Frat Girl. Kiley Roache

but don’t tell anyone. We don’t need a dirty Rush violation and neither do you. Keep it real—Jake (I’m the Rush chair always wearing a hat)

      Yes! One step closer to a bid and, in turn, securing my scholarship.

      I lock the door, then grab my laptop on my way to bed. From my desk, someone—and by someone I mean Leighton—could read over my shoulder if they opened the door. But when I sit on my bed I can position myself against the wall and gain some privacy.

      I open a private browsing session so nothing shows up in my history and go to the Stevenson website. I log in using my password and a verification code sent to my phone, and open the folder for my field journal entries.

      The journal was Madison Macey’s idea. The Stevenson people loved the personal experience part of my proposal, and they want a lot of my voice. What it’s like to piss in a bathroom that has urinals, how the guys eat, and so on. The color of the story, as they say. “The fluff” is what Price calls it.

      No Files Uploaded. Well, at least for now.

      Entry 1, I type.

      Entry 1: The fraternity Rush process seems wholly superficial. Perspective members compete for the attention of actives by “bonding” over objectifying women, whether it be ranking the school’s women’s sports teams on attractiveness or debating the virtues of Kim Kardashian’s rear end vs. Nicki Minaj’s.

      Potential New Members (PNMs) also recount their sexual exploits to impress the actives, who seem to value the number of women a PNM has slept with as a good indication of whether he will fit. The phenomenon of “Eskimo brothers”—a term used to describe two men who have had intercourse with the same woman based on quasi-historical misunderstandings of Inuit practices of polyamory by young men throughout the country—seems to be the pinnacle of this ranking system.

      Drinking to extreme levels is also valued, second only to sexual prowess.

      Sororities are often invited to these events and encouraged to speak to PNMs in a move that seems to associate interactions with these women as a possible benefit of membership. Rush posters often advertise sorority guests alongside food—e.g., the lovely ladies of KAD and sushi, or Pi Beta, steaks and cigars.

      An hour later, I submit my entry and close my computer.

       Chapter Seven

      “I don’t think I can do it.” I stare up at the rock wall, arching toward the ceiling.

      The sun is just beginning to set beyond the windows that make up the opposite wall, and it’s casting a pink-orange glow on the stone surface.

      People scramble up and down, hopping between footholds that seem way too far apart.

      “Nonsense,” Jackie says. She looks different without her glasses and hipster clothes, wearing athletic shorts and a tank instead. “You’re gonna be a natural. I can tell by looking at you.”

      I look at her and the biceps that seem almost comical on her petite frame. I turn back to the other climbers. Some are her teammates, using the same blue-and-gold gear she’s strapping herself into. Others, like me, have rented gear from the gym, but they’re all lean men with beards and women with remarkable arms—your classic granola-eating climber types.

      People who are actually naturals at this.

      “Have you seen me?” I turn and flex my nonexistent muscles.

      She laughs. “I’m serious, you think it’d be all about upper-body strength, like the big bodybuilder types would be the best. But petite girls are actually the most suited, because of their low center of gravity. You’ve got to have the right balance of flexibility and core strength, and traditional athletes don’t always have that.”

      “Hmm, a sport I actually have the possibility of being good at.”

      She smiles. “Exactly.”

      She explains the basics as she straps me into my harness. “Okay.” She pats me on the shoulder. “You are good to go.”

      By the time I’ve managed to get both feet off the ground, albeit only about a foot up, she’s strapped herself in and started scrambling up the wall like some sort of small forest creature.

      “C’mon, you can do it,” she yells down to me.

      I stumble my way toward the top. Jackie scales the entire thing and rappels back down before I make it halfway.

      She starts up for a second time and catches up to me at about the three-quarter point.

      “I’m stuck.” I readjust my feet by a few centimeters; they feel like they might go numb. My fingertips scream, sick of supporting so much of my body weight.

      “See that red one, at about your knee?” she says.

      I nod but don’t turn toward her, my eyes on the rocks.

      “That’s your next step. It’s kind of small, so you’re only going to be able to fit one foot, and you’re going to want to move on quickly.”

      My eyes dart from the red rock to my feet, then to the ground far below. “Shit. Maybe I should just rappel down.”

      “Nah, you’ve made it this far—no way this one will be hard for you.”

      Grunting, I lift my right foot to the tiny red rock. All my weight on my right toes, I push myself up and then grab higher rocks with my left hand, then my right. I scramble to get my feet onto two bigger rocks a bit above the rest.

      “Nice!” Jackie climbs up to my level.

      “You sound so excited. I thought you said that part was nothing.”

      “Are you kidding? That’s the hardest part of this course! Took me three tries to get past it.”

      I roll my eyes and keep moving.

      We both tap the ceiling before rappelling back down.

      “This is actually pretty fun, once you get past the part where you think you’re gonna die,” I say once my feet are back on the ground.

      “I know, right? It’s a pretty cool workout. A great place to think, you know? I like how metaphorical it is. Making progress, reaching higher.”

      “Yeah. I guess so.” I hadn’t really thought about it as something so...deep. It was just a sport, after all. “But you don’t actually go anywhere.”

      “That’s true. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.” She reaches down to adjust her harness. “Like, there are these Tibetan monks who make these amazing sand paintings, spend weeks with their backs bent over them, working in excruciating detail. And when they’re done, they wash them all away. That’s climbing—you have all this progress, you reach higher just long enough to take a breath, and then you come back down.”

      I took up at the wall, at the almost-gone sun, then back to her.

      “But that’s also life.” She places one foot on the wall, ready to go again. “You try so hard to live as much as you can, to grow and change and develop, and maybe inspire the same thing in the people around you, but you know that either way, you and everything you do and everyone you meet will be dust in the end.”

      She starts climbing again. I stand there for a minute, dumbfounded, before I follow her.

      I hate how snobby it makes me feel to say it, but I would never have had a conversation like that with the kids at my old school. They were plenty smart, but not in a daring way, in a get-good-grades-to-get-a-good-job way.

      Sure, they knew more when they left school than when they started, about the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, and the green light representing Gatsby’s desire, but they had the same opinions on politics and religion and life as they did freshman year and, for God’s sake, as their parents had before them.