Brimstone

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  If I did bow out, my last article could be about taking the high ground, turning my back on the shallow inanity of sororities. But tonight, I was finishing this article for Tricia.

  And Rush can break your heart, just like dating. You can pin your hopes on a guy, change yourself for him, pretend to be something you’re not, and if he doesn’t love you back, you think it’s the end of the world.

  How much better would it be if women stopped judging their self-worth by somebody else’s arbitrary standards. My mother always said, if he’s worthy of you, he’ll take you as is. This campus is full of organizations where the power of membership lies with the joiner.

  And the world is full of guys who don’t read Greek.

  I saved what I’d written and checked my watch. Just enough time to print it out and try to catch the most egregious typos. Unfolding myself from the bed, I carried the laptop to my desk and plugged it into the printer. Then I proofread, fiddled with the hook at the end, sent it to Cole via our supersecret system, and finally fell into bed.

  “Maggie!”

  Dad’s voice dragged me from the well of slumber. The dregs of a dream had come up with me, twisting my thoughts into dizzying patterns. I had to climb the shreds of reason and try to make sense of my room, which seemed fractured and reassembled in parts, like a cubist painting.

  “Maggie! I know you have class this morning.”

  Downstairs. Dad was shouting up at me. I oriented on the familiar sound—it was far from the first time I’d been shouted awake—and the room came into familiar focus.

  Unfortunately, the first thing I saw with any clarity was the clock on my bedside table.

  “Crap.” I rolled out of bed and went to the stairs to yell, “I’m up! I’m up!” Immediately I regretted it, and squeezed my pounding head between my hands.

  Okay. Not a normal nightmare, then. I get these sometimes. Psychic hangovers, the aftermath of one of my real dreams, as opposed to the random firing of neurons that happens to nonfreaky people in their sleep.

  Fortunately, I’d showered the night before, so I just had to find clean clothes and grab my homework and my laptop. When I woke up the screen with a tap on a key, I saw that I’d left a browser window open when I went to sleep. In it was the pop-up ad from the other night, the one with the strange, hypnotic pattern.

  Without moving the cursor, I hit Control-P to print the screen. The window closed—and the browser crashed—as soon as I moved the cursor, but this time, I’d captured a hard copy. A spark of recognition gave me an idea. Wherever else I had seen that pattern, its most recent appearance had been on the back of my eyelids. And that, if anything, rated investigation.

  Dad handed me my travel mug of coffee when I reached the bottom of the stairs. “This isn’t going to be a pattern, is it?”

  “What?” I was still thinking about the pattern in my dream, which had somehow transferred into the waking world. Or vice versa.

  He was in no mood for a sidebar. “If this sorority thing is going to interfere with your grades …”

  Mom answered for me. “It won’t.” She was dressed for work, but she still looked green beneath her carefully applied makeup. The doctor had assured her that as she was out of her first trimester, the puking would stop any day now. He’d been saying that for two months.

  “You won’t let it get the best of you, will you, Magpie?” She kissed my cheek, her breath smelling of mint toothpaste and ginger ale. “I’m so proud of you. And if you want to continue in a sorority …”

  “Really, Mom,” I assured them both, “I’m not setting out to become a Stepford Greek. I have my reasons.”

  This earned me two sighs—one of dismay, and one of relief. “Oh, Maggie,” said my mother. “Can’t you, just once, do things like a normal girl?”

  “Of course not, Laura.” Dad grinned, his humor restored. “She’s a Quinn.”

  I headed for the door, mug in hand. “Sorry, Mom. We can’t all choose a destiny in accounting.”

  “You could choose a destiny outside of The Twilight Zone,” I heard her grumble as I hurried on my way.

  Since I have biology lab only on Tuesdays, I used the open space in my schedule to visit Dr. Smyth in the chemistry department.

  The earth science building was bustling, and redolent of an experiment gone wrong. Or so I assumed. Chemistry could be stinky, even when it goes right.

