Heart of Ice

Chapter Thirty-two

Jenna set her alarm clock for 5 A.M., jumped from the bed, turned on her laptop, and headed for the private bathroom of the Beta Zeta guest suite. Despite the thumping of the stairs a few times during the night, she was remarkably refreshed and ready to tackle the issues that awaited her. She was there to get the house back on track. The chapter was in trouble or she wouldn’t be there. Occasionally, once popular sororities found themselves in a state of decline. One of the women in the national office told Jenna during her training that the decline experienced by a formerly top-tier house was sometimes due to the trivial.

“Fashion, dear. Dark-dyed jeans work today, but acid-washed or lighter colored jeans make those of us who know better want to scream,” said the woman, an attractive redhead with obvious extensions and green-tinted contacts. “We have a couple of, shall I say, problem houses. We started on that path and should have nipped it in the bud right away. But we didn’t and now we pay for it. The girls were nice enough, but they didn’t attract the correct kind of pledges and the spiral started.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Jenna said. “At Cascade, we have a house that no one calls by its proper name because a couple of the girls two years ago were on the chunky side.”

The woman talking from behind her mahogany desk nodded. “That’s right. That would be Ate-a-Pie, right?”

Jenna smiled a little nervously. It seemed peculiar that this fifty-something-year-old would know something like that. “Yes, Beta Pi.”

“We have to keep our chapters up to par, beyond par, really. As a national consultant, your job will be to be our eyes and ears. You’ll be the keeper of our ideals and expectations. You’re the one we’ve hired to stop the spiral and keep the quality of our southern region as it should be. No detail is too small. The way the girls dress. The GPA. The kinds of cars in the parking lot. All of it adds up to our Beta Zeta image.”

Jenna understood, though she felt the “keeper of our ideals” comment was not only stupid, impossible to do. She didn’t say so, but she knew the real reason was to keep the chapter dues flowing. A dying house is a cash drain. For all the talk about sisterhood, the Beta Zeta was a big business, too.

Remember, she told herself, this job is only temporary. Maybe when I’m a lawyer I can help some “chunky” girl sue a sorority.

Jenna looked around the guest suite and went into the bathroom. It was clear that the bathroom needed updating. It still had the orange-and-green daisy appliqués of almost forty years ago. It also had an accent wall covered by a mod print by a designer named Vera.

It sure wasn’t Vera Wang. Just Vera.

As she let the water run over her, she picked at one of the edges of a daisy decal.

This could come off pretty easily, she thought, resisting the urge to remove it. God knew these girls needed help, but she was not there to help with their décor. She was there to save them from probation and the revocation of their status as a BZ sorority.

As she laid out her clothes for the next day—a “snappy professional” look consisting of a fitted pink blouse and black wool skirt, J. Crew—she replayed the conversation she had with Sheraton Wilkes before she went to bed.

“Of course,” Jenna had said, “you know that what we said is between us.”

“Yes, sister to sister.”

“That’s right. But not sister to sisters, if you get what I’m saying.”

“I can’t tell Midori?”

Jenna shook her head slowly and deliberately. “No. That’s the way it’s done. Nationals sent me to save you from being drop-kicked out of the system. It would be absolutely demoralizing if your girls knew that.”

“But wouldn’t they work harder if, well, they knew we were bottom-tier?”

“We’ve been doing this a long time. You aren’t the first to need a nudge in the right direction. If your girls knew, some—and maybe even the strongest girls—would leave. And we can’t have that.”

Sheraton seemed confused. “But they’ve taken the pledge. They can’t leave.”

“I like your attitude,” Jenna said, unsure if the girl standing in front of her was naive or a dream come true.

Sheraton smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

Must be naive.

Jenna ended the conversation reminding Sheraton that she’d have to be ready at 7:30.

“The day will be long,” she said, “but I think we can do it. Yes, we can!”

She rolled her eyes at the thought of her own inane words. She knew that she was doing the sorority gig to make money for law school, but it seemed pretty tasteless. If the BZ organization was in trouble, it wasn’t necessarily because its girls were not up to par. The whole organization needed to be Vera Wanged.

Jenna answered a knock on the door. It was Sheraton, dressed to the nines, holding a cup of coffee.

“Mocha, extra hot, extra shot,” she said, with a voice that Jenna could only describe as a grating chirp. “Just like you like it.”

Jenna looked surprised. “Thank you. How did you know?”

The girl beamed. “I Facebooked you!”

Jenna smiled at her. “Oh, I’ll have to add you as a friend.”

“Invite already sent,” Sheraton said, beaming. “Just log on and we’ll be able to stay in touch all the time.”

“Oh-my-God,” Jenna said, letting her vernacular drift not to Southern-fried, but to the kind of Valley-speak that still seemed to be the dialect favored by the young, blond, and educationally disinterested. “That’s awesome.”

She motioned Sheraton to sit on the daybed while they went over the PowerPoint presentation that the national office had provided. The first slide with its smiley-face art trumpeted the purpose of the meeting

IN IT TO WIN IT: RECRUITMENT MADE EASY.

“This looks amazing,” Sheraton said. “Very high-tech. Do you want me to make it go to the next slide? I’m a communication major.”

“I thought you said fashion merchandising yesterday.”

Sheraton made a face. “I did. But I’m not sure. I might go to medical school. I just want to help people.”

Jenna wondered for a fleeting moment how fashion merchandising fit into the category of “helping” people.

“Wonderful,” she said.

