And the older girls were cooking up something involving nudity, no doubt, for the Sigma pledges too. The Tri-Delts had done a nude run through the library (with all the frats tipped off, in order to line the parade route and make catcalls) so the Sigmas had to top that.
Jerilyn was shy but she had resigned herself to public nudity—it came with the territory with pledge stunts, and she didn’t think she looked so bad. She just wanted to make sure it wasn’t videotaped, and of course, wouldn’t you know, that was the very nature of what was being talked about.
The pledge director, Marlie, laid out a potential plan: “It’s called SororitySleaze.com. They pay ten thousand dollars—ten K—for amateur girl-on-girl action. If we made and sent in, say, three videos and they accepted them, that would be thirty thousand dollars! That would get the whole house to Ocho Rios, right?”
There was affirmative squealing—oh my God—Jamaica!
“Uh, aren’t you worried,” one pledge asked timidly, “that my—your dad or brothers will see these things?”
“Ten thousand dollars—you’re not listening. All the new pledges just have to do it! You’re out if you don’t help us get this cash! In these scenes, everyone sits around a dorm room or the sorority living room and everyone’s bored and horny…”
Parker: “Just like real life!”
“Yeah, and so someone says they’re, like, so horny they could do a girl and the other girls go oooh gross, but then one by one they start kissing, then playing truth or dare…”
Kidge: “They should have seen my junior-high slumber parties. They’d be writing me a check for ten million.”
“Shit, why do the pledges get to have all the fun?” said Brittanie, leaning in too close to Marlie, flicking her tongue as if she might commence girl-on-girl action right here.
Jerilyn remembered some materials they handed out at the registration for rush; it clearly stated that if any of the initiation activities made you uncomfortable or violated your sense of right and wrong, then you were to tell the house president about it, and if you didn’t get satisfaction, then you could approach someone on the Pan-Hellenic Council, but if you went that far to rat them out, surely it would compromise your being accepted. Jerilyn exhaled heavily: get real, she told herself, you’d be finished … or they might have to let you in, but never include you in things, never really befriend you.
She would have a private word with Corinne, their chapter president.
* * *
Joey D’s many-times-removed cousin Ryan met them at the Sheep Research Center and hopped into the back of the van, directing them to a parking place near the animal pens. Ryan was a thickset country boy, dark gold frizzy hair stuffed under a farmer’s cap; he scratched continually at his goatee, smoothing the beard to a point. Ryan led Joey D, Skip, and Justin to a low-lying brick building with classrooms on the first floor, and animal pens in the basement.
“Hold it,” Ryan said on the stairs, fairly certain any involvement with his cousin was trouble. “We’ll go in the stall, you can take your pictures, and then we got to go.”
Skip said, “Yeah, we really appreciate it.”
Justin tried to assure Ryan that they weren’t going to do anything weird with the sheep, just a photo.
Ryan: “I don’t need or want to know what you’re doing—I can imagine.”
Joey D: “Oh yeah, cuz? Just what is it you can imagine?”
“Some frat boy shit. You pretending to screw the sheep or something for some dumb initiation.”
Joey D was getting hot, but he couldn’t blow the arrangement this close to completion.
“Heck,” Ryan went on, “I’d do the sheep before some of y’all’s sorority girls. Probably far fewer venereal diseases.”
“Just let us see the sheep,” Joey D said, barely audible.
Ryan used his key to open the basement door between the stairway and the sheep pens. There was a clean hallway with twelve sheep pens in a row against one wall. Third one down was Ryan’s pen; a clipboard chart was hung on a hook showing feedings and shearings. A removable cardstock label declared this was the pen of
FURBALL
.
Ryan: “Now take your picture and then get gone. We’re already breaking a hundred rules being here.”
Joey D now saw the difficulty of escaping with Furball. “Uh, could you give us some privacy?”
Ryan stared at them. “You really gonna screw my sheep?”
Skip Baylor cleared his throat. “It’s supposed to be an embarrassing photo. Like you said, a fraternity initiation stunt. You know, our mascot at Carolina is Rameses, a big, um, sheep.”
Ryan mumbled, “Your mascot is a horned Dorset, this is a polled Dorset. Does that matter?”
“Sheep’s a fucking sheep,” said Joey D. “No offense.”
