Chapter 18 #2
“Oh, it’s not … I mean, the picture won’t really do it justice.
” Nina had shown Jas his department headshot the week before, to which Jas had said ew, which was a bit harsh.
Though, to Jas, there were no men on earth compared to Arya.
Still, Nina preemptively explained, “It’s more about, like, his mannerisms. The way he talks.
” His lecture on existentialism and ennui had made Nina’s toes curl with sapiosexual longing.
She didn’t know how to express that in terms Fawn could properly understand. “But, I mean, here.”
Fawn leaned closer to see him on Nina’s phone screen.
“Ooh, no, I totally see it. He’s hot.” She said it vigorously.
Too vigorously? Like she wanted Nina to know she really loved dick.
Or maybe Nina was overthinking. “Love that. I don’t have anyone interesting on my radar these days,” sighed Fawn, fashionably listless.
Nina realized she physically couldn’t bear to discuss the possibility of Fawn dating or even lusting after someone, despite that being a fundamental cornerstone of girl talk.
Problematic. “Well, still time.” Nina gestured to the grocery store they still hadn’t entered. “So, what was the plan here, again?”
“Ah. Well.” Now Fawn’s cheeks were peach with casual embarrassment, the faintest hint of shame that paired so expertly with a vivacious episode of recklessness.
“I guess the plan was to get a handle of cheap vodka and douse it in even cheaper fruit punch while sitting in the carport of my sorority house with the pledge I abducted in a moment of weakness. Did I miss anything?”
“I mean, it’s definitely a plan,” said Nina charitably, and Fawn laughed.
“Forget it, let’s get a tube of cookie dough instead.” She threw open the driver’s side door and gestured for Nina to come along. “Though you’re still welcome to do illicit things with me in the carport, if you want.”
Nina ignored the flutter of innuendo from a place of self-preservation. “Like tax evasion?” she offered instead, getting out of the car.
Fawn tossed her head back with a laugh, reaching for Nina’s arm and leaning companionably into her, drawing multiple sets of eyes to the pretty pair they made, shiny-haired and young, full of possibility and talking only a handful of decibels too loud.
A forgivable offense when you looked like this, attending this University—wearing these letters, as Fawn currently was, like a glimmer of protection, an amulet around her neck.
“You know, I never saw you as a sorority girl,” Dr. Villanueva commented to Nina the following day, leaning against the podium at the front of the auditorium while Nina packed up her things from lecture. She had thrown on her Bid Night shirt in a rush, having accidentally slept in that morning.
For whatever reason—the implication, perhaps, that Tessa and Fawn and Dalil were anti-intellectual in some way—or the hint of misogyny buried deep within the concept that a woman couldn’t be beautiful and worth taking seriously at the same time—Nina felt her crush waver, no longer so distracting she couldn’t look him in the eye for fear that he might somehow read her mind.
“I take it you don’t think much of sororities? Groundbreaking.” Nina’s voice was more dull than cold, but ultimately there was a dearth of flirtation that felt appropriate under the circumstances.
“I didn’t say that. My wife was in a sorority.” Dr. Villanueva’s wedding ring glinted purposefully, utilitarian on his finger, like punishment for stepping jarringly out of the game.
“You say that like ‘I have a Black friend’ or ‘I’m a feminist because I have a daughter,’” challenged Nina.
Dr. Villanueva laughed, breaking their momentary tension. “I do have a daughter and a Black friend, so you might be onto me.”
Nina could feel the other students’ eyes on them, realizing she had somehow begun to be comfortable with it.
The power that came with being interesting.
Magnetic. She grit her teeth around it, that same feeling, the urgency to hunt.
Dr. Villanueva seemed to sense it from her in the same moment, leaning away, distracting himself with the process of packing his laptop back into the leather messenger bag that bore his initials.
The kind of thing that had probably been given to him by a colleague, or his wife.
It was something about his behavior, his obvious desire to clutter up his tracks with misdirection that made Nina realize he actually wanted to fuck her.
Not a tease with no chance of follow-through, but foreplay with a destination.
If this was just flirtation, if it was a game he played with every young woman in his classroom, then he wouldn’t have bothered to end or conceal it.
