The Stevenson Scholarship was magic. It had the power to make a $60,000 annual bill disappear. It was the difference between a community college and the school of my dreams. Between spending the next four years in giant lecture halls with the same kids who partied their way through high school ignoring me while I studied alone and they skipped class for beer bongs and wet T-shirt contests, and joining the most elite group of young men and women in the world. Between spending the next chapter of my life still in the Midwest—land of marrying at twenty-two and popping out 2.5 kids—where half the people would assume I was going to college only to get my “MRS degree,” and flying away to California to study feminist and gender studies at one of the most progressive places on earth.
But I needed a project. The scholarship was funded by tech billionaire Greg Stevenson. You know, the one who created an empire by night and studied by day when he was in college just ten years ago.
My online application was picked from among thousands, and the interview rounds went better than I could have dreamed. I was one of two finalists left and would be pitching my project to the board, including Stevenson himself, in a few days.
I wasn’t terrible at public speaking, so I wasn’t too stressed about presenting my idea.
The problem would be not having one.
“I’m so fucked,” I say, sitting at my desk and scrolling through Facebook, like I might find inspiration there.
I turn to my best friend, who is sitting, her ass halfway out my open second-story window, chain-smoking Marlboros.
“What’s the other person doing, again?” she asks.
The official emails didn’t tell me who my competition was, let alone what they were doing, but I searched Twitter for the name of the scholarship, and, lo and behold, my competition is the type to Tweet his every movement, from trying out a gluten-free diet for fun to humble bragging about how #blessed he was to be a Stevenson Award finalist.
Two hours of stalking instead of working on my project later, and I knew he was a CS major from San Francisco who’d already created two moderately successful social media apps. I also knew waaaay too much about his cat, Ashby.
“It’s got to be another app, right?” I say.
“Well, I’m assuming it’s not poetry,” Alex says, swinging her combat-booted foot, casting a shadow on my baby-pink walls.
I pull out my phone and turn my whole body toward her, sitting cross-legged on my desk chair.
“He Tweeted yesterday at 11:06 a.m. ‘working on a new project’ and then two hours later ‘coding by the pool. Could I be more #SiliconValley #California!?!’”
Since the fund is run by Stevenson’s charity, not his company, they supposedly invested in all sorts of projects, but there was a clear favor toward the technical, money-generating kind.
“So he’s the same idiot that school is made up of.” Alex takes a long drag and blows smoke out the window, toward the quiet suburban street below. “You’re something different. Sell that.”
“Yeah, I’ll just tell them I want to do something different. I don’t know what, but different.”
“Welcome to being a humanities major.” She shrugs.
Alex and I have been best friends since the Model UN conference I attended freshman year, when I was waiting for another young Republican in a suit to give the opening remarks and instead she bounded onstage: pink-haired, tattooed and brilliant.
She’s a year older than me and the only person from our town to go to an elite school before me. In fact, she’s at the school I’m so desperately trying to find a way to attend: Warren University.
Before college she went to the giant public school with metal detectors at the entrances—the same school my parents paid the archdiocese an obscene tuition to keep me safe from—where she got straight As in all APs and tried every drug ever invented. “God, imagine how smart she’d be if her brain was fully functioning,” our friend Jay once said.
Dirt-poor and knowing equally about ’shrooms and Sophocles, she didn’t exactly scream typical Warren University student. But she was everything they want to be. They dress like her at Coachella, but she’s been going to the thrift store since fifth grade, when her dad was laid off, not since vintage came back.
We’ve been at this all week, spitballing stupid ideas fueled by coffee (me), cigarettes (Alex) and rosé (her all day, me once I give up).
“What’s up, nerds?” Jay leans against the door.
“I’m watching my future slip away from me,” I say, putting my head in my hands.
“Ugh, drama much?” He flops down on my bed. “Just be like me. Go to IU and have blonde girls with Delta Delta Gamma tank tops stretched over their double Ds try to claim you as their very own gay best friend while you fuck their closeted football-player boyfriends behind their backs.”
