I Was A Sorority Reject

I don’t know what went wrong. Things sounded so promising during my 30-second conversation with the head of Panhellenic. I remember feeling like I was in my own private infomercial about how Greek life could be mine for just three easy payments; I could have cared less if one of those payments was my soul. But my bubble of social expectations was quickly burst over a weekend that’s still branded in my mind like the Greek letters that no one ended up offering me.

I have to disclaim that I’m not usually one to jump into situations I know nothing about. I like to do my research beforehand and act surprised about things I’ve already found out from my own personal sources. And it’s not as if I didn’t try to do that, but those Greek Organizations like to keep things under wraps, what with their secret rituals and all. As for solid information, my best leads on sorority life came from an old lifetime movie; One that, come to think of it, ended up in a hazing-related murder. I guess I should have known better.

But my new friend Mari who I’d met during RA training was all gung-ho and all “Hey lets be sisters, sis,” and “We’re going to have boyfriends for sure, don’t you want a boyfriend,” and “You said you wanted to meet more people- what could be better than 60 new best girl friends?” What was I going to say; Thanks Mari, but I’d rather spend my Friday nights watching reruns of Square Pegs on Nick at Nite? Mari already seemed puzzled over my insatiable appetite for everything musical theatre, so even joking about the idea of not striving to be a college socialite didn’t seem like a good idea.

My other new friends were disappointing with their obvious disdain for sororities, interrogating Mari and I on why we wanted to sell our souls to wear Greek letters across our chests. With great enthusiasm, and what any therapist would quickly identify as a deep high-school social life wound, I would regurgitate everything I knew; Sisterhood! Philanthropy! …Boys! It was cliché, but those were some of my biggest goals for my first year away at college.

The other girls didn’t understand. They thought it was stupid. They thought they could spot a sorority girl from a mile away.

They told me I would change, and I assured them I most certainly would not. Our collective glimpse into the future might have looked similar; me in a pair of trendy, tastefully-ripped blue jeans and a pink sweatshirt with a few Greek letters across the front- my hair, long, straight and shiny as I stood happily in the middle of a crowd of girls. So what? What was so wrong with that picture? Granted, the other girls looked relatively similar to one another, but the people against this idea were one to talk- with their identical black converse Chucks. I sat through an endless amount of debate with these new friends, naively wondering when straight hair became a crime against humanity.

After signing up for Rush weekend, Mari and I, along with our friend Liz, spent a Friday evening at the mall in preparation of what (we were assured) would be a memorable weekend. None of us had the funds to be shopping, but you certainly wouldn’t want to be wearing the wrong thing when you met the girls who would be your best friends for the rest of your life. A slim packet of information with a lavender cover guided us through the weekend ahead and instructed us that we would need, namely, three somewhat trendy outfits; casual, dressy casual, and cocktail attire. Examples of what would be appropriate were modeled at the meeting we attended that night. As the mall began to close, my friends and I emerged with our arms full of bags from various, moderately priced merchandisers.

Back on campus, Mari locked her car door and the three of us went off to our respective dorms, reminding each other to meet at precisely 8:40 am the next morning. Check in was at 9:00 am on campus, but with our cute (painful) shoes we were unable to take the 20-minute walk from the dorms.

“Goodnight, Sisters” Mari called behind her as she hurried to her building where I knew she’d be trying on her outfits for the whole weekend before she went to sleep, because I’d be doing the same thing.

I slept well that night and happily reported to the parking lot the next morning, to meet my two friends to go off on our adventure toward a better social future. Mari and Liz were also looking fairly perky. We grabbed a spot and got out of the car for final inspections. Hair? Check. Make-up? Check. Clothes and shoes? Check, check. I’d say that we were all feeling pretty good about ourselves for fifteen paces or so, until we ran into our first mob of sorority hopefuls. There they were- half a dozen tall leggy blonde girls- exploring more shades of pink within their wardrobes than I knew existed- as they walked in two rows, giggling amongst themselves. It was like that scene in Village of the Damned, before the children become evil- where they’re just walking around in a line, not causing any trouble- but you still know something’s wrong from the way they look at you. Or in this case, the way they don’t look at you.

Mari, Liz and I stopped instinctually to watch the girls. Liz barely exhibited any signs of distress, but Mari and I were noticeably shaken by the first sign of the day that we didn’t really belong there. After a few moments of silently observing the crowd ahead of us, we stepped forward in the direction of the sign-in table where we parted to join our respective groups. I found another brunette on a bench and sat beside her until the rest of the group was called to assemble.

