Dirty Rush (10 page)

That's when the phone rang. The landline. I didn't recognize it at first because I don't think I'd heard it ring once during my entire time at CDU. It was so jarring and loud and could not have come at a more awkward time. Who was calling me at 10:30 on a Saturday night? I hadn't given that number to anyone. Even my family called me on my cell phone.

The ringing didn't seem to have broken Jack's focus, because he continued to caress and kiss my body. I was relieved when the phone stopped because I wanted to enjoy every moment of this.

“These need to come off right now,” Jack whispered as he started taking down my jeans.

“K.”

Thank God I got a wax before I came to school.

What happened next can only be described in one word: nirvana. After kissing his way down my stomach, over my hips, and onto my thighs, Jack went there. When I say that he went down on me, I really mean that Jack took my whole notion of pleasure, smashed it with a steel-toed boot, and proceeded to redefine the
boundaries of ecstasy. Perhaps it sounds like I'm being overly dramatic, but I'm not. I never knew what sex could really feel like, let alone oral. It was insane. Every other sexual encounter I'd had up until that moment was amateur.

When it was over I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I was in outer space. I looked down between my legs at Jack's face and I realized that he was saying something to me. My head was floating.

“Do you need to answer that?” Jack asked.

I guess the phone had been ringing the whole time, but I was so zoned out that I hadn't heard it. Once I collected myself, pulled my underwear on, and unplugged the phone, I laid down on the bed and curled up into Jack's shoulder.

“That was really nice.”

“Happy you feel that way. Some girls just want to rush into sex, you know?”

“What would you call what we just did?”

“I mean dick-in-vagina sex,” he laughed. “Didn't feel like we needed to rush into that tonight.”

“Okay . . . why?”

“Because I didn't want you to think that I was just one of those guys.”

“One of what kind of guys?”

“A hitter and a quitter.”

“But are you?”

“Very funny. I don't know. Just wanted to wait. Is that weird?”

“I like that you wanted to wait. No complaints from me.”

“Well, tonight was all about making you feel good.”

“What about you feeling good?”

“Next time. I actually need to get back to the house in a bit. Duty calls. Also I would check your messages. Someone just called you like eight times in a row.”

Jack put his shirt on and kissed me goodbye. I grabbed my cell phone and turned it on. Fifteen texts, three voice mails, all from Colette and Meg.

B
y the time I got to the front door of the Beta Zeta house I was completely out of breath because, of course, my dorm was on the total opposite side of campus. I'd never run so fast in my entire life, and I hate running. I was sweating through my clothes, and scared. Colette's tone on my voice mail made it sound like something terrible had happened. She just kept repeating that I needed to get to the “fucking house” immediately, but she wasn't yelling. She was really calm. I was terrified.

I took a deep breath and slowly opened the door. I fully expected the entire house, including all the pledges, to be standing there waiting for Colette to publicly shame me. But the house was empty. Like weirdly empty. Maybe something terrible had happened. Was there some kind of emergency or accident? Were they all at the hospital? I was very confused, yet also relieved that there was no confrontation.

It was strange to be in the house alone, like I was seeing it for the first time. During rush I was barely there, and the times I was there, it was always a shitshow with, like, a thousand people there and a million things going on. So I'd never really looked at the house that closely. I'd been inside the BZ house once when my sister was a junior at CDU and living there, probably when I was a freshman in high school. I was too young to care back then.

Beautiful old furniture and a ridiculous fireplace of carved stone. They must have hired an interior designer or something, because the attention to detail was insane. Like, all the throw pillows on the couch matched the fabric on the huge draperies that hung at the sides of the large glass doors leading to the backyard. Two gigantic paintings of abstract daisies hung on the wall, framing the fireplace. They were tasteful, understated, and had been positioned in a way that allowed for the composites that were also hanging to not be so in your face.

I walked through the empty, dimly lit common room, running my fingers along the top of the soft couch. When I got to the kitchen I saw Colette sitting alone at the island with her back toward me. I froze.

“You're late,” she said quietly without even turning around.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“You know, Taylor, this isn't a joke. You need to take what we do here more seriously.”

“I do. I promise. I just . . .”

“You just what?” she said as she slowly turned toward me.

“I was out with Jack and we were . . . indisposed when you guys were calling me.”

“Well, good for you. But your phone needs to be on every hour of every day until you are initiated. Nothing is a sure thing until we say so. Do you understand?”

“Yep.”

“This time is about bonding and trust and reliability.”

“I get it. My bad. This will never happen again.”

“It
better not. Because there is only so much leeway I can give you without other people feeling less than special.”

“I don't need special treatment. I just want to be treated like everyone else.”

“I'm pretty sure that's not possible and you know it. They've all gone to the bar already. I suggest you get over there ASAP and start mingling with the other girls. Before you go, however, you need to fill out this pledge information sheet that the other girls just did.” She pulled a stapled packet of papers from a stack that sat on the counter in front of her, slid it to her left.

“Thanks,” I said, sitting down on the stool next to Colette's. “Do you have a pen?”

She retrieved one from her bag and put it on top of the packet.

“ 'Kay, thanks, Colette. And sorry again. Will I see you at the bar?”

“I'll probably show up later. I need to run and do some errands off campus tonight. Some non-BZ business needs attention.”

“Gotcha,” I said, “well, good luck with that. And maybe I'll see you later?”

“Yeah.” She stared at her phone with a look of concern. “Just leave that on the counter with the others when you're done,” Colette said as she walked out of the kitchen.

“Sure,” I said, feeling relieved that she was gone.