  I tapped on the door to the professor’s office, which was just off the lab. Because of the ventilation fans, the smell of burning tires was less pungent than in the hall. I loved the anachronism of the computers and modern equipment in the hundred-year-old space. It reminded me of A Wrinkle in Time, and how Dr. Murry had her electron microscope set up in the stillroom of their farmhouse.

  “Dr. Smyth?” She looked up from her work, a frown of displacement on her face as she reoriented herself. “I’m Maggie Quinn. You helped me out with a chemistry question last spring.”

  “Oh yes!” Recognition swept away her confusion, and she waved me to a chair by her desk. “You were working on some kind of fantasy story the last time we talked. How did that turn out?”

  I perched on the seat and set my satchel beside me. “Better than I thought it would.” In that I was still alive.

  “Why aren’t you taking chemistry with me?” she chided.

  “All the sections were closed. I’m in biology instead.”

  With an impatient wave, she dismissed the principles of our biological existence. “You should have called me. I would have opened one of the sections for you.”

  “I still have another science credit to earn. I’ll be sure and take it with you.” I wouldn’t dare do anything different. Dr. Smyth was a force of nature, with flaming red hair and a vibrant personality to match. “I have another question for you.”

  “Excellent.” She leaned her elbows on the desk. “What can I do for you?”

  I pulled out the printout of the browser window. “This seems familiar to me. Maybe some kind of crystalline structure?”

  She took the picture and immediately identified it. “This is a fractal design.”

  “A fractal! I couldn’t place it.” My moment of clarity was short. “But that’s math, not chemistry.”

  “Well, it’s both,” she said. “You can create fractals by putting a solution of copper sulfate between two glass plates and applying voltage …”

  I know my eyes must have glazed over. “And in non-geek?”

  She started again. “Basically—and I’m really oversimplifying here—a fractal is a system of illustrating things that cannot be described with normal geometry. Tree branches and snowflakes and the stock market. Things that seem random, but if looked at in a mathematical way, aren’t really.”

  “Like chaos theory.”

  “Right.”

  All I knew about chaos theory came from watching Jurassic Park, but I didn’t mention that.

  Dr. Smyth laid her hand on the printout. “Most people see fractals in computer graphics. Pretty pictures made out of irrational numbers.”

  “Irrational numbers,” I echoed. “Like pi.”

  “And phi.” She was into it now, like a kid showing off a favorite toy. “Phi—1.618—called the Golden Mean or sometimes the Divine Proportion. Grossly oversimplified, it means that the sum of a plus b is to a as a is to b.”

  “Um. I left my math brain in calculus. Can you translate?”

  “All that’s important is the proportion.” She drew two equal squares touching, and then on top of it drew one rectangle that was equal in size to the two squares. Then she drew another rectangle that was equal in size to the first three put together. Then another, et cetera, until she had a diagram that looked like a stack of blocks.

  “These rectangles are all in the ‘divine’ proportion,” she said. “The Parthenon and the Great Pyramid at Giza were both built incorporating this ratio. It’s been shown to be universally pleasing to the eye.”

  “Okay.” I took her word for it, not lea
st because it resonated in my memory.

  “But watch this.” She drew a curved line connecting all the corners of the progressively larger rectangles, until she had a spiral that looked familiar.

  “That’s a nautilus shell.”

  “And a cochlea.” She tapped her ear, and I remembered that little shell thingy responsible for hearing from high school biology. “And even …” She drew a parallel spiral and connected the two with hastily drawn lines, like a ladder.

  “DNA?”

  “Subtly, but yes.” She turned the paper back over and tapped the design from the computer. “Fractals. A pattern that repeats with self-symmetry to an infinitely small, or infinitely large scale.”

  I stared at her, a little helplessly. “You realize I have no idea what this means.”

  Dr. Smyth sat back in her chair. “It means that if you look at things from a certain perspective—in this case mathematically—there is nothing truly random in the universe.”

