by Kiley Roache
“Then why the fuck were you at Sig A?”
“I was with a boy.”
“Oh.”
I don’t say anything.
“Are you crying?
I nod, and then remember he can’t see me. I clear my throat. “Um, yeah.”
“What did he do?” His voice is weirdly calm, but with tension coursing through it just below the surface.
“It doesn’t matter.” My voice breaks and betrays me.
“That fuckin’—you know what, I’ll be right there. Don’t move.”
Keeping my eyes on the dark path, I try to figure out how the hell I got here. How I thought I could beat them, and it would all just be fun and games.
A dark figure runs toward me through the shadows. It’s been only about five minutes, so he must have truly sprinted from the house.
He’s barely around the corner when three more figures appear behind him. Bambi, Marco and Duncan.
“They insisted,” Peter says from a few feet away, only slightly out of breath.
When he’s close enough, he grabs my shoulders, probably a little too hard. “Are you okay?”
His eyes bore into me.
I nod.
“Did he hurt you?”
I shake my head no. “Let’s just go home. It’s not a big deal. I’m just being a stupid girl.”
Marco and Duncan run up.
Bambi is just behind them, struggling for breath. Doubled over, he looks up at me. “Cass, what’s up?”
“Nothing.” My eyes start to fill with tears. “Let’s just go home. I was kicked out and didn’t want to walk back alone.”
“Kicked out? What, for being a DTC?” Bambi turns to the other guys. “Fuck that shit. The next time one of these second-tier assholes tries to get into one of our parties, I swear to God—”
“Oh my God, no. It wasn’t because I’m DTC. It was because I was a prude, okay?”
“Some boy kicked you out of bed because you didn’t want to fuck his scrawny Sig A ass?” Bambi says.
Peter looks at Bambi like he wants to say something but then shakes his head and turns back to me. “He called you that?”
I exhale. “Yeah.”
“Which one is his room?”
“Let’s just go back...”
“Cass, answer him,” Duncan says. “That’s fucked.”
I wave my hand. “It’s not a big—”
“Pledge, you are going to show me where this son of a bitch sleeps right now or you’re gonna have so many shots tomorrow—”
My face heats up, and I try not to smile. “All right,” I say. “Follow me.”
The back door is still propped open with a plastic handle from the party earlier in the night, and we make our way through the house unnoticed.
When we get to Connor’s room I point, and Peter nods.
He approaches quietly and raises his fist. He pounds on the door. “Wake the fuck up, shmeg!”
The door still seems to be vibrating when it swings open a few seconds later. Connor stands in the doorway with tousled hair and sleepy eyes, wearing an undershirt and boxers.
Bambi’s right, he does look kind of scrawny after all, especially with Peter towering over him.
“Are you the fucker who was an asshole to my Cassie?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Connor looks from me to Peter. “Her boyfriend?”
“Ew, no. She’s my frat brother, you shithead.”
“Your what?” Connor’s eyes dart to me.
I shrug.
“She’s one of my goddamn pledges, asshole.” Peter grabs him by his collar, pulling him forward until their faces are just inches from each other. “I got the motherfucking football team and the—”
“Frisbee!” Bambi interjects, stepping between Connor and me. I try not to laugh at his valiant attempt to defend my honor.
“The motherfucking Ultimate Frisbee team and the goddamn United States Army stand behind this girl,” Peter says. “Remember that the next time you’re trying to tell her she needs to fuck you and your four-inch fucking dick just to stay in your goddamn house, you shitty excuse for a man.”
He pushes Connor against the door frame. “If it wouldn’t cost me my scholarship, I would beat your tiny West Coast beach boy ass into a pulp of quinoa and motherfucking kale.” He lets him go. “And next time I will. So don’t think about being a douche to any of the girls in DTC again! I mean—shit. Just—” He holds up one finger. “One, don’t be a douche to any girls, and—” the second finger goes up “—two, don’t mess with my frat.”
Peter turns to me. “That should cover you in, like, at least two ways.”
I nod.
“Okay, let’s go.”
He starts to walk away, then turns back and lunges toward Connor. He stops before he makes contact, but Connor flinches anyway, quickly scrambles into his room and closes the door.
“All right, let’s roll.” Peter nods to the rest of us.
We follow him back into the main room.
“Let’s fuck up some of their shit on the way out,” Duncan says.
“Good call.” Peter picks up a full handle of Taaka from under a table and hurls it at a large silver shield on the wall.
It ricochets off with a dinging sound and falls to the floor, where it explodes, spreading the smell of nail polish remover through the room.
I’m reminded that below all the big brother, mama bear protectiveness, he’s still a frat boy.
But for some reason that doesn’t seem so bad anymore.
Bambi steps on a wine bag and probably does more damage to his jeans than anything else.
Duncan starts to knock over their beer pong tables.
“You guys, follow me,” I say. I lead them into the kitchen and start knocking all the clean cups on the floor—if there’s one thing rare and precious to a frat, it’s their clean cups.
