Pledged (23 page)

The next day, when the girl who had been drugged returned to the house, the chapter president called her in to see her. “This didn’t happen,” the president insisted. “You aren’t allowed to tell anyone and you can’t press charges.”

“The president said this because she didn’t want to get in trouble with Nationals,” Lissa explained. “She didn’t want anyone to know it was a [Beta]. One of the national rules, though we don’t enforce it, is that you’re not allowed to pre-game.” The president was petrified that Nationals would find out that their chapter didn’t measure up to the national image. “My sister was just floored,” Lissa said. “She couldn’t believe she had been treated this way. She had something totally traumatic happen to her and she was like, ‘You don’t even care about
me
?’”

The Fight

DECEMBER 7

CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

“To err is human, but to forgive, divine.”

CHRIS WAS WALKING CAITLIN HOME FROM A PARTY WHEN
they got
into what began as a petty argument over whether Caitlin’s lacrosse coach was playing favorites.

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, Chris, I don’t believe you.” Caitlin teased him with a self-satisfied smirk, thinking they were just playing around.

Chris stomped onto the stoop of the Alpha Rho house. “You don’t believe me?” Caitlin suddenly realized that Chris was angry—and drunker than she had thought.

“Chris, what just happened? I didn’t do anything wrong. I—I’m sorry.” She tread cautiously.

“You don’t trust me?” He was yelling at her now.

“Whoa, why are you yelling at me—because you don’t think I believe you?” Caitlin hoarsely raised her voice back at her boyfriend. “I said I was sorry.” Chris, she could see, was furious. “I’m not doing this. Fuck you,” Caitlin said, and went inside alone, still wearing Chris’s jacket and forgetting that Chris had a set of her keys.

Within minutes, Chris called her room, still yelling. Caitlin hung up on him. He called again. She unplugged the phone. Using Caitlin’s keys, Chris stormed into her room, fuming about how Caitlin didn’t trust him.

“Damn it, Chris, listen to yourself!” He didn’t usually get this drunk.

Chris threw Caitlin’s keys at her, hitting her hard in the leg. “I want my fucking jacket!”

Caitlin, almost laughing at his belligerence, tossed his jacket into the empty hallway. Immediately Chris was up against her, pushing her into the wall, his elbow at her throat. “Chris?” She tried to stay calm, but he was hurting her. “You’re drunk and nothing is getting accomplished by this. Just leave.”

He let go of her neck and said in a low voice, “I want my hundred dollars back.”

Caitlin had borrowed the money from him a few days before. “I only have eighty-two,” she said.

“I want the rest.”

“I don’t have the rest.”

“Well, find it!” Chris shouted.

“Whoa, Chris, I can’t believe this got as far as it did,” Caitlin said. “You say
I
blow things out of proportion? Look at where this has gone. You refused to listen to me. Just leave.”

He wouldn’t leave.

“If you don’t leave,” Caitlin said, her narrow eyes icy, “I’ll call someone who will make you leave.” Crying, she started to dial the House Mom. Chris came running to grab the phone from her, stepping on her foot on the way. She jabbed him with her elbow but he kept coming at her. She clocked him on the head with her lacrosse stick.

“Get out of here!” she shouted. Chris seized her wrists and tackled her onto the bed, pinning down her arms. “Get off of me!” Caitlin cried out. “Get out of here!”

Grace, who lived next door, was awakened by the noise and came rushing into Caitlin’s room. “Get off of her!” Grace looked terrified. “Get out of here! You have no right to be here!”

Chris, easing up on Caitlin, looked from girl to girl. “You didn’t see her hit me, did you? She hit me first.”

Caitlin sat folded on the bed, crying as Grace shut the door behind him. Chris banged on the door, this time speaking more evenly. “I just want to talk. I just want to talk to you.” The girls didn’t move. He addressed Grace. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Nobody’s letting you in,” Grace said. “Go away.” She called the House Mom, who called the police.