  “You couldn’t have just said that?”

  She grinned and handed me the paper. “What kind of educator would I be?”

  I thanked her, promised she’d see me, eventually, for a class, and left. I wasn’t sure I had any answers, but I definitely had more questions.

  The first was why had this design popped up, twice, on my Internet browser.

  And theoretically, if seemingly random events were mathematically not really random, then didn’t it follow that if you changed the math of things, you could change the outcome?

  I suddenly had a new appreciation for arithmetic. I guess I was going to have to start paying attention in calculus.

  10

  The campus of Bedivere U. is tree-shaded and quaint, full of redbrick colonial revival buildings on an unregimented layout. The buildings went up gradually over the last century, wherever was convenient or empty. It lent the campus a lot of charm, but made learning your way around, especially when you had back-to-back classes on opposite sides of the campus, a little challenging.

  I’d grown up here, more or less. The two places I could find with my eyes closed were the library and Webster Hall, which housed the history department and archives. My father’s office was on the third floor, and I headed there after my chat with Dr. Smyth. Dad was out of the office, and that suited me fine. I didn’t need him, just a little privacy.

  I cleared a space on his desk, made myself at home, and took out my laptop. It was new, acquired this summer after my old computer had gone up in a hail of brimstone. But what the heck. I needed one for college anyway.

  Going into the application folder, I clicked on the SpyZilla icon. No red flags had popped up since I first saw that fractal screen, but that only meant that the software didn’t find any cooties it recognized.

  So I ran a manual search and found, without much effort, a suspicious script that the program didn’t know how to identify. It wasn’t known spyware or adware. It was just … spookyware.

  Destroy unknown script? I clicked. “Hell yes.”

  “Dr. Quinn, did you see this—” Justin entered with a token knock on the open door, then drew up short when he saw me behind the desk. “Oh. Hey, Maggie.”

  “Hey.” We stayed frozen for an awkward tick of the clock. I was trying to remind myself we were just friends. Whatever he was thinking, his brows were drawn into something approaching a scowl. I looked at what he had in his hands. “Something interesting in the paper?”

  He held up the page with the Phantom Rushee article. “You’re not really going through with this, are you?”

  I glared, gesturing to the traffic in the hall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  Closing my laptop—after making sure SpyZilla was done de-fractalfying my hard drive—I stood. “I’m working on something.”

  “In a sorority.” Not a question. Just incredulous.

  “Don’t think I can pull it off?” I asked, slinging my satchel over my shoulder.

  “I know you can. That’s what worries me.” He tapped the page. “It says right here: ‘Resistance is futile.’ These things—historically, sociologically—they suck people in.”

  “It’s a sorority, not a cult, Justin. I’ll be fine.”

  I swung out the door, already regretting the words. When would I learn not to tempt fate?

  Bid Day. The drama and angst of the whole week came down to this: The sororities submitted their choices—the list of girls to whom they would extend a bid. Meanwhile, the rushees listed their top three houses, in order of preference. There was a certain strategy in what you listed. You didn’t have to list three, and some had only one pick, preferring to try again as sophomores rather than take a second choice. Others made sure they had at least one house on their list that they were assured of getting into. EZ, for example.

  Then we all assembled in the Student Center ballroom to learn if we’d “matched.” The doors were closed and no one was allowed in or out until we’d all received our envelopes.

  Holly and I stayed together in line—Quinn and Russell are reasonably close alphabetically—an island of dispassion in a sea of drama. There were many tears—of disappointment, joy, or simple relief. Mostly there was hugging and squealing. Lots and lots of squealing. It bounced from the wainscoted walls and the parquet floor. The chandelier tinkled an echo. But the noise was nothing compared to the way the stratospheric emotion was scouring every psychic nerve in my body to a bloody, raw thread.

  No story was worth a whole semester of this.

  I had to do something; it figured it was desperation that made me put Gran’s imagery book to practical use. Closing my eyes, I pictured deflector shields, like on the Millennium Falcon. I visualized the laser beams of angst bouncing off my defenses, ricocheting harmlessly back into the throng.