I wish I could. Well, at least the attending-IU part. I had messed up pretty royally when it came to applying for schools. My mom hadn’t gone to college, and my dad “didn’t have the time to waste” on helping me, so it was just me and a guidance counselor with three hundred other students to help.
So when I went to college night and the Warren representative stood up in his gold-and-blue suit and said they meet 100 percent of financial need, I believed him. I applied early, and when I got my acceptance, I saw no reason to try anywhere else.
But then the financial aid letter came. And the people who sat in a boardroom in California saw meeting my need in a different way than me and my mother did, bent over bills in our cramped kitchen. They included the restaurant franchise in their assessment of what my parents “owned,” but it wasn’t like they were about to sell it to meet my tuition.
By that point, it was too late to apply anywhere else.
But I don’t want to talk about all that right now. I turn to Jay and roll my eyes. “My gender and orientation prevent this plan, but thanks for your input.”
“Yeah, I think that’s just you, Jaybird,” Alex chimes in from the window.
He rolls his eyes. “It’s overrated anyway.” He props himself up on his elbows, swinging his feet up and down alternately. “Is angst-y time over? Because I’d like to enjoy one of our last nights together before we all grow up and our souls die, Wendy Darling.”
“He’s right—not thinking is when I think my best. C’mon, bring the wine.” Alex steps up on the windowsill and pulls herself onto the roof. We grab the bottle and follow.
Lying on the roof of my parents’ compact house, we stare at the stars and city lights. We listen to trains go by and point out planes coming into the airport a neighborhood over. We pass around Two Buck Chuck Rosé and sip from the bottle. And I try to think about anything except for getting out of here on one of those planes. About the pitch in three days that will decide my fate.
I take a sip. “Seriously, though, the school’s in goddamn Tech Town, USA. What gender and sexuality studies project will make them happier than a million-dollar app idea?”
“A million-dollar app that just allows people another way to socialize?” Alex takes the bottle from me, takes a long pull and continues. “I mean, I like socializing, but, please, like the best and brightest people in the world don’t have better things to do?”
Jay snaps his fingers in agreement.
Alex pauses just long enough to nod at him. “I mean, I’d prefer world-class minds to be endeavoring to understand who we are and why we are here and what this place—” she waves her hands, sweeping into her sentence the suburb around us and stars above us, and almost spilling the pink wine “—means, not creating apps that make it easier for eighth graders to send each other tittie pics.”
I take the wine back and think about this as I sip the hypersweet concoction.
“You could start some sort of nonprofit for girls in tech,” Jay says.
“I looked it up—there are already like five student groups there that do that. Plus I know almost nothing about coding.”
“You could learn.”
“Yeah, but if they’re gonna give someone this much grant money, they kind of want you to be able to produce something for them pretty quickly. Not like, I’ll get back to you when I learn how to code.”
“Truuuuue.” Jay nods solemnly.
We lie silently for a while.
“Maybe Warren is too much of an old boys’ club to want a major gender project,” Alex says.
“Maybe that’s why they need it,” Jay retorts.
“They’re trying to get better,” I say. “They suspended that frat.” While I’d procrastinated, I’d read article after article about the controversy surrounding Delta Tau Chi.
“Put them on probation,” Alex corrects. “And it’s just a PR move. There’s so much money in that frat, they’re not really changing anything.”
“What’d they get in trouble for?” Jay asks.
“They’re sexist, homophobic pigs.” Alex lights up a cigarette.
“No, I mean—”
“Creating a hostile environment for women.” She takes a drag before continuing. “There’s some rule with housing and Title IX. They had signs all over the house with sexist jokes on them.”
“Signs?” he asks.
“Yeah, they threw a party for International Women’s Day. Had signs over the kitchen about it being a woman’s true place, signs in the bathroom about period pain being punishment for being so bitchy, and don’t even get me started on the ones near the bedrooms.”
“That’s repulsive.” I’d never heard the details; the articles I’d read said only that they’d been misogynistic. But Alex had been there. Well, there as in Warren. I doubt she’d attend some godforsaken frat party.
