Chapter 21 #2
“God, as if! You got me all those interviews. And Priscilla said she wants me to submit a book proposal officially. She said she knows an agent who’d love the project—not that I know for sure what the project even is,” Sloane said, glancing cursorily over the grades.
They were good? What else did an academic advisor even do?
“So you’ve decided to go the non-academic route with Skit, then?” Alex asked, turning to stir the sauce on the stove.
“Well, I’ll send Burns the same proposal, I guess. But maybe having some outside interest will make him … more amenable to it, I don’t know.” Sloane realized that even she had some doubt in what she was saying. Delusion was powerful stuff.
“He’s an obstacle,” Alex said, leveling a wooden spoon at Sloane as she appeared to come to the same conclusion.
“Not an ally. After a certain point you have to allow yourself to stop jumping through hoops. If he won’t recognize you as a person worthy of respect, nothing you do can change that. And that’s not your fault, it’s his.”
The words struck Sloane unexpectedly, like the crack of a whip. “Wow.” She exhaled swiftly. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
“It’s the same thing I tell The Girls,” Alex said with a shrug. “You have limited reserves of energy. Don’t keep throwing yourself at something that won’t move. Find another way in. There’s always another way.”
“Do you think that’s actually true, though?” Sloane said, and watched an odd wave of something pass over Alex’s expression. “Not everyone will find a way in. I mean, in terms of, like, marginalized identities, or social capital, or actual capital—”
“The world is unfair,” Alex said coolly, setting the wooden spoon down on the ceramic plate beside the stove.
“But that’s the purpose of sisterhood, to raise each other up.
To help each other up the ladder. They are each other’s allies.
They are faithful to each other, and that’s how we create the means to succeed.
We do it,” said Alex, with an almost biting acerbity.
“We don’t wait for someone to give us credit, because if we did we’d all toil in obscurity until we died. ”
Sloane glanced over her shoulder, checking on Isla and Theo. The two children were playing side by side, Theo stacking cups while Isla appeared to be organizing them.
“You know, I did notice,” Sloane remarked over her shoulder to Alex, “that many of the alumnae have similar backgrounds. Difficult adolescences, maybe even some trauma. They all credit The House with giving them some kind of second chance.”
She turned back to Alex in time to see her shrug. “That’s what college is, isn’t it?” Alex replied simply. “It’s a bridge between adolescence and adulthood. A place to explore things intellectually, to decide who you want to be.”
“But within The House specifically—”
“Sloane,” said Alex with a laugh, “are you investigating us or something?”
“I think I’m jealous, honestly.” It was only after Sloane said it that she realized it was true. “I just … I wish I felt that secure, I guess. But that’s not much of a research topic, is it? I mean, what’s the conclusion to the book? What’s the ending?”
“That when women help women, we all win,” said Alex, easily.
“Sure, but how can we apply that to the average reader when you just admitted that this kind of success only exists for people with access to The House’s connections?”
“Are you writing a self-help book?” asked Alex wryly, before beginning to plate the spaghetti. “Just … let it marinate for a bit, let it stew. I’m sure it’ll come to you.”
“What about you?” Sloane suddenly asked, struck that she hadn’t thought to ask sooner.
“What about me?” Alex replied without looking up.
“Did you … what was your life like, before The House?”
“Oh, Sloane.” Alex shook her head with a mirthful sigh. “I’m just another girl who got let down by men, that’s all. I really think that’s what everything comes down to.”
The following day Sloane sat in her office, residual self-loathing from Isla’s daily drop-off fading to an unproductive replay of the dinner.
The rest of the meal had been focused on the children—Theo had been especially proud to show off to Sloane and Isla his new technique for jumping from his play-couch to the sofa—with a few minutes of looking over grades.
The Girls now had a 3.89 cumulative GPA, which struck Sloane as wildly above the campus average but that Alex waved away, saying they chose smart women in the first place, and the emphasis they placed on scholarship accounted for the rest.
“What about The Country Wife?” asked Arya from his chair.
Sloane hadn’t realized she’d been mulling her notes aloud. “What?”
“You interviewed everyone who fit the pattern,” Arya said. “So what about the outlier?”
“Oh.” Sloane tried to play this off like an oversight rather than what it actually was—procrastination.
Intellectually she understood that she could not move forward without talking to Caroline Collins; in a deeper, more amorphous way, she also understood she would be betraying Alex the moment she did.
“God, do you think she’ll want to talk to me?
” Sloane play-acted hesitation, trying to make her protestations true, as if they could be presented as evidence to the court of her good intentions sometime later.
“I mean, what am I even going to tell her? I’m writing a book about her sorority?
And I doubt I could ask Alex for her contact information—”
“She’s an influencer,” Arya said with a shrug. “She definitely checks her DMs. And I think you should tell her the truth. She’s probably interested in telling her story—that’s what her whole account is.”
“A story?”
“Of course. What’s a brand other than another way to tell a story?” Arya was grinning at Sloane like a dog who’d set a tennis ball at her feet.
Sloane hemmed and hawed uselessly, a function of being ethically stuck. “I already know Burns isn’t interested in this, though.”
“You keep going back and forth on whether Burns’s opinion matters,” Arya observed. “Either you care or you don’t.”
“It’s not really Burns.” It was something, though, Sloane realized.
She wanted Burns’s approval, followed by Burns’s apology, to prove her instincts sound.
And of course she felt that way! Max had wanted the University, to put down roots, to let their daughter grow up in this mecca of elite intellectualism, to afford Isla every resource in the world, even though—as Sloane knew—many of those resources would still regard her as someone whose interests weren’t serious, meaningful, or profound.
“Look.” Before she fully noticed it, Arya was on his feet, bending over the edge of her desk to lean on his elbows, his face floating before hers.
“Your idea is solid. It’s interesting, objectively so.
If some old white dude doesn’t like it, so what?
Plenty of other people will.” He paused, his mouth quirking up at the corners in a way that drew Sloane’s eye.
“But you gotta be okay with danger, Doc. You can’t just talk to the people that the Sorority Queen wants you to talk to.
She’s treating you like the media, putting her best face forward, which is fine, that’s her job.
But your job?” He leaned closer. “Yours is to find the ugly. You want the skeletons. You want the sins.”
Sloane couldn’t help a shiver. The presence of Arya’s mouth so close to hers helped nothing.
She thought of Alex’s red lipstick, the cool knife-edge of her voice when Sloane seemed occasionally to get too close, to break the rules.
A part of Sloane unfurled like a petal, stretching out, reaching.
Dancing close to something wild, something hot.
“The sins?” Sloane echoed.
“The sins.” Arya’s eyes glinted. “That’s where the real story lives.”