It was three in the morning, but it was balmy enough for the girls and the House Mom to meet the police outside so the sisters wouldn’t wake up. Caitlin didn’t rouse Amy; she didn’t want her to be involved in this situation. It was bad enough, in her opinion, that Grace had barged her way into the room and blown the argument out of proportion. She decided not to call Sabrina, either, who was probably out with the professor. Caitlin was wary of the “weird adult effect” the professor was having on Sabrina, which gave Caitlin the impression that she wasn’t mature enough to be good company. She had never met the professor, but his presence in Sabrina’s life left Caitlin feeling inferior. When she would call Sabrina and ask her to hang out, Sabrina used a tone of voice that implied that the activities they used to have fun doing together were things only college students did—and that Sabrina was trying to get out of that world.

“Look, he didn’t hit me,” Caitlin told the officers. “I hit him really good with my lacrosse stick, but he didn’t hit me. I’m not pressing charges.”

“Caitlin,” one of the officers said to her after hearing her story, “this is an abusive relationship and you should get out of it now.”

Caitlin shook her head. The officers assumed that Chris treated her aggressively all the time, but it only happened when they fought, she told herself. She knew he could be obnoxious. But sometimes he was different.

“You two need at least a twenty-four-hour cooling-off period,” the officer said. “If he comes back, call us. He’s lucky he’s not in cuffs.”

The next day, Chris IMed her, “You called the cops on me! How did they get involved? They just fuck things up. I can’t believe you called the cops on me.”

She called him. “Grace is scared of you now. That was a dumb move, threatening her.”

“Well, I’m glad you have someone looking out for you and protecting you,” he said sarcastically.

“So why were you yelling at me?” Caitlin asked. Chris said he didn’t know how the fight had escalated to that level.

“You’ve lost me, you know,” Caitlin said. “It’s over.” Chris was quiet. “I’m not going to deal with someone who feels the need to restrain me,” she said. “I’m not sorry for how I handled the situation. You say stuff and threaten things all the time.” She hung up.

Later, Chris called her back on his way to class.

“Why are you calling me?” Caitlin asked.

“I’m really sorry for what happened. I don’t know what got into either of us. But I know your mom would want us to talk this out, and I’m really sorry.”

Caitlin relaxed. He didn’t apologize often. “Me, too.”

“What does this mean for us?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it means,” Caitlin paused. “But I do know I love you a lot and that we’re worth fighting for. If you think it’s a lost cause, that’s fine. I’ll love you regardless of what decision you make.”

Later, she scrounged up $18 in quarters from her change jar, put it in an envelope with her $82, and asked a sister to bring it to Chris.

“I’ll take it to him.” Amy, who by now had been caught up on the situation, spoke gently and held out her hand.

That night, Caitlin, Amy, and Grace met quietly to talk about how to handle the incident. They agreed it was in Caitlin’s best interest to keep it from the other sisters and from the Alpha Rho Disciplinary Board.

“I know it looks like I’m the girlfriend who keeps going back, but I’m not like that,” Caitlin explained. “If anyone put their hands on me, it’d be over. But I don’t blame him.” The raised bruise on Chris’s cheek would last for a week. “When Chris tackled me onto the bed, it was because I tripped and brought him down with me. I
know
he could never hurt me.” The other girls looked unconvinced.

“He would never hurt me and I know that for a fact,” Caitlin repeated, kicking off her Sambas and crossing her bare feet beneath her.

The group decided to have a secret meeting with the House Mom in a week. Meanwhile, they would consider their options: either Chris wouldn’t be allowed in the house or he would be allowed only when others were around. “If he’s not allowed in the house,” Caitlin warned, “there would be resentment on my part, and I would consider getting an apartment. You guys shouldn’t be able to dictate who I have in my room.”

Exploiting the Rules

DECEMBER 10

SABRINA’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

Why can’t this semester be over already?

SABRINA WAS IRRITATED. THERE WERE SO MANY OTHER
things to
worry about this time of the year, with the semester quickly coming to a close. She didn’t need another house drama on top of it all. But this week was room draw, which perennially had the potential to be the second most stressful time of the year (next to January’s rush). The Alpha Rhos had an unofficial agreement that every semester a new sister would get to move into “the Palace,” the one single room in the house. Because Grace’s three roommates were going abroad for the semester, the consensus was that Grace, a senior, should move into the Palace.

