by Rachel Shane
When he used the hard tip of his tongue on my most sensitive spot, I gripped the bed sheet like handrails, the only thing keeping me from floating. His tongue stroked me in alternating swirls and licks. Thank God Nate wasn’t in the room because my moans grew so loud, I feared the sound would teem over into other rooms. Sensation rose until my body convulsed in waves of euphoria. I let out a single scream in the soon-to-be-empty room. The last hurrah.
He let my underwear drop back in place and rested his cheek against my belly button. His face glistened in the candlelight. “Good call. I’m glad we left those on.”
“Well, they don’t have to stay on anymore,” I teased.
I expected him to laugh but suddenly his face turned serious. “I do, you know.” He crawled up my body and brushed my hair from my face. “Love you.”
I cupped his cheeks in my hands. “You know I do too.”
LATER, WE CUDDLED IN his Beta Chi bed for the last time. Our arms and legs were so tangled up in each other, I wasn’t sure where he ended and I began. I nestled into the crook of his shoulder, his arm sliding around me. “I have an idea for how to fix Rho Sigma,” I said.
Corey’s fingers danced along my stomach, soothing me. “I thought of one too. We get all the other sororities kicked off campus. That way, Rho Sig is in good company and the Greek Org has to let you all back in or they lose their jobs.” He let out his raspy laugh. “Foolproof, right?”
“Hmmm, that one’s good.” I made a grand show of contemplating it by tapping my finger against my kiss-swollen lips. “But what about starting it up underground? Keep all the girls involved, spend the rest of the semester improving our image, show the school the sorority has changed. Like Out House. We’ll focus on philanthropy stuff to impress the Greek Org.”
His arm stiffened around me. “Mac, that’s illegal on this campus, it won’t solve anything. Look at what it made Harrison do.”
I was about to say the craziest thing of all. I sucked in air through my lungs as encouragement. “Yeah, but it worked for him. And that’s what the girls want—they want to feel like they can still party with frats, they want organized events, someplace they belong. If I start it up, I’ll be in control. I can make sure things actually change.” I kissed his chest. “Plus, they’ll be the coolest sorority on campus. Everyone likes forbidden things.”
He chuckled. “Okay fine, let’s say you did this, there’s a lot of logistics to work out. First, you’ll need a place to hold meetings. You can’t do it at Rho Sigma, not while a school official lives in as a security guard. And you’ll need to make sure all the girls are fully on board, otherwise they could turn you in.” His arm tightened around me. “You yourself already have a warning. If Throckmorton gets wind that you started up Rho Sig, they’ll skip academic probation and go straight to expulsion.”
I rolled around to face him. “I’m good at getting people to commit.” I dropped a hard kiss on his lips. “I mean, I got you to buckle down. After that, the girls will be a piece of cake. Anything’s possible!”
He smiled, pulling me closer to him again, arms surrounding me. “But it took you several months.”
“Pssh. Details.” I shrugged. “And the place to meet…I was thinking your new apartment might be perfect. For the rest of this year at least. We’ll figure out a new game plan next year.”
“So that’s what you want me for? My apartment?” He scoffed, trying hard to look offended. “And here I thought you loved me.”
“No, I hate you,” I said, throwing his words from Quigley’s back at him.
But there was another risk he hadn’t said, a personal one. Could I handle the parties? I thought so. I hoped so.
He paused, thinking. “Can I be an honorary member? I’ve always wanted to be in a sorority. I want to see if those topless pillow fights are real.”
“Of course they’re real. What do you think we do at chapter meetings? Discuss upcoming events and rehash rules?” I giggled.
“I’m serious about the honorary member thing. I’m in need of a new group to join.”
“Well, if we’re breaking some rules to resurrect Rho Sig illegally, might as well break them all.”
“That’s the thing,” he said, voice low in my ear. “When your sorority is underground…there are no rules.”
“It’s so…empty,” I said the next day in Corey’s room.
“What did you expect?” He let out his raspy laugh, the one that made my heart squeeze with love.
I expected his Beta Chi room to be void of Corey, after all, he’d moved everything to his new apartment yesterday afternoon, but I didn’t expect the room to feel so lifeless. Cold, as if the only things left behind were the negative memories of all those frustrations, all those moments that should have been right but went horribly wrong. We could start fresh in his new place.
I sat down on the barren mattress. On his desk, a square of polished wood where his laptop had been gleamed between the thin layer of dust. All the empty bottles of liquor that sat atop the TV stand like trophies, gone. Specks of dirt stood out on the empty floor no longer covered by dirty laundry. An old, empty keg already replaced the clothes that had once hung in Corey’s side of the closet. It hurt to look at Nate’s side of the room, still so full of life.
Corey hovered in the doorway. “You’re not considering moving in here, are you? Because I’m about to head out.”
We’d come over to the fraternity because Corey knew everyone else had already fled the snow for warmer Spring Break climates and he wanted to raid the food storage, a parting gift, he’d called it. We’d stopped up here to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.
I pushed myself off the bed, about to join him, but then I saw it. One of Corey’s t-shirts, scrunched up under the couch. I bent over, picked it up, and flung it a few times, dust flying. The wrinkled mess in my hands was the last piece of him in the room. It even still smelled like him.
