Hell Week (9 page)

Dr. Smyth sat back in her chair. "It means that if you look at things from a certain perspective--in this case mathematically--there is nothing truly random in the uni- verse."

"You couldn't have just said that?"

She grinned and handed me the paper. "What kind of educator would I be?" I thanked her, promised she'd see me, eventually, for a class, and left. I wasn't sure I had any answers, but I defi- nitely had more questions.

The first was why had this design popped up, twice, on my Internet browser.

And theoretically, if seemingly random events were mathematically not really random, then didn't it follow that if you changed the math of things, you could change the out- come?

I suddenly had a new appreciation for arithmetic. I guess I was going to have to start paying attention in calculus. 10

The campus of Bedivere U. is tree-shaded and quaint, full of redbrick colonial revival buildings on an unregimented layout. The buildings went up gradually over the last cen- tury, wherever was convenient or empty. It lent the campus a lot of charm, but made learning your way around, espe- cially when you had back-to-back classes on opposite sides of the campus, a little challenging.

I'd grown up here, more or less. The two places I could find with my eyes closed were the library and Webster Hall, which housed the history department and archives. My father's office was on the third floor, and I headed there after my chat with Dr. Smyth. Dad was out of the office, and that suited me fine. I didn't need him, just a little privacy.

I cleared a space on his desk, made myself at home, and took out my laptop. It was new, acquired this summer after my old computer had gone up in a hail of brimstone. But what the heck. I needed one for college anyway.

Going into the application folder, I clicked on the SpyZilla icon. No red flags had popped up since I first saw that fractal screen, but that only meant that the software didn't find any cooties it recognized.

So I ran a manual search and found, without much ef- fort, a suspicious script that the program didn't know how to identify. It wasn't known spyware or adware. It was just . . . spookyware.

Destroy unknown script? I clicked. "Hell yes."

"Dr. Quinn, did you see this--" Justin entered with a token knock on the open door, then drew up short when he saw me behind the desk. "Oh. Hey, Maggie."

"Hey." We stayed frozen for an awkward tick of the clock. I was trying to remind myself we were just friends. What- ever he was thinking, his brows were drawn into something approaching a scowl. I looked at what he had in his hands. "Something interesting in the paper?"

He held up the page with the Phantom Rushee article. "You're not really going through with this, are you?"

I glared, gesturing to the traffic in the hall. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, come on."

Closing my laptop --after making sure SpyZilla was done de-fractalfying my hard drive--I stood. "I'm working on something." "In a sorority." Not a question. Just incredulous.

"Don't think I can pull it off?" I asked, slinging my satchel over my shoulder.

"I know you can. That's what worries me." He tapped the page. "It says right here: `Resistance is futile.' These things-- historically, sociologically--they suck people in."

"It's a sorority, not a cult, Justin. I'll be fine."

I swung out the door, already regretting the words. When would I learn not to tempt fate?

F F F

Bid Day. The drama and angst of the whole week came down to this: The sororities submitted their choices--the list of girls to whom they would extend a bid. Meanwhile, the rushees listed their top three houses, in order of prefer- ence. There was a certain strategy in what you listed. You didn't have to list three, and some had only one pick, pre- ferring to try again as sophomores rather than take a second choice. Others made sure they had at least one house on their list that they were assured of getting into. EZ, for ex- ample.

Then we all assembled in the Student Center ballroom to learn if we'd "matched." The doors were closed and no one was allowed in or out until we'd all received our envelopes.

Holly and I stayed together in line--Quinn and Russell are reasonably close alphabetically--an island of dispassion in a sea of drama. There were many tears--of disappoint- ment, joy, or simple relief. Mostly there was hugging and squealing. Lots and lots of squealing. It bounced from the wainscoted walls and the parquet floor. The chandelier tin- kled an echo. But the noise was nothing compared to the way the stratospheric emotion was scouring every psychic nerve in my body to a bloody, raw thread.

No story was worth a whole semester of this.

I had to do something; it figured it was desperation that made me put Gran's imagery book to practical use. Closing my eyes, I pictured deflector shields, like on the Millennium Falcon. I visualized the laser beams of angst bouncing off my defenses, ricocheting harmlessly back into the throng.

