing.”

  He leaned on the chair directly in front of her and looked her straight in the eyes.

  “Please don’t go,” he said quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come hang out with me.”

  “What about your date?” Caitlin asked.

  “She passed out in someone else’s room.”

  Back in Taylor’s room, they moved toward having sex again. “Can we slow it down and do it at my pace now?” he asked. Afterward they talked for hours. He told her how frustrated he was that an entire semester had passed when they could have been getting to know each other better. And Caitlin, who had until then merely been enjoying the moment, abruptly became aware that Taylor genuinely liked her. For Taylor the Player to be talking sincerely about seeing her again, Caitlin realized, she must have unknowingly made a tremendous impression on him.

  Early in the morning, Caitlin slipped back into her hotel room so that no one would ask any questions. In the limousine on the way home, Jake and Amy corralled her.

  “So,” Jake asked, in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge tone, “how’s it going?”

  “Fine,” Caitlin said, amused.

  “Did you guys have fun?” he pressed.

  “Taylor and I? We just talked.”

  “Seriously?” asked Jake, disappointed.

  “Yeah,” Caitlin repeated. “We just talked.”

  Amy, Jake, and Caitlin’s date fell asleep quickly. Caitlin was glad she had been able to spend some quality time with Amy—who was genuine and a good friend—even if it hadn’t come until the end of the semester. Caitlin leaned against her window and watched the scenery whiz by, smiling at last night’s memory. Caitlin doubted that she and Taylor would embark on a serious relationship, but who knew? It didn’t matter to her, anyway. What mattered was that even just six months ago, with her world centered on Chris, she never would have entertained the thought of being with another guy—especially a fraternity brother of whom her mother would disapprove even before knowing anything about him. And now, what seemed like eons later, she was finally realizing that there were so many other people out there who would think that she was terrific that there was no reason to hold her breath waiting for someone who couldn’t decide.

  Caitlin concluded that she had changed more this year than any other year in her life. She had finally learned that at some point she simply had to give up her futile efforts to please her mother. It had taken an extraordinary amount of turmoil for her to feel like she was finally growing up, and now that she had successfully wrestled with so many issues, it dawned on her that she was gradually starting to become what she had always pretended to be on the outside but was not truly until now. She was becoming—she thought—strong.

  Saying Good-bye

  APRIL 25

  VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  gangs so tight they call us virgins!!!

  ON THE LAST SATURDAY IN APRIL, BETA PI HELD ITS END-of-the-Year Banquet, which was simultaneously a semiformal date function and a farewell dinner for the seniors. Beta Pi rented out a local restaurant and decorated it with candles and tablecloths in burgundy and cream, the Beta Pi colors. At each senior’s place setting rested a Tiffany sterling silver mesh bracelet nestled in a blue box—a parting gift purchased by the rest of the sisterhood.

  Vicki arrived straight from pre-game with Olivia, Ashleigh, Morgan, their dates, and William. Beneath sidewalks framed in creamy white magnolia trees, the girls walked in a tight group together, their dates practically afterthoughts. Having been escorted to her Formal by Dan, Vicki chose to invite William to the banquet as a gesture of friendship.

  After dinner, Vicki was dancing with her friends in a circle of long blond hair when Morgan tapped her on the shoulder and told her that Ashleigh was crying in the bathroom. Vicki followed Morgan to the women’s lounge. When Ashleigh saw them, she cried even harder, blubbering about how the Iota brother William had set her up with didn’t like her.

  “I never bring someone to these things who actually cares about me,” Ashleigh bemoaned, sniveling as she dug into her hot pink purse for a scented tissue. “You can find love and Olivia can find love and Morgan can find love but no one’s ever going to love me.”

  “Ashleigh, yes they will,” said Vicki, hugging her friend.

  “If I could change one thing about myself it would be everything,” Ashleigh wailed.

  “Ashleigh, who’s ditching her date to spend time with you in the bathroom for like half an hour? I love you so much, obviously,” Vicki said.

  When the girls emerged, the seniors were passing out the Superlatives Booklet, an annual tradition during which the Beta Pi sisters wrote “Most Likely to” jokes on the designated page for each Beta Pi.

  “Nobody get offended!” the seniors shouted as they distributed the stapled pamphlet. “We tease because we love!”