Ryan frowned, then turned and walked to the stairwell … before turning back. “But none of y’all are pledges. So who exactly is being initiated?”
Joey D smiled. “Skip here. He was sick last year when he pledged so we don’t want anybody missing out on the sheep-photo fun.”
Ryan frowned again. “Furball is my—and about five other people’s—senior project, Joseph. Nothing better happen to her or I can promise you a righteous shitstorm of biblical retribution. Can’t y’all just drink each other’s piss or spank each other in wet underwear or the usual stuff?”
Skip and Justin hunkered down, waiting for the explosive Joey D response, but their Northern brother remained all smiles. “If you just give us ten minutes or so, Ryan. C’mon Skip, down with the pants…”
Ryan crossed his arms. Skip, smiling weakly, began to undo his belt.
“What?” Joey D asked his cousin. “You wanna see him in his underwear?”
Ryan narrowed his eyes to a squint then left them to it. “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he mumbled. “Try not to give my sheep genital herpes.”
After Ryan was out of earshot, Skip whispered, “We’re never going to get her out of here—”
“We’ll take her out that door. Grab her by the collar.” Joey D headed to the emergency exit, which promised loud fire alarms if opened.
Justin pushed and Skip pulled on the collar, but Furball wasn’t budging.
Joey D told Justin to run back to the parking lot and bring the van around to the emergency door; if he sees Ryan tell him, Joey said, “that you need some fresh air.”
Skip had an idea. He got a handful of the green feed pellets from the pen’s trough and tried to lure Furball toward the emergency door. Furball happily ate what was held out to her. “It tickles,” Skip giggled, as Furball grazed from his palm. “I wish you could get a picture of this! Joey, look! She’s eating from my hand!”
“Yeah, it’s an Animal Planet moment right there—look, I’m all teary.”
Joey D’s cell phone rang; it was Ryan. “Y’all about done with your unnatural acts?”
“Two more pictures, thanks!” Joey D sang out, while thrusting his middle finger at the phone.
“I don’t wanna be washing y’all’s bodily fluids out of the wool tomorrow.”
“Hey Ryan, fuck you, you know? I ask for a simple favor, cousin to cousin—”
“Yeah, like that simple favor I asked for, that I come over to Chapel Hill for one little party? And you told me—what was it?—the girls would smell the barnyard on me.”
“Hey, cuz, that’s true, isn’t it?” He hung up on Ryan.
There was the honk of the Suburban from outside. Furball started bleating, barely allowing herself to be dragged, trotters skittering on the smooth industrial floor. They came to the emergency door with its dire red warnings. Joey with one hand banged the emergency exit panel and held Furball’s collar tight with the other.
Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop
… Now that’s a really loud alarm, Skip thought.
“All right,” Joey D cried out, wrestling with the back half of the animal, “you bag of sheepshit, you’re coming to a party in Chapel Hill, okay? That’s a good girl…”
Justin jumped down from the driver’s seat to help, his mom’s van idling in position with its tailgate down, ready for loading. “I scraped the exhaust pipe,” he whined, rubbing the scratch with a licked finger. “I backed it up over the curb onto the sidewalk here—oh shit, you can really see this scrape. What is my mom gonna say?”
Joey D screamed in profanities violent and volcanic that Justin and Skip should participate more helpfully in getting the sheep into the back of the van.
Ryan arrived in time to see the emergency door ajar to the outside; he staggered back to the pen … no Furball. He ran through the emergency door in time to observe the van, tires spinning in the grass, pull away, divotting up mud, and speeding directly into a metal pole atop which was a purple martin birdhouse. The pole swayed and the birdhouse came loose and landed with a smash onto the windshield, shattering both objects … The van then backed up quickly, straight into the fenced outdoor daytime enclosure, putting out a taillight, before speeding away … but not back toward the highway but rather deeper into the meadow, bouncing out of sight with a spiraling-free hubcap catching a gleam from the streetlight before the van disappeared.
Ryan squeezed his cell phone … then hesitated.
He had let them in the building, he had let them in the sheep pens. He would surely get in trouble with the rest of them if he called the campus police. He called his cousin’s cell, but Joey D didn’t pick up so Ryan left a message:
“Of course, I’m gonna beat your smug-Carolina-bastard face in. That goes without saying. My friends and I will be at your gayboy frat house in an hour and I want my sheep back.”
