Chapter 10
As if a spell had been lifted in the moments after Nina was extended a bid, The House seemed to unzip its pants and stretch out on the sofa, returning to a more authentic state of existence.
Like petals unfurling in the sun, the uniform style of each bedroom began to change mere hours after bid night ended and festivities gave way to the light of day, taking on the fingerprints of its occupants.
Now, the front window of the house boasted a glittery BLACK LIVES MATTER sign.
The bedroom above it—belonging, Nina would later learn, to Alina Antwerp and Leonie Monaghan, who were best friends in real life in addition to being co-rush chairs—displayed a vintage presidential campaign banner for the most recent female nominee, which could be seen clearly from certain angles on the row depending on your position as you traversed the sidewalk.
There was, as Nina had known to expect, an array of bikes now locked up against both sides of the house in a glittery spectrum of colors, freed from the polished veneer of recruitment.
Perhaps most noticeable, though, was the way each girl had begun to shed her formal camouflage, settling back into some unknown personal aesthetic just as Nina finally got to shrug on the communal letters of The House.
Tessa, for example, had been wearing an oversized Kendrick Lamar T-shirt that read DAMN.
in pastel letters across her chest while she’d been wandering the house, which she’d swapped for her bid night T-shirt just before accompanying Nina to class.
The new members, which Nina had felt a thrill of self-satisfying pleasure to observe did include Dalil (thanks to Nina—or was that, as Nina often asked herself, the thought of a narcissist?), had been asked to come in early for a new member education meeting, where they were given their initiation bibles: binders including information they had to memorize and songs they had to learn before each sheet was burned and the details therein committed to memory and passed on orally, like the storytelling of yore.
Dalil and Nina had exchanged a glance over the tops of their rush bibles, wordlessly expressing a sense of having been woken too early and assigned an unreadable amount of homework.
Nina wanted to be a member of The House, yes, and therefore she understood that in some way it should feel difficult, as suffering was the only true way to weed out the unworthy.
(She was, again, pre-law.) That being said, Nina was still taking eighteen credits for the semester and struggled to consider “sisterhood songs” a matter of supreme importance.
“Oh, I know, it’s ridiculous,” Tessa assured her as they walked.
Nina didn’t have a bike—her apartment was only just off-campus—but she understood that she would have to get one.
She felt burdensome to Tessa, who was charitably walking her bike alongside Nina to keep pace.
“As long as you’re, like, fifty-one percent of the way there, muscle memory will eventually take over,” Tessa assured her, with an air of jaunty conspiracy.
“Everything’s a ritual. You’ll do it all a million times before you leave here, so as long as you can remember the things you’re required to recite for initiation, the remaining lore will be mastered by virtue of time and bludgeoning repetition. ”
Tessa was a junior, one year Nina’s senior, as was Fawn.
Tessa had already explained that it was unusual to have a president that was a junior, as it meant Fawn had actually taken office when she was a sophomore, and typically speaking it took an extraordinary member to do that.
Fawn had also not been selected by Slate, the election committee—meaning, she had not been appointed to run by the older girls whose business it was to decide who in The House ought to take over.
For most positions, Tessa explained, if nobody objected, then whichever girl was slated for a position won by default.
Such was not often the case with the office of president, Tessa assured her.
But Fawn had run anyway, and won what was essentially the popular vote.
“It’s silly, honestly, since the president is mostly a figurehead,” Tessa went on as Nina attempted to conceal a yawn.
She had already learned during her first semester at college not to sign up for 8 A.M. lectures, as what had been doable, even luxurious in high school was no longer justifiably within reason.
“A sorority president’s job is basically to be the pinnacle of sisterhood.
She doesn’t have to be as pretty as the rush chairs or as organized as the VPs, but she can’t have a single blemish on her reputation.
She has to be a myth, basically. And sure, some of the girls disagree with Fawn’s philosophy,” Tessa qualified with an offhanded shrug, “but it’s a house, not a cult, you know what I mean?
There’ll always be disagreement, but the difference between a hot girl and an It Girl is that ephemeral quality of making people either want you or want to be you, even against their will.
” She passed Nina an unreadable sidelong glance.
“And I think we can agree that Fawn is very good at that.”
Nina felt a slight tinge of embarrassment, as if Tessa had read her mind that morning while she’d been unable to keep herself from glancing around, waiting to see if Fawn might appear from the stairwell.
Over the course of the new member meeting, a handful of The House’s residents had slipped into the dining room groggily, returning to their rooms with an apple or cup of coffee in hand.
A few others had come down the stairs fully dressed, cat-eyes sharp, to proceed directly out the door.
Tessa herself had come from the small in-house gym down the hall, sweaty from the treadmill, partway through Nina’s meeting.
Then, just as the girls were dismissed, she was waiting for Nina beside the door, her braids pulled back in a messy bun with tendrils casually hanging loose around her face.
Nina had realized with a slight flush that Tessa had probably been assigned to her, given that someone had also called for Dalil from the dining room, inviting her to stay back.
Presumably each of the other pledges had met a similar fate.
The intricacies of ritual seemed not to have left them despite the fact that rush was over.
Nina had expected to feel that the period of time in which she would have to prove something about herself was at an end; that she would instantly blend and belong.
But this, it seemed, would require a period of transition, and she couldn’t decide if she should feel patronized by being assigned a guardian at all times or grateful that The House took care of its young, easing them in.
“You were Leonie’s rush crush,” Tessa remarked, jarring Nina out of her thoughts. Two very attractive frat guys nodded to Tessa, who gave a small, careless wave back. Nina felt their eyes linger subsequently on her, assessing. “Don’t tell her I told you.”
“Wait, rush crush?” echoed Nina.
“Yeah, you know, when you get obsessed with a girl you want to be your friend. You’ll understand next year—it’s unavoidable. You meet someone pretty and smart and cool and you just think wow, I want to share a bathroom with her for the next three years.”
Tessa was clearly joking, and yet Nina had felt exactly that about the girls she’d met. She couldn’t believe Leonie had felt that way about her—they’d barely spoken. And Leonie looked like a Barbie come to life. “Wow, that’s crazy. I mean, I kinda get it already. I’m so excited.”
That wasn’t the right word. What Nina actually felt was a hot, molten desperation to skip over the next month and some change and be a proper member of The House—to know the rituals already; to already be familiar with where the coffee accoutrements were kept; to already know who had early classes and which days of the week Fawn and Tessa ate lunch on the quad; to tune in to the frequency of The House instead of jerking along in the wake of its current.
She wanted to already possess the shorthand of sisterhood, the kind where she no longer had to wait to be invited, to wonder if she was included, if a stray comment was meant to encompass her among the us.
She wanted to dissolve the barrier between herself and Tessa, the one where Tessa knew things about her and she didn’t really know anything about Tessa, the one where she was new and Tessa was not, where as long as they remained on opposite sides of the invisible line they could never really be close.
She wanted to stop questioning the right thing to say—to simply know it.
She understood that theoretically speaking, every relationship began this way, that she had once not known Simone or Mei or Adelaide either, and had wondered whether they found it weird that she talked to her sister so much and had not started using tampons until partway through freshman year because her mother had not allowed it, despite the fact that Nina had not been a virgin since she’d slept with Jonathan Zein at his homecoming afterparty, and Jas had not been one since the year before that.