Moving in Reverse

Moving In Reverse

Katy Atlas

Copyright 2012 Katy Atlas

Smashwords Edition

For Chad

Chapter One

Who knew, I thought to
myself,
that Emma Stone was such a sick
foosball player?

She slammed the goalie across the
small opening, catching the tiny white ball with the edge of the
plastic player’s foot. It shot across the table, hitting the side
wall and rebounding expertly, heading straight for the goal I was
supposed to be defending.

I spun the handles on my side of the
table wildly, trying to predict the direction she’d shoot from.
With a quick exhale, she stopped the ball on one of her player’s
feet, jerked her arm back, and shot — directly into the goal.
Slapping her hand against the table in victory, she grinned at
me.

“
Want to play
again?”

I shook my head, smiling too. “I’m
humiliated enough. I used to play this all the time in high
school,” I said sheepishly. “Let’s go outside.”

We walked through the open glass doors
onto the deck, where I could see the Pacific Ocean crashing against
the beach, wide open stretches of sand glittering orange in the
sunset. A group of people were sitting outside, and I walked over
to my boyfriend, Blake Parker, and perched on the arm of his
chair.

“
Are you happy?” he asked
me, his face tan and relaxed in the fading sun, like something out
of a magazine or a cologne ad.

“
This is the best day of
my life.”

Emma had wandered off, inside or down
to the beach or somewhere else. Across from us, Sophie, the drummer
of my favorite band, Blake’s Band, Moving Neutral, smiled back at
me, her face partly obscured by the sunlight behind her.

“
Casey,” she said, her
voice turning urgent. “It’s time to go.”

I looked at her, confused, and then
back at Blake. The scene around me seemed to waver, flickering like
a shadow at sunset and then fading to black.

“
It’s time to go,” the
same voice repeated.

I opened my eyes.

“
Casey,” I recognized the
voice this time, calling to me from the door of our
eighty-square-foot dorm room. “It’s time to go.”

My pillow had fallen off the bed
sometime during the night, and I felt a cramp in my neck the second
I lifted my head.

“
It’s okay,” I mumbled to
the door. “Just go without me.”

“
Class starts in ten
minutes,” my roommate said, hesitating, her foot tapping next to
the door.

“
Just go,” I sighed,
feeling around on the floor for a pair of jeans.

I heard the door close, and lay back
in bed, staring up at the grey plaster ceiling.

It was the third week of school. I had
a lecture in ten minutes.

And all I wanted to do was go back to
sleep.

Chapter Two

“
There are two things
you’re going to have to remember, Casey,” Darby told me, a clip in
her mouth muffling her words as she wrapped her hair into a French
twist. “First, no pants. Got it?”

I nodded. “No pants,” I echoed,
looking down at the knee-length jersey dress she’d picked out for
me. It was a pink and yellow pastel pattern and made me feel like
an Easter egg. “What’s the second thing?” I was a little bit afraid
to ask.

“
This is important. If you
don’t get a bid from Kappa, you’re done, okay? No second
choice.”

“
What happens if I like
the girls at one of the others?”

“
You won’t,” Darby chirped
the words like it was the simplest thing she’d said all day. “I
don’t even know what I’m worried about,” she giggled, looking me up
and down like a proud parent about to send her kid off to
kindergarten. “They’re going to be battling over you.”

It was a month into freshman year of
college, and sometimes I felt like my roommate, Darby Ann Pearson,
from Raleigh, North Carolina, was something out of a cartoon. She
listened to country music and said y’all like it was a real word
and drank bourbon mixed with lemonade whenever a bar let us
in.

Darby was a Kappa Theta Beta legacy
because her mom had gone to Ole Miss, which turned out to be short
for the University of Mississippi. She’d stared at me like I’d
grown a third head when she realized I didn’t know what Ole Miss
was — it was like a kid from Taiwan not knowing that people didn’t
say Coca Cola, they said Coke.

And thanks to Darby, I was
sorority-bound on the second week of October, two weekends before
Halloween and two months before final exams, in one of New York
City’s first brisk afternoons after a long, hot Indian summer. And,
also thanks to Darby, I was spending our first afternoon of sixty
five degree weather in a sundress. And high heeled
sandals.

Darby handed me a lip gloss. “For your
bag,” she lilted sweetly. “You ready to go?”

I took one last look in the mirror, my
brown hair curled into loose waves that Darby had taken half an
hour to roll into curlers, twisting each lock around her fingers
and then setting them into Velcro strips.

When I’d imagined culture shock with
my freshman year roommates, I was thinking about kids from Hong
Kong and Zimbabwe, introducing them to the old seasons of Grey’s
Anatomy and Laguna Beach, celebrating holidays I’d never heard of
or national soccer teams I didn’t recognize. I had not pictured
Darby Ann.

My cell phone buzzed on the table next
to me. When I opened the text message that had just come in, it was
from Madison, my best friend from home who’d started at NYU as a
freshman the same week that I’d entered Columbia.

GOOD LUCK XOXO GIVE EM HELL, she
wrote.

I smiled to myself. I wasn’t sure that
giving them hell was part of Darby’s game plan.

“
Ready as I’ll ever be,” I
said to Darby, trying to smile. “Let’s go before I chicken
out.”

She didn’t need much more
encouragement. Picking up a straw handbag from her dresser, she
looked me up and down and nodded, opening the door to our tiny
shared bedroom and stepping out into the hallway. I followed, a
wisp of her perfume still noticeable in the air.

