American Fraternity Man (41 page)

“This evening?”

“This evening,” he says. “They’re finished.”

“Then why am I still
here
? Why did I spend all day trying to stop this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Standard operating procedure, Charles,” he says. “You know all about this, I trust. We immediately suspend a chapter whenever we hear of major risk management issues, just to cover our bases. That happened yesterday. Pending investigation, our suspension process allows us to close a chapter within twenty-four hours of the initial suspension, which we did. Strictly a paperwork closure to limit our liability, should there be trouble tonight. It puts the responsibility for any…damages…onto the chapter, and relieves us as much as possible. We can always reinstate Illinois, but from the looks of the situation, what’s worth saving? Depending on what happens in that house tonight, we might
’ve just dodged a bullet.”

“
They’re still having the party,” I say. “We didn’t dodge anything.”

“They’re no longer part of our fraternity, though. Not anymore.”

“What does that mean?”

“They can do whatever they want,” LaFaber says. “They
aren’t part of the National Fraternity anymore. We’ve cut them loose.”

“This seems so quick. Too easy.”

“Listen, Charles,” LaFaber says. “It’s
Illinois
. A big university. We uphold our values, close the chapter, then re-organize later. Standard.”

Standard. And I’m thinking of my goals, of the “Healthy Eating” section of my goals. No fried food. No KFC or Hardees. No breakfast buffets. No danishes or cinnamon buns or Krispy Kremes. No elephant ears. So many ways I could get fat, waste money, so many ways. No beer, I wrote in those goals. No hamburgers and no French fries. No milkshakes and no ice cream. No pork rinds or onion rings. Standard, I’m thinking, but
look at me
, I’m already softer and pudgier. I never had control of this chapter, could never change anything even if I operated flawlessly; they’ve been closed all day and I didn’t even know it.

“I have to go,” I say. “I have to find somewhere to sleep.”

“Great,” LaFaber says. “Just get away from that house. Get out of that city, even. Hotels are out by the interstate. The second they find out they’ve been closed, you
don’t
want to be around. Nothing you can say or do will make things right for them.”

*

By the time I find a hotel, check in, unpack, and flop into bed, it’s past 11 PM. My head is pounding so hard and with such steady rhythm that I find myself taking deep methodical breaths as if I’m jogging. Pounding so hard that my head actually feels like it’s shaking. Deep breaths.

I tug my heavy-weight suitcase to the far end of the room, drop it onto the floor, pop the top and swing it open. The opened suitcase looks like some dissected creature from a high school biology lab, a cut-open cross-section of my life, but it looks different than usual, disheveled
and scattered.
This is a creature dissected by the classroom rebel, and he’s stabbed everything with his scalpel, and I don’t know what’s dirty, what’s clean; my boxers are bunched up, wedged between mismatched socks and crumpled shirts, my bottle of vitamins opened and spilled out.

The room is hot. I’m tired, but I want to move. I’m suffocating.

I step outside the hotel, unlock my Explorer, open the center console. On the left side, I keep a package of black pens, a stack of notecards, and a flashlight. Each of these supports the next, fits so snug that removing anything would cause the infrastructure to collapse like a burning house. On the right side of the console, I keep the bound Sacred Laws of Nu Kappa Epsilon, and, under a pair of gloves, a flask filled with Jack Daniels left over from the Senior Send-Off. For an emergency. I remove the flask, lock the car, re-enter my hellishly hot room.

I drink from the flask until my headache subsides, and I’m thinking that I could walk back down to the front desk, talk to the cute girl at the counter in the red Ramada polo and khaki pants, maybe get her number, invite her to the NKE party, why not?, but I can barely remember what she looks like, and I finish the flask and I’m calling Jenn, leaving her a message, and I’m not even sure what I’m saying, but it has something to do with how I need her to be there for me and
where is she
and when I look at the clock, I see that it’s midnight, and I’m thinking,
where am I going tomorrow
?, thinking
one stack clean shirts, plastic bottle of vitamins, one stack clean boxer short
s, thinking tube tops and tight white pants, and I flop onto the bed, and I’m tired and my head is pounding again.

*

Internet access at the hotel runs $15 a day, and even though it’s the middle of the night and I’ll be gone in just a few hours, I open my laptop and enter my credit card and head straight to the Facebook home page.

“Charles…hasn’t been back to this page in months.”

“Charles…wonders what’s on the other side of this login page. How has the world changed? Check it out. Just a peek, just a peek. Sign up, Charles. Reactivate yourself.”

But I don’t. I erase the
[email protected]
username, th
e


password, because I’ve come too far and I won’t slip back into the old me, and I simply type “Nu Kappa Epsilon, Rush Party, Illinois” into the search box, because—now that I’m here—I want to find the event page that this chapter created, the event page that alerted the Headquarters to this nightmare and brought me here. Not too tough. It’s the first search result listed:

“Charles…is shocked that it’s so blatant.”

“Charles…is actually impressed that there are 3,245 RSVPs. That’s a hell of a party.” And the girls…so many girls attending…picture after picture of young women in short jean skirts, in tight black shorts that end just south of their asses, so many swooping necklines, so many breasts and so much exposed skin that—as I’m scrolling through the attendees—I look back over my shoulder here in the
hotel room to make sure no one’s watching me.

