Chapter 12
Nina didn’t see Fawn on Thursday, and as the week crept into the weekend, she realized she was going to need to stop looking for Fawn.
She felt a creeping tendril of embarrassment, like the first flush of a fever, realizing she had mistakenly thought of Fawn as a friend when really, Fawn had plenty of friends.
And so, now, did Nina! She needed to stop lusting over some imaginary SVU marathon with an emotionally unavailable person she hardly knew. It was Jonathan Zein all over again.
The first weekend as a member of The House was a lively one, filled with innumerable fraternity house parties, all of which Nina was now able to attend, having fulfilled her puritanical recruitment abstention.
She packed three super tampons into her clutch, took approximately eight thousand milligrams of Advil, and met up with Dalil and their fellow new members at The House before venturing out onto the row.
Nina had promised to catch up with Simone and Adelaide at some unidentified point in time, at whichever party they happened to vibe with for the night, once she’d gotten her mandated hours of sisterhood out of the way.
But then she’d lingered overlong at the particular frat house that was full of well-built crew-rowing nepo babies, both because they’d taken an unusual interest in her and because Nina had spotted Fawn out of the corner of her eye, one arm linked through Leonie’s.
A desperate part of Nina wanted to cry out, “Leonie! I was your rush crush, wasn’t I?
Can you tell me everything you admire about me in extreme, agonizing detail?
” but of course she held it in, like a lady.
She could feel The House settling like a cloak over her shoulders, a silky invisible material that heightened her magnetism and accentuated her natural social gifts.
Even her cramps seemed slightly easier, anxiety having briefly loosened its jaws.
Suddenly Nina’s hair seemed to fall perfectly, her jokes all seemed to land.
Her pseudo-Parisian affectation of contrarian disinterest had sharpened so effectively that when a boy she would surely have gone home with the previous year invited her up to his room, Nina gave a coy laugh and flatly turned him down.
It was as if the impulse to seek attention had dimmed, a prior necessity transformed into an erstwhile symptom of cringe-inducing youth, the high of casual hook-ups now rendered cheap and fleeting.
She could afford to be selective now. The gift of The House was the luxury of time and permission. Now, unlike before, Nina could wait. She could choose.
“Boring,” said Jas. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re saving yourself for your husband, who will be named Tripp and have a family cabin in Sun Valley.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t come along?”
“I mean, I’d go, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.”
“I’m not going to date a Tripp. But for the record, there are three of them and they’re all friends with Tessa, so if you really wanted I could probably do it. A little Tripp, as a treat.”
“Oh, see, you’re making jokes, but I can tell you’re drinking the Kool-Aid.” Jas laughed. “By all means, though, keep going. I’m going to write about you for my term paper.”
“Let me guess, it’s about … Oh, I don’t know, institutional power?”
“Second-wave feminism,” Jas corrected, “but it’s always best to draw an ominous conclusion, like how the systems you participate in that are meant to empower women are really only speaking to a certain class of privilege.”
Nina scoffed. “Hello? Last I heard we share a DNA sequence, not to mention a tax bracket. If I’m privileged, you’re privileged.”
“Sure, but I’m not trying to ingratiate myself with that privilege. It’s different.”
“Is it?” As usual when it came to Jas there was no point getting into the weeds, but Nina couldn’t help herself. “Look, the reality is that every douchebag at this school is using their privilege without a second thought. So why shouldn’t I benefit?”
“Because you’re not actually one of them, Nina!” Jas rolled her eyes. “This is all very ‘I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face’ from the woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
“Touch some grass, J. I gotta go,” said Nina, though she didn’t have anywhere to be, she just couldn’t continue discussing privilege or she’d get a headache and spontaneously start a podcast.
It was ironic, in Nina’s mind, that there was no correct way to be a woman of color, just as there was no correct way to be a beautiful woman or a sexually active woman or just a woman, period.
She didn’t need Jas’s help hating herself, or what was the cosmetics industry for?
She sensed that family Thanksgiving would become unbearable as they aged, unless Jas did what every other left-leaning first gen queer person did and brought home a peaceable middle-class white woman.
