Sorority Girls With Guns (2 page)

“Is that what you really think?” Morgan asks, traipsing down the stairs in one of those fluffy-collared robes that I associate with dead movie stars from the sixties.

The truth is, I’ve always wondered what she and Richard see in each other. He only comes over to see her, and as soon as he comes out of her bedroom, he starts bitching about what he thinks is the high life here in a small-town Texas sorority house. For her part, Morgan usually makes excuses for his whining, saying he’s just trying to be a better person than his parents. She won’t tell me what they’re supposed to have done in their quest for the all-mighty dollar, but judging by his holier-than-thou attitude, I’m guessing they swindled a few people. Or a few hundred.

Richard turns to look at Morgan, and something wipes the contempt off his face, at least briefly. “I'd just like to see all of you...” He scratches his head, searching for the right word. “...financially obese individuals go on a money diet for a few weeks, that's all. I think it would be enlightening for everyone.”

And that's when I have my next great idea. "That sounds like a challenge," I say to Richard, who, I'll be honest, annoys the crap out of me with his rich-people-suck rhetoric. But I've just had an idea that might help me get to a viral video. "Why don't you bet all of us we can't live like you do for a month?"

Tiffany looks at me like I just announced Justin Bieber was having an affair with one of the One Direction guys. Or all of them. "I thought you hated this rich-shaming thing he's got going on more than any of us?"

"I do," I say evenly. "That's why I want to prove him wrong. What if we all live like the middle-class in this bad economy for a month? I'll use my phone to record it for my vlog. We could go viral in no time!"

Tiffany rolls her eyes. "Oh, this is another one of your schemes to get famous."

"They're not schemes. I simply don't want to deny the world a talent like mine." Tiffany, like everyone else in my life, has no idea what it’s like when the world doesn’t appreciate your talent.

"I actually think it's a good idea," Richard says, looking at me like a cat who just had an injured bird fall into his lap. Not that cats have laps.

“How much money are we betting?” Tiffany asks. She swivels her head around to look at Richard. “And how’s he going to pay us if he loses the bet?”

As usual, I’m one step ahead of Tiffany. Well, three or four steps. “How about if Richard loses, he stops criticizing us and our lifestyles? That’d be worth a pile of money to me.”

“And you do all our homework for free, like you get paid to do for the football team,” Tiffany says, her eyes lighting up.

“I do
not
do the football players’…” Richard sighs. Apparently at some point even
h
e doesn’t believe the lie he’s been spouting since he got here. “What do I get if you don’t make it through a month of living like the other ninety-six percent?”

“That’s a good a question,” Morgan says, her dark eyes glittering with something between anger and humiliation. Richard has been visiting her room several times a week for most of this semester. They have never officially gone out in public, probably because neither of them want to be seen with the other. It’s sort of a strange relationship, but I can see why they’d both want to keep it that way: It would be hard for Richard to admit that he’s dating one of those people he hates. And Morgan would find it humiliating to publicly date a guy who disapproved of her background and lifestyle.

Which begs the question, why are they together in the first place? That I haven’t figured out, although I’m definitely not buying that they’re just “studying together”.

“We could give you a monetary payout,” I say. “But then you’d be like us, and you’d have to hate yourself.”

Richard looks at me the way Tiffany looked one time when we were eating in a five-star restaurant (on her daddy’s dime, of course), and she saw a rat. Well, she
thought
she saw a rat. She was more than a little drunk at the time. (She claims five-star restaurants have stronger champagne and she didn’t realize she’d get tipsy faster.) At any rate, she looked pretty disgusted when she
thought
she saw that rat dashing under a table.

  But back to Richard. “I don’t hate any of you,” he says, his stormy-sea eyes drifting from me, to Morgan and then back again. His expression flickers so quickly, I almost miss it, but I do come from a long line of liars, thieves and manipulators, and I'm much more finely tuned to tiny nuances than most people. So I see the sadness that flashes for a split second as he looks at Morgan.

Until just now, I thought maybe he was just using Morgan for sex, or maybe he wanted to make an embarrassing video of a dumb rich girl, drunk at a party. Hell, maybe he thought he could have his own viral video. And I figured maybe Morgan saw him as a new type of boytoy.

That part could still be true, but I know now that Richard has real feelings for Morgan.

My vlog is going to get really interesting now!

“How about this?” Richard says. “If I win, I want all of you to pool your money and donate ten grand to the Student Loan Payoff fund I've been trying to start. I have enough signatures from college board members, and I got twenty thousand in funding already. It's a fund to help people who still can't pay off their loans even after graduating. All I need is another ten grand and the school will match the rest.”

“That's about two-and-a-half grand each,” I say.

“Sounds okay to me,” Morgan says. “Besides, we're not going to lose.”

                                                                                  ***

Richard and I, through the years, have flirted a lot. I'm not going to tell you that I don't find him attractive, with the Ryan Seacrest hair and the dimples when he smiles and the fact that he doesn't look bad with his shirt off. But every time we start to flirt, and maybe go out once or twice, he reminds me what a pig-headed idiot he is about money and how other people spend it, and I lose interest.

Here's another interesting fact about Richard: He's the only guy I've ever met on this campus who actually rufies women so he can talk to them. Apparently, he's had some lying, cheating girlfriends in the past and just can't trust anyone. I'd like to say that's annoying, but I've been lied to a lot myself. I can't really fault him for that, and in no way is that the dealbreaker that keeps derailing us as a couple.

But it does mean that we have a lot of conversations like this one: It'll be late, after some party, and I'll be wandering the halls of the sorority house getting into my usual mischief. I'll find Richard downstairs with a drink in his hand, which is interesting because he usually never shows up when the party is in full swing. He's not really a people person any more than I am.