It’s just me
and this hideous bedspread, of course, and this laptop, and this event page, and all of these sexy profile pictures, but before I know what I’m doing, I’m clicking onto their profiles and searching whatever half-pornographic pictures these girls have made public for all the world to see.

Snapshots of a 21-year-old female standing/crawling on bartop, t-shirt soaked from spilled tequila.
Another photo: her tits perked out like this is part of a portfolio she sent to
Maxim
. Panoramic shot of seven sorority girls in bikinis so tiny, so precariously adjusted over the choice sections of their anatomy, that it seems any movement at all—a single step, a slightly raised arm—might tear the fabric, might rip the whole top free.

“Charles…shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Charles…is staring directly at Jenn, now.”

And yes, at some point, I typed “Jenn Barry” into the search field, and now I’m lurking on
her
profile page, but she’s set it to “Private”—viewable only by friends—and I no longer have a Facebook page myself and thus am not her friend and thus can see only her profile pic (Jenn on a beach chair, wearing a pink tank top and a pair of white shorts, sipping a margarita, and you can barely see another arm on the photo’s left side, and it’s
my
arm because I’m in the next beach chair over, and have I been cropped out of the picture?) and her most basic information (“School: Edison University,” “Hometown: Tampa, FL,” “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated”), and that’s all I can view as I scroll through her page as a stranger, and I rub my eyes and close the Facebook page, and “It’s Complicated?” Did I just see that? I shut my laptop and look over my shoulder again. Alone. This is what I’ve become?

Six months ago, I
was
Adam Duke. Senior in the fraternity house. President. In charge, directing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar budget, honored at the Alumni Ball
,
ready to graduate and assume some important job. “Man on campus,” people joked. I wasn’t just sitting on a beach chair nearby;
I was in the Facebook photo
, not an empty hotel room drinking Jack Daniels.

Blank side of the business card, all that white space.

And minutes later, I’m back in my Explorer and I’m driving toward the Nu Kappa Epsilon fraternity house, toward the party, ready to do something, who knows what?

*

Erratic, shaky, my driving, and I pass a police car parked at a gas station and I grip the steering wheel harder and try to drive straight but I slip over the center line in the street and have to correct myself. I watch out my rearview mirror, slow down, but the cop doesn’t follow.

When I finally arrive at the house, the parking lot is packed, bumper to bumper, and so many kids are standing in the front yard in a winding line from the curb to the porch and the door, that I park around the corner and watch the party from a distance. One of the fraternity brothers—could be Adam, for all I can see—stands atop a keg on the porch and points to someone in the line and shouts and laughs. Another pack of girls, white pants and tube tops, saunters past my Explorer and joins the slow-moving line into the party. From inside the house, the microphone feedback has been replaced by the steady bass-thump of party hip-hop. I can only imagine what’s happening in there. Hundreds of students holding plastic cups full of keg beer, guys pressed against girls, strobe lights and smoke in the air, so loud with the combined noise of a thousand conversations and a band and a DJ that you can say anything you want, move anyway you want. My hand is on my door handle, shaking on the door handle.

And suddenly there is a knock on the window of my car, the sound of fingernails or jewelry tapping against glass.

I jump back, nearly bang my head against the ceiling, and there
is a girl at my door. Dark hair and makeup so bold that—under the strange glow of the streetlights—her face carries an exotic tone, indigo on bronze. But even with the alien lighting, she is stunning, and she is only two feet away from me, and we are separated only by my window. She wears a bright pink club top, cut so high at the bottom that I can see her flat 19-year-old abs, so sparing at the top that her bra straps are visible under the thin straps that crest her shoulders.

He
r fingers still touch the glass and she says something, but I can’t hear.

“Roll down your window,” she mouths.

I realize that I’ve been pressing back against my center console for five seconds, ten, eyes looking shocked or scared and hand still gripping the handle tightly, so I loosen up, comply.

“Hello,” I say when the window is down.

“Hey. What are you doing in there?” she asks.

“I’m just, you know, sitting?”

“Sitting outside? While your party’s going on?”

“Sure?”

“Must be a crazy-good time in your car to keep you from the party,” she says, and she peers inside, scans the dark interior. I wonder what she sees, if these folders and snap-shut cases and hanging rods disturb her, if they tip her off that I am not whoever she imagines me to be. “No. Definitely doesn’t look very fun in here.”

“It isn’t,” I say, and wish I could have said something flirty, the sort of mindless boy-girl banter I was able to spin off without a second’s thought back at EU.

“So why are you out here?”

I open my mouth, but I can’t stop staring at the bare skin of her shoulders.

“Are you smoking?” she asks with a smile. “Are you about to light up?”

“I don’t…” I start, but I don’t want to let her down, this girl who approached my Explorer. “Not now. Um. Not yet.”

She licks her lips. “Well. Come get me when you do.”

“I will. Are you,” and I swallow, “are you going to be inside there? In the house?”

“Please,” she says. “Free beer.”

“Right. Dumb question.”

“Your car’s pretty full,” she says. “Why?”

“I had a long drive. I’m packed up.”

“You just got into town? Classes started a week ago.”

“Oh, it’s…I’ve been busy.”