Childhood really lasts through college, doesn’t it? Sure it’s in its waning days, but the world still seems as bright as a new penny: hopeful and huge. My four years in this sorority were the last incubation period, my final cozy womb until I burst out, ready to take on the world. And if I had partially stayed in that Delta Beta cocoon by becoming a semi-permanent Sisterhood Mentor, well, who would blame me? It was fun. And happy. Except when people died at Chapter meeting. That part was kind of a bummer.
I headed downstairs to the kitchen to get a drink of water. I used the back stairs where every square inch of wall was covered with Delta Beta history. I didn’t think anything had changed in fifty years, much less ten. I pushed open the door to the kitchen and there was movement in the dark. With a jump and a squeal, I slapped at the wall and turned on the lights. A young college-aged man in khaki shorts and an untucked polo shirt was just as startled as me when I screamed. He held his hands up. ‘I’m sorry! I’m just finishing up!’
I put a hand to my chest, where I found my racing heart drumming a tattoo. ‘Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?’
Men were only allowed in the public areas of the first floor of the sorority house between the hours of eight am and eight pm. And they were strictly forbidden in the chapter room. It was inviolable Delta Beta law.
‘I’m the house brother,’ he said nervously. ‘Hunter Curtis.’
Well, that explained it. A house brother was a young man, generally a fraternity member, who was hired to do light housework and/or heavy lifting around a sorority house. It was usually someone who many of the sorority members considered a friend or even a little brother and there were strict rules about his conduct in the house. Hunter looked trustworthy enough, with friendly brown eyes, sun-streaked brown hair and worn-in Sperrys.
‘What are you doing here? It’s after midnight,’ I asked again, this time with the crazy turned down.
‘With the police here, I couldn’t finish sweeping up after dinner. So I came back to make sure it was all ready for the morning.’
I relaxed a little bit. ‘I appreciate your hard work, but you really shouldn’t be here this late.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He seemed like a nice young man, just doing his job.
‘We’ll let it go this time.’
‘Ok, Miss …?’
Where were my manners? ‘Margot Blythe,’ I said, reaching out to shake his head. ‘I’m the temporary Chapter Advisor.’
Hunter’s expression altered when he heard that. Like I said, respect changed people.
I locked up after Hunter left via the kitchen door and padded through the halls with my cup of water until I found what I was looking for: four framed pictures, hung chronologically. The chapter composite pictures, compiled each school year, featured portraits of each sister, memorialising their youth and beauty for all time. The pictures were alphabetical and thanks to my last name, I was near the top for my sophomore, junior and senior years. I went back to my freshman year. Here, I was closer to the middle, as pledges were placed after the active members.
Written in calligraphy, my name was under a portrait of a girl I barely recognised. Fresh from having my braces removed the summer before college, I sure liked to show off all those straight, pearly teeth. My natural brown hair was thick and virgin, free of dyes. One of only two brunette pledges that year, I knew what it was like to be a minority.
As the composites went on, my hair lightened as more and more highlights were magically added by the sun. My hair was almost all brown again now. Traveling as much as I did, I didn’t have time for all the upkeep that a good head of highlights required. The freshman in the picture had hated her full cheeks. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I appreciated what a little baby fat could do to a face.
Self-consciously, I brushed thick bangs off my face. Six months ago, I had been talked into bangs with a picture of Zooey Deschanel distracting me. Zooey Deschanel was a better woman than I. It took me three weeks before I decided to grow them out. Now they just looked like an awkward brown flap at a strange length. They were just long enough to flip behind my ears, where they would stay for about three seconds before slipping out again.
I placed my hand on the faces of my sisters, too, wishing them well, wherever they were. I reached my big sister’s portrait, beautiful and self-assured as always. It would be fun to get to hang with Amanda while I was in Sutton again.
Still not sleepy, I had another pilgrimage to make. I tiptoed up to the third floor. There were fewer bedrooms up here and most girls didn’t like to carry all their shoes all the way to the third floor. It was popular with the older sisters and the really studious ones who liked the quiet. Needless to say, I had lived on the second floor. I tried the door handle at the end of the hall. Luckily, it was open.
The room was nearly pitch black. There were no emergency lights in here, as it was basically a floored-in attic space where the chapter stored rush props and the random detritus of college women. I was sure, if I turned on a light, I could find enough supplies to survive on a desert island. I walked slowly, keeping my hands out in front of me, feeling for furniture or boxes. I stubbed my toe almost immediately, but then I saw the silvery light coming in through a window.
Sorority row sat on the south side of campus, the sorority houses lined up like proud Rockettes on a rise that wasn’t apparent from the street until you were up here, on the third floor looking over the edge of campus, the town beyond and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the far distance. I don’t remember when I discovered the view from here, but I would escape to this little nook on the days when things got too loud, too dramatic, too much to deal with on the floors below. The town of Sutton looked like a Norman Rockwell dream, all red brick and straight edges with elm-lined streets. Everything made sense up here. The world looked perfect. And it reminded me that perfection was possible. All you had to do was look at the world in the right way. Stay positive and you’d see the most amazing things. I was pretty sure that Mary Gerald Callahan or Leticia Baumgardner would agree.
The next morning was bright and clear as I made my way across the Sutton College campus. It was easily one of the prettiest college campuses I’d ever been to and in the last six years as Sisterhood Mentor, I’d been lucky enough to visit nearly forty institutions of higher learning across North America.
Brick buildings were built in the colonial style and wide tree-shaded pathways snaked through campus, in curves, rather than the straight-lined sidewalks found at most other campuses. During my undergraduate years, students would joke that the campus planners had been drunk when the sidewalks were built, but I preferred to think that they just liked taking their time when getting to their destination. Kind of like I do.
Even though I had a meeting scheduled for nine, I took a bit of extra time strolling on campus. Each building had a special place in my heart, each bend in the path was another precious memory to relive. There, at the Harrison-Peterson Cafeteria, was where I saw Kirby Jones cheating on me over a spaghetti lunch with an Epsilon Eta Chi sorority sister. And there, at the War Memorial fountain, was where my cute exchange student boyfriend Felipe told me he was married and had three kids back in Chile. And the ivy arbor next to the psychology building was where I found my ex-boyfriend macking down on a Beta Gamma Chi. College days were the best.
My destination this morning was the Commons, or the student centre, specifically the basement offices of the Panhellenic Council. Panhellenic is a nationwide quasi-governing organization of the national sororities, kind of like the United Nations. Similar to the United Nations, joining Panhellenic is political and voluntary and rule-making is toothless. The bite of the Panhellenic is more often found at the campus level and Sutton College was no exception.
In fact, almost fifteen years earlier, there had been a big kerfuffle between the Epsilon Eta Chis and the rest of the sororities when the Epsilon