Chapter 34 #3
“You’ve basically admitted that Summer’s the heir apparent,” Alina said flatly to Tessa, “and this shit with Fawn aside, I do think Summer’s a solid choice. But what I do not want to do with my last days in office is start an unnecessary war.”
“So then don’t,” Tessa insisted. “Slate Fawn because she’s the incumbent and she’s eligible, and then let The House vote Summer in—”
“Tessa.” Alina gave Tessa a look that edged close to pity. “It’s not going to be Fawn.”
Tessa looked like she’d been slapped.
Nina felt it too, the thud of something. Significance.
“Alina,” Tessa said hoarsely. “You’ll destroy her.”
Alina brushed this away. “Come on, she knows it’s coming—”
“She knows she won’t run unopposed, but to not even get Slated?
” An insult, Nina pieced together contextually, or possibly worse.
She herself was still shocked to some degree, as she could not imagine Fawn without the presidency, nor could she imagine someone else filling Fawn’s hallowed shoes.
(Fawn’s feet didn’t sweat—another otherworldly thing about her.)
“You of all people know Fawn turned out to be…” Alina hesitated, her attention slipping briefly to Nina before she shrugged in put-on indifference.
“Look, Fawn does Fawn, end of story. And I get that, honestly, I do. I wish her luck with it. I just don’t respect it.
” Alina’s expression was stone. “If we’re going to leave this house in someone’s hands—this ritual in someone’s hands—then it should be someone who comes to it with fresh eyes.
That’s the point of trying to pick someone like Dalil—someone without any baggage.
But I promise you,” she finished, “the only thing that room can agree on right now is that Fawn is definitively out.”
Tessa looked stung. Then pained.
Then, within a matter of seconds, Nina watched Tessa run through a cycle of grief that resolved with a weary look of acceptance. Like a flower blossoming under accelerated time-lapse.
Then Tessa shook her head, exhaling, and looked square at Nina.
“Pick Sister Kaur instead,” she said, and Alina and Nina both balked.
“What?” said Nina, at the same moment Alina let out a frustrated sigh.
“Tessa. Sister Kaur—” Alina cut herself off, potentially realizing that Nina was right there, and a person.
“Nina is a great candidate,” Alina said with an air of weighty deliberation, “but she hasn’t shown any sign of interest in joining Exec.
Dalil is more active and influential within their pledge class, and she shows more of an interest in the other members of The House—I mean, Nina is basically Fawn’s acolyte. No offense,” she added to Nina.
“None taken,” said Nina faintly. It was, after all, true, although she hadn’t previously known there was another option. She’d thought Fawn was The House, and vice versa. It hadn’t occurred to her that Fawn’s agenda could ever be separate from the rest of the hunt.
The House, Nina corrected herself.
“Exactly,” said Tessa, with a grim air of necessary risk.
“Then Nina can say she learned from Fawn, or even that Fawn personally tapped her. Right?” Tessa looked at Nina again, imploringly, before turning back to Alina.
“And if Nina loses to Summer, then fine, the other faction gets their pick. Democracy, baby,” she added, echoing Alina with a similarly bitter laugh.
But this course of action did not seem as reasonable to Alina as it did to Tessa.
“Tessa, why—” Alina looked like she’d begun to say something more inflammatory, but stopped herself just in time. “Why are you still trying to protect her?” she said, with slightly more measured frustration that time. “She doesn’t deserve it. You of all people know she doesn’t deserve it.”
Nina looked sharply at Tessa, who lifted her chin and refused to meet Nina’s eye.
“It doesn’t matter what she deserves,” Tessa said after a moment.
“She can fail me all she likes, that’s her choice.
Doesn’t mean I have to do the same.” She straightened, then said, “With Nina, Slate gets what they want: a fresh candidate. Summer probably knows she’ll have to run either way, so does it matter which pawn you sacrifice to take Fawn off the board? Do it as a favor to me.”
The expression on Alina’s face said that she’d lost the argument.
Nina couldn’t imagine how—she agreed with Alina, frankly, that Dalil was a more compelling candidate.
Nina didn’t understand how Tessa could feel she was any more suitable a choice, or what possibly gave Nina the credentials to be president of something she’d only belonged to for a matter of weeks.
But to Alina, Tessa’s decision was obviously final.
“Fine. Say we play it your way and Slate Nina,” Alina posed aloud. “There’s no chance Summer sits it out.”
“No,” Tessa agreed. “If you pick Nina, Summer runs and she wins. That’s your argument to convince Slate.”
Nina tried to do this math in silence. It seemed like Tessa was implying that people might actually like Dalil enough not to run against her, whereas Nina was no such threat. Nina did not feel this observation like an injury; she felt it like awe. Like she was watching Tessa take the Western Front.
Everything Nina thought she knew had shifted. The person she’d thought was everyone’s idol was only her own, and now her hero lay on the floor with twenty-three knives in her back, with only Nina left to praise her. It was Tessa everyone looked to all along. Was that power?
Alina, meanwhile, was still posturing. “Even if Fawn does decide to run, the best she could hope for is winning over the younger members, who’d more likely vote for Nina. Which would still split the vote in Summer’s favor—”
“Fawn won’t run against Nina,” Tessa cut in loyally, with certainty. “She loves her.”
“Yeah? She loves you, too.” Alina arched a brow.
Tessa said nothing. Nina opened her mouth and then, finding nothing, closed it again.
Alina heaved a sigh before diving back into her calculations like a person performing surgery.
