by Kiley Roache
When I turn around, Alex has pulled the pages from my printer.
“What is this? Delta Tau Chi?” Her eyes widen, and her excitement radiates from her as if her pink hair is made of fire. “Oh my God, you are not!”
Jay just looks confused.
“Can you really?” she asks.
“As far as I can tell, there’s no rule anywhere. I think it’s just usually assumed or implied. But they’re on probation for telling sexist jokes, so what are they gonna do, kick me out of Rush when there’s no rule against it?”
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” Jay says.
“I’m joining a frat,” I say.
“Not just any frat, but the douchiest frat on campus,” Alex interjects.
I nod. “I’ll go undercover and write a personal account of real culture inside a frat house. Show how terrible and sexist they actually are, so no one can deny it anymore. End them.”
“That’s crazy,” Jay says, but he’s smiling.
“I think it’s simultaneously the best and the stupidest, riskiest idea I’ve ever had.”
“That’s why I love it.” Alex’s purple-shadowed eyes absolutely sparkle. “How can I help?”
“Hand me those papers. And get some coffee. We have thirty-six hours.”
Chapter Two
Dear Cassandra:
Congratulations, I am pleased to inform you that you have been selected by the Stevenson Fund to receive the Stevenson Scholarship for Study and Research for this year. This scholarship was established to promote a lifelong practice of simultaneous scholarship and creative endeavors, because we at the Fund reject the premise that your career begins only after graduation or that academic pursuit should ever cease. The award value and other information about your scholarship are provided below.
We were very impressed by all you have done in your academic career, but even more by your potential for growth and future success. This is not simply a prize for what you have done; rather it is an investment in your future. The Fund provides you with a full-tuition scholarship in exchange for equity in any and all entities you create during your time at Warren University. Tuition will be granted each year upon the submission of a renewal application, and on the condition that you maintain a GPA of 3.0 or higher and keep on schedule with all projects.
Our goal is to help you make a difference in the world. We believe in your vision and leadership, and aim to grant you as much creative independence as possible, but there are certain criteria you are expected to meet.
With the help of a project coordinator at the Fund, Madison Macey, you will create a plan for the completion of your projects. But you must meet the deadlines you set for yourself or risk losing funding. The exception would be extensions you request with the help of your PC and that are approved by the Fund board.
Please fill out the attached forms as soon as possible, at which point the amount of your scholarship for one year will be sent directly to Warren University. It will be placed in your student account on hold status awaiting the completion of the first round of tutorials with your project coordinator and the creation of a preliminary four-year plan. Please send this to your project coordinator (address listed below) in two weeks’ time.
Congratulations, and best wishes for a productive and successful academic year.
Sincerely,
Rupert Jones
Vice President
Stevenson Scholarship Fund Board
I stare for the thousandth time at the letter that had changed my life. The result of an all-nighter, followed by the scariest twenty-minute presentation of my life. Then the waiting and checking the mail, and the waiting and the pacing, and the waiting. And then, one morning I opened the mailbox and the waiting had ended, and it was time for screaming and crying and calling my grandmother and getting absolutely obliterated on cheap champagne with Alex and Jay.
After reading over the letter for the umpteenth time, I fold it neatly and place it in my empty desk in my new dorm room. I want to hang it on the wall for inspiration like I’d done in my room at home, but I have to be low-key about the scholarship or people will ask what my project is. It’s the same reason there wasn’t a press release from the university, and why I didn’t get to attend the Fund’s banquet in New York City. I have a fake backup project about the experience of female athletes, but I’m not about to bring it up in conversation. Which honestly doesn’t make me much different from the other kids on scholarship in a land where most kids arrive at school in Audis and Teslas, if not by helicopter. (Okay, I’ve heard of only one person doing that, but really...)
I shut the drawer and turn to inspect my new home, a rectangular room with twin desks, wardrobes and beds. Everything I own is in duffel bags and boxes around me.
After all the movies I’ve seen about moving into college, heading off on your own, getting into your first apartment, taking on the big world with wide eyes, I expect...something.
But all I really feel is that it’s kinda stuffy. It’s like I’m waiting for all the deep, life-changing emotions to finally arrive. In the meantime, I’m just in a much too hot, nondescript room without air-conditioning on a late-summer afternoon.
The building is the oldest on campus, like two hundred years old, and it takes me a while to pry open the window. Doesn’t do much to affect the heat anyway.
“Pretty bullshit they don’t give us air-conditioning,” my roommate says, returning from the bathroom down the hall and slamming our door, disregarding the open door, open friendship rule they kept telling us about during orientation events.
Warren has a really strict roommate policy, forcing everyone to enter randomly so all the kids from elite schools don’t pair up and leave kids like me—who know zero of the two thousand other students in our year—stranded.
Which is how Leighton Spencer got stuck rooming with me instead of one of her ten close friends who also got in.
