Chapter 17: Amy’s surprisingly extensive knowledge of the Greek alphabet.
Wednesday night
Seven hours after my lunch with Jenny, seven hours after my trip into the past with Marty McFly, I’m saying “Sorry I’m late” as I slide into the chair across from Amy. I knew I’d end up being a few minutes late, but I wasn’t going to show up without running home to shower first. Even if I didn’t smell like curry to her, I would’ve to me. And that’s not the way to start a first date.
Amy puts her phone down, graces me with a smile. She dressed up a little, I note — a button-down top with a light purple cardigan over it, silver hoop earrings hanging from the bottom of ears lined with silver studs. Light lipstick, a little bit of eyeshadow. Jane Lane dark hair pinned away from her face on one side.
I’m just about to compliment her when she points at the counter. “What do you want?” she asks. “I’ll go put in our orders.”
I shake my head. “No, no, let me get — ”
“Not a chance. I asked you out, remember? That means I’m the one treating here.”
I can’t argue with the logic, so I give her my drink order, fiddle with the petals of the fake flowers while I wait for her to come back.
She returns a couple minutes later, sets a latte in front of me, sits back on the bench side of the table.
“I didn’t peg you as a latte drinker,” she comments.
I raise an eyebrow. “No?”
“No.” She squints at me like I’m a distant street sign she’s trying to make come into focus. “No… you look more like a Gatorade and Vitamin Water kind of girl.”
I make a face. “Hate that shit.” I sip the latte. “Well — okay, I’ll drink Gatorade in a game. But only because it’s necessary.”
She chuckles; a few seconds pass. I worry we’re going to descend into irretrievable awkwardness before we even really get started, so I search my brain for a question, just to get the conversation going again. But we both start to speak at the same time again, just like at Soul Mountain the afternoon before. I wave for her to go ahead.
“So what’s it like being back in Ohio?” she asks.
I think of everything that’s been going on — of Mom, Dad, Jenny, and Gerry, of discovering the restaurant might not be financially solvent. I take the thin wooden stirring stick that’s still in my coffee and swirl it around a few times as I try to think of a polite way to word it.
“It’s been… interesting.” I figure I should say more, so I add, “I came home because my mom’s sick. Since she co-manages the restaurant with my dad, and since my other siblings are all busy with their own things, I said I’d come home and help out til she got better. But I don’t know how long that will be, so…” I trail off with a shrug.
“None of your siblings are helping out?” she says, sounding skeptical.
“Well, I mean there’s Gerry. If he counts. But PJ and Dutch are too busy.”
“But you’re busy, too, right? What about basketball?”
“It’s like I said before, this might be my last season anyway. So it was a better time for me than for the rest of them. And I felt like I owed them — the last time I was living in Ohio, I kind of left in a hurry. My parents ended up cleaning up the mess I left behind.”
She hesitates a second, then says, “I won’t ask.”
“Probably better if you don’t,” I agree, thinking of my epically dramatic breakup with Jenny that gave Jodie’s hair salon gossip fodder for weeks. “Anyway,” I say with a dismissive wave, “how’s it going with your friend’s wedding?”
Amy rolls her eyes. “This is the last time I will ever agree to be a bridesmaid. I’ve been here for three days and already it’s like I’m back in the sorority again.”
“You were in a sorority?” I ask, mildly surprised.
She nods. “Oh, girl. Not just any sorority. I was a Pi Phi.”
“No the fuck you were not.”
“Yes the fuck I was.”
I shake my head hard to show her what I think of her obvious big fat lie. “No, there’s like a fucking rule that all Pi Phis have to be blonde and rich and pretentious.”
She raises both eyebrows like it’s a challenge. “And you don’t think I could be any of those things? Or did you just imply that I am?”
“Well, obviously you’re not blonde — ”
“You’ve never heard of dye?”
“And you told me your dad was military and you had a stay-at-home mom, so no offense, but I doubt you were rich growing up. Plus Pi Phis… they’re like the straightest of the straight girls,” I add.
Amy flips her hair dramatically, bats her eyes a few times, gives me a smile that makes me think of a cat sneaking up on an unsuspecting bird. “You’d be amazed how good I am at faking things.”