  Holy cow. It actually worked. The muscles of my shoulders began to unclench and the knot in my stomach …

  “Maggie! Holly!” Tricia threw herself at me, wrapping an arm around my neck and drawing Holly into the embrace. “It worked!”

  “That’s great, Trish!” Holly hugged her back.

  Something had worked, until I’d completely lost concentration. The noise and emotion surged past my fallen defenses.

  “Beta Pi totally wants me!” Holly had talked her into putting down her next highest choices after the Deltas. The Betas were brunette and bubbly, so we’d figured she’d be a fit.

  Tricia bounced off to find other Betas; Holly bent down to frown critically at my face. “Are you feeling all right?”

  Clearly, I looked as bad as I felt. “It’s really hot in here.” Someone squealed nearby and my eye twitched in reaction.

  “We’re almost done.” This was relative. There was still a lot of alphabet in line behind us. Darn those Ss. The tradition was to release the rushees—now called pledges—all at once out into the quad, where our new sisterhood waited to greet us and escort us back to Greek Row.

  I reached the front of the line; at least once I got my bid—I’d put down SAXi first, as I promised Holly, and the Zetas second, because I was assured of an invite, since I was a legacy—the matter would be settled, and I could find a seat in one of the chairs that ringed the room and observe from a small distance.

  “Quinn,” I told the Rho Gamma behind the table full of stationery boxes. “Maggie.”

  “Here you are.” She held out a cream-colored envelope with a smile. “Good luck.”

  If I’d been thinking clearly, maybe I would have expected it. But my brain thrummed in my skull, as if I’d had about fifty espresso shots. As soon as my fingers closed on the invitation, a gray-white light blossomed on my retinas, like when you press on your closed eyelids and make a ghostly impression in the black. Only the brightness kept streaming in on my optic nerve, carrying impressions and images too rapid and bewildering to interpret, a moiré pattern splitting and repeating; infinite variety of waking dreams, pushed into my brain like water through a fire hose.

  Cons
ciousness tripped like a fuse, and everything went black.

  I woke up on the floor, with Jenna patting my hand and Holly leaning over me anxiously. “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” Holly said as I struggled to sit up.

  Surely not. How … girly. “Really?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the Rho Gamma said, correctly interpreting my reddening face. “Too much emotion, girls forget to eat. Happens all the time.”

  “I never forget to eat.” They helped me to my feet; my thighs trembled, but it was better than lying there with the Ss stepping over me to get their bids.

  As if anyone would notice one more Drama Girl.

  They walked with me to the chairs by the wall, and as I sat, Jenna turned to Holly. “There’s some bottled water in the coolers behind the tables. Would you grab one for Maggie?”

  “Really, I’m fine—” But Holly was already headed over to where the other Rho Gammas were handing out the bids.

  Jenna sat beside me and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s overwhelming.”

  I sunk my head into my hands, rubbing my pounding temples. “Tell me about it.”

  I didn’t expect her to take me literally. “We Sigmas have a hard time in the middle of all this excitement, though some of us are more sensitive than others.”

  Her face conveyed nothing, and everything. She might have just been talking about a mundane sensitivity to emotional stress. But she met my gaze evenly, significantly. “I could tell you’re one of the more sensitive ones.”

  “So …” I formed my next question carefully. “I’m not the only one?”

  Jenna smiled, as if my ready acceptance pleased her. “Well, no one has ever fainted before.”

  “Oh.” I had to wrap my head around that. Of all the things I thought I might hear today, that hadn’t been it.

  She laid her hand on my knee, pressing lightly to weight her words. “I think you’re used to keeping your specialness a secret, Maggie, so I don’t have to tell you that we Sigmas don’t talk about this outside the house. You probably shouldn’t talk about it much with your pledge class. Most of them have no idea of the latent potential inside them.”