  “If you don’t have a sense of humor, don’t read this,” muttered another senior.

  When Vicki got her copy, she and Olivia ran to a corner to peruse it together. They laughed hysterically, both because of the booklet and because Olivia was drunkenly repeating everything that Vicki read aloud.

  “Here’s Morgan’s Page: Most Likely to Vote for Herself as Most Beautiful, Most Likely to Marry a Senior Citizen at Age 25, Most Likely to One Day Model Clothing Lines for Sticks and Poles,” Vicki laughed.

  “Ha-ha, sticks and poles!” echoed Olivia.

  Vicki continued down the list. There was a Most Beautiful, Most Likely to Have a Sexual Position Named After Her, Most Likely to Need Her Stomach Stapled, and Most Likely to Lose a Car While Still in It. Ashleigh was labeled Least Likely to Be Able to Hold an Aspirin Between Her Knees and Most Likely to See Titanic Too Many Times. Laura-Ann was tagged Most Likely to Be Put in a Mental Institution and Most Likely to Be an Old Woman Who Talks to Her Cats, Which Will All Be Named Beta Pi. Olivia was voted Most Likely to Miss Class for Pre-Pre-Pre-Game and Most Likely to Wake Up Still Drunk. And Vicki’s page read Most Likely to Be a Player for Life and Least Likely to Sleep in Her Room. Upon reading their pages in the booklet, some of the sisters, offended, ran out of the room.

  As Vicki and her friends resumed dancing, she spotted William walking by and caught his arm. “Come dance!” she said. After a few minutes, Vicki turned around, saw Olivia, and danced with her for a while. When she turned back around, William was gone.

  Vicki found him sitting alone, hiding beneath his blond curls at a table across the room.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “You haven’t been treating me like your date,” he said.

  “Okay, first Ashleigh needed me. She was really upset. Then we had the superlatives . . .”

  “I don’t know how to act with you,” William cut her off. “We went from so much to absolutely nothing. Do we act like we’re friends? We’ve never been friends. Do we act like we’re together? We’re not together.”

  “This couldn’t wait until after Banquet? I mean, you couldn’t just dance and have fun and we could talk about it later?” asked Vicki.

  As they squabbled, the sisters grouped together on the dance floor, put their arms around each other, and sang two senior farewell songs, the first one dirty and the second one sad. Vicki ached to join them, but William wouldn’t let her. All she wanted to do was have a good time with her sisters. Half an hour into their argument, the DJ played the song the girls had used for their Delta Lambda Homecoming serenade. The sisters ran to the dance floor again and joyously shouted their raunchy Beta Pi lyrics. Vicki, who couldn’t pull away from the argument in time, grew increasingly upset that this was the seniors’ last Beta Pi event and she couldn’t fully participate.

  After she and William had been arguing for nearly an hour, Vicki saw Ashleigh and grabbed her arm. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, dragging Ashleigh with her. In the bathroom, Vicki retreated in
to a stall and wept, something she hadn’t done since September. This was the first real fight she had had with anyone all year.

  “I can’t go back in there,” Vicki whispered hoarsely to Ashleigh, who wrapped her arms around her. “I can’t deal with him anymore.”

  “What happened?” Ashleigh asked. “Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay.”

  “Don’t cry, Vicki,” Morgan said as she opened the door to the stall and came in. “There’s no point in crying.”

  Olivia came rushing into the bathroom and dashed into the stall. “Vicki!” When the sisters updated Olivia, she knelt and looked Vicki in the eyes. “Oh my God, Vicki. Screw him. You shrug it off, take a couple of shots, and get out there on the dance floor and have a good time.” She spritzed Vicki with a tiny perfume bottle from her purse. “This is your banquet. And we love you.”

  There in the bathroom stall, Olivia began to belt out the Delta Lambda Homecoming serenade that Vicki had missed. Ashleigh and Morgan joined in and shimmied to the tune, their hips banging against the sides of the stall. Laughing, Vicki looked around at her closest sisters, singing and dancing, missing their banquet to spend time with her in the bathroom. “This is what really matters—not the guys out there,” she thought to herself, getting up and standing tall in her heels. “These are my girls. And they’re here for me.”