In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead
Chapter 14
January, sophomore year
Over time, I’d learned there were other girls like me—Kappas who were unhappy being second-best. No girl ever said it out loud, but still, we found each other. Our first opportunity to dethrone Chi Omega came rush, sophomore year. We poured our hearts and souls into it—hours of researching freshman girls on Facebook, buying them alcohol, holding secret rush parties in our dorms, slipping into forbidden conversations in line for frat bathrooms. We did everything we weren’t supposed to do.
I’d also learned that sometimes, the space between what you were and weren’t supposed to do was one of those messy gray areas. Like senior year of high school, when I was neck and neck with Madison Davies for salutatorian. Madison, with her perfect, corkscrew curls and hottest-girl status, was also smart, much to my dismay. The class ranking came down to winter finals. Whatever position we held at the end of fall semester was what we’d report to colleges. What I’d send off to Harvard.
It was the last exam on the last day before winter break. We were in the library, which had been cordoned off for senior tests. Over the course of ninety minutes, the other students had sighed, packed their pencils, and turned in their tests. Madison and I were the only two left, using every last minute. Finally, she stood up, shuffled her pages, and gave me a smile—not a full smirk, but a knowing look, like a smirk in church clothes.
In her cloud of self-satisfaction, she didn’t notice the test page that slipped out of her pile and onto the floor, sliding under the proctor’s desk. Instead of stooping to collect it, she handed her test to the proctor and flounced out the door.
I bubbled my last circle and gathered my papers carefully, rising and walking to the proctor, who reached out to accept my test. I hesitated. She raised an eyebrow.
I glanced down at the corner of Madison’s missing test page, the small triangle of white sticking out from under the desk like a flag of surrender.
Then I smiled and handed the proctor my test.
She wished me a good winter break, settled my papers in her bag, and hummed on her way out. I tracked her silently down the hall until she disappeared.
I became salutatorian.
It was so easy—that’s what I thought when I looked back. It couldn’t have been simpler: spot the paper. Give the proctor that wide, ingratiating smile, like everything was normal. And then do nothing. Stay quiet. So little effort, such maximum effect. Doing nothing was comfortable, like slipping into an old, warm robe.
The other thing I thought when I looked back: how pathetic that I had to fight for second place.
But the competition with Chi O wasn’t for second. It was for first. Best. And, if I was being honest, it was for revenge.
Caro teased me about how intensely I rushed sophomore year. I suspected she was jealous of the time I spent with other girls, the ones who cared as much as I did. Caro was like that—always trying to stay glued at the hip, resenting any time we spent with people outside the East House Seven. I’d noticed she’d do anything—really, anything, even go watch Frankie’s football practice—to keep from being alone. Sometimes, when I stopped to think about it, I felt bad for dating Mint and leaving Caro behind, just like Heather did with Jack.
But other times I needed space. Sophomore rush was one of them.
The holy grail of freshman girls was Amber Van Swann. She was rich, beautiful, perfectly dressed, and dating a senior Phi Delt. The number one recruit on campus. I wanted her so bad I could taste it, and I knew—because I was friends with Heather—that the Chi Os were hungry for her, too. Heather had instituted a no-talking-about-rush rule to keep things friendly, but still. I knew.
Then the night before Bid Day came—the night we got our list of pledges. And despite how hard we’d tried, Amber Van Swann wasn’t on it. She’d chosen Chi O. Standing in Kappa’s front lawn on Bid Day, my friends and I watched her run to the Chi O porch and get swallowed up by screaming, hugging girls. In the center of the mayhem were Courtney and Heather, wearing matching gold foil crowns and pink boas.
Stop punching down.
I stood there and imagined ripping the crowns from their heads, my hand arcing through the air, seizing the pointed tips, jerking their blond hair out, collateral damage. I shivered and blinked the picture away, turning to my friend Kristin, who hated second place as much as I did.
She looked at me and said, in a voice with zero inflection, “Amber Van Swann made a sex tape.”
I stared, but only for a beat. “Show me.”
That night, three of us sat in Kristin’s dorm room, gathered around her desktop computer—me, Kristin, and Caro, who’d insisted on following me. Kristin pulled up a video, grainy at first, then very, very clear. Amber Van Swann and her Phi Delt boyfriend, going at it. Loudly.
“How did you get this?” Caro asked, once the video ended and she’d uncovered her eyes.
Kristin shrugged. “Amber sent it to her boyfriend, and he sent it to a Phi Delt I hooked up with last weekend. He showed me as a joke, and I asked for it. Simple.”
“That’s terrible,” Caro said.
“It really is,” I agreed. “You have to be so careful what you film nowadays. What are you thinking, Kristin?”
“It’s pretty obvious,” Kristin said. “We send it anonymously to JuicyCampus.”
“What?” Caro sputtered. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“Good question.” I squinted at Kristin. “She’s eighteen, so it’s not child porn, but are there any other laws?”
“In some states. But not North Carolina.”
“Hmm.” I tapped my chin.
Caro looked back and forth between Kristin and me, her eyebrows lifting higher than I’d ever seen them go. “For the love of all that is holy, do not tell me you’re actually considering this. What we should do is track down every copy of the video and delete them. That’s girl code.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Was it girl code for Amber to string me along so I’d buy her tickets to the Nelly Furtado concert and a whole semester’s worth of alcohol?” On a credit card I couldn’t afford, I added silently. “Is it girl code for Courtney to throw herself at Mint every time she thinks I’m not looking?”
Caro turned pink. So she’d noticed.
“Or, sorry—you know I love her—but for Heather to keep casually mentioning that the last five Phi Delt Sweethearts have been Chi Os, when she knows we all want it? Is that girl code?”
Kristin snorted. “Or what about Courtney telling Emma Davis she needs to lose weight to get a boyfriend, when Emma has a thyroid problem and Courtney’s only skinny ’cause she takes secret diet pills her mom buys from China?”
“None of those things are good,” Caro cried. “Especially Courtney’s pills. Those things are basically speed and they make her crazy and way too thin. It’s sad her mom buys them for her. But releasing some poor freshman’s sex tape to get back at the Chi Os is worse.” She turned the full force of the Caroline Rodriguez guilt stare on me. “Please tell me you recognize that. You’re going all Lady Macbeth, and it’s freaking me out.”
Outside Kristin’s window, the sun began to break through the steel-gray sky, warming the half inch of snow on the ground. A lone bird trilled.
I sighed. “Caro’s right. It’s wrong. And we could get caught. Sorry, K.”
Kristin only shrugged.
“Thank God,” Caro said, dropping her head in her hands.
She and I went back to our dorm room, made popcorn, and watched Felicity. Two days later, Amber Van Swann’s sex tape was sent from an anonymous number to a handful of fraternity brothers, who passed it to their friends, who passed it to theirs, and within a week the whole school had it.
Amber was destroyed. She wouldn’t leave her room. Her parents threatened to sue the school, but there was nothing the administration could really do, and Amber refused to let her parents go after her boyfriend, the likeliest source of the leak. She transferred out of Duquette before the semester was up, and for months—several glorious months—the whole campus called Chi Os the sex-tape girls. Heather was furious. Courtney refused to say Amber’s name out loud.
A light dimmed in Caro. For a while, she didn’t want to go out, didn’t want to binge nineties shows, studied alone at the library. But for all her talk about right and wrong, she never once insisted we go to the chancellor with what we knew.
I was horrified, obviously. But the day it leaked, my first thought—I couldn’t help it—was that sometimes, you really didn’t have to lift a finger to get exactly what you wanted. Sometimes, all you had to do was sit back and do nothing, and it was just that easy.
Of course, I banished the thought.