The logical option for Charlotte, who as president automatically earned the Palace in the fall, was simply to switch places with Grace for the spring. But Charlotte wasn’t cooperating. She insisted that because of her seniority as president, she shouldn’t have to move into a quad. Instead, she said she was going to pull Fiona from the Penthouse and the two of them would take the largest double in the house. The double, however, wasn’t empty; Charlotte would have to kick out those sisters, whose room eviction would create a domino effect throughout the house. Charlotte had the power to do so, she said, referring to Article X of the chapter bylaws, which stated that if the outgoing president chose to switch to a new room, the girls in that room were required to move. There was nothing even Caitlin as vice president could do. Sabrina, who hated the bylaws, considered pointing out the hypocrisy of enforcing some bylaws and not others. Article XII, for example, stated that no boys were allowed upstairs, but that rule was broken on a daily basis.

When Charlotte hadn’t arrived by the start of the house meeting for the preliminary room draw, the sisters who were present talked about her. Nobody wanted to live with Charlotte. She hadn’t been elected president out of popularity; rather, she was elected because she was Little Miss Sorority, as some of the girls referred to her. The sorority meant everything to her, and she was always involved in every Alpha Rho activity. But as president she had focused so intently on the sorority that she had had no time for the sisters. They tried to come up with various alternatives to present to Charlotte. One solution was that Grace, who didn’t want to cause trouble, could stay in the quad for a semester with new roommates and Charlotte could keep her bed in the Palace. But many of the girls thought Charlotte didn’t deserve that privilege. “She’s the main problem,” they argued. “So she’s the one who should move.”

When Charlotte finally arrived toward the end of the meeting, a few girls presented the group’s final recommendation: she should switch with Grace and move into the quad so that no one else in the house would be affected. Charlotte only smiled. Shortly afterward, she came up to the Penthouse to see if any Pents wanted to go to a frat party. The girls were still talking about the meeting.

“Charlotte,” Sabrina said, “we’re all sisters, so we’re supposed to be friends. Why can’t we all live together? Is it really that big a deal?”

Charlotte raised her chin. “Yes,” she said. “There are certain people I could never live with, and people who could never live with me.” She sat down on Fiona’s bed, where the two conversed quietly.

“I guess we won’t be rooming together,” Fiona said within Sabrina’s earshot.

Sabrina was startled to hear Charlotte’s mocking laughter. “We still could,” she said smugly, “if we really want to.”

C.C., the vice president of House Affairs, was frantic. She told Sabrina in tears that the handful of girls who had spent the fall semester abroad had already sent word back that they refused to live in the house if they had to live in the quads or the Penthouse. In her elected position, C.C. was obligated by Nationals to make sure every bed was paid for, which was becoming an increasingly unlikely scenario.

Sabrina and C.C. had each gained enough merit points to move downstairs. C.C., Sabrina could see, wasn’t going to move because it would make her job more difficult. Sabrina hated the Penthouse—living with twenty-five other girls was extremely difficult for a person who cherished her privacy—but she didn’t want to cause C.C. additional grief (or draw her sisters’ ire) by kicking girls out of downstairs rooms if it meant they would move out of the house rather than live in the Penthouse. Sabrina decided to keep her bed in the Penthouse. She was staying at Mike’s three or four nights a week anyway.

Their relationship was progressing, but Sabrina was still uneasy with the fact that they were teacher and student, a sensation she attributed to her personal insecurities, not to him. The awkward part was the way he was treating her in his class. He didn’t call attention to her, positively or negatively, in front of the other students—nothing like that—but he was grading her papers harder than he had graded them before they had started dating, and much harder than he graded the work of other students in the class. Instead of her usual As, Mike was giving her B+s, which were a slap in the face to a student who was used to 4.0 semesters. Before they began dating, she had received As on her last two quizzes. But on the quiz he handed back today, he took a point off because she had one spelling mistake, an error that had nothing to do with what Mike taught in class. While at Mike’s house, Sabrina read some of her classmates’ papers. Though the content was decent, the papers were fraught with grammatical and spelling mistakes, but Mike still gave them As. He told Sabrina that he had graded her harder than the other students because he could tell that she was much more talented than her classmates. He wanted her to “realize her potential.” Sabrina was resentful but didn’t want to say anything to him about it yet. She would wait to see what grade he gave her for the semester. She loved him, she thought, but wondered whether her visions of him as her husband had perhaps been too hasty.