She’s a pretty, wiry track runner—“not here, in high school, but I could if I wanted to”—with a platinum-blond ponytail and a ten-minute answer about where she’s from that includes three European cities and the most selective boarding school on each side of the United States. And she scares me absolutely shitless.
“I started hanging some stuff up while you were gone. I hope you don’t mind.” I glance at my Christmas lights, Warren pennant and vintage Beatles poster. “If there’s anything you don’t like, I can take it down.”
She flops on the plasticky blue mattress she’d claimed by the time I’d arrived, her Louis Vuitton luggage stacked around her, untouched. “It’s your half of the room—why would I care?”
“Thanks.” I clear my throat.
All my decorations are up, and all my shirts, pajamas, underwear and socks are placed in their respective drawers, by the time she eventually gets up to hang a rainbow of cocktail dresses in her wardrobe and starts taping Polaroids above her desk.
“Do you mind if I play music?” I take my speaker out of a box my mom labeled “Cassie’s dorm stuff” (so specific and helpful) and set it on the desk.
“If it’s not pop.”
Okaaay, then. I scroll past the boy bands and choose an indie alternative band I heard at Fountain Square.
She looks up as the first song starts. “I actually like this band. Where did you say you were from again?”
“Indianapolis.”
She turns back to her things.
I look at her pictures. Leighton vacationing in the Maldives, at home in Hyde Park, leaning on a balcony with the Eiffel Tower in the background, Leighton with three different boys in a series of repeating shots. There are also a bunch with a dark-haired girl, laughing candids, posed with her hand on her hip, meeting James Franco.
I think of Alex.
“Is she your best friend?” I point to one with the girl.
“N
o.” She scoffs. “I’m not friends with girls—too much drama. That’s my sister.” She rolls her eyes. “I mean, half sister. That’s why we don’t look alike. She’s at Dartmouth. Pi Phi.”
She stares at me for a second too long and then turns back to her wall, trying to figure out how to hang up her map from Urban Outfitters that still has the USSR on it. Edgy.
“First hall meeting!” someone shouts, knocking on our door. “Come on out, frosh!”
I open the door to see a tiny redhead ringing a cowbell and wearing a very bright T-shirt with a button that says, “I Frosh.”
A group of people are huddled awkwardly and silently in the hall. Leighton stands in the doorway, as if debating whether she should go outside for this at all.
“Welcome to Warren!” the overenthusiastic redhead says. “I’m your RA, Becky Scott. I hope you are all just loving meeting your roomies! I think we might just have the best hall ever this year, and I’m really excited to go on this journey with all of you! But first I have some presents!”
The presents turn out to be all the free shit Housing gave her, and soon I find myself with the weirdest assortment of objects I have ever held at once.
There’s a rubber duck with a mental health hotline number stamped on its butt to represent “Duck Syndrome,” the idea that the high-stress environment of an elite school combined with the Californian desire to seem chill creates a group of students who act calm on the surface but are paddling for their lives underneath.
Welcome to college, I think. That’s comforting.
Next come the rainbow stickers with the words This is an inclusive community! across them. And your choice of glittery or black ones that say, “Of Course I’m a Feminist.”
A muscular guy about the size of Hagrid from down the hall opts not to take one of these. “Those are who’s messing with my frat.”
“Aren’t you a freshman? How are you even in a frat?” My hand flies to my mouth—that was not in character.
“Yeah, but I’m a football player.” He looks at me like I’m stupid. Maybe I should’ve noticed his T-shirt, which also broadcasts this affiliation.
“All football players rush DTC,” he says.
“Oh.”
Next there were the condoms. I blush despite myself, used to my Midwestern Catholic school and the oxymoron that is Abstinence-Only Sexual Education, which is a little bit different from liberal California. I mean, this stuff shouldn’t be taboo; it’s a health issue. Still, I can’t bring myself to grab one in front of these people I just met. I feel like a bad feminist.
The football player has no problem taking multiple boxes. Classic. He’s my favorite type of antifeminist, the sexually prolific guys who don’t support gay rights and think the very women they fuck are “slutty” for being available. The hypocrites who are all right with the sexual revolution when it means they get laid but not when it means oppressed groups expressing their sexuality.
The meeting disperses, and Leighton is still in the doorway, apparently not wanting anything rubber, duck or otherwise.
“Hey, I’m gonna put this on the door, okay?” I say as I struggle to peal the backing off one of the feminism stickers.
She seems about to give another grunt of indifference, but then the words register.
“Yeah, no, I’d rather you not.” She wrinkles her perfect little nose.
“What?”
“It’s not a good look.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t sure about the sparkles, either. I could grab a black one?”
She just stares at me blankly, turning her head to the side so her blond ponytail swings.
And something clicks. “Leighton...are you not a feminist?”
She shrugs. “Are you?”
“Yeah...” I resist the urge to add “of course.”
“Whatever, just don’t put it on the door, okay? I don’t want any guys to see it and think I’m like that.”