I swipe my arm over the table, and they clatter to the floor loudly. It feels so good. Adrenaline rushes to my head.
“What the fuck are you guys doing?” A Sigma Alpha is standing at the kitchen door.
We all look at each other.
“Run!” Peter says.
“Cassie,” Duncan says, gesturing toward me and bending his knees.
I jump on him, piggyback-style, and we take off, out the door and down the hill, toward the path around the lake.
They start to sing the song from bid night, and I join in, screaming the words.
We whoop and holler as we make our way across the silent campus, victorious.
I wonder if this is what it’s like to have biological brothers.
My heart is full, and for the first time, thousands of miles from where I was born, where I spent eighteen years, where my family and friends live, where I learned to walk and French kiss, I feel like I’m home.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Slipping off my headphones, I rub my temples. My vision is blurry, and it feels like my skull is pressing on my brain. I’ve been watching videos of Stephanie’s interviews for the last four hours.
My first report is due right as the semester ends, which means I have exactly five days to turn it in, while also, you know, being a freshman preparing for her first finals. It seemed like a great idea to have my work schedule mirror the school calendar back at the beginning of the semester, but I forgot to consider this part.
I stare at the blank screen, watching the thin black line of my cursor flash as the clock in the corner ticks on.
Fifty journal entries, five days, twenty hours and counting.
I think about the boys who carried me home singing just a few nights ago.
But they’re also boys who keep tallies in the hallways of how many women they’ve fucked so far, who made a very public list ranking the hottest girls in the
freshman class, who make jokes like, “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you already told her twice,” “What do you call the useless skin around a pussy? A woman,” and my personal favorite, the so-direct-it-barely-passes-as-a-joke: “Wanna hear a joke? Women’s rights.”
But do you decry the sexist joke because it normalizes misogynistic attitudes, or do you brush off the joke, so it doesn’t seem like you’re an alarmist and going after the little things? Because plenty of men make crude comments but would never dream of harming a woman, right?
Because there are women being shot when they try to go to school or having acid thrown on them, women being beaten and raped just for being women. Do we delegitimize our ability to speak out against those things when we take the bait and make feminism about being mad about shaving our armpits or men in “make me a sandwich” T-shirts?
I mean, after half a year I can tell there’s definitely something not right about the Greek system, especially for women and minorities.
But I can’t tell what’s uniquely Greek and what’s simply societal.
Do I blame these boys for basically continuing what society has been feeding them their entire lives? Wouldn’t that just be avoiding the problem? To blame them and then dust off our hands like that takes care of the problem?
When people talk about posters hung in the women’s bathroom of DTC last year that read, “Why do women have periods? Because they deserve them,” I am disgusted.
But I also know that Judeo-Christian teaching—which most of Western society is based on—says both that God punished Eve with the pain of childbirth and that women were to be shunned until they were “clean” again after menstruation.
They had to kill a dove to come back home after their period. Let’s be honest—frat boys’ bad jokes are nothing compared with bird murder.
And then there’s the girl who heard a male student yell, “No means yes, yes means anal!” at the participants in a sexual assault rally last year.
Anyone who heard that would want to vomit, right? What kind of uniquely awful human would say something like that? Fraternities that say stuff like that must be scorned by the rest of society, right?
Nope. We elect presidents from them. A quick Google search of the phrase reveals that George W. Bush’s Yale frat was using it as recently as a few years ago.
Uggghh. I slam my head down, and “ytbgbbv” appears on the screen.
Ah yes, exactly what I want to send to one of the top scholars in the world and the people paying for my college education.
I bite my lip.
What is there to do but state the facts? To simply present what I’ve found, what I’ve seen, what the interviewees have seen, accompanied by the data from other studies.
Like a reporter, I will show what happens without comment.
An anecdote, statistics on how that sort of thing is a trend, transition, another anecdote, stats, another anecdote. Repeat, repeat, repeat ad infinitum.
It feels a bit like a cop-out to not take a stance, but it’s fine for the first segment of my study, right? It would be irresponsible to rush to judgment. Reporting the facts I gathered is all I can do at this point, really. Everything will become more conclusive after another semester.
Before I do this, I add one more entry to my journal, although I had liked having an even number.
Entry 51:
Some fraternity men illustrate a sense of entitlement when it comes to sex. Some seem to view the Greek system as a sort of vague, horrendous barter system, where they supply the alcohol and party site, and female guests repay them with sexual attention. They see the status coming from membership in the organization as reason to demand sexual favors from women who socialize at the house. Women who refuse to engage in this barter—barring those with the excuse of being already claimed by another man (“I can’t because I have a boyfriend”)—are seen as “bitches” and “teases” who don’t hold up their part of what is seen by the men as an unwritten agreement.
At the same time, a number of fraternity men go out of their way to make sure the house is a safe place for women. They kick men out of parties who seem to be acting “creepy” toward female guests, offer to walk their female friends home from parties and, in at least one case, have threatened to fight a man who acted entitled to sex.