Holy cow. It actually worked. The muscles of my shoul- ders began to unclench and the knot in my stomach . . .

"Maggie! Holly!" Tricia threw herself at me, wrapping an arm around my neck and drawing Holly into the embrace. "It worked!"

"That's great, Trish!" Holly hugged her back.

Something had worked, until I'd completely lost concen- tration. The noise and emotion surged past my fallen defenses.

"Beta Pi totally wants me!" Holly had talked her into putting down her next highest choices after the Deltas. The Betas were brunette and bubbly, so we'd figured she'd be a fit.

Tricia bounced off to find other Betas; Holly bent down to frown critically at my face. "Are you feeling all right?"

Clearly, I looked as bad as I felt. "It's really hot in here." Someone squealed nearby and my eye twitched in reaction.

"We're almost done." This was relative. There was still a lot of alphabet in line behind us. Darn those Ss. The tradi- tion was to release the rushees--now called pledges--all at once out into the quad, where our new sisterhood waited to greet us and escort us back to Greek Row.

I reached the front of the line; at least once I got my bid-- I'd put down SAXi first, as I promised Holly, and the Zetas second, because I was assured of an invite, since I was a legacy--the matter would be settled, and I could find a seat in one of the chairs that ringed the room and observe from a small distance.

"Quinn," I told the Rho Gamma behind the table full of stationery boxes. "Maggie."

"Here you are." She held out a cream-colored envelope with a smile. "Good luck."

If I'd been thinking clearly, maybe I would have expected it. But my brain thrummed in my skull, as if I'd had about fifty espresso shots. As soon as my fingers closed on the in- vitation, a gray-white light blossomed on my retinas, like when you press on your closed eyelids and make a ghostly impression in the black. Only the brightness kept streaming in on my optic nerve, carrying impressions and images too rapid and bewildering to interpret, a moir� pattern splitting and repeating; infinite variety of waking dreams, pushed into my brain like water through a fire hose.

Consciousness tripped like a fuse, and everything went black.

F F F

I woke up on the floor, with Jenna patting my hand and Holly leaning over me anxiously. "What happened?"

"You fainted," Holly said as I struggled to sit up.

Surely not. How . . . girly. "Really?"

"Don't worry about it," the Rho Gamma said, correctly interpreting my reddening face. "Too much emotion, girls forget to eat. Happens all the time."

"I never forget to eat." They helped me to my feet; my thighs trembled, but it was better than lying there with the Ss stepping over me to get their bids. As if anyone would notice one more Drama Girl.

They walked with me to the chairs by the wall, and as I sat, Jenna turned to Holly. "There's some bottled water in the coolers behind the tables. Would you grab one for Maggie?"

"Really, I'm fine--" But Holly was already headed over to where the other Rho Gammas were handing out the bids.

Jenna sat beside me and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "I know it's overwhelming."

I sunk my head into my hands, rubbing my pounding temples. "Tell me about it."

I didn't expect her to take me literally. "We Sigmas have a hard time in the middle of all this excitement, though some of us are more sensitive than others."

Her face conveyed nothing, and everything. She might have just been talking about a mundane sensitivity to emo- tional stress. But she met my gaze evenly, significantly. "I could tell you're one of the more sensitive ones."

"So . . ." I formed my next question carefully. "I'm not the only one?"

Jenna smiled, as if my ready acceptance pleased her. "Well, no one has ever fainted before."

"Oh." I had to wrap my head around that. Of all the things I thought I might hear today, that hadn't been it.

She laid her hand on my knee, pressing lightly to weight her words. "I think you're used to keeping your specialness a secret, Maggie, so I don't have to tell you that we Sigmas don't talk about this outside the house. You probably shouldn't talk about it much with your pledge class. Most of them have no idea of the latent potential inside them."

"I don't understand." I felt the way I had when Dr. Smyth explained fractal theory, as though there was some basic, fundamental thing here that my mental fingertips could brush, but not quite grasp.

"You don't need to understand it right now. That's what pledge class is for. To get you ready for initiation, when everything will be clear."