I turned to Corey. “Does Nate have any thumb tacks?”
“Oooh, I’ve been looking for that.” He held his hand for it.
“It’s gross.”
“Actually, that looks cleaner than most of my others.”
Mentally, I added another to-do list to our growing Spring Break agenda: laundry. Right below resurrect my dead sorority.
I walked over to Nate’s desk and checked the drawers, grabbing a few tacks from a tin inside. I was about to head back to Corey’s side, when a permanent marker caught my eye.
“What are you doing?”
I uncapped the marker and smoothed out the t-shirt out as best I could. On the front, I traced a thick line across the fabric. Beneath it, I drew a triangle, filling it in with the marker. And underneath that, I outlined a square. Inside the square, I put a single Greek letter, an Upsilon. For Underground.
“I hope you wrote something naughty on there.”
“I did.” I climbed onto Corey’s bed. Trying to keep my balance on the wobbling mattress, I tacked the shirt onto the wall, stretching out all the wrinkles.
“A house with a line?”
“I figure we can’t wear letters anymore, so we need a logo. The house is beneath the line, therefore, it’s underground.”
He grinned. “And you’re not even a marketing major.”
Most kids ventured off to Mexico where the drinking age lowered to eighteen and hook-ups were better if you didn’t remember them in the morning. Some students went home to their parents, desperate for clean laundry and relaxation. Almost no one except international students remained on campus. Well, and Corey and me.
We spent most of the week preparing for the opening of Underground Rho Sigma…and christening his new bed.
I’d also used the opportunity to schedule a few additional sessions with the school psychologist while her schedule remained mostly empty. When I’d asked Corey to come along to one of the sessions, he hadn’t protested, he’d grabbed my hand. After, he scheduled a few of his own. Next week when the students got back, he’d accompany
me to my next AA meeting.
“A viral marketing campaign,” Corey said one day while we attempted to cook chicken stir fry in his kitchen with a five-dollar pan we bought at Wal-Mart. If the two of us stood with our backs to each other, we could almost fit inside the tiny kitchen alcove at the same time. Ugly gray carpeting that had seen its fair share of parties and possibly murders covered every inch of the apartment except for the tiny square in front of the refrigerator. I hung a few of my Coin series paintings on the bare white walls to give the place some life, plus a giant portrait of a used condom painted in rainbow hues. Fallon had made it freshman year as part of an assignment to get a visceral reaction from the viewer as art was meant to do, and while our teacher had loved it, it wasn’t exactly intended to hang above a ratty curbside-rescued couch. But Corey insisted I hang it in prominence.
“You can’t exactly control what goes viral.” I turned the burner to full heat and set a pot of water to boil for the rice.
“You can with the right variables. We’ll put that symbol you created everywhere. People will have to pay attention. They’ll wonder what it means.” His eyes lit up. I hadn’t seen him excited about anything in a while.
I shrugged and dumped the box of rice into the simmering liquid. “Or they won’t care.”
“We’ll make them care. If they’re interested in the mystery, they’ll be interested keeping the secret, in partying with us.”
“In philanthropy?” I reminded him.
He swung his head around to give me a dirty look. “Yes, that.”
“It’s worth a shot,” I agreed. “Anything to give the girls incentive to join.”
“Hey now.” He swept me up in an embrace that caused the refrigerator door handle to dig into the space between my shoulder blades. “Don’t forget about the lone guy.”
So we photocopied the symbol onto flyers and taped them in various strategic places on campus: bathroom stalls in every building, bulletin boards that announced classroom changes, slipped under doors in all dorm rooms as a welcome back greeting to sun-kissed returning students. And we paid for it to appear in The Daily Snowflake the following week as an advertisement. Not even Harrison could mess with that.
Then there was the virtual campaign: a dedicated twitter account that tweeted pithy universal truths about life at Throckmorton. After @ replying to a bunch of students and earning several retweets, we ranked up over one thousand followers in only two days. I spent an entire afternoon in the computer graphics lab—Corey catching up on homework on the desktop next to me as Clever Trevor songs streamed via Internet radio—and animated an entire movie-esque trailer set to the narrative of a mystery about the symbol, its impending arrival on campus, and offering hilarious (but untrue!) speculation on what it might mean. The YouTube views skyrocketed and comment arguments broke out as our fellow students tried to guess from the comfort of sandy beaches.
We knew by the time everyone got back to campus and official invitations went out to potential members, the entire campus would be buzzing. The smart ones would make the connection pretty quickly and be scared. Because Rho Sigma would no longer be under control of the Greek system. That made us dangerous. And hopefully popular.
That wasn’t all we did. We held hands in public, strolling through the quad like we owned it. We stayed away from Quigley’s. We downloaded movies and watched them in bed, clutching coffees instead of beers. We had sex in a variety of public places since it was still Spring Break and we still wanted to have fun. But we also applied for jobs at the same restaurant to pay off our respective debts. Me: the hospital bill. Corey: rent and food.
THE FIRST DAY BACK from Spring Break, Bianca’s number appeared on my phone. I leaped across Corey to answer it. “Hello?”