* * *
Jerilyn nervously tailed along behind Corinne, the president, hoping to speak to her alone. It was eight
P.M.
and they were due to arrive at the Zipperhaus around nine. Corinne was in high makeup, formfitting designer jeans and a floppy silken top with a plunging neckline that would have revealed all, had she bent forward. Corinne explained that this was the first full-on party of the year and it was a tradition the Sigma Kappa Nus would be in super-slut mode, flash a little bosom, laugh, flirt, and then get out “at maximum tease,” right as the boys were panting and desperate. “This is the time for you new girls to show your wares,” Corinne chirped. “If they want you, then we want you!”
Some of the older sisters were chiding the pledges on looking like Library Science majors. Jerilyn figured she didn’t have one dress in her entire closet that was right for this sort of gathering. She settled for her tightest jeans—not so much tight in a designer way as they were outgrown from high school—and a midriff-baring top … But anyway, she had to talk to Corinne. She thought she finally had her alone when there was a knock at the door.
“God, what now?” Corinne said.
One of the workmen who had been digging up the front yard throughout the day was standing on the Sigmahouse porch.
“Yes?” Corinne hissed, as the older man in the blue workman’s clothes towered before her. “If you’re trying to get a free peek at all the girls, fella, I’ll call your boss and have a few words.”
“I am my boss,” said the man, “and we can talk about the plumbing situation here or inside.”
Corinne pursed her lips and stepped out. Jerilyn stood in the doorway, sort of curious. Now the smell of sewage was everywhere. “I’m gagging,” Corinne said, her neck pulsing. “God, how could you guys do this to us? We’re trying to convince thirty young ladies to call this house home and every day they have to walk through this torn-up front yard and the smell of septic tanks and shit everywhere! I thought this was going to be done two weeks ago!”
“Miss, you need everything replaced,” the man said somberly.
“Oh what a fucking shakedown. You dig everything up and now we have to pay big money to get our yard back to normal.”
“I’m telling you what every plumber in town would tell you. You have got blockages in three pipes and the septic is not breaking down the waste matter.”
“For God’s sake, just fix it, fix it already!”
“You have to…” The man, who could be anybody’s grandfather, looked concerned, perhaps for the plumbing, not so much for the girls. “You have to … You have to chew your food, miss. Get the girls to digest their food. You can’t just swallow it for a little while and throw it up into the toilet. It—”
“Look, we’ll do in our toilets whatever we want to do in our toilets—they’re our toilets!”
“Just telling you what the problem is, miss.”
“Fix it, whatever the bill is, then give it to me, and I promise you, Mister … Mister Old Plumber Guy, that the Greeks in Chapel Hill will boycott you and I will see to it that you will never have another bit of business from any sorority in this town.”
Corinne stormed away, pushing past Jerilyn.
The man returned to his van and Jerilyn stood out on the porch for a moment and gazed across the street to Thetahouse, having some kind of do tonight. A small limousine pulled up in front and six men and six women got out, all dressed in formal wear, beautiful. Jerilyn watched a man in a dinner jacket put an arm around the lower back of his date, and escort her lovingly up the walk. Jerilyn was already feeling chilly in her skintight jeans and bikini top.
Layla appeared beside her on the porch. “They think they can see my tits through this top but they can’t … see?” Layla was exhibiting herself under the porchlight. Her gauzy Kleenex-thin skirt barely made it over her privates. She had Carolina Blue pumps that added three inches to her height. “Want to feel good?” she asked, and Jerilyn understood there was more coke to be sniffed on some surface somewhere inside.
“I like feeling good,” she said, following her friend.
* * *
Five of the pledges, wearing only a jockstrap, were marched into the television room, all dark except for the TV, tuned to a static channel and muted.
Cory and Kevin bade them stand at attention against the wall. The boy christened Smegma (their pledge names were written on their foreheads in permanent marker) was shivering. “The Pledgemaster will be here shortly,” Cory said gravely.
Kevin added, “You must do as he says or you’ll never be a Zipperman.”
The pledge christened Scrotum mumbled, “Better not be any gay stuff…” There were frats that filmed their hazing rituals—unending hours of nudity and homoerotic dares and things inserted places—and then sold the videos to hazehim.com—again, for a bit of spring break money.