Holly returned and handed me a bottle, still dripping icy water from the cooler. I pressed it to the back of my neck, hoping the chill would shock my brain into motion. It also gave me an excuse to duck my head and let Holly and Jenna talk while I tried to align my scattered thoughts.

All this week, I'd taken secret pride in being what the sorority girls termed "Not One of Us." Now I had found out that actually, I was one of them. Or they were a lot of me. Or . . . something.

I sat with my head resting in one hand, shielding my face. A cold prickle of worry spread through me, and I didn't think it was just the icy water bottle, or the cracking of my il- lusion that I was special or unique.

The bid envelope lay in my lap. Opening it was a for- mality now, but I did it anyway:

S I GMA A LPHA X I

INVITES

M A G D ALENA L O RRAINE Q UINN

T O JOI N O U R S A CRED S ISTERH OO D .

In the words of Han Solo, right before the Millennium Falcon got sucked into the Death Star: I had a bad feeling about this. 1

1

I stood in the foyer of the Sigma Alpha Xi house with seven other girls. Other houses had thirty or forty new members-- pledges, in the Greek vernacular. We had eight. No wonder SAXis had a reputation for being in a class of their own.

By their nature, the members of a house run together. They chose for type, and Sigma Alpha Xi did, too, if Jenna was to be believed--and I had no reason not to. Their crite- ria was definitely not physical similarity. At one end was lanky Holly, with her hair the color of autumn mums. At the other was me: short, too curvy on the bottom and not curvy enough on the top, with disobedient short dark hair. The other girls fell in the middle and had yet to differentiate themselves.

We, the pledge class, waited as a collective. Nervous, gig- gling, or silent, according to nature. The gigglers were Ash- ley, Kaylee, and Nikki. On the quiet, sober side were Holly, Alyssa, and Erica. A girl named Brittany had appointed her- self pledge wrangler, and kept admonishing the gigglers to shut up and be serious.

The chapter room doors swung partially open and one of the Sigmas greeted us, wearing some kind of stole or wrap over her street clothes. We all shut up.

"Sigma Alpha Xi invites Ashley Adams to join our circle."

Ashley, a blond girl with a California tan, looked sud- denly intimidated, and I wondered if she didn't have some Spidey Sense after all. She wiped her palms on her jeans, took the older girl's offered hand, and followed her into the room as another active member appeared in the doorway.

"Sigma Alpha Xi invites Kaylee Carson to join our cir- cle." A dark-haired girl with a ballerina's build went in ea- gerly.

They continued alphabetically, until only Holly and I were left. Then Jenna appeared, a crimson stole hanging, Roman senator�fashion, over her elbows. "Sigma Alpha Xi invites Magdalena Quinn to join our circle."

My full name was on my school records, though I'd made it clear I preferred Maggie. We were too careless with names in modern culture, and I wasn't just talking about identity theft. Names have power, and calling things by their proper names can evoke it, or diminish it. Why else don't we call private body parts by their anatomical terms? I followed Jenna into the chapter room, which had been transformed once again. The lights were dim; the air was cool, almost clammy on my bare arms. The rug had been rolled back, and inlaid on the hardwood floor was a spiral, like a nautilus shell or a galaxy.

Nothing in the universe is truly random.

Jenna led me inward along the loop, and I joined the ring of pledges in the center. Holly completed our group, and the doors closed.

At the north end of the room stood Victoria Abbott. Was it normal for an alumnae adviser to always be around? Something about her presence struck a wrong note with me.

In front of her was a cloth-covered table with several items on it: an oil lamp--think Aladdin and the genie--and an enormous book. Gutenberg Bible enormous, and possi- bly that old. A spiral of fragrant smoke rose from a small sil- ver bowl--incense, exotic and spicy, making my head feel stuffy and strange.

Victoria spoke, in a soft but carrying voice. "We move through life in a series of patterns: family, friends, school classes and clubs."

One Sigma handed each pledge an unlit white candle as the alumna continued. "Today you will form the first of the new patterns in your life in Sigma Alpha Xi: your pledge class, a circle of sisterhood.

"Later you'll make new patterns as you get a big sister, find roommates, take offices. All of these will mean new roles, new positions in the design."