Chapter 32 #2
Things could … change? Occasionally Nina almost believed this.
But then she saw some impressively moronic opinion on the internet that assured her stupidity was not generational, that apathy wouldn’t die out.
One simply could not “Okay, Boomer” the entire world’s injustices.
Someone was always eating. Someone else was always being eaten.
Was it magic? Was it balance? Was it a simple exchange of energies, neither lost nor destroyed?
The point was: Nina believed in it. The ritual.
She could no longer remember a version of herself that did not.
She was, after all, the reincarnated version of herself who understood the sisterhood that sat plated before her every Monday evening, piled high with love and care and compassion and unconditional support.
It was more than just painlessness, more than wellness.
It was utopia, it was womanhood the collective, it was the mercy and benediction of The House.
The House was the Mother, they the Daughters, indivisible from the Holy Spirit. This was communion on high.
“We should ask what Caroline thinks. She’s crazy,” Fawn acknowledged aloud to the expression on Nina’s face, “but she has a lot more experience with getting the most out of the ritual.”
“I thought it was Alex who took care of the ritual?”
Nina thought of the woman called Dr. Hartley, the academic advisor who looked a lot like Alex.
They had the same aesthetic build, like two white women exiting yoga together and going to the organic grocery store to talk about how their husbands never emptied the dishwasher.
Nina felt an awareness of something then, a low-burning hatred, not like the hatred she had for The Patriarchy, which was the mortal enemy of The House, but something more like frustration or the feeling when you’re having sex you didn’t really want to have.
Alex represented something, an old guard, maybe, the kind of woman who might want Nina to succeed but wouldn’t bat an eye if Jas were starving.
Nina couldn’t put a finger on why she knew this, exactly, but she just knew it, like some essential calculation in her soul.
Dr. Hartley, she wasn’t quite that, but her husband was Dr. Villanueva, and didn’t that have to mean something?
Wasn’t there something wrong there somewhere, something off, with a woman who had chosen a man who was probably a predator, or was it just that she had chosen a man?
But then Nina wasn’t against men, romantically or sexually.
She just didn’t understand why Dr. Hartley had not had the same feeling Nina had, that to Professor Villanueva she was interchangeable, one of many—or maybe what Nina disliked was her certainty that Dr. Hartley had had that feeling but she had wanted to feel chosen anyway, because there was something inherent in being that choice that felt a little bit like winning, even from inside the game that nobody could win.
Nina didn’t respect it, was the thing. She knew it was hypocritical, her joining The House because its acceptance would give her power, or her willingness to defy a fundamental tenet of human ethics because it would taste (ha) like victory in some way.
But if it was all hypocrisy anyway, then who the fuck cared?
Better this version of fake power than some guy who didn’t unload the dishwasher, right?
Or one who behaved and acted and voted from a place of solidarity, to make sure that power never transferred hands.
“First of all, Alex is completely full of shit,” said Fawn.
“Apparently the first ritual only happened because she accidentally killed some guy who’d roofied her.
It was her pledge sisters who came up with the idea—no body, no crime.
” Fawn laughed faintly. “That’s why she won’t leave the ritual alone. She can’t.”
Nothing about that tracked for Nina. “I mean, isn’t it only getting worse, though, the longer she keeps herself involved?
Criminally speaking?” Nina recalled that Alex was a lawyer.
She recalled even more hazily that she herself wanted to be a lawyer.
It was another choice that tasted like safety.
There was a savoriness there, a kind of maple-smoked essence, like a really complex barbecue rub.
It existed from a place of hypocrisy. Nina wanted to make money.
She wanted to do good. She couldn’t do both, because in order to accomplish anything meaningful, goodness needed power behind it, but power without exploitation didn’t exist. Or maybe this was just the hypocrisy thing again.
Fawn rolled her eyes. “Alex just needs control. If she’s not in control then she’s out of control. Then it’s wrong.”
“Is it wrong?” asked Nina.
Fawn said nothing for a second. For a moment, Nina wished she were having this conversation with Tessa.
Sometimes, when she spoke to Fawn, she had the feeling she was staring directly into a shiny surface.
Granite countertop. Vintage mirror. Glassy lake.
Something that could change depending on where the wind might blow.
Then Fawn pushed herself up to one elbow from the Icebox floor. “Come here,” she said, and slipped her tongue between Nina’s lips, brushing the roof of her mouth. “Is that wrong?”
Without hesitation: “No.”
Fawn’s hand slipped under Nina’s shirt, under her bra, taking a greedy palmful of Nina’s breast. “Is this wrong?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not in any way that means anything.”
Fawn laughed and pinched Nina’s nipple.
“After a certain point you just don’t give a fuck, you know?” she said. “I don’t do ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ anymore.”
“Did something happen to you?” Nina asked.
She didn’t know why she asked it then. She just had a feeling.
She felt it in the Icebox, in the chapter room.
That was it, she realized. The hum. The frequency.
The way each of her new sisters carried something around with them.
Someone who hadn’t accepted the word no.
Someone else who had never even asked permission.
She couldn’t tell if that was true of every roomful of women or if it was specific to The House—if The House’s collective heart could only beat against a dissonance, a fundamental wrongness, a desperation to believe in a goodness that everyone else had denied them up to that point.
A worthiness that only their personal gods could judge.
They each had a starting point—then a definitive endpoint— of the girlhood they’d all endlessly fought to win back.
Nina’s was last year. He had a name, but she hadn’t asked it. She’d been the one wearing that dress, she’d been the one drinking to excess, she’d said yes to everything—except for the thing that she hadn’t.
And for that, she knew there would never be justice. There would only be dinner.
“Yes,” said Fawn, and kissed Nina again; quickly, hungrily. The real Fawn was always hungry, Nina realized.
So anyway, hedonism. Professor Villanueva didn’t seem to understand it, but he taught Nina something about it all the same.