It was almost three by the time we got
to the student center, our group collecting near the door with a
guide who was supposed to accompany us to each of the houses at
forty five minute intervals. She had short, curly hair and was
wearing khakis and a white polo shirt. Next to the dozen or so
pastel-clad freshman girls she was shepherding around, she looked
kind of like a waiter at a country club. As each girl joined the
herd, she handed them a nametag and a pink magic marker.

A tiny red-haired girl next to me
tripped in her heels, and I held my arm out to catch her before she
hit the sidewalk.

“
Thanks,” she whispered to
me, so quietly that I had to strain to hear her. “I guess I’m kind
of nervous.”

I tried not to laugh — she looked like
she was only a few steps away from fainting, and I didn’t want to
be the thing that put her over the edge. “I think today is supposed
to be pretty low key,” I whispered, trying to sound
reassuring.

“
For you,” the girl
scoffed, rolling her eyes. I was so surprised by her reaction that
I dropped her arm, looking over to Darby to see if she’d heard. But
Darby was deep in conversation with another girl in a pink,
strapless tropical-printed dress, which looked about as ridiculous
for the middle of October as what Darby had dressed me
in.

I guessed that she was a legacy
too.

I looked over at the redhead again for
a second, but she was already in front of me, asking the guide
something faintly nauseating, about community service or internship
opportunities or one of the things you’re supposed to be excited
about when you join a sorority. As if anyone who rushes isn’t
thinking about the parties.

Except Darby. Who was thinking about
her mom.

I looked behind us, at all of the
girls in frilly, pastel dresses, and then beyond them at the rest
of the campus, everyone in sneakers and jeans, watching us as if we
were some kind of preppy parade transplanted out of Nantucket for
their amusement.

My toenails were painted coral pink.
There was exactly one thing going through my head: how, exactly,
did Darby convince me that Rush was a good idea?

By the time we got to the first house,
I was seriously considering hiding in the bushes as a viable
alternative to forming the single file line that our guide was
trying to organize us into. Maybe no one would notice if I went
missing.

I sighed inwardly at the thought. The
redhead was right. Maybe a year ago, no one would have noticed if
Casey Snow went missing, but those days were long gone. I molded my
face into a perky smile and got into the line next to a girl in a
pale blue shirtdress and espadrilles.

We walked into the first house still
in the single file line, everyone starting to crowd the entryway
once we were inside. The first twenty or so girls were immediately
swept away by older girls in sorority tee-shirts and designer
jeans, their smiles beaming and bright through shiny and glossed
lips.

I watched as Darby immediately broke
into excited conversation with a blonde girl wearing pearls. They
walked away towards a corner of the room, as if they’d been waiting
all day for this conversation and didn’t want to miss an instant of
it.

“
Casey?” A girl with
stick-straight brown hair came over to me, smiling in a way that
looked warm, even if it was probably forced. “I’m Jen, it’s so nice
to meet you.”

I thought about Darby’s encouragement
as we were getting ready, and plastered on my best first-impression
smile.

“
I know this is a little
overwhelming,” Jen said. She led me across the room towards a table
stacked with nothing but rows of sugary, pink cupcakes. I wasn’t
sure if I was hungry or frightened.

“
A little bit,” I agreed,
trying to smile.

“
Just wait till the skits
start,” she grinned. “When else are you going to see a future 1L at
Harvard law singing Copa Cabana in a coconut bikini?”

I laughed so suddenly that it was
almost a snort, catching myself at the last minute.
“Seriously?”

“
Well, none of us will
know about law school till spring,” she said. “But the coconut part
was serious.”

“
You’re a senior?” I
looked at the girl closely. She was thin and barely taller than me,
with giant brown eyes that seemed to take up half her face. In
short, gorgeous.

“
I am,” she said. “This is
my last Rush, so it’s a little bittersweet. I was Rush Chair last
year — this is one of my favorite weeks of the year.”

The words were faintly nauseating, but
the girl actually seemed pretty sincere about them, so I smiled
back at her.

“
So how did you decide to
come out?” she asked, opening her eyes wider with what I assumed
was interest, or at least designed to look like it.

“
Oh, my roommate,” I
pointed across the room at Darby with the blonde girl. They’d been
joined by a few others, and I could see Darby excitedly telling a
story, gesturing with her hands while everyone laughed. “She wanted
to rush, and she convinced me to come too.”

Jen smiled with something that looked
like relief. “Oh, we know Darby already,” she grinned. “Her mom was
a Kappa too, so we were hoping she’d come out. But I didn’t know
you guys were roommates.”

For a second, I looked at her a little
suspiciously, and then dismissed it. Most people who recognized me
went straight to giving me the third degree, and this girl
definitely wasn’t going that route.

“
So, how do you like
college so far?” she swiftly changed the subject.

“
It’s great,” I said,
launching into a quick discussion of classes, dorms, my mind
starting to wander.

When I thought about college, I’d
never imagined myself as the sorority type. I was shy rather than
bubbly — on the periphery at parties, not planning them. But when I
got to Columbia, it felt like I had this opportunity to be someone
different, like anything that had tied me down in high school could
just be set aside, making way for a new Casey. It was the kind of
thing you could really only do once or twice in a lifetime, and
part of me thought this was the right time to try.