I open my mouth, close it again. Open it. Finally say, “Okay, I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole.”
She lets out a light, musical laugh, and gives me a broad grin that sends her dark eyes twinkling.
I have to look at my latte for a second, because that smile? Yeah, it’s like staring straight at the fucking sun.
When her laughter dies out, she takes a sip of her own drink and says, “I was good at faking, but not so good at not getting caught.”
I cock my head to the side, intrigued. “Okay. I’ll bite. Getting caught at what?”
“More like ‘getting caught at who,’” she answers.
#
Back to the future: Twenty years ago. Amy’s college coming out adventure.
Amy’s just turned nineteen when she joins the Formal Recruitment process to rush Ohio State’s sororities. She’s got plenty of good fakes going for her back then — she’s got long, fake blonde hair; she’s bent the truth about what her father does for a living (says he’s a department head at an “international organization,” which is technically true, she just makes it sound like he’s a business man instead of a Lieutenant Colonel); she plays up the fact that she’s lived in Europe and entered college already fluent in German and semi-fluent in French.
What she’s not faking is her interest in Pi Beta Phi. She knows, like plenty of young women like her know, that Pi Phi takes only the prettiest, most popular girls to be a part of their self-congratulatory club. And self-congratulatory or not, she wants in.
Because Amy’s never been “in.” She’s always been outside looking in. As soon as she thinks she’s made a solid new group of friends, it’s time to move. She tries keeping in touch with them for a little while, but inevitably they stop taking her calls, stop answering emails, disappear off her Facebook feed. It’s been like this her whole life.
Now that she’s in college, she’ll be in one place for four. Straight. Years. An unprecedented luxury that her father’s next post can’t change. And Amy’s going to make the most of those four years. She’s going to make the Friendships That Last a Lifetime. And when she graduates, she’s going to list one of the most exclusive sororities in the country on her resume. With those three little Greek letters tacked onto her name, she’ll never be on the outside looking in again.
No matter where she goes after college, she’ll be a Pi Phi. She’ll have Sisters everywhere. Friends everywhere. No starting over ever again. And it’s something no one can take away from her.
So she charms and fakes and lies her way through the recruitment process, endearing herself to one Pi Phi after another. But when she talks to her future sisters, she expresses her doubts about the sorority. She drops the names Kappa Kappa Gamma and Tri-Delt in her conversations with them, talking about how kindly the girls there have treated her, how interested she is in them, how interested they are in her.
Amy, it turns out, is a total fucking con artist.
By the time she gets her Pi Phi invitation on Bid Day, they’re practically surprised that she chooses them. Like she graced them with her acceptance, rather than them gracing her with an invitation.
#
Annual mixer with Sigma Chi, spring semester of Amy’s freshman year
Amy staggers into a bathroom, mostly drunk, and is about to hitch her dress up over her hips so she can pee when she spots a girl leaning against the sink, touching up her lipstick.
“Oh,” Amy says. “Sorry — I didn’t know there was anyone in here.”
The girl’s silvery dress hugs her lanky frame in all the right places, and it makes her seem even taller than she is (but Amy comes in just over five feet, so everyone seems tall to her). The tall girl looks Amy up and down, giving the kind of snooty inspection Amy endured over and over again during rush. Then she lets out a half-laugh, telling Amy the inspection’s obvious conclusion was — Amy’s been found wanting.
It’s irritating. Amy’s a Pi Phi now, goddammit. And who’s this girl, and what the hell did Amy do to offend her?
Amy gives as good as she gets, crosses her arms against her chest and does her own inspection. The tall girl in the silver dress has long, wavy brown hair only a few shades darker than her tawny brown skin. Amy’s first thought is that she looks Hawaiian. Maybe Polynesian. Or Indonesian. But she doesn’t ask, doesn’t let her eyes reveal how striking she finds the other girl. Instead, she says,
“What?” and gives the word as much haughty Pi Phi venom as she can.
The girl looks her up and down once more. “Nothing. Clearly.”
The icy stare-down continues for a few seconds more, but then something dawns on Amy. “Wait a second,” she says. “I know you. You’re Quinn Kama. You’re a varsity soccer player.”