But he'll appear when everyone else is leaving and help himself to a few drinks. So I'll come across him having his drinks, and he'll offer me one, and we'll get to talking. By this time he's usually a little drunk himself, which is fine. And he'll eventually get drunk enough to tell me how he really feels. He'll tell me that he's wanted me for years, since the day we met, that he thinks I'm the only girl who could ever really understand and appreciate him.

And then I lean over on the hideous paisley couch, and I muss up his hair, and I tell him that I have a thing for him too, but it will never work in the long run.  I see the world of idiots around us as people to be manipulated and bent to my will; he sees them as pathetic losers to criticize and feel morally superior to. We would never make it as a couple.

Then Richard tries to convince me that I'm wrong, that I should give us a chance, but I keep saying no, that the most we'll ever be is a flirtation, maybe a few fun nights together on spring break.

“You'll find someone else,” I say. “Someone who wants to key BMW's and intentionally spill wine on $7,000 white couches and rail against the rich every chance she gets. That someone isn't me.”

“But you get me,” Richard says. “I can tell, because...”

“Because you rufied me? And you think I don't know?” And he looks shocked and I just roll my eyes. “I  live in a sorority house, Richard, you think I don't know I've been rufied right away?”

“So....why are you still here?”

I shrug. “Because I know you're harmless. I've seen you do this before, to other girls, you know. The first time, I thought you were going to take advantage of Tiffany. I was going to flip the lights and start screaming at you to leave her alone until I woke up the whole house, but then I saw that you were just trying to use those pills as a truth serum.”

“I know that's not really what they're for...”

I roll a shoulder languidly. “They don't exactly stop you from lying. They just slow the brain processes that make it possible to lie convincingly.”

“Exactly.” He looks at me carefully. “But they don't have much effect on you, do they?”

“You have to understand, I come from a family of liars, thieves and backstabbers,” I say, calm and cool. “I'm pretty sure anyone who didn't have a high tolerance for drugs and poisons wouldn't have lasted long. Darwinism and all that.”

Richard nods. “Pills never do much for me either.”

“It's weird, right? You know, Tiffany loves pain pills, like she had after her last almost-skin cancer was removed.” Tiffany's been tanning since she was two, and it's catching up to her. “She says they make her deliriously happy, just sitting around doing nothing. I took some of those things when I had a toothache, and all they did was make me feel slow and stupid. It was a fair trade for not being in pain, but it wasn't something I'd do for fun.”

Richard looks down at his drink. “I just never know if people are telling me the truth or not. And I never know what girls want from me. Are they just having a good time, do they like me, are they using me to make some guy jealous, am I their charity case, what?”

I nod. “I understand, Richard, I do. And I wish that we didn't have such different values. But we've had this conversation before, you know.”

He looks at me in surprise. “We have? No, no, we haven't.”

“Yes, we have. This is the seventh time.” I reach over and find the inner pocket of his school jacket. “And every time, I tell you that despite my feelings for you, we can never be together. And every time-” I pull the tiny, unmarked pill bottle from his pocket. “-you take one of these, so you can forget, too. Because having this conversation might ruin our friendship, and you know it. That's why you rufie me first – so you have this option if things don't go well. And if they did, well, I guess you'd tell me how you feel again tomorrow. But unfortunately, my answer is always the same, sober or  slightly drugged. So every time, you take one of these pills, so we can go back to being friends, just like before.”

I hand him the bottle of pills. “So go ahead and take one of these, and put us both out of your misery.”

Chapter Three

When I eat chocolate, I feel fan-fucking-tastic. When I drink alcohol, I feel nothing. As a result, I don’t drink much, but I do eat a lot of chocolate.

So I was up at the crack of ten this morning, just like usual, and went for a three mile run at the school gym, also just like usual. While I was on the treadmill, I received about thirty text messages confirming that, although my friends got a lot drunker than I did at the party last night, they all vaguely remembered making some bet with Richard about slumming for a while. We all agreed to meet at the campus Tenbucks’ Coffee Shop at noon to thrash out the details.

Here’s what we settled on: None of us four-percenters (a
vas
t exaggeration for most of us, but no one wants to admit they’re not really that rich, so no one corrected Richard) are allowed to use trust funds, parents’ credit cards or monthly allowances during the week-long bet period. Googling and finding the calculator app on my cell phone estimated that the average person making minimum wage in the state of Texas would earn about $290 a week, before taxes.

We were going to go with that, but then Matt, who’s a lot smarter when he’s sober (not that that’s saying much), pointed out that $15,000 a year was below the poverty line and would qualify you for food stamps, which would have to be figured into the budget somehow.  Then Tiffany said that you could make a hell of a lot more than 15K a year and still count as poor. Charlie asked if food stamps covered beer.

“I think the purpose of this exercise is to live like the average person, not the poorest person in the state, right?” I ask, loudly, because I know it'll irritate those who are still hungover – which would be everyone except Richard, who refuses to drink rich people beer, and Matt, who just has a really high tolerance for booze, apparently.

“Shhhh…” Tiffany mumbles into her coffee cup.

“So what you’re saying is we don’t have to use minimum wage as our starting point?” Matt asks.

I consult with Google and the calculator app again. “What if we used the average income for the state of Texas? That’s $25,000 a year, or about $480 a week, approximately.”

“Let’s round it up to five hundred and call it good,” Charlie says. He’s slouched down in the corner opposite Tiffany.

“Is that okay with you?” I ask Richard. He’s staring over my shoulder at the coffee shop’s menu board, shaking his head at the prices. “$500 seems like more than enough hardship to me. I mean, Tiffany here spent more than that on her last pair of shoes, even after I told her they were hideous.”