“I’ve got the brownies, Nate’s bringing the popcorn. You’re on voodoo doll duty.” She paused. “Though I guess we’d also accept sodas.”
“Um, what?”
Corey trailed his fingers along my bare back but I slapped his hand away.
“An Unrequited Love Club. I know you’re still pining after Corey and I need to replace Rho Sig chapter meetings with something.”
That could be arranged, I wanted to say. But not yet. “Actually, about that. He and I are back together.”
“Hi, Bianca!” Corey yelled into the phone.
She sucked in a breath. “I should have guessed. So I probably should change the name of the club to Super Awkward Club Where Nate and I Try To Hang Out Without a Buffer.”
I spit out a laugh. “I could still hang out. I do have something to tell you.”
“Oh. Good. Come over in like twenty minutes?”
My throat closed. “To Rho Sigma?”
Corey arched a brow.
“Obviously. Just sneak up the back.”
The thought of traipsing up the steps I once called my sisterly home, possibly running into the girls who abandoned me…it made me want to crawl under the covers and hide my head. But if I was going to resurrect Rho Sig, I’d have to face them eventually. With a sigh, I hopped off Corey’s bed and tugged on some jeans. “I’ll be right there.”
I threw on the rest of my clothes and grabbed two pristine Underground Rho Sigma bid invites off the neat stack. She’d said twenty minutes…but I had to reach her before Nate arrived if I wanted to hand deliver these.
Corey was right…the walk from his apartment to campus was punishment enough. Wind bit at my cheeks and though the temps had risen above the freezing mark, the piles of snow covering the sidewalks clung to existence. I trudged in the street, dodging both speeding cars and cat calls from the drivers. By the time I arrived at Rho Sig fifteen minutes later, sweat coated my chest thanks to my too-heavy-for-strenuous-exercise jacket.
My nerves immediately kicked into high gear as I faced the back door. I pressed a shaking finger against the key pad and punched in the code I knew by heart. An angry red light blinked in my face. Crap. I should have expected this, really, but it hit me like a slap in the face.
I slid out my cell phone and combatted my flipping stomach by texting Bianca for the code. She didn’t supply it, instead trudged all the way downstairs to let me in. I was no longer a sister; I was a visitor.
“You’re five minutes early.” One of her eyelids contained glitzy gold sparkles as if she were preparing for a night out at Quigley’s instead of a night of commiseration with the boy who didn’t feel the same way as her. Her other eye contained nothing but mascara. She still looked beautiful, the kind of gorgeous only professional models could master.
“I know, I wanted to talk to you alone.”
“Then it’ll have to wait. Erin’s here.” She held the door open for me and the warmth and familiarity of the Rho Sigma back entrance swallowed me whole. The entryway contained nothing particularly exciting, mostly a tiny hallway that branched off into either the kitchen, the upstairs, or the basement. She took the stairs two at a time, stomping confidently like an alarm. I hurried after her, my heart thrashing against my chest. Wasn’t it a cliche in horror movies to go upstairs where the killer could find and trap you?
At the top of the stairs, she poked her head out and obeyed traffic laws by looking both ways. “Coast’s cl—”
A door opened and I flattened myself against the stairwell banister, the thin wooden rod digging into my back. Footsteps clomped, getting louder as they approached. My heart beat so fast I thought it might explode. I stomped down a step, then another, ready to make a run for it when a second door slammed shut above.
“Okay, she’s in the bathroom. Quick.”
I ran as if I were being chased by a rabid bear. When I collapsed into the sanctuary of Bianca’s room, I thought I might pass out from relief. My body, on the other hand, protested my newfound religion of exercise. I tore off my jacket and let my heart rate cool to room temperature.
Erin swiveled around in her desk, a bottle of vodka stationed next to her at the ready. She squinted at me. “I thought you were bringing sodas?”
&nbs
p; Whoops. I gave her a guilty smile and shifted my eyes away from the vodka. The key to staying in control was to ignore temptation. “I have something better.”
My fingers ratcheted up the shaking once again as I lifted the creamy ivory envelopes out of my purse and presented them.
Bianca and Erin exchanged glances but tore open the invites. The cryptic symbol I made flashed as they tilted the papers in the overhead light. Underneath the symbol, only a few key words embossed the heavy card stock:
You’re invited to join.
March 15th - 7p.m.
435 Euclid Avenue.
Discretion is required.
Bianca squinted at me. “I’ve seen this symbol everywhere but what the hell does it mean?”
Erin’s mouth parted. “We were trying to figure it out in all my classes.” She tilted her head. “Did you create it?”
I nodded. “It’s the new logo for Underground Rho Sigma. URS—we can call ourselves Yours for short.”
“Underground?” Erin’s chair creaked as she leaned back. “Like Out House?”
“Yep,” I said. “Think about it. Out House had once been on campus before getting kicked off. But they came back, first illegally, then legally. If we can show the Greek Org that Rho Sig has learned our lesson and we’re still united as one, maybe next year they’ll reinstate us for good.”
This time neither of them rebutted. Bianca twisted the invite in her hands while a wrinkle bridged Erin’s eyebrows.