“If Fawn does run against Nina, so will Summer, and then Nina and Fawn both lose. That’s actually the easiest possible sell for Slate.
” Something in Alina’s expression had changed.
She looked at Nina for a long, invigorated moment, like seeing someone who wasn’t actually there.
“Okay, Sister Kaur. Congratulations.” Alina’s smile, unlike Tessa’s, was bright with relief, and then she disappeared back inside the chapter room, leaving Tessa and Nina alone.
But having time to process derived no clarity for Nina. “What the fuck?” she finally said, after several seconds of silence. “Did you just orchestrate a coup against your best friend? And did I … help?”
Tessa sighed witheringly. “Look,” she said, turning to Nina. “I did what I could for her. And I suggested you because I know you will, too. But as Fawn would say, you either eat or you’re eaten. That’s just what the world is.”
It did sound like something Fawn would say. Was that power?
Or was it just nihilism?
“Am I the one being eaten in this scenario?” demanded Nina, suddenly frustrated beyond belief.
Tessa’s laugh was listless and dry. “Do you even want to be president?”
“Of course not.” That much was obvious and accessible. “But I don’t know, wasn’t there more we should have done? Shouldn’t we have defended her, or—?”
“Look, I meant what I said. Fawn loves you.” Tessa rubbed her temple, looking tired. “And because she loves you, you being Slate’s choice will spare her in a way Dalil wouldn’t. This way, she stands a chance to walk away unscathed.”
Unscathed. Well, fair enough. Fawn was never scathed, which was half the reason Nina couldn’t envision anyone else in her place.
Fawn said things like “you either eat or you’re eaten” specifically because she was cool, so cool in the face of scarcity, so cool she always knew how to walk away with grace.
Which Nina didn’t understand, because Nina wasn’t cool!
Nina had never been cool because Nina was too fucking hungry—she wanted things too powerfully, too close to the surface.
She felt, then, the presence of two options: get over it, dummy! That was an easy one. Sometimes the person you were secretly fooling around with didn’t get to be Lady Superior anymore and that wasn’t a tragedy. It was just one person’s bad day.
But then there was another, nearer option—the one always chanting FAWN FAWN FAWN at all hours of the night and day—which was, obviously, to go insane.
“Tessa,” said Nina, “sincerely, no fucking joke, this is bullshit. I’m not even talking about one sorority election here.
Or one dinner.” What was she talking about?
Everything seemed to blur, and everything hurt.
“I just mean … Come on. ‘Eat or be eaten’—is that really the world? Because you can’t tell me what power is or what feminism isn’t and still try to convince me that everything’s just a zero-sum game.
” There! Abruptly, departing wildly from the matter of Fawn’s displacement, Nina could finally diagnose it—the visceral problem her body seemed to have with The Country Wife.
As if, with enough distance from the point, her internal organs could finally become the oracle making sense of the unknown.
It wasn’t The Country Wife’s mere existence or her popularity or even her embrace of the bizarre, pseudo-religious practice of traditional feminine roles that relied on the hegemony of white men.
It was the fact that there was no objective measure of a woman, no simple framework by which to exist, and the only real danger was in the pretense that there was.
It was the performance again, Nina realized. The performance of respectability! The performance of womanhood! The fucking oxymoron that was the performance of an election designed to stab one woman gently in the back!
“I promise you, this is not about feminism,” Tessa sighed, just as Nina felt a rush of adrenaline, another shock to the framework of what she could or couldn’t accept.
“I mean seriously, Nina, you think I don’t know the world’s fucked up?
The only thing I’m ‘Black enough’ for is racism and I still wouldn’t be here if I were about fifteen percent less hot.
So honestly, this shit is just…” She waved a hand, and Nina thought again, helplessly, about what power wasn’t.
“It’s politics. Okay? Someone loses. Someone wins.
Believe it or not, this is the softest landing.
I truly think this is the kindest thing I could have done. ”
“But it can’t just be that, though!” Nina felt hysterical.
“Like, if there are no other options, if there’s no good or right choice—if everything is some stupid game we can never actually win—then what the fuck are we even doing here, you know?
” Nina pleaded with Tessa, and then stopped.
“What the fuck are we even doing here?” she registered aloud.
As if in answer, several things occurred to Nina at once.
One, that she would have to tell Fawn about becoming part of a hostile takeover despite never answering the question as to whether or not she’d accept.
Two, who the fuck was she going to bring to dinner.
Three, this was what everything ultimately was, wasn’t it?
Just filthy compromise and little treats.
“What is any of it for?” asked Nina desperately, to which Tessa gave a dry laugh.
“No idea,” she said, and then, “The economy?”
“What about me, though?” Nina demanded. “Can’t I be, I don’t know, different? Can’t I just say no?”
“To what?” asked Tessa skeptically. “Slate? You could, but why? Fawn would rather have you than any of the alternatives, believe me.”
“But what about devotion to the sisterhood?” Nina asked, or maybe begged.
The hunt, her precious hunt. That sacred, innermost desire to devour, born from the innocence of girlhood, stoked by a lifetime’s hunger to the point of righteous flame.
Was it not holy after all? “What about the high ideals of friendship?” What about the power I was promised?
What about The House’s salvation that was supposed to be my grace?
“Oh god. Nina.” Tessa cupped one of Nina’s cheeks in her hand. “The dumbest part is that you’d make the perfect president. Alex would love you. The whole goddamn House would be better off.”
“But why?” Nina’s eyes had filled with tears.
“Because you still believe in it,” Tessa said, and her voice was gentle, and her touch was kind. “Even though it lied to your fucking face.”