Chapter 11
Sloane had never paid much attention to who in her classes was part of the Greek system, a non-issue at her previous college.
She considered it a mere signifier of archetypes, not unlike the athletes and cheerleaders who dressed up for game days in high school.
She supposed she could admit, grudgingly, that even now as a fully grown woman, she partitioned those sorts of associations into one of two categories: a try-hard mentality, if the student in question was unattractive, or a victim of pathological groupthink, if they were.
She supposed she did have a sense for which Greek letters represented beauty, sophistication, money …
Admitting this to herself felt embarrassing and juvenile, but it was true.
She looked around during her lecture and spotted the letters belonging to The House, realizing that it was no wonder those girls eventually became women like Alex, like Priscilla and Britt.
As Sloane had already observed, Dalil Serrano was breathtakingly beautiful, with wavy brown-black hair and breasts like the ones Sloane used to have before she’d sacrificed them on the altar of breastfeeding.
Which, Sloane recalled, she was meant to stop doing, per her pediatrician, who coincidentally did not have to deal with Isla’s rage. Breast was best until apparently, mysteriously, it wasn’t.
“Oh god, that’s absurd,” Britt had said when Sloane mentioned it offhandedly, after they determined that the twelve new members—well below the International standards that called for a pledge class of at least sixty given the size of the University at large—were all very good potential representatives of The House. “What’s she complaining about?”
“Oh, she said I needed to night wean, because the sugar from breast milk was destroying Isla’s teeth or something—”
“Oh, come on,” growled Britt, whose twins looked up briefly at the declarative sound of their mother’s ire, but then merely went back to their business of coloring, as if it happened all the time. “How often do you brush her teeth?”
“Well—” Sloane felt her face flush, not wanting to confess aloud that Isla was simply very noncompliant, and sometimes Sloane forgot to brush her teeth in the morning when she was in a hurry and didn’t want Isla to wipe toothpaste on her shirt, and if she didn’t do it then Max certainly wasn’t going to do it because Sloane was the one who always did it, and because—despite the fact that Max was older and had therefore been brushing his teeth for even longer than Sloane had—when it came to Isla, Max simply didn’t know how.
“I mean, I’m trying to do it twice a day, but—”
“It’s not a big deal,” Britt concluded with a shrug, though Sloane detected a slight sense of disapproval.
Britt, after all, had the time for it, and she had two sets of teeth requiring brushing, not to mention perfect abs and a slew of industry awards on display in her perfect house.
“But if teeth are the concern, that’s an easy fix. ”
“My trick is to use two toothbrushes,” Alex offered. “One for Theo to ‘brush’ and one for me to sneak into his mouth at any given opportunity. I used to use two spoons to feed him, too.”
“Oh god,” said Sloane, who wanted to die at the mere thought of feeding Isla, a thing she did several times a day and yet couldn’t imagine having to do again. “I can’t get Isla to eat anything. She’s not even a picky eater, really. She’s just apathetic to food.”
“Smoothies work really well,” Britt said.
“Or ice pops,” added Alex.
“Yeah, ice pops are great. And Trader Joe’s has precooked beets, those have tons of protein, plus as a bonus they turn the smoothies pink.”
“Sprinkles,” said Alex, deathly serious. “Sprinkles are a game changer. I’ll send you the link for the ones Theo loves.”
“Oh, I forgot you’re the one who got me started on sprinkles!” Britt laughed. “I avoided sugar for so long, and then you came around with the fucking sprinkles—”
“I mean, I randomly get the kid who loves broccoli,” Alex said to Sloane with a little eye roll of aren’t kids such rascals. “But all dairy products require sprinkles or it’s not happening.”
“I’ve got a great ragu that has liver in it,” Britt said. “Lots of iron. The girls love it. I’ll send you the recipe.”
Alex nodded vigorously. “Theo loves it, too. You can make a huge batch and freeze it.”
Quietly, Sloane considered saying that she didn’t know how she would find the time.
She was teaching a new-to-her course—the quantitative methods one—and wasn’t confident in her syllabus yet.
She wanted to have the time to be good at her job, to write something worth publishing by the end of the semester, and also to work out with the same frequency with which she had maintained her body previously, to cook extravagant meals her daughter would eat and her husband would celebrate her for, to read for pleasure, to feel sexual desire, to shower regularly.
But in reality, doing any one of those things chipped away at any plausible time for the rest, and worse—any time Sloane did get a spare moment to herself, her exhausted brain misused it scrolling VidStar, hate-watching The Country Wife’s homesteading montages like they were porn.
Sloane had looked longingly at Alex’s nails, a trendy shade for autumn that Sloane had scrolled past while rocking a restless Isla to sleep the night before.
