Josie seemed to soften after it became clear that, although Shelly had uncovered a truth, she wasn’t going to make threats, or a scene.
Maybe Josie even seemed excited.
She was sitting at the edge of her seat now, leaning toward Shelly, moving her hands lightly through the air between them, explaining the finer points of hazing in sorority life. She was bouncing her knee a little, and although she didn’t look directly into Shelly’s eyes, she grazed Shelly’s face as she talked, letting her eyes linger on Shelly’s shoulder or earring for a split second before scouting the room around them again.
“We never do anything physically dangerous,” Josie said. “But you really can’t feel like a group, you know, without some rituals and traditions. And secrets. If it’s not at least a little dangerous, there’s no point in keeping it a secret, so—”
Could Josie simply be relieved that the truth had come out, and that Shelly seemed to have accepted it?
Josie was thrilled, Shelly realized, to be able to spill the secrets, to have a captive audience in Shelly. Because what could Shelly possibly do with any information she received from Josie now?
“I mean, it’s not hazing like they used to haze. We’ve heard all about that. The sisters used to cut their palms—I mean really slice them open until they were gushing blood—and stand naked in a circle around a candle and have these, like, mystical things happen or something that made them sisters. In the attic there are these black-and-white photos from the sixties or something, and there’s blood all over the place, and some naked guy with long hair playing the flute. Freaky.”
It seemed like the kind of thing that would have gone on in the sixties, Shelly thought. Josie was laughing.
“I wonder what happened if someone bled too much?” Shelly said, more to herself than to Josie. She was thinking of a story her ex-husband had told her about a girl he’d had to treat after something like that: some blood ritual between volleyball teammates. They’d sliced their inner arms, and the girl had managed to hit an artery. Shelly’s ex-husband had described it in such a way that she could still, twenty years later, see the imagined girl (red, white, and blue, wearing nothing but her Wildcats Varsity jacket), who died in the ER waiting room.
“I suppose they’d get help,” Josie said, seeming disinterested. What did she care? What were the sixties to her? “We’ve always got someone standing by, in case something goes wrong.”
Josie checked behind her shoulder, but there was nothing there except the wall. Still, it was clear she knew she was now headed toward forbidden territory, about to tell Shelly something she wasn’t supposed to tell.
“We’ve got this EMT. This paramedic guy. He belongs to us. He’s like everybody’s boyfriend or a mascot or something. We love him. We make him wear his uniform because it’s so cute! He sleeps in a room at the back of the house, and the sorority pays him to be there for the events, and to be on call so . . .” Josie drifted off, eyes seeming to go unfocused, moving down to some place between her own knees and the floor.
“What ‘events’?” Shelly asked.
“Well, there’s this thing. There’s a Spring Event and a Winter Event. You do it your second year—so, for me it’s coming up.” She giggled a little. “I’m scared shitless. Promise not to tell anyone?”
The absurdity of this seemed to occur to Josie even as she said it, and she continued before Shelly could have answered.
“We’re reborn. As sisters. You won’t believe this.”
Shelly raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Try me, but the thing she was having a hard time, at the moment, believing was that she’d ruined her career, tossed off her entire life, to go to bed with this chatty, banal, empty person, who was sitting across from her at Starbucks talking about her sorority as if she were the only person who’d ever been in one, as if the things that took place in it were of some kind of import in the wider world. Only a week ago, Shelly marveled as she looked at Josie Reilly’s pale, excited face, she had felt she would be willing to chop off a few digits if it meant another lazy afternoon in bed with this girl. She’d actually believed herself to be in love.
“It’s called the Raising. We keep a coffin in the basement,” Josie said, leaning forward, whispering so energetically that if anyone in Starbucks had the slightest interest, they could have heard her from four tables away. “And every second-year pledge gets put into it. They do this thing where—well, first everybody’s drunk off their ass, and then the girl who’s being raised sits on the floor, and you breathe in and out really fast for two minutes exactly, and another girl presses on your neck, your artery, and you’re out.
“They put you in the coffin, and when you come to—there you are, reborn. And your sisters are all holding candles.
“The pledges all wait upstairs because they won’t let you see the ceremony until you’re either being reborn or have already been reborn.
“It’s my turn in three weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Shelly said, but she was reacting not to the upcoming ordeal but to the wideness of Josie’s pupils. Her eyeballs—had Shelly ever noticed before how large they were? Certain cartoon characters came to mind: Minnie Mouse. Betty Boop.
“Can you believe it?” Josie asked.
“Yes,” Shelly said. “I mean, no.”
But of course she could believe it. It seemed almost laughably believable. Par for the course. Shelly would have thought that by now sororities might have come up with some truly new, shocking, and innovative ritual. This one hardly merited the term hazing. She had herself, in fact, participated in such passing-out rituals in junior high, in Valerie Kolorik’s rec room while her parents were at their country club. There’d been no coffin, of course, but only because they could never have located or afforded one. They’d have loved a coffin. Shelly could still remember the feeling of Valerie’s clammy hands on her neck after the two minutes of hyperventilation. Those small clammy hands were the last physical sensation she’d had before slipping into oblivion. When she awoke, the other girls were all sitting around her, laughing.
“Yeah,” Josie said, nodding at Shelly with such anxious energy that it occurred to her that the girl might actually be scared. “I mean,” she said, “it’s really just a game, but there have been times when sisters got hurt. So the EMT’s there, in case.”
She sincerely whispered this last part—no longer the stage whisper—and Shelly knew it was her own cue either to ask about the sisters who’d gotten hurt, or to express concern for Josie, but she couldn’t bring herself to do either. This, she thought, was its own kind of falling into oblivion—but, this time, the little hands around her neck were Josie’s, and Shelly knew she’d be feeling them there for the rest of her life.
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Josie said, her eyes narrowed to slits. A statement, not a question. “About the Events. I mean, it’s not really hazing, but if the Pan-Hellenic Council—”
“No,” Shelly said. “Of course not.”
“Thank you,” Josie said, but it was pure formality. “Especially after Nicole got killed, and all this bullshit with fucking Denise disappearing . . .”
“Denise?”
Josie waved her had and smirked. “Ran away or something. She was creepy. But people keep snooping around like we buried her in the back yard or something.”
It came back to Shelly from her research of the accident: the music school student who’d disappeared. “What happened to her?” Shelly asked.
“How would I know? But we can’t be blamed for psycho sisters running off. She should never have gotten in to OTT in the first place. She was the kind of trash that belongs in—” She stopped herself before naming Shelly’s sorority, and a ridiculous flush spread across Shelly’s chest. She blinked, and swallowed, and stood (chair legs scraping loudly and obscenely against the bare Starbucks floor), and said, trying to sound composed, “I should go now.”
Josie looked annoyed, and disappointed, as if she’d had more surprises in store, as if she were considering whether or not to let Shelly go—and they both knew that if Josie commanded her to sit back down, Shelly would have to, so she stayed where she was, standing before Josie Reilly, waiting to see if she would be dismissed, and Josie seemed to be considering this as she looked around the coffee shop, and then to the front door, where, it seemed, someone more interesting had just stepped in.
When Josie rose, Shelly saw her opportunity to say good-bye, and even found herself bowing a little, but Josie brushed past her, and said, “Sit down, would you? I have to say hello to someone, but I’ll be right back.”
What could Shelly do?
Slowly, but inexorably, she felt her weight, and the weight of Josie’s words, pull her into the chair as she sat back down.