Jenna refocused on the images of the pretty and perfect—and a few of the less so for diversity’s sake—as they floated into view. The bullet points accompanying the images stressed sisterhood, the importance of a first impression, and how to ensure success when it comes to making sure the top girls pledge their sorority.

“I have to be honest with you,” she said turning to look directly at Sheraton. “This recruitment effort is crucial. We have to fill up every bed in this house. We have to ensure that we never have another incident like what happened last fall.”

Sheraton made a face.

Sad? Sorry? Regretful? Annoyed? It was hard to say.

“Oh, that. I guess that was pretty bad.”

That was, without room for argument, the understatement of the century.

Jenna knew the story well. Everyone did. It was the reason this particular BZ house was nominated by the university newspaper as the sorority as the “Girls Most Likely to…Do Anything!”

The previous September, the Beta Zeta girls hosted a cruise on the Little Tobacco River that ran lazily through town and into the corn and tobacco fields that made up most of the area’s agricultural economy. Such cruises were part of the BZ program—invite some potential sisters for fall recruitment, some cute frat boys, and maybe even a former valedictorian or two. Midori and the BZ social team ordered T-shirts silk-screened with the BZ logo, and the words “Cruisin’ for Love.”

The next day, the event was renamed “Boozin’ for Love.”

The sisters and their guests took a bus from Greek Row for the hour-long drive out to the launch for the cruise. Midori and Sheraton sensed trouble nearly from the outset. Two of the frat guys—handsome and hopped-up—brought a stash of vodka.

“No one can smell it. No one can tell we’ve been prefuncing,” one of the guys told some girls in the back of the bus.

That might have been good advice, if the girls hadn’t started so early and been so eager to have fun.

Misty or Missy Johnson—no one really knew her, or her name—was the first to start throwing up. The bus pulled off the highway in Bakersville and the rest of the girls who were drinking fell in line. A wave of vomit roiled through the back of the vehicle. In less then two minutes, the sympathy pukers started in.

The bus driver, a big barrel-chested fellow with an accent as deep as an oil well, ignored the entire scene. He had a job to do and if he didn’t get the busload to the river in time, he didn’t get paid. He cracked a window and kept driving. By the time he arrived, things had calmed down a bit and he could later feign no knowledge of the chaos of the drive.

But it got worse.

Once everyone got on board the boat, the booze continued to flow. The Diet Coke bottles—liter-sized—were spiked with rum. One of the potential recruits brought enough marijuana that she could have made one of those airplane travel pillows out of her stash.

Both Sheraton and Midori did their best to try to stop the debacle.

“Hey, you guys,” Sheraton said, in near-tears, “we need to get control of this situation.”

She was met by blank stares.

Midori steadied herself with her hands on her hips. “She means it!”

Again, no response.

The captain’s voice over the loudspeaker did, however, get the point across. “I’ll have no hanky-panky or drinking on my vessel. My crew will be watching your every move. You signed a waiver to come aboard and I’ll hold you to it. No drinking. No smoking—or you’re kicked off. Thank you.”

The thank-you was a bit odd, but the man made his point. For a time, it seemed that order was restored. The boat went down the river. The DJ played eighties music stalwarts like Bananarama and Tears for Fears, and the girls who weren’t drunk had a good enough time.

One had too good of a time.

Dressed in a quasi-sailor suit and tennis shoes, the woman in charge of the tortilla chips and salsa went back into the boat’s storage locker off the galley. Despite the rumble of the motor, she heard the kind of noises that belonged more in a motel room than on a boat.

“What’s going on here?” she asked once inside.

One of the BZs was on her knees, her bleached blond head down, in position while a frat boy with his brown eyes rolled back into his head moaned at her, “Don’t stop! Keep going! You’re doing good!”

“Enough!” the woman yelled at the two of them. The BZ snapped to, wiping her mouth. But the young man looked right at her.

“You next?” he asked.

“I’m going to tell the captain and you’re going to swim back to the dock.”

“Sure? In your dreams.”

Of course, there was no walking the plank. The kid zipped up his pants and thought he’d be able to disappear into the crowd. But he couldn’t. The lady in the sailor suit never forgot a face. The incident was written up and made its way into the annals of disastrous sorority social events.

The only saving grace for Sheraton and Midori was that they hadn’t been drinking and that they’d done their best to thwart disaster. The women at the national office gave them copies of a popular self-help book that came with a promise in its title: No One Will Ever Push Me Around…Again!

Although a communication major, Sheraton Wilkes was technologically challenged when it came to helping out with the presentation part of the chapter meeting. She had an excruciatingly difficult time advancing the PowerPoint slides. Jenna took over the remote clicker midway through the presentation.

“No worries, Sheraton. I’m a bit of a control freak anyway,” she said. The girls all laughed. Jenna, however, was disappointed. Part of the strategy from Nationals was to get the president involved in the presentation.

“If she clicks it, she’ll stick with it,” was the advice of the fifty-five-year-old sorority sister in the deep red suit and triple strand of pears. Real pearls, at that.

On the last slide, Jenna looked around the dining room at the girls who were about to be drafted into an army of representatives for a faltering chapter.

“Each of you holds a great power here,” she said. “We want you to succeed. We want you to be all that you can be.”

The girls stood and applauded. Jenna smiled, but she felt silly. She said the text as it was written, but it always felt a little over the top. Almost like it was an ad for the Army.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know you guys can do it. I know you guys are ready to make sure that next year is unforgettable.” She stopped and self-edited. “But not as unforgettable as last year, that’s for sure.”

The girls laughed. They got it.