Which, ultimately, was no different from Nina joining The House—where so far, her two closest friends (three if you counted Fawn, which she wasn’t, obviously) weren’t even white! —so yeah, she had somewhere else to be.
Jas aside, Nina was coming to learn that The House wasn’t quite as she’d expected. She understood, to some extent, that every one of her new sisters had a unique fingerprint, blah blah blah, but even taken as a collective, things were ultimately surprising.
Take their Monday night dinners, for example.
Over the course of Nina’s friendship with Adelaide—strike that.
Over the course of Nina’s friendship with other women, she had become accustomed to varying degrees of disordered eating.
It was normal, in Nina’s mind, for girls to allow themselves sweets and fries and various other culinary misbehaviors, but only with a sense of guilt, and a collective understanding that it was a sin-ridden act in some way, something they would all offer penance for in the gym, or perhaps in the bathroom, depending on how far gone the girl in question happened to be.
True, there was a certain progressivism among Nina’s close friends as opposed to her understanding of previous generations—there was no longer public acceptance of “body shaming,” and people were just as quick to police fatphobia as they were to engage in any discourse on privilege—but it didn’t change the fact that some girls really did appear to believe that nothing tasted as good as skinny felt, and even the ones who were healthier about it were still diligent about the optics of their bodies in ways that were hard-edged with shame.
So, Nina had expected dinner at The House to be a similar affair.
She hadn’t invented the stereotype of the sorority girl who asked about carbs and didn’t eat gluten or dairy.
She didn’t even think she’d judge it if she came across it.
The expectations for feminine eating were so patently common she doubted she would have even noticed if that had been the case.
But it was the opposite—profoundly the opposite.
The first time Nina entered The House for Monday night dinner, she’d been struck by the eerie sense that she hadn’t been invited—that she’d somehow broken in.
The smart-tech front door opened for her fingerprint just as it previously had, but her awareness of The House’s internal frequency was louder, a faint buzzing in her ears, in the space between her navel and her spine.
It was like walking into a room where everyone had just been talking about you, but she could tell that wasn’t the case—the energy wasn’t directed at her, or directed anywhere, really.
It was just a sense that something invisible was present, something tangible and pressing that Nina couldn’t yet see.
The girls filed into the dining room in their pretty formal dresses without any particular sequence or hierarchy, but it was easy to tell who was a new member and who was not.
The established, the old guard, the ones who belonged were all patently waiting for something, shoulders uniformly tensed beneath delicate straps of silk and linen as they walked.
Dozens of tables lined the dining room, with beautiful, intricate place settings for each girl.
The silverware was heavy and antique, the glassware thick and iridescent, low-falling sun warming the view from the open windows, shadows of the candle-flames dancing blithely along the walls.
As the space gradually filled, House members distributed themselves at random throughout the room—only the head table, where Fawn sat, was reserved—and Nina caught sight of a senior sniffing the air like a hunting dog.
Two tables over, Summer Toft took desperate sips of her water like her throat was dry, her bottom lip nearly cracked open with wanting.
Alina’s and Leonie’s knees jiggled in tandem; the girl across from Nina (someone Nina hadn’t met yet) arranged and rearranged her jaw like she’d been steadily grinding her teeth.
There was an almost imperceptible thrum of apprehension, or desire. Like the moment you know a kiss isn’t just a kiss anymore—it’s going somewhere. The presence of anticipation passed through the dining room like a shiver, a sudden shift in the wind.
Plates were carried out from the kitchen by the hired catering staff, several heads snapping toward the pair of servers. Next to Nina, closer to the center aisle between the tables, there was an odd, almost cartoonish glint in Tessa’s eye, a typewriter flick of unfaltering interest.
Amused by all this, Nina turned to find Dalil, who was two tables behind her, but Dalil’s gaze was fixed on a sophomore sitting across the table from her, whom Nina could see had begun to quietly pant.
Nina felt it again—the chattering teeth, the hum of inorganic stillness. The House’s true members sat coiled and waiting, a collective bow strung taut. There it was again, that presence of something. Of waiting. Hunting.