Chapter 6
Nina immediately regretted having chosen a Friday lecture—it had been the only G.E.
that knocked out two simultaneous requirements, a sort of operational hole-in-one, but at what cost?
She felt groggy and exhausted, weighed down by the two previous days of recruitment, numbed by the three still to come.
The early days of gentle courtship were over—now, with recruitment numbers sliced in half each day like a scything of the undeserving, came the tracks to exclusivity (a tour of the house, introduction to each sisterhood’s pet causes) and the moment of avowal (a preference ceremony tantamount to sacrament; the declaration of undying love that was, half the time, a bald-faced lie).
Each morning was a cliff-edge of anxiety, waiting to be alerted whether this was the day Nina returned to the tedium of obsolescence.
Whether The House had at last (inevitably) recognized the deficiency in her or somehow deemed her worthy of redemption and summoned her back.
She fiddled with her phone all through her lecture, waiting apprehensively for the clock to strike noon, for the gods of linear time to take pity on her nerves.
For Fawn Carter, supreme goddess of The House, to have made an almighty ruling.
Nina knew, objectively, that whether The House summoned her back wasn’t Fawn’s sole decision.
Adelaide had already explained to Nina all the grimy intricacies of recruitment, the power differentials and secret codes.
The way the so-called “door girl” wasn’t just a pretty face but a discerning one; that she would leave Nina’s bid card face-up if she liked her and turn it face-down if she didn’t.
That Nina would know she wasn’t a frontrunner if she was seated far away from the front doors, relegated to the back of house like bad fish.
If any of the girls hinted at something specific to Nina, like her major or her hobbies, it was because they already knew it.
“We spend all summer going through every girl’s social media and academic records,” Adelaide explained, revealing all of this to Nina as if it were a slumber party revelation rather than a sacred rite of passage.
“So, if you suspect they might have assigned someone to you for a reason, chances are they totally did.”
Over the past two days—during which the recruitment pool remained largely indiscriminate, a mutual process of speed-dating before the real gore of selection began—Nina had spoken with the hottest non-white girl from every house on the row, many of whom spontaneously dropped details on their favorite K-pop band or Bollywood drama as if they had never seen Nina’s Instagram stories or her Spotify account.
They complimented Nina’s nail beds and her hair.
They made affectionate jokes about their immigrant parents.
They told self-deprecating stories about henna stains on the white boys they’d kissed or the humiliation of bringing beans and rice to the fifth-grade cafeteria.
They said things like “I’m an engineering major and screenwriting minor—my mom would kill me if I didn’t get a degree in something practical” as if Nina could inherently understand.
And Nina did understand. But all of this felt somehow unsettling, deeply unserious, as if they weren’t flirting with her cleverly or sophisticatedly enough and would therefore never make it to a second date.
Not so at The House. On the first day, Nina’s initial conversation partners were gleaming, golden blondes.
Then a mahogany brunette and a redhead were inserted into the mix, alongside an olive-skinned beauty of indeterminate origin (her name, unhelpfully but accurately, was Summer).
The second day, Nina met Tessa, who was half-Black, after two more blondes had welcomed her into the house.
Perhaps it had been the long days getting to her, but Nina couldn’t help asking, “Does it ever feel weird for you? Being one of the only people of color?”
Tessa laughed, then reached out at the precise moment that Fawn Carter was passing by, greeting the various potential recruits with a smile in her eyes but nothing more. “Fawn,” Tessa said, and Nina’s heart stopped. “C’mere for a sec.”
Nina held her breath as Fawn turned playfully to Tessa, receiving a brief, telegraphed message before taking a seat beside her on the chaise. (Other girls, Nina noticed, had been relegated to ubiquitous rented furniture or uncomfortable surfaces like a nearby piano bench.)
“Hi,” said Fawn, focusing her attention on Nina. Her eyes were a golden brown, a burst of amber. “You’re Nina, right?”
“Yes.” It didn’t come out clearly but Nina knew it would be humiliating to clear her throat, to try again. “Hi.”
“Nina was just asking me what it’s like to be one of the only people of color,” Tessa prompted knowingly to Fawn, who laughed.
“Wait,” said Nina before she could stop herself. “Are you—?”
