Brimstone (47 page)

I looked at the clock and said a word that made Mom protest. It was going to be a long, busy day. I’d find time to call Lisa tonight. And Gran, I reminded myself. Don’t forget.

After calculus, I put in an hour at the editor’s desk, hurried to the science building, dissected an earthworm, then came back to work straight through the afternoon. I didn’t mind skipping lunch, because frankly the only thing grosser than the outside of an earthworm is the inside of one.

By the time I had to leave for history class, I’d entered all the corrections for the next day’s edition and uploaded them to the server. Cole was hard at work at his own computer when I stopped by to tell him I was leaving.

“Thanks, Mags.” He didn’t look up from the screen.

“Hey, Cole.” I waited until he made eye contact, and I knew I had his attention. His face had always been long and thin, but there were dusky shadows under his eyes, and furrows of fatigue around his mouth. “Don’t forget to sleep occasionally, okay?”

“Sure thing.” He said it absently, and went back to work. I turned to go, but stopped when he said, “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

He picked up the day’s edition of the
Report
. “Good job today.”

I smiled and one knot of my tension slipped loose. “Thanks.”

Handing me the paper, he waved me off. “Now go to class.”

I dashed out the door, into the brisk September air. The leaves were starting to turn, mottling the green with yellow, and I hurried to the history building. It should be an intramural event: the cross-campus sprint.

The only thing I cared about was beating Dad there, and I managed that. I burst into the lecture hall, red-faced and
puffing like a steam engine, but I’d made it five minutes before the hour.

“Maggie!”

I scanned the tiers of desks and saw Ashley pointing to an empty seat beside her. Great. As if the Sigmas weren’t encroaching on my life enough already.

Unfortunately, everyone else had figured out to come early, so it was the closest empty seat. It was also surrounded by Greeks. I slid down the row and dropped into the desk, pulling out my notebook. A lot of the students took notes on their laptops, but I was a traditionalist. I also knew shorthand.

“I saved you a seat,” said Ashley, unnecessarily, since I was already occupying it. “Will was just reading today’s Phantom Pledge report.”

“The phantom is a pledge now?” I asked, not ingenuous at all.

“Seems so,” said the guy I assumed was Will. He was wearing the fraternity uniform—cargo khakis, letter jersey, beat-up athletic shoes—and slouched so far down in his chair that his butt was almost hanging off. Not that I was looking at his butt or anything.

“Listen to this: ‘As I reached out to take my own envelope,’ ” Will quoted, “ ‘stark fear took over, welling up from my nonconformist heart. When I took that bid I would be subsumed, assimilated. Resistance was futile, but my real terror came from knowing that part of me didn’t want to resist.

“ ‘What is more potent than the temptation of belonging? It’s a Faustian lure—acceptance, superiority. All you have to do is hand over the soul of your individuality.

“ ‘Any sane person would end the experiment here. Yet here I go, into the social jungle, upriver to the heart of darkness. My reports from this point on may be few, carried out by pontoon boat. Wish me luck. I love the smell of beer keg in the morning.’ ”

Victoria might yet turn me into a frog.

I thought they might laugh, but the clump of fraternity guys was quiet, contemplative. It was Ashley who spoke first. “Well, that’s a little harsh.”

“Not really,” said a shaggy-haired boy in a purple shirt. He sat beside the reader, Will, on the row above us. “You girls are
scary
when you get your Rush game on.” The guys laughed, breaking the pensive tension. “I can totally see you going all Francis Ford Coppola.”

“Come on,” she protested, twisting in her seat to glare at him.

I took the paper from Will and had a surreal moment, talking about myself in the third person. “Do you think she’ll go native, like Martin Sheen?”

“Whatever makes a better story,” said Purple Shirt. “It’s all a gimmick anyway.”

“You think so?” Will looked right at me, making me nervous. “I think she got it at least a
little
right. I mean, I admit that part of the reason I pledged was to feel like a big deal on campus.”

A snort from Purple Shirt. “Dude. You’re Gamma Phi Epsilon. You guys are the big swinging dick on campus.”

Since Will didn’t hit him, I figured this was a term of respect. Guys are gross.

“Eww,” said Ashley, and faced forward. Will exchanged a
grin with me before I did the same. Just in time—in walked my dad.

“Hey,” whispered Ashley while Dad settled in at the front of the hall. “I think Will is totally into you.”

“How can you tell?” I hissed back. “We talked for five seconds.”

“That personal admission to encourage intimacy … he was looking straight at you.” She nodded decisively. “Totally into you. You should go for him.”

“Um …”

“And he’s a Gamma Phi Ep! Perfect.”

“Why’s that?” The name was familiar. SAXi’s brother fraternity—a redundant term.

“Because
all
Sigmas date G Phi Eps. It’s tradition.”

At least as far back as Victoria and Peter Abbott. I jotted a note in the margin of my paper: “Things to check out.”

“Literally all, or figuratively all?” I asked, keeping an eye on Dad’s progress plugging in his laptop and getting the projector going.

