Chapter 2
Nina moved into the campus apartments a day early, with permission from the University, because fall recruitment started early.
Her sister, Jasleen, could not for the life of her understand why Nina had any interest in rushing a sorority.
To be fair, Nina did have trouble explaining it.
The best she could come up with was “it sounds fun,” despite the fact that rush requirements were the opposite of fun, and were, in fact, punishing.
Until rush was at an end and a bid from a house had been formally extended, there would be no drinking, no parties, no carousing of any sort, and Nina would have to come to class each day with her face and hair made up, operating under the watchful eye of every sorority girl on campus while pretending to be unaware this was the case.
It was not unlike existing under the conditions of a debilitating crush, wherein one must appear effortless and casual despite slow, molten destruction at one’s core, and the expectation of—indeed, hope for!
—unrelenting surveillance. So possibly that was why Jas didn’t believe her.
Of Nina’s three apartment mates—one of which, Simone, was her randomly assigned roommate from last year, while the other two, Mei and Adelaide, had been suitemates in their eight-person cluster of rooms—only Adelaide was in a house, and she was extremely upbeat about the possibility of being Nina’s sister.
Adelaide’s encouragement meant that Simone and Mei did not really ask questions, which was good, as Nina had a daily barrage of them from her sister, e.g.
, “Can’t you just hang out with your friend without performing some kind of patronizing bonding ritual? ”
Actually, Nina hoped not to be in the same house as Adelaide.
Which was not to say that Adelaide wasn’t beautiful and smart and generally deserving of great envy.
Nina believed Adelaide had the prettiest face of all her friends, which was saying something, as Nina had always attracted pretty friends.
But when it came to the known and publicly understood ranking of Adelaide’s sorority compared to the other houses on the row, matters could frankly be improved upon.
Adelaide herself could have done better had she not been a transplant from rural Idaho and therefore unaware of how to dress herself during her own recruitment.
As dicey as it was to be a sophomore going through rush—by most panhellenic philosophies, you simply could not repair a sophomore’s bad reputation, nor could you successfully mold her into the Ideal Woman of Two-to-Three Greek Letters—there was a profitable tradeoff with respect to the University’s ecological learning curve.
To Nina’s mind, what she lacked in malleability she made up for in maturity and social expertise.
Approximately a quarter of the University’s student body population was part of the Greek system, which statistically a person could take or leave as a matter of significance except for acknowledging the stratosphere within the system, wherein a person received an additional layer of value by association.
An individual could be decently meritorious on their own, but a member of three-Greek-letters was already gifted a personality type and a corresponding likelihood of success.
Acceptance by the gatekeepers of social capital meant that even on an ugly day, a bad hair day, a bloated day, you were automatically more beautiful than the vast majority of your peers.
Even if you didn’t look your most sexually delectable at any given moment, you were, in a more transcendent way, hot. Two sexy Greek letters had said so.
“You really think it matters what a bunch of white girls think of you?” said Jas.
For having shared an upbringing and a womb, they had substantively very little in common.
Jas was a comparative literature major with a minor in gender studies, whereas Nina daydreamed on occasion about girls too but she didn’t announce it to the world.
Also, they’d gone to the same predominantly white high school, which meant that if Nina didn’t think about it very hard, she could easily forget she wasn’t white.
Her friends were white. Her boyfriends had mostly been white (she’d tried for Jonathan Zein, who was half Lebanese, but that had always been a pipe dream).
The term “coconut” was often thrown around—brown on the outside, white on the inside.
Thoughtless weaponry that was the height of disparagement to Jas, which to Nina could be easily laughed away.
The important thing was that Nina understood the trajectory of her chosen path.
If she was going to go to a top twenty law school, which she had every intention of doing, followed by securing a spot at a big law firm in order to pay her various University debts as well as take care of her parents—in the only actual display of privilege Nina could think of, Jas had taken herself out of the running, filially speaking—she was going to need not only achievements, but connections.
The last year, her freshman year, had not gone as smoothly as expected.
No need to ask why—bygones and such. Suffice it to say, this year was her second chance, her opportunity for necessary improvement.
In order to win it all back (“it” being academic excellence, professional success, the ability to look at herself without a disemboweling sense of shame, so on and so forth), Nina was going to invent a new version of herself.
It was baptism by initiation, transcendence to a better model, via glorious rebirth.
And not just any reincarnation. To offset the previous year of her life, Nina needed to reach a better plane, a higher one.
She was going to need The House.
That was how she thought of them: in terms of the proper noun, perhaps even the royal.
They were, of course, the same Greek jumble of meaninglessness as the others, but its members were in no way interchangeable with the community at large.
Each member of The House was not only noticeably beautiful, they were also peerlessly high-achieving, singular among the fray of their intended fields.
Nina had, by then, experienced the presence of The House in a few of her classes—occasionally a small gaggle of them—and understood them to be exceptionally gifted as a group.
The House’s average GPA was a 3.86, which was unheard of.
Their philanthropy had been lauded by multiple national media outlets.
Among their recent alumnae were a sitting governor, an Oscar-nominated actress, a Pulitzer-winning playwright, an Olympic sprinter, multiple acclaimed academics, four celebrity lawyers, and a zoologist whose book on invertebrate sentience had been selected for a presidential honor.
The University at large was known for churning out the next generation of leaders, true, but The House was next level.
Statistically, that degree of success was beyond made—those women were chosen.
Curated. Being a member of The House was not only to be gifted access to the launching pad for eternal success, it was to be preselected for it.
It was to be bestowed upon, dipped in the River Styx for an extra coating of invulnerability, because you were already worthy.
“Your desperation for external validation is honestly tragic,” commented Jas over video call.
Jas was watching Nina put on eyeliner, which she herself eschewed as a matter of principle.
Despite this, if both of them had sat perfectly still it would have looked like Nina had taken a selfie.
They wore twin expressions of fond disdain.
“I have to go,” Nina replied. “I’ve got to suckle the teat of white greatness.”
“That’s not what I said because it’s disgusting, but spiritually it’s not untrue. You make me deeply ashamed of you.” Jas sighed.
“Should I wear the purple dress or the red?” Nina asked.
If she couldn’t make the perfect first impression, forget it.
The House was notoriously brutal. They slashed their numbers in half each day despite the University specifying daily percentages of callbacks.
How could you argue with The House? It was almost like being a man.
“The red,” said Jas. “And tell Arya I said hello.”
“When I pass this greeting along to him,” Nina posed, “should my eyes say, ‘By the way, my sister is willing to compromise her feminism to suck your dick,’ or would you prefer a coyer message?”
“That one will be sufficient,” said Jas, before hanging up.