“I’m half, yeah,” said Fawn, which was incredibly unclear to Nina. Half what? She didn’t dare ask. “I’m what the kids call white-passing, which Tessa just loves to bring up.”
“There’s definitely been some problematic stuff in the past,” Tessa said to Nina, finally answering the question, although Nina didn’t initially understand what she meant.
“Hair rules,” Fawn contributed in explanation. Tessa made a face.
“Hair rules?” echoed Nina.
“As in only certain styles. No natural hair, no dreads, no braids—” Case in point, Tessa’s gesture seemed to say in reference to her own petite braids, which had been pulled back in a low, impossibly chic chignon.
“Let’s just say we took a red pen to the rush bible,” Fawn purred.
“Several red pens.” Tessa snorted. “Years ago, though, before our time.”
“We have really good advocates,” Fawn said. “Peer advocacy, obviously, but also alumnae.”
“Yeah, the alumnae club is great—”
“Alex is the best.”
“—yeah, definitely, Alex is a game changer for sure.”
“It’s nice not to have to suffer the microaggressions on your own, you know? We really have someone in our corner. Last year Tessa had an issue with the English department—”
“The whole house had my back.” Tessa’s nod was firm, almost warlike. “And I don’t know if you heard about the thing last year with Camille Strahan, her performance art at Take Back the Night—”
“Oh, Alex was instrumental in the disciplinary case the college launched against her. Against her, can you believe it? Not the guy who roofied her, but her, because somehow Camille’s the one who made the University look bad.”
Tessa’s mouth was thin and grim. “The fucking audacity—”
“But look, exactly one white guy got any consequences from the University for sexual assault last year and it was him. So, you know—” Fawn’s dispassionate shrug displaced her hair an inch, revealing the sharp edge of her clavicle. “Good riddance.”
Tessa and Fawn had such a leisurely rapport, an affluence of fluency, that Nina only caught bits and pieces from their communal storytelling.
What mattered more, the sense memory that Nina took away like a victory, was the warmth of camaraderie, inclusion by proxy.
A contact high of sisterly feeling that could almost count for acceptance if she forgot for a moment that she didn’t belong.
And she could forget, for which she couldn’t be faulted. Nina was, after all, talking to the president of The House; two obviously valuable members were discussing their advisor with Nina by name, as if she, too, would meet her soon.
Alex is the best, Nina imagined herself saying one day, perhaps a year from now.
She also imagined herself telling Jas—See? These girls care about advocacy. They aren’t mindless bimbos. They’re not falling in line for the same misogynistic, whitewashed pipeline to weaponized femininity. Or whatever Jas’s argument would have been.
“I will say, Nina,” Fawn continued, as if Nina had been actively listening and not daydreaming about the conversations she would have with Tessa and Fawn in the kitchen, giggling over midnight burritos and a shared flask, “I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s pretty unusual for us to take sophomores.
We just like for everyone to be at the same stage, you know, life-wise.
It’s just a little more sisterly that way, for the pledge classes to literally go through everything together. ”
To Nina’s discerning ear, there was a clear but that she was meant to leverage. “I totally understand,” she said, stepping capably into the negotiation ring, ready to pre-lawyer. “I’d have rushed last year, but I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind to really go into it with my heart open.”
She’d seen someone say that on social media at some point.
She realized only belatedly that it had been The House’s public VidStar, in the caption for a beautiful, bikini-clad group collage before everyone’s social media had gone on lockdown for fall recruitment.
Was it too on-the-nose? Was she now the cringe-worthy try-hard, the partner ultimately doomed to the power differentials of working harder, loving more, begging stay?
Frantically, Nina realized she should say something else, something better, something new and fresh and innovative—something funny, or witty, or for god’s sake something she’d come up with on her own—
But Fawn and Tessa exchanged a glance then, consulting each other in silence. Nina tried to read the look between them but it was too quick. Too foreign.
“That’s so true,” Tessa agreed, and silently, Nina exhaled. “Timing is everything. Everybody’s journey is different.”
“It’s really cool of you to know yourself that way,” Fawn added. The light caught on her gold-plated lavalier, gleaming like a Byzantine painting. Divinity conveyed by the Greek letters of The House. “Honestly, most people who go through recruitment have no fucking clue what they’re doing.”