“Well,” Ashley hedged, “everyone I’ve interviewed for my pledge book.”

Now she had my attention. “Your what?”

She showed me the front of a binder, which was decorated with stickers and had “ΣAΞ=♥” written on it in paint pen. “Brittany said we’d better start doing our interviews of the actives now, so we’re not stuck doing all fifty right before Hell Week.”

“Hell Week?”

“The week before initiation. That’s when we have our pledge test, and have to turn in our pledge book with all the interviews complete. Weren’t you listening in class?”

If Brittany had been talking, then chances were not.

“We’re supposed to say Sisterhood Week,” Ashley continued. “There’s usually some fun quests and assignments and stuff to bond us all together.”

“Sounds like a blast.”

“I can’t wait,” she said, missing my irony entirely.

The rest of the week progressed the same way: class, paper, class, sisterhood, homework, fall into bed exhausted. I stopped worrying about my lack of dreams; my neurons had nothing left at the end of the day. Not only were the normal brain cells getting a workout, but the freakazoid ones, too. I didn’t get sick with them anymore—my deflector shields were becoming second nature to me now—but I still got flashes sometimes, still saw things in people’s expressions that I wasn’t sure anyone else could see. Maybe it was a trade-off—more waking weirdness for less nightmares. I couldn’t say I didn’t like it.

Saturday I slept and caught up on my reading for history. Dad tended to call on me whenever he asked the class a question and got nothing but cricket-filled silence, so there was no slacking off with his assignments.

Tara, the pledge trainer, had moved our class to Sunday evening so that we wouldn’t have the time constraint of the chapter meeting immediately following. I picked up Holly at her dorm; on the way to the Sigma house, she grumbled that this meant Brittany could talk as much as she wanted, and then realized that “when” I was president, I could shut her up. Which I had to admit was more tempting than anything Victoria Abbott had mentioned.

We settled in the TV room, and Tara—looking more hippie than usual in a long bohemian skirt—started the meeting.

“From now on, the president will call the class to order. So we need to decide who that’s going to be. Nominated, we have Brittany and Maggie. All those in favor of Maggie?”

Holly raised her hand. So did Kaylee and Alyssa. I did not, even when my pledge sister kicked me in the ankle. “Ow! I’m abstaining.”

“You can’t abstain,” said Tara.

“I have a conflict of interest.” My tone was as unshakable as I could make it. “So I courteously decline to vote.”

Her mouth turned down. “Fine. Those for Brittany.” Ashley, Erica, Nikki, and of course, the girl herself raised their hands.

“Brittany should abstain, too,” Holly protested.

“She doesn’t have to.” Tara’s voice was deep with disapproval, not of my opponent, but of me. “Brittany wins.”

To halfhearted applause, Brittany beamed, put her hand on her heart, and made a face of embarrassed gratitude. “Thank you all for your support. I really appreciate the trust you’ve placed in me.”

“Okay,” said Tara, opening her binder. “Let’s—”

But Brittany wasn’t done. “I actually have some ideas for our class. Is it okay to do this now, Tara?”

She blinked, her earth-mother calm taking a hit. “Actually …”

“Thanks. It’ll only take a sec.” She whipped out a long,
long
checklist from the front of her own notebook. “First of all, everyone”—she glared at me—“should make a real effort to try and hang around the house more. Second, I think we should have mandatory checks of our pledge books at every meeting. We don’t want
some
people”—why didn’t she just say Maggie?—“waiting until the last minute.”

Holly shot me the death eye, and I had to admit, I was really regretting my abstention just then.

“Are you two listening to me? This is important stuff. Now. On to Homecoming. I expect everyone to really pitch in and show the actives what we can do.…”

On Tuesday after history, someone called my name just as I was about to duck into Dad’s office. “Hey, Maggie! Wait up!”

Will, the Gamma Phi Epsilon from class, loped down the hall toward me. I’d only seen him slumped in his desk, and he was taller than I’d realized. I had to tilt my head back to look at him as the rest of the class went on by. Including Ashley, who gave me a wink of great significance.

“Maggie, right?” he asked.

“That’s a good guess, since I’m the only one that stopped when you bellowed it down the hall.”

He laughed. “I was just starting conversation. But I’ve been sitting behind you for weeks, and we haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Will.” He stuck out his hand. I had gotten into the habit of steeling my defenses before shaking hands. Sometimes I felt like that guy in
The Dead Zone
, and look how crappy things had turned out for him.

A slight tingle, as if I’d hit my funny bone, but no voyeur vision. I breathed in relief and surreptitiously brushed my palm on my jeans as he released it.

“Are you going to be there Friday?”

I drew a blank. “Friday?”

“You know. At the Underground. Sigmas and Gamma Phi Eps are getting together for a mixer.”

“Oh yeah. They talked about that in the chapter meeting on Monday. I thought it was a type of drink.”

He laughed. “You’re cute.”

“Uh. Thanks?” I assumed this was a compliment, but since I’d slipped into a parallel dimension where fraternity guys even talked to me, I couldn’t be sure.

“Are you going to be there?”