Sloane had once been religious about her nail color, but since Isla was born there’d been no guarantee she’d be able to fix a chip in a timely manner, so she’d given it up.
And yet Britt somehow had time to bake. Sloane had now eaten food prepared by Britt twice and offered nothing in exchange.
She felt a mix of longing and inadequacy, a desperation she hadn’t felt since she was in her twenties, or maybe even earlier.
It was a desire to do things correctly according to an invisible metric, to be good enough—not even better, but the same. To keep up, that was it.
Wasn’t that supposed to have gone away? Sloane remembered turning thirty and realizing with relief that all of a sudden, she no longer depended on the opinions of others to define the outer constraints of her value.
Did her professional success matter to her?
Of course. But in a bigger way, she knew she was smart, understood she was deserving of respect, in a way she hadn’t when she was younger.
She had grown into self-acceptance, which was functionally the disposal of deep-seated inadequacy.
She had always had something to prove, but no longer did that apply directly to her personhood.
Then she’d had Isla, and suddenly the bliss of maturity, of being a woman who understood how she made her way in the world, simply disintegrated overnight.
Sloane remembered the exact moment she felt it leave her, replaced by a new version of an old doubt.
She’d finally given birth in the late evening after two full days of labor, the hospital staff having changed shifts multiple times.
After Sloane had held Isla, falling madly in love with the infant who’d curled kitten-like on her bare chest—after Sloane had been stitched up—after Sloane had taken the most terrifying, painful pee of her life—the nurses had set Isla, carefully swaddled and asleep, into the bassinet beside Sloane’s hospital bed, turning off the lights.
Max, on a cot on the opposite side of the room, fell instantly and heavily asleep.
Sloane closed her eyes, aware for the first time that she’d been awake for almost forty-eight consecutive hours.
Then Isla had begun to cry, and Sloane understood through an ineffable, cosmic jolt that this was her life now, and she didn’t know what to do, and she might never again know what to do, and the best she could ever feel when it came to motherhood was that she had maybe gotten something sort of right in an acceptable, passing way, but never like she had really achieved something.
She couldn’t even win over the affections of her dog.
And she had once been full of achievement, literally all the time!
She’d gotten As—so many As. She’d set so many curves.
She gave blow jobs so good Max had once gone out while she was showering and bought her a box of donuts in gratitude.
And the irony was that the whole time Sloane had been the best in her class or the prettiest or attracting the most envy from her peers, from her friends, and from other women, she had still felt on the inside like she should have gotten that one point she’d missed, and she needed to lose five pounds, and she had to learn to fix every little flaw she’d always previously lived with, because if she didn’t then Max would inevitably leave her, because who could ever really see all her shit and still want to stay?
So it felt cruel, then, to eventually ease into the comfort with herself that no longer demanded her waist be the smallest or her hair be the shiniest or that she be the hottest professor in the department or the one with the best overall student rating, only to now have her mind consumed in different ways to the exact same degree with an overwhelming sense of constant failure.
Not just in terms of what she did, but some more fundamental wrongness—something she couldn’t articulate about who she actually was.
Sloane glanced, then—almost helplessly—at Dalil Serrano.
Beautiful Dalil, who even in jeans looked like the Vogue profile of an up-and-coming movie star.
God, Sloane thought with a sudden, visceral internal correction, Dalil wasn’t just beautiful.
The House didn’t just have beautiful girls—it was so much more specific than that, like how the most gorgeous woman alive wasn’t just beautiful.
It was a bigotry-defying beauty, striking enough to dazzle the racism right out of anyone with eyes.
And yet, breathtaking, perfect Dalil was glancing surreptitiously at her phone screen, probably checking to see whether some tall bland white dude had summoned the energy to venture sup.
In that moment, Sloane realized she’d rather die than be eighteen years old again.
No matter how tired she was now, she wouldn’t go back to some self-sabotaging youth, the version of her who felt like she might disappear without the attention of some fucking asshole, the stakes of the universe arranged not by any rational, objective measure but by how she felt about herself in her worst moments, by how others might feel about her.
She’d take a bullet to the head rather than return to the fundamental question of who would she be, what would she accomplish, what was she good at, was she running out of time?
The Sloane Hartley who stood in front of the class delivering a glorified statistics lecture already knew that life was long, that the world didn’t stop at thirty, that maturity had only given her value rather than stripping it away, that her desirability to men had never offered her anything that actually mattered, even if it had felt like it at the time.
But fuck, Sloane thought, looking at Dalil Serrano with the same surreptitious pretense as Dalil’s observation of her phone and the fuckhead frat bro no doubt haunting the poor girl’s messages.
If someone said Sloane Hartley, you have to be eighteen again, then she’d give anything to do it Dalil’s way, with those letters printed on her perfect chest.
Just saying.