Nina had heard once from her roommate Adelaide that you weren’t allowed to swear while wearing The House’s letters.
Nina wondered now if that was true, though either way, she liked Fawn more for doing it.
“Right,” she managed to say. “I just wasn’t ready last year, but now I am.
And I really think I could contribute a lot to the house.
” She meant to say it that way, the house generic, as if it were merely hypothetical that this could be the house she wound up in, but she knew Fawn and Tessa could hear what she really meant—The House.
Nina’s hunger for it was audible, maybe too audible.
She tried hastily to pare down her thirst. “I think there’s something to be said for a little more life experience.
I mean, I’m definitely not going to be one of the girls throwing up on their first bus ride back from a party. ”
“She’s got you there, Tess,” Fawn teased, and Tessa laughed, unfazed.
“It’s true, a little wisdom can do wonders for the bus insurance—”
“At least it wasn’t the venue—”
“Can I have a little of my dignity, please?”
“Fine, fine, whatever’s left of it—”
“The point is, Nina,” said Tessa, turning back to Nina, who had again been basking in the glow of inclusion, “we’re just really looking for girls who are committed to this. Who are ready to be involved—really involved, not just for events. For the sisterhood itself.”
“It’s for life, Nina.” Fawn’s voice then was deathly serious.
Nina thought again of the heartbeat, the pulse, the tension that defined the hunt.
The frequency she’d first sensed among The House’s members, a vibration only the worthy could be trained to hear.
“And I don’t mean something trite, that these are the girls who will be your bridesmaids or whatever, even though they very likely will be.
I mean that these are the women who will stand by you in your darkest moments.
This house isn’t just a four-year stopover. This house is your home—our home.”
Fawn and Tessa seemed to lace fingers without even thinking, without consulting each other. As if the love that pulsed between them was too profound to be held with less than two hands.
“Every girl in this house will go on to become extraordinary,” said Tessa. “We choose the best of the best for a reason. And look, you can be successful on your own. Of course you can. But what The House can offer you—”
Fawn cut her off with a look so swift that Nina almost missed it.
“It’s a sisterhood,” Tessa finished, a subtle, sunshiny sidestep from whatever she’d been about to say. “And that means you have to be willing to be a sister.”
(“Oh my god,” Jas said later. “They actually said that? And you bought it?”
“I mean, who knows if I convinced them,” said Nina, as if she didn’t care, when in fact she’d stayed up all night replaying her answer, rewriting it, trying to determine if some other turn of phrase would have said it better; if, in her answer, she’d been cool enough, attractively aloof, while conveying with her eyes that she’d make it so good for them, baby, so good, if they’d only give her a chance.)
But now it was Friday, she was awaiting the results of her best efforts, and the clock had struck 11:58.
Class would start in two minutes. The professor strode in, an unusually handsome man who looked possibly Latino, maybe even an Asian mix, though either way he had to be half, because his eyes were light, maybe green or hazel.
He was tall and lean, elegant, with artist’s fingers, brown-black curls that all but begged to be touched, a dimple below the scruff on his cheek that was the precise size and shape of her pointer finger.
Nina sat up slightly straighter as he wrote his name on the board.
11:59. PHIL 275, On the Nature of Being, Dr. Villanueva. His lips looked soft.
“Welcome, welcome,” said Professor Villanueva, and there was the dimple again. “You have thirty seconds to get your affairs in order and then, please, phones away. For the next fifty minutes, you have nothing to ponder except the meaning of existence and whether this is indeed oatmeal on my tie.”
There was a low rumble of obligatory laughter.
“Please,” said Professor Villanueva, with the bashfully sardonic motion of both hands. “Don’t encourage me.”
12:00. Nina hastily hit refresh on the window of her recruitment portal.
Congratulations! You are cordially invited back to—
“Time’s up,” said the professor, and possibly it was Nina’s full-bodied rush of relief, but when she locked eyes with him just then, she couldn’t remember ever having seen a more arresting shade of green.
The sensation dropped hungrily into her vagina as Professor Villanueva leaned casually against the desk at the front of the auditorium, crossing his ankles right over left.
“Now, who can tell me,” he invited, “is there such a thing as free will?”