The packet only took me a few minutes to fill out. It was a series of personal questions. My favorite color, my birthday, my height, favorite band, etc. It occurred to me that Colette didn't
want me there to fill out this info sheet with the other pledges; she wanted me there so that I knew BZ took precedence over my personal time from now on. I was a little surprised that she hadn't screamed at me. But then again, I couldn't really picture her raising her voice to anyone. She was too composed, too hard around the edges to lose her shit like that. But still, it all left a weird taste in my mouth. I didn't come to college to follow someone's arbitrary rules.

I never made it to the bar that night and I never heard a word about it from Colette, so I'm assuming she never made it either.

T
he next few weeks flew by. In between classes and studying, our pledge class was summoned to the house about every other day to do various things, which Jonah found annoying because we couldn't hang out as often. But he had endless swim practices anyway; we each had our thing.

The required BZ activities I liked: full-chapter dinners, a Tahitian-themed Sunday brunch where I won a limbo contest, and a Big/Little speed-dating night that was priceless. Things I kind of hated: liquor and beer runs, cleaning responsibilities in the house, and a few Human Dignity workshops that were just boring.

The sense I got from around campus was that we had it pretty easy at BZ. I went to coffee one day with this super-tiny girl, Sarah, whom I'd met on move-in day. She was compact and
looked a little scrappy, but had this booming voice that I thought was hilarious. We weren't really that close, but she seemed funny and kept texting me about meeting up for coffee. So we met at a café on the River and swapped pledge stories. Sarah was pledging Beta Pi. She came wearing a lavender cashmere cardigan, an Hermès belt, and Tory Burch flats. I felt a little underdressed in my shorts and T-shirt.

Beta Pi was kind of known as the slutty and raunchy house, so I wasn't surprised to hear that her experience had been different from mine, but one thing she told me literally blew my mind.

Sarah explained: “One night, before a frat party at Alpha, all of us pledges were called to the house, blindfolded, and led to the basement. A table had been set up with a bunch of vodka and mixers and we were told to just hang out and have fun and wait for further instructions. After about an hour, we were all pretty tipsy and having a blast, when one of the older sisters came down and told us that we needed to get completely naked, I'm not even joking, and sit on some wooden chairs that had been set up in a row. Each chair had a piece of newspaper taped to the seat. I was confused, but all the other girls stripped down so fuckin' fast that I just went along with it. When all twenty or so of us were seated on the cold wooden chairs, a TV was wheeled out in front of the row of us. A hard-core porn video, which apparently took place in a Jiffy Lube, was then turned on and one of the seniors explained that we were not allowed to get up from our seat and come to the party until the
newspaper was wet and the ink had ‘printed' on our asses.”

When Sarah's story finished, I realized that my jaw was hanging to the floor.

“Are you fucking serious?” I asked.

“As HPV.”

“Holy shit, Sarah. That is insane! What . . . what happened?”

“I mean, we all got there. Eventually. It started off as the most humiliating thing ever, but by the end we all felt like it was a badge of honor to go up and show them our newspaper-printed ass.”

“Oh my God. My house is seriously PG compared to that.”

“But you guys still have to sleep with a guy from Omega Sig, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We have to fuck at least one guy from our partner frat, Alpha, before initiation or we don't get in, officially.”

“Wait, wait, wait. So you have to ‘officially' fuck some dude? To get in?” I wondered if forcing their girls to do this was even legal. I was completely speechless. I had no idea how lucky I had been with my pledge experience thus far.

“Honestly, Taylor, I really don't mind it that much. The guys in Alpha are all so hot and one of my potential Bigs told me which of the brothers were hung and which weren't. I was gonna fuck a couple of those Alpha boys anyway, so it doesn't really matter. I can't even believe you are a Beta Zeta. I never pegged you as Greek.”

“Me neither.”

I
wanted to be able to relate to Sarah's pledge experiences, but I mean, she was sitting across the table from me talking about how she'd basically been sexually harassed. Deep down I believed that I would never be hazed, like, for real. Beta Zeta was different. It just wasn't that kind of a sorority. They weren't that type of group.

Sarah went on about a few of the guys she was considering for the “fucking assignment” and I entertained her with as much enthusiasm as I could muster while we looked at each of their Facebook profiles on her iPhone. One guy had a mohawk, so I told her not to fuck him because before I left for school, my grandmother told me never to sleep with a mohawked man and I happened to agree with the old quack on that one. Sarah argued that “Stevey” a.k.a. Mr. Mohawk was a starter on the lacrosse team, so he would raise her proverbial asking price for the rest of the semester, if not year.

As we got up and tossed our empty soy lattes into the trash, the thought crossed my mind that I was going to need to stop judging girls like Sarah for being slutty. Not that everyone was as extreme as her and Kenadie, but there was no way I'd be able to make it through even one year in this world of frombies and soiled newspaper while passing judgment on these girls. I'd go insane. I made a promise to myself then and there: Don't be a bitch, don't judge, and just enjoy the ride.

We hugged and Sarah went off on her way and I headed toward my dorm.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from Olivia.

Olivia 4:45PM
Question

Taylor 4:46PM
Hey, Olivia what's up

Olivia 4:46PM
You're a women's studies person right?

Taylor 4:46PM
Yeah

Olivia 4:46PM
Cool

Olivia 4:47PM
So you know about like women's lib and shit?

Taylor 4:47PM
A little bit. Why?

Olivia 4:47PM
I'm having a situation with this one professor of mine who I think might be objectifying me

Taylor 4:48PM
Hmm. Okay. How can I help?

Taylor 4:48PM
Also is it a male or female professor?

Olivia 4:48PM
Male

Olivia 4:50PM
He's always singling me out in lecture and saying weird shit to me after class and I can't tell if he's being sexist or if I'm just being sensitive because I think he's a creepy old loser

Olivia 4:50PM
Like today he asked me to sing in front of the whole class