It’s impossible not to wonder whether this is a matter of groupthink or personal morality. Putting both these groups under the same umbrella when it comes to the treatment of women, simply because both groups are members of fraternities, seems deeply flawed.
I hit Submit and start trying to make sense of everything I’ve done so far. I use my notes from the interviews to get a general idea of what people said, but then have to go back and look at old tapes so I don’t misrepresent or misquote.
It takes hours to get a few hundred words done. I decide to sleep in the lab until I get things finished, four-hour intervals at a time, leaving only to go to class or back to the house to eat and shower.
After three days, twenty cups of coffee, half a disgusting-tasting energy drink I threw away, two sessions of crying and more than a few spontaneous dance breaks, I type the last sentence of the report.
My brain can barely process it. I’m done.
Well, with the first draft.
When my phone dings, I pick up my head and realize I’d fallen asleep.
I glance at the clock: three hours until delivery. I still need to proofread, at the very least, and Professor Price wants a hard copy.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
I quickly reread the whole thing.
Actually, it’s not too bad.
I print it, read it again in hard copy, fix a few errors, print again, search for a stapler and glance at the clock.
Thirty minutes.
I sprint up the stairs and out into the early morning, my messenger bag smacking my butt with every step.
Professor Price’s office is on the other side of campus, but I can make it if I run.
I get to her door and glance at my phone. Ten minutes to spare. I stare at her name plaque for a second, trying to catch my breath before I knock.
“Come in,” she says from the other side of the door.
I have to exert way too much energy to open the heavy wooden door.
She smiles at me, and her skin gleams in the sparkling daylight coming through the large windows behind her. She adjusts her brightly colored blouse. She’s like the sunshine to my storm cloud.
“Good morning, Cassandra.”
I clear my throat and try to manufacture a smile. “Good morning. I, um, have my first report,” I say. “The Stevenson people wanted you to read and approve it for sometime after the holidays.”
She extends her hand, and I shuffle over to give the report to her. She slips on her glasses, which had been hanging on a chain around her neck. She nods and flips to the first page.
My stomach is in knots.
After a minute she looks up. “This seems really great, Cassie. You should be proud.”
“Thanks.” My voice sounds weak.
She looks up, and for a second her eyes scan me up and down.
I squirm, feeling dirty and greasy, unshowered in my wrinkled, two-day-old clothes.
“Cassandra, how many hours of sleep have you had this week?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But in the last few days?”
“Um, probably like four or five hours a night.”
She shakes her head. “Go home right now. I’ll send you my thoughts as soon as I’ve had a chance to read this.”
Tears fill my eyes, and I remember when I was in the fifth grade and cried in front of my teacher, then was mortified for the next five years. Suck it up, Cassie—no one wants a repeat.
“Okay.” My voice breaks, and a Nobel winner pulls a tissue out of
her purse and hugs me, and I’m not quite sure how my life got like this.
Chapter Thirty
The door closes behind me, and I squint up at the sky. It doesn’t seem real, the sun shining through the palm trees. It’s like looking at a postcard of this happy scene while I feel hollowed out and overcaffeinated. Nauseous yet hungry.
I look down at my hands, watching as I squeeze them into fists and open them back up, slowly, again and again. My old therapist used to recommend movements that caused release, to tighten and then relax your muscles. Hoping it will cause my brain to do the same. I’m not sure if it’s easing my tension or making it worse.
I try to dispel this feeling of nervousness, of anxiety, but it’s hard to do when it’s so amorphous. You can be nervous about a test or job, and though it bothers you, at least you know that in a week or a year it will be decided either way. It’s easy to logic your way out of rational stress. I’m worried about this test, but if I don’t ace it, I just have to do better on the paper. But when the stress doesn’t have a rational source, when it’s simply anxiety about life, it’s so much harder to cope with. How do you shake the feeling that something inside you is slowly killing you, when you don’t know what that something is?
This used to happen junior year, when I would wake up feeling like I was dying and throw up in the shower.
When I would check all my water bottles and coffee cups for mold every three sips.
That was about the SAT, just like this is about the project. Both are just the seed that makes me worry about what I’m doing with my life.
And now I feel paralyzed because I can’t be perfect.
So worried about doing the wrong thing that I do nothing.
That’s why, in my totally untrained and not at all qualified mind, I think anxiety and depression are so commonly tied.
When everything is rushing past too fast, when it’s so scary and there’s so much to do...
Why not just lie down, close your eyes and try to sleep away your problems?
And maybe that’s all it is; maybe I’m just tired. Maybe this isn’t junior year again, and it’s just the lack of sleep and nothing more making me feel like this.
Maybe when I wake up tomorrow, the way this lie is eating away at me, the way I feel like my body will be ripped apart straight down the middle by my torn-up mind...maybe when I wake up tomorrow all of that will be gone.