Like what? Sure of your own inherent worth no matter what kind of reproductive anatomy you have? The type of person who’s for equal pay and against the human trafficking, abuse and inequality that so many women are victims of? Are you worried a sweaty frat guy might not like you because you think women in Pakistan should be able to go to school, or women in Saudi Arabia should be allowed to drive or there should finally be more Fortune 500 CEOs who are female than who are named David? Do you think you’ll seem bitchy and shrill if you support women voting or getting to go to college?
I think all this but just say, “I have to use the bathroom.”
Splashing water on my face, I think, I am so fucked.
If I can’t change the mind of a bright, athletic girl who has every reason to demand her accomplishments not be diminished because of her sex, how am I going to change the minds of a group that basically benefits from a patriarchal system?
I dry my face with shitty industrial-style paper towels and look in the mirror.
And I remember: I don’t have to convince them of anything; I just have to listen, record, write and publish, then watch their whole system go down in flames.
I throw the sticker in the bathroom trash and walk outside.
“Hey there!” a peppy voice says when I’m barely out the door.
That’s the thing about the first week of freshman year—people are dying to make friends. Especially at a school like this, where it’s incredibly rare to enroll alongside another person from your high school. Unlike Leighton, most people get dropped here, cut off from everyone else who used to define their lives, the single goal that guided them through high school—get into a good college—achieved, and have absolutely no idea what to do with themselves or who they even are.
It’s like they ooze desperation: I really want to know about where you’re from and your potential major that you will definitely not stick with. Love me. Please!
I’m not saying I’m not victim to the loneliness and anxiety, too, but when you’re about to embark on a complicated social experiment, you can’t really make legitimate friends.
For a lot of the students on this campus, the ones who introduce themselves with a suffix of Greek letters after their names, what I am about to do would be social suicide. The ones who will want to cheer me on are probably good people, too good for me to want to lie to them as much as I’d have to.
Which is why I’ve planned to make friends only within my frat (such a weird sentence still) and those who are directly connected to it (the sister sorority or whatever) and steer clear of lying to more people than necessary.
Still, I don’t want to be rude...
I step the rest of the way out of the bathroom and take in the pretty Asian girl with winged eyeliner and hipster glasses smiling at me. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Not to be weird but I heard what your roommate was saying. About the stickers. What bullshit!”
I smile. “Thanks. I’m just glad someone else thinks it’s crazy.”
“Where are you from?” she asks.
“Indiana.”
Her eyes light up. “No way! That’s so cute.”
“Thanks?” I say.
“Do you live on a farm?”
“No I, uh, live in Indianapolis. It’s the fourteenth-biggest city in America.”
“Oh, of course,” she says, waving her hand as if to dismiss the picture of me with pigtails going out to milk the cows she had started to conjure.
“That’s cool, coming to such a different place, though. I’m from SoCal, so it’s only a few hours away for me.”
I nod knowingly, even though I just recently learned that “SoCal” means Southern California and not, like, Very California.
We look at each other for a beat.
“I’m Cassie, by the way.” I reach out my hand.
“Jacqueline Wang. Jackie.”
And it’s silent again. “W
hat are you majoring in?” I ask, hating myself for becoming one of the Eager Freshmen.
“Physics or CS. How about you?”
“Gender and sexuality studies.”
I brace myself for the They have that here? or What will you do with that? I’ve come to expect.
But she just raises her eyebrows. “Maybe you can bring back some books to educate Leighton, then.”
I decide one real friend can’t hurt.
But now the pressure of small talk is on. I look down at my shoes. I look back up. “Do you play any sports?”
“Yeah, climbing.”
“Like rocks?”
She turns her head to the side.
God, I am such an idiot.
“Uh, yeah,” she says.
“That’s so cool.”
“Yeah!” She smiles. “We should go sometime.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool.” I kick myself and hope she doesn’t think “cool” is the only word I know.
“...”
“...”
“Wellll... I gotta go,” she says, breaking the silence. “I wanna finish unpacking tonight, because I plan to fill an entire wall with postcards. But come by my room later!”
I smile and wave and wonder if I should take her up on that offer, if I can take her up on that offer. I debate if I should call my project coordinator to get approval first. And then I hate that I even thought that.
Approval for a friend, what am I doing?
Chapter Three
Like a typical freshman girl, I’m spending my first night of college trying on outfit after outfit, making countless trips to the hallway to look in the full-length mirror.
But unlike a typical freshman girl, I am not obsessing over my outfit for the first day of class. I picked that—a white boho blouse and olive shorts—in about 2.5 seconds.
I am probably the first girl in history to spend her first night of college obsessing over what to wear to fraternity Rush. Not exactly the trails I thought I’d be blazing when I was seven with a poster of Sally Ride on my wall or when I was fifteen and carrying one of Gloria Steinem’s books everywhere I went.