Quinn Kama is momentarily caught off-guard. “Yeah? So? I’m here with my boyfriend. He’s Sigma Chi,” she says. It’s all unnecessarily defensive, and she’s justifying her presence at the mixer, Amy realizes. Compensating for the insecurity of feeling like she doesn’t belong. It’s something Amy gets.
“Do you remember me?” Amy asks. “I write for The Lantern. I interviewed you after the last home game. You scored twice.”
Quinn’s face softens a little; her stance relaxes. “Yeah… Actually, yeah, I do remember you. Your name’s… It’s, uh…”
“Amy.”
“Amy. Right.” Quinn relaxes further, lets out half of a smile. “I remember you watching from the stands. You seemed like you were really into the game.”
“I am — or, I mean, I was. I love women’s sports.” Amy shrugs self-consciously, because her obsession with women’s sports is something none of her Pi Phi sisters understand. Hell, it’s something that Amy herself doesn’t entirely understand. All she knows is that she loves watching female athletes. She loves the power, the strength, the skill — but also the grace. A grace that male athletes rarely match.
There’s a long pause. “Look, Amy,” Quinn says. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch. I just… Rod’s always dragging me to these mixers for his fraternity. Most of the time, people treat me like I don’t belong here, so I’ve just gotten into the habit of…” She drops her gaze to the floor.
“Of preemptive strikes,” Amy supplies with a nod. Her father’s a career military man, after all. She can appreciate Quinn’s strategy. “Believe me. I get it. Sometimes I hate these things, too.”
Quinn looks back up, meets Amy’s eyes. Smiles fully this time. Perfectly white teeth provide a beautiful contrast against her tawny skin, and butterflies flutter into Amy’s stomach for reasons she doesn’t entirely understand yet.
“Umm,” Amy says. She gestures in the direction of the toilet. “I kind of need to use the, uh…”
The spell is broken. Quinn clicks the cap back onto her lipstick and titters out an uncomfortable giggle. “Right — I was hogging the bathroom. Sorry. I’ll just…” She turns sideways to step past Amy, her chest brushing against Amy’s shoulder through the silvery dress as she does. “…I’ll get out of your way,” she says.
Quinn leaves, closing the door behind her.
Alone in the bathroom, Amy lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
#
Amy can’t stop thinking about Quinn after that, and when she’s offered a chance to cover the women’s soccer game against Ohio the next week, she jumps at it, immediately seeking out Quinn in the locker room after the game.
Amy was a high school sports reporter at both of her high schools, and she signed up to write for The Lantern the very first week of school. And since most of the sports reporters were guys, and since most of them had very little interest in covering women’s sports, Amy practically had interviewed, highlighted, or at least known of almost every female varsity athlete on campus.
It means she’s no stranger to women’s locker rooms.
But there’s something different about being in the locker room after the Ohio versus Ohio State game this time. There’s something about the smells of heat and sweat and grass stains and floral shampoo that make Amy feel out-of-balance. She walks through the locker room unsteadily, like a woman with vertigo, mumbling apologies as she bumps into more than one bare arm and bare back before she makes it to Quinn.
Quinn’s hair is pulled up and back; sweat-darkened curls are plastered to her temples and the back of her neck. In a sports bra, soccer shorts, and cleats, she’s somehow both more intimidating and more beautiful than she had been in her silver dress in the frat house bathroom.
Amy steels herself. “Hi — Quinn? It’s Amy. From the, well, from the bathroom at Sigma Chi — remember?” She’s rolling her eyes at herself even as she says it, blushing even as she tries not to. “I’m doing the write-up on the game for The Lantern again.”
Quinn looks up at the sound of Amy’s voice, flashes that perfect, bright white smile again. The sensation of vertigo gets so strong that Amy plops down on the bench beside her interview subject.
“Amy,” Quinn says. “See? I remembered this time. Nice to see you again.”
The interview goes smoothly — so smoothly that the two are laughing and joking like old friends by its end. The next time she spots Quinn on campus, they smile and nod at each other as they walk past. The time after that, Amy offers to buy Quinn lunch.