Within moments I found myself in the middle of a huddle wreaking of hair products and sugarless gum. Three girls stood in the center of the circle, posed like a modified Charlie’s Angels team. Jessica P had her cell phone in her hand to warn us girls to turn ours off. Jessica R held out a handful of the tickets we were to turn in each time we attended a session, and Melissa held a container of Altoids with the lid open so could venture into our first meeting with curiously strong minty breath.

Once this business ended, we were lined up and brought into our first room, a banquet hall, decorated with crepe paper and lavished with pictures of Alpha Phi sisters at every event from horseback riding to clubbing. As we entered the room in two straight lines, the sisters came out individually and one girl took each hopeful by the hand and dragged her across the room to an empty spot- all to the tune of some pop song.

The music faded out and the chattering around my Alpha Phi companion and I went from a whisper to a roar. I found myself face to face with Jeannie, a short, perky, recovering brunette. She smiled at me with her perfect teeth and started to talk about how great her experiences had been. She seemed particularly excited about Big and Little Sisters; Upon acceptance into the sorority, someone who a new sister had met and spent a lot of time with during Rush weekend would become her “big sis”. I imagined myself, a new Alpha Phi, with my new friend as my “big sis”. I pictured us smiling for a photo- her jumping on my back in a semi-candid moment and grinning as we pointing to our matching sweatshirts- hers reading “Bonnie’s Big Sis” and mine reading “Jeannie’s Little Sis”. Back in reality, Jeannie shook my hand and expressed how pleased she had been to meet me as a whistle blew and I got herded out of the room with the rest of the group.

Next up, the two lines were led into a smaller room, tightly packed with 50 girls dressed in the same straw-colored platform sandals, many in cowboy hats for some reason, and all wearing identical hot pink T-shirts reading Kappa Kappa Gamma. The same process occurred to get each hopeful girl a partner to talk to- they took us by the hand one by one and pulled us across the room- but first they subjected us to their rendition of “We Go Together” from Grease- which was more over-choreographed than the production I did of it in elementary school. We applauded dutifully as a girl wearing a hot pink cast over her broken foot pushed stop on a portable stereo and turned on an even trendier song than the one that had been playing in the background of the last room.

I ended up talking with a girl named Rachel with chunky blonde highlights in her overdyed hair. She wore it in a long ponytail and the whole thing bounced about every time she asked a question, or ever time she sounded like she was asking a question- which was every sentence.

“So, do you have a boyfriend?” she inquired right off the bat.

“No. Um…not right now,” I told her, immediately feeling like I had opened a test booklet and realized it was in the wrong language.

She talked about herself for a few minutes and finally eyed me up and down like she had just read my unwritten biography.

”So, are you really into school?” she asked, frowning.

I didn’t really know how to answer that question. I felt a little bit offended- I wanted to ask her if she realized we were at college and paying thousands of to get an education, studying to be proficient in our future careers. I guessed that meant, despite my completely unbraggable 3.0 GPA, that yes, I was considerably “into school”- particularly by Kappa Kappa Gamma standards.

“Well, I do okay” I told her. “Actually, I’m really into theatre.” She stared blankly so I added “acting” just to make sure we were still on the same page. She took me by the wrist and led me over to a blonde girl called Missy who talked to me about Kappa Kappa Gamma philanthropy as Rachel backed away slowly. I don’t think I impressed her- or maybe she was just going to look up “theatre” in the dictionary.

The next room was occupied to capacity with Phi Mu girls- four of whom lived on my floor. I thought maybe I’d get some brownie points from them- if your RA is also your sister, it might be slightly easier to get away with all of the stuff that would later go down in room 112. I quickly realized I was wrong as three of the four girls proceeded to snub me and the other waved at me dutifully as if I was her mother who had shown up to her school in curlers and a bathrobe.

I was overwhelmed by the lack of stature in this particular sorority- it seemed that they had the opposite sign that big roller coasters had in front of the entrance. “You must be this short to be a Phi Mu” or something- with the exception of a tall, skeletal girl who I watched with fascination. She spoke to me about the organization’s philanthropy but I didn’t hear her because I was too busy noticing how much she resembled an animated Tim Burton character.

Finally we