Chapter 20
“It feels cult-y,” said Jas, commenting idly while Nina searched around for a suitable white dress. “Don’t you think it feels cult-y? Like you’re being indoctrinated into a priestess sect or something. The Jedi.”
Of all Jas’s commentary, Nina felt these were among the comments she could fairly and rationally discard. “Yes,” she said, ignoring the stab of pain radiating to her back, “I am joining a cult. Are you happy now?”
“I guess, kind of,” said Jas with an unusual listless energy. “Maybe I should find a cult to join. You seem more at peace than the average person.”
Nina suspected that was actually true. Cramps aside, she had never before felt this absence of anxiety.
Midterms were going fine—her personal rebirth was already underway, with sparkling results in academia specifically.
She was also far less concerned with the mating rituals that had so dominated the previous year, of which Jas had been previously disdainful (before Jas had taken up the sorority-related disdain).
Increasingly, though, Nina felt Jas had become accustomed to the idea of The House, perhaps even in a way that mirrored envy.
The more mocking Jas became of its little absurdities here and there, the more Nina detected a shadow to her sister’s tone, a longing for similar mundanities that might make daily life a little easier, a little more protected. Which was, indeed, how Nina felt.
She bid farewell to Jas in a bit of a rush, having agreed to meet Dalil on campus before walking over to The House together.
In the days since discovering that Fawn was her Big Sis, Dalil seemed substantially lighter, to the point where Nina was finally able to pinpoint the aspects of her that Fawn must have been wary of at the start.
Only in retrospect could Nina grasp that Dalil’s attitude about the various hoops of recruitment had previously represented something tactile, a cynicism she had worn like a mantle.
“It’s mainly an issue of retention rates,” Tessa had explained to Nina at the end of Big night, when she’d caught Nina watching Fawn and Dalil taking pictures together with a variety of props.
Dalil wore an uproarious false mustache that Fawn had smoothed down with her fingers.
“Since we take so few pledges,” Tessa explained, “it looks bad if any of them fail to initiate. The last thing we need is International breathing down our necks, or Alex.”
“Is there something weird about Alex?” Nina asked, thinking of the argument she’d overheard Alex having with Fawn.
“Mm, I’m really not the person to ask about that.
Fawn would have a much longer speech prepared, probably because she’s the one who’s always having to deal with Alex.
” Tessa shrugged. “In my opinion, Alex isn’t weird, she’s just …
basic. She’s controlling, you know? She’s a micromanager, but not in an abnormal or problematic way.
More like the prom queen who keeps going back for homecoming because she peaked a long time ago. ”
“But she’s a lawyer,” Nina said, leaving out that her own aspirations were essentially to become exactly like Alex. “It’s not like she’s worse off now than she was when she was our age.”
“Well, who knows about her private life. In any case, she’s way more invested than I plan to be,” said Tessa. “Isn’t the point to reap what we can and move on? If you stay, it just gets sad.”
This assessment crossed Nina’s mind again when she and Dalil arrived at the house to discover it was fully unlit, and at first glance, completely empty.
Except for Alex. She stood alone in the corridor from the foyer to the kitchen, looking up from her phone as the pledges began to slowly file in, with Nina and Dalil being among the first to arrive.
The entryway to the house had the original dark wood floors, which gleamed with polish beneath the tastefully selected entryway rug.
The walls, which were generally covered in fashionable House of Hackney wallpaper, were newly lined with framed composites of portraits that Nina hadn’t seen before.
Even from a distance she could see they were filled with the faces of alumnae, like an ancestral record or collection of family heirlooms that had ostensibly been carefully stored during the brief period that usurpers—pledges—roamed the house floors.
Unlike the pledges in their stark communion gowns, Alex wore a red wrap sweater, her lips painted a blazing scarlet to match.
Her hair was pulled away from her face, and there was …
something, Nina thought. Some tension to her expression, the queen bee fretting over the hive.
Basic, Tessa had said, but Nina saw something even older than that, almost fairytale-like in its familiarity.
An archetype, which Nina supposed was “basic” in the narrative sense.
Someone whose power would inevitably be lost, worrying about whether her power was being lost.
That, and a familiar teeth-chatter of longing.
Nina realized as she set her bag down on the floor that Alex was watching her specifically, observing her from a distance with a divot of thought between her brows.
Before Nina could say anything, though, Alex tore her gaze away to return her attention to her phone, then turned to exit the house through the rear door, by the carport.
Evidently she didn’t plan to address them.
Then the rest of the pledges arrived, vermilion vestiges of sun burning low through the foyer windows.
“What are we supposed to be doing?” whispered Maud, loudly, to Fran, who shrugged. Without consulting each other, the pledges seemed to have agreed the waiting period should be silent.
Then, just as the sun began to fade into darkness and Nina struggled to discern the expressions on the faces of her cohort, a faint flicker of candlelight appeared from the foyer’s rear corridor.
Nina nudged Dalil, who instantly stood a little straighter.
They felt the hum, the presence of the sisterhood, its precise and unignorable frequency, before any of The House’s members came into sight.
Then, stepping into view from the darkness, their new member educators Nicole and Mallory appeared, each holding a lit votive candle.
“Welcome, sisters,” they said in unison, their voices low and solemn, something that would have ordinarily made Dalil’s eyes cut to Nina’s with exasperation at the campiness. Instead, Dalil stood unusually still at Nina’s side, a look of contemplation on her face, like a new bride.