At the moment, he wasn’t looking at Nina—was in fact looking pointedly away, like The House’s letters were temporarily blinding him, or maybe it was her youth.
She felt a different thrill then; a sudden, sharp stab of agency.
This wasn’t some infantile crush on a teacher that was safe because it could never, would never happen.
This was real. This was a man, a man who knew how to fuck, who wanted to fuck her.
It was repellant and also sexy, in that by virtue of her awareness of his desire, he suddenly became the object.
Power, Nina thought. Power.
Her heart thudded while she dressed for the Big Sis reveal, imagining what she might tell Fawn. Oh, him? Turns out he’s a creep.
Never trust a man, Fawn might say. Or maybe Nina was totally off base and she’d offer some variation on Get it, girl! When it came to The House, it was difficult to predict where sex ended and power began.
“Respectability politics can suck my dick,” Tessa had once told Nina over Monday night dinner, nearly bludgeoning her with a Portuguese egg tart that tasted like the afterglow of orgasm.
“What’s the point of being a ‘good girl,’ hm?
” This Tessa had put in air quotes. “Like, there’s a real threshold for effort, you know.
Code-switching gets me this far”—Tessa made a small motion with her thumb and forefinger—“and anything beyond that is won by whatever means necessary or it’s not given at all. ”
(“I like her,” Jas had said when Nina relayed this conversation to her. “I still think this whole pledge thing is dumb, but I do love supporting women’s wrongs.”)
“I’m certainly not earning anyone’s respect by straightening my hair or ‘maintaining boundaries’ with my TA,” Tessa ranted.
“At best, all I’m ever doing is dodging vitriol.
Because in the end, I’m still having to prove my worth to someone who requires proof, aka an impossible task.
Because if they were going to respect me or even see me as a person, they would have done it.
You can’t earn your way to personhood or some shit. You know?”
“So what’d you say when your TA asked you out?” said Nina, because that was what had started the whole thing—the discussion about whether going out with the dude who inputted your grades was a slutty move or a savvy one.
Tessa shrugged. “I said I’d think about it, and I will. Now pass the gravy, pledge.”
Nina was glad that Tessa was her Big—glad that Tessa wanted her and not one of the baby freshmen who might be more docilely in her thrall.
Which wasn’t to say Nina wasn’t in Tessa’s thrall to some degree, because Tessa was brash and charismatic and unapologetic, things that Nina could only be when she focused her energy very hard, like trying to blow things up with her mind.
She was glad when her scavenger hunt led her to Tessa, because she earnestly felt the relationship was lasting—that one day, when Nina was sad or lonely or desperately in need of some advice, she would pick up her phone and call her Big Sis Tessa, the next Great American Novelist, and it would be like calling her actual sister Jas, except that Tessa wasn’t obsessed with their cousin and had no working knowledge of what Nina had looked like in the sixth grade.
The Nina that Tessa knew was someone Tessa couldn’t weaponize against her—was even someone Nina felt she could grow into being in a more permanent way, like finally finding her signature perfume.
“But I thought you wanted that other girl. Fawn.” Jas couldn’t say Fawn’s name without pairing it with a weird, melodic singsong, ostensibly meant to pitch her voice into the babygirl register, where someone of Fawn’s nomenclature belonged.
“Fawn’s the president, Jas. She can’t take a Little, it would be unfair.”
“Oh, so she’s like the entire house’s Big Sis?”
“I can hear you mocking me, Jasleen. And yeah, sure, basically.”
“But she has her special friends, right? She gets to participate in the rituals, does she not?”
“Stop.”
“You’re making it sound like she’s some kind of living saint. A vessel of sisterhood. Mother Sister, Most High.”
Fawn’s title was actually Lady Superior, not that Nina would be caught dead admitting that to Jas. “The point is, I like Tessa. She’s cool. She’s fun. And she’s probably going to be famous one day.”
“Is she one of the important ones?”
“On Exec, you mean?”
“Yeah, is she on the Holy Council?”
“It’s called Exec, and no, she’s not.” Tessa “didn’t care for group projects,” in her words.
“Wouldn’t it be better to have a Big Sis with some political capital? What’s Fawn’s major, anyway? Is she pre-law too?”
The former remark was typical Jas meaninglessness; the latter felt like the start of a tangent, or possibly a trap. “She’s a business major.”