Jay runs his hands through his jet-black hair, considering this. “I mean, not to defend the douche bags, but it’s not technically supposed to be an environment for women, right?”
“That’s not an excuse.” Alex sits up.
“I’m not saying I would make the joke. I think they’re assholes for saying it. But how can you get in trouble for creating an environment that’s unwelcoming to women when your charter is to be a boys’ club? I mean, no one would really know if a frat was a toxic living and learning community for a woman unless one tried living there.”
“Maybe I will,” I say.
I was just trying to make a joke before this conversation devolved into one of their ridiculous arguments, which always get way too heated, considering they always represent the far left and the farther left.
For half a second they laugh politely, but then the banter goes on, fading to buzzing in my ears.
I stare down at the street below, the street I danced down when I got my acceptance letter. I’d met the mailman at the curb for five days straight until finally, finally, that letter I’d been dreaming about arrived.
I was ecstatic to tell my parents that their daughter was going to attend the most exclusive school in the country. I hadn’t even told them where I’d applied, not wanting to get their hopes up.
I’d pictured hugs and tears. I’d pictured champagne.
But I should’ve known.
Should’ve known the response would be that there was no way they were about to spend that much money so I could get a piece of paper that would hang uselessly in my husband’s house.
I told them not to worry, about the 100 percent need thing. But when the second letter came and it was time to go to the bank for unsubsidized loans and second mortgages, I should have known they’d say it wasn’t worth the trouble.
I should’ve known my dad would say, between beers, “Hell, your mom didn’t even go to college, and she seems perfectly content.”
And that my mother would nod and extol the virtues of 1950s-style housewifedom in the twenty-first century. The satisfaction of a life filled with aprons and diapers and Xanax.
What my father doesn’t know is enough of the latter or a bottle of white wine will get her talking about how she always wanted to be a veterinarian growing up. “Coulda done it, was top of my high school class, you know,” she’d tell me between hiccups. “What am I now? Is this it?”
I thought I’d study hard and do well and avoid her mistakes. I wasn’t about to get pregnant and married at eighteen. I hadn’t even stopped working long enough to have a boyfriend.
But I should’ve known what was coming. I should have known years ago when my father went to alumni meetings to protest women being accepted into his alma mater.
Hell, I should have known when I was seven, eating ice cream earned with straight As, and my father said, “You are so smart. It’s too bad you’re not a boy.”
Or all those times he said he wished he had a son to carry on the family business (because apparently you can’t run a Chili’s franchise without a Y chromosome).
Or to be a legacy in his stupid frat...
“Oh my God! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” I scramble off the roof, back through the window and practically run to the computer, where I start searching, typing, printing.
I work for fifteen minutes before I even sit down.
I hear Jay and Alex climb back through the window but don’t look up.
“What—”
I hold up a finger, cutting Jay off. “Hold on—I don’t wanna lose my train of thought.”
When I turn around, Alex has pulled the pages from my printer.
“What is this? Delta Tau Chi?” Her eyes widen, and her excitement radiates from her as if her pink hair is made of fire. “Oh my God, you are not!”
Jay just looks confused.
“Can you really?” she asks.
“As far as I can tell, there’s no rule anywhere. I think it’s just usually assumed or implied. But they’re on probation for telling sexist jokes, so what are they gonna do, kick me out of Rush when there’s no rule against it?”
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” Jay says.
“I’m joining a frat,” I say.
“Not just any frat, but the douchiest frat on campus,” Alex interjects.
I nod. “I’ll go undercover and write a personal account of real culture inside a frat house. Show how terrible and sexist they actually are, so no one can deny it anymore. End them.”
“That’s crazy,” Jay says, but he’s smiling.
“I think it’s simultaneously the best and the stupidest, riskiest idea I’ve ever had.”
“That’s why I love it.” Alex’s purple-shadowed eyes absolutely sparkle. “How can I help?”
“Hand me those papers. And get some coffee. We have thirty-six hours.”