Nina realized that in addition to baptism, this also seemed a lot like a wedding.
The House was both religion and spouse, institution and lover.
She wanted to point it out to Dalil, but realized she didn’t feel mockery about it.
Slowly, gradually over time, she’d developed not just an opposition to derogation, but a genuinely protective feeling, not unlike how she might have felt about her religion or her partner.
Of course everything to do with The House could be odd and silly and imperfect.
Did that necessarily make the love less pure?
“Tonight, we will commune with our sisters past, and beseech them for acceptance. May the sisters who came before us welcome you into the auspices of The House.”
Nina felt a shiver of something down her spine. Renewed, collective teeth-chatter. Air-conditioning, or ghosts.
“As you know,” Nicole recited, “The House was established centuries ago to celebrate sisterhood, and the improvement of both heart and mind.
Our founders believed that we are stronger together, and that binding together as a sisterhood would create new opportunities for women—opportunities to learn and grow.
“The House was built on the ideals our founders believed to be imperative for the growth of women. Truth, honor, and loyalty are the foundation of our sisterhood. These ideals are as important today as they were to our founders over one hundred and fifty years ago.
“Tonight, you are but one step from becoming a member of The House. We as a sisterhood have found in you the qualities we cherish in one another. Sincerity, honor, friendship, and love are the hallmarks of our sisterhood, as are the hunger of our hearts and the protection of those we call our own.”
Mallory passed around a box, gesturing for each of the pledges to take their own white votive candle. Nicole began to walk around the circle they’d formed in the foyer, one hand cupped around the open flame she held in her hands.
“On this special night,” said Mallory, “we invite you to share in our bond. But first, we must ask you to complete your vows before crossing the threshold of our sisterhood.”
Nina was last in the circle. Nicole held her eye for a brief moment, kissing her own candle flame to Nina’s wick before rejoining Mallory, all the pledges’ candles having been lit.
The house was so unnaturally quiet they could hear the creak of every floorboard beneath Nicole’s careful footfall, not a sound coming from the row outside, nor the occupants upstairs.
Briefly, Nina wondered how they’d done it.
What she would have done for this kind of silence under other circumstances—even the library was quiet but profoundly unsacred, easily pierced by the undignified crunch of someone’s midnight Lay’s.
Just as Nina’s thoughts began to wander, Mallory spoke again. “Before you enter the hearth of our sisterhood, we must ask you to complete these vows. Do you accept our foundational beliefs of loyalty, honor, and friendship?”
This part they’d been schooled in answering. “I do,” Nina said quietly. Beside her, she heard Dalil murmur the same.
“Do you reject the temptations of envy and deceit?”
“I do,” came the low-thrumming chorus. The hum was there again, louder, or perhaps nearer. Nina felt the space between her shoulder blades constrict, her body centralizing, condensed, as in the moments before the shotgun start.
“Will you put first the high ideals of friendship, generosity, and trust?”
“I will.” She could hear every sound in The House, perhaps even miles beyond it. The snap of a twig, a branch on the ground. Any threat to her sisters.
“Do you share in our goals of betterment and growth, that together we may become women of higher scholarship, achievement, and self-worth?”
“I do.” She could feel Quinn’s breathing. She could taste Maud’s lip balm.
“Will you choose the beating hearts of your sisters and place this love above all others?”
“I will.” Dalil exhaled softly. The hairs rose on Nina’s arms.
“Do you swear to guard the secrets of our sisterhood with integrity, until death?”
The invocation of death in the moment felt appropriate. The solemnity felt earned.
“I do.” The hum fell away.
The thing was: Nina wanted to believe it.
She wanted more than anything to come to these promises without irony—with no hypocrisy, no fear.
Truthfully, she missed the earnestness of girlhood, aware that in her ordinary University life, with its mimicry of adulthood, she constantly straddled a line of something unknown with one foot in and one foot out.
But what had she been as a girl if not capable of magic, both vengeful and pure?
What womanhood would she possibly want where those things were gone from her, all because she had willingly unclenched her fingers, let them go so as not to be humiliated, caught in the act of wanting without moderation or restraint?
Better to be gauche than to be ordinary, to have pulled herself back from this kind of devotion at the cost of herself.
To receive nothing more from social convention than a tired adulthood filled with playing someone else’s games.
Already Nina felt nostalgia for this moment, for this person, for this version of herself.
She understood that after tonight, she would likely never be able to speak like this, so openly.
Swearing a blood oath to be friends forever.
She could never again reasonably ask that of anyone.
After tonight it would always be too painful, too naive.
So she was glad, more than glad, that Dalil seemed just as rapt as she was.
In that moment, Nina wanted every promise that passed her lips to be true—that these women would forever be hers, that nothing would ever change, that she would protect them with her life or let her be struck down where she stood for her failure.
She wanted desperately to invoke the ghosts, to join the thrumming chorus, however sinister it was.
To opt in to the promise of this haunting.
It was the closest she had ever felt to actually mattering—like if she could strengthen herself with the mortar of this sisterhood, then no one would ever be able to hurt her. She could never again fall apart.
“May the memory of tonight stay with you always,” Nicole said softly, while Nina prayed to her girl-gods and ghosts. She bargained with the universe in silence. Let there be safety in this house, she prayed, for she already knew there would be none outside of it.