Jas let out a mocking snort, so definitely a trap. “What kind of business?”
“How should I know?” Fawn’s general approach to academics implied some pressure from her parents, presumably not the white one.
(The other, Nina had eventually gathered with the compulsive desperation of an alcoholic noir detective, was Filipino—a critical commonality!
Asian parents! Something-something not a monolith, but still.) Fawn wasn’t unambitious—she spoke generally of getting her MBA at some point in the future, pending whatever greatness she felt like attending to in the meantime—but overall, Nina got the feeling Fawn had chosen something broadly applicable for a reason, and not one she felt compelled to share.
“And for the record, I don’t think anyone on Exec is taking a Little this year. ”
That part might have been a lie, or maybe not.
Either way, Nina wasn’t going to let Jas make her feel like she was failing at sorority politics.
As far as Nina was concerned, The House was fundamentally egalitarian.
To her, The House was like the Greek agora, a free-flowing place of ideas, where the theoretical idea of womanhood could become dynamic and real.
Nina felt she could almost touch it, the woman she would one day be, which was different from the version she might have been before she’d let the letters kiss her skin.
She could see the many routes and pathways, the language she would need to speak but didn’t yet, couldn’t.
The glimmer of possibilities that would eventually be bestowed by The House, by virtue of being one of its inhabitants—but it was also not strictly The House that conferred their womanhood upon them, because it was they who were The House.
Of course, waxing poetic to Jas about The House’s egalitarianism would not have been productively received. It also undermined Nina’s whole thing about Fawn not taking a Little, which was something Nina needed to believe for purposes of personal survival.
In fact, when it did eventually come time for the Big Sis reveal, Nina was ashamed to say that despite this, there had been a perilous second while making her way down the papier-maché yellow brick road to her mysterious Big Sis where her heart had soared—a brief nanosecond of time during which she spotted Fawn first before she saw Tessa, and thought perhaps it was indeed Fawn who was waiting for her, like the sparkling manifestation of the dream.
Then, once Tessa came into view and the situation played out exactly as anticipated, and, indeed, entirely as she had pre-reasoned with Jas, Nina had thought but actually, wasn’t it sweet that Fawn was so close to Tessa that her choosing to be with Tessa during this momentous ritual (“Stop referring to them as rituals or I’m going to start doing it too,” Nina had growled to Jas that morning for the hundredth time, and for good reason!) meant that Nina was kind of both their Littles, like a polyamorous circle of sisterly fondness and trust?
And then, as Nina leapt excitedly into Tessa’s open arms like throwing herself directly back into girlhood, she caught Fawn’s eyes traveling over her shoulder—over Nina entirely—away from Nina—toward …
something else? Yes, to someone else who was a person that wasn’t Nina.
To a figure entering the room at Nina’s back—to the person who was more important than Nina.
Prettier, probably. Funnier. A closer friend. A forever kind of person.
Nina clung tightly to Tessa. Rush crush. Self-care. Respectability politics can suck my dick. Participation in the rituals. She tapped sisterhood like a tree and waited for that new-old golden feeling, the sweetness of utter relief.
“I would have taken you,” Fawn explained in Nina’s ear at the end of the night, when the slumber party energy had taken them from silly games to the retro dance party of their pre-teenage dreams. “But Tessa really wanted you, and the others already think you’re my favorite.
Plus, we’re already so close, you know? And Dalil doesn’t show it, but she’s kind of struggling to find her place here. ”
Fawn and Nina both glanced over to where Dalil was swaying to the music with her eyes closed, dappled by the shoddily installed mirror ball overhead. They watched her in silence for a long moment, and then eventually, Fawn said, “She needed someone who would really make her feel like she belonged.”
Nina understood, then, the sweetest thing that is possible for anyone to understand. She didn’t need to be told that she belonged because she already belonged—had always belonged, as if from another life. Intrinsic sisterhood. A natural conclusion.
“Besides,” Fawn added, raising a glass of lemonade to her lips as she lowered her voice, “can’t exactly do illicit things in the carport with my Little Sis, can I?”
Nina choked on her swallow, messily spluttering liquid back into her cup.
“Like tax evasion,” Fawn said, straight-faced.
But Nina, still choking, couldn’t laugh.