I adjust to life in my new “frat home.”
Every morning I wake up and step over beer cans and half-empty Taaka handles on the way to the shower. I always wear shoes when I leave my room, because a grimy film seems to cover everything in the house.
I carry Lysol in my shower caddy and try to air out the gross boys-locker-room smell before I shower.
Sometimes there are girls with messed-up hair and miniskirts loitering around, and I offer them my comb and their choice from the thirty-pack of toothbrushes I picked up at Sam’s Club.
Then I head off to class, saying a quick hello to the athletes coming back from practice, and those with more questionable hobbies who are waking up wherever they collapsed the night before.
When I return I am always greeted with the loud sounds of gunshots coming from Call of Duty in the main room or a yell of “pledge,” followed by some sort of profanity.
And at night I fall asleep to the lullaby that is 50 Cent vibrating throughout the house.
I spend my waking hours sitting in the corner, pretending to read the same few pages of my sociology textbook while listening for material for my journal entries. And I get plenty: how sex is often seen as a conquest; a guy “got head,” or if he is often successful, “slays.” Saying someone has sex often is a compliment for a guy—“he pulls”—while a sign of weakness for a girl—“she gave it up.”
“I mean it’s not bad, but we know most of this already.” Madison Macey’s voice is staticky over the phone. She’s on Bluetooth driving through LA and has interrupted her thoughts on gender with bouts of swearing at other drivers.
I crouch beneath the window of the listening booth I’ve reserved at the library. I can’t exactly take calls like this in the house, but even here, in the soundproof booth, I feel like a fugitive.
“Know what?”
“Intense drinking, power dynamics and dominance when it comes to sex—this is not shocking or new.”
“So?” I run my hand through my hair. “I mean it’s my findings so far. And although it’s the stereotype, I’m not sure if it’s been illustrated with an academic study like this. And even if it has, more proof for a theory is worthy research, right? I mean, isn’t that part of the social science process, to gather more evidence to support the prevailing assumption or to disprove it? We can’t, like, change the facts just to make it novel.”
She sighs. “‘Frat Just What We Expected’ is not headline making, Cassie. I want something new, something that raises eyebrows, turns heads.”
How about that rolls eyes? “What exactly do you have in mind?”
“Well, first of all, you aren’t in the story at all. It’s all I heard this, I heard that. Push it a little more, engage with them. I want to see you in the story. Fuck. Sure, asshole, just cut me off, fabulous.”
I move the phone slightly away from my head to spare my ears the cacophonous honking. When the noise subsides, I cautiously bring the phone back to my face. “But I’m just the reporter—it’s not about me.”
“Of course it’s about you. Otherwise we’d just have a bunch of hidden cameras in there, not a coed.” She pauses. “You’re replaceable, Cassie. Remind us why it’s important that it’s you in there, embed yourself. When I read your next entry, I want to be blown away.”
The line goes dead, and I wonder if she’s done with me or just driving through a tunnel.
Embed myself. I wish it was as easy as she made it sound. But it’s hard to engage with people who mostly don’t seem to want me in their house at all.
Not that they don’t like the idea of me. For God’s sake, the Warren chapter and the National Organization for DTC wrote press releases about the great example they’ve set by welcoming me. Their Google News tab has gone from talk of probation to talk of awards.
But the reality of me actually living there, actually being a member and not a talking point, seems to be an inconvenience they forgot to consider. Everyone seems to view me as an annoyance at best, an intruder at worst.
I’d like to think the actives are no meaner to me than they are to the other pledges, that this is just the reality of pledging. But then again, I never budge from the bottom of the pledge list, except for the one time I was second to last to a dude named Pledge Bambi.
But that doesn’t explain the way the rest of the pledges treat me.
I can hear them most nights, from my window, drunkenly yelling as they gather outside the house to romp around campus, to have nights they’ll look back on when they talk about their glory days.
Everything I’ve read about frats tells me this is the time when we should bond over our common pain. The people who defend hazing under the guise of “tradition” always say that creating adversity makes people come together.
But my pledge brothers don’t seem to want to forge any sort of bond with me.
The only one who seems to want to interact with me, besides the ones who want to torture me, is Jordan.
I can’t tell if he likes me or just pities me, feeling bad for the kid always sitting alone.
But he starts inundating me with invitations.
He pops up at my door at least three times a day, smiling like I’m his long-lost best friend.
“Hey, Cassie, do you want to study sociology?”
“Hey, Cassie, do you want to get lunch at the student center?”
“Hey, Cassie, do you want to sit with me at dinner?”
“Hey, Cassie, do you want to go to this party/social/sorority mixer where everyone but me will hate your guts?”
“Hey, Cassie, will you come out of your room so I can stop worrying about my charity project and get back to hanging out with my real friends?”
Okay, so those two aren’t exact quotes per se.
I take him up on the studying and eating, and he becomes the only one who can draw me out of my room for anything but class or mandatory pledge events. Granted, he’s the only one who tries.
And that scares the shit out of me.
Because he’s the only one I want to try. Which is a bad thought, because I should be focused on the experiment, on interacting in a purely research-based way with these people I hate, not spending the day waiting for a text that sets off butterflies in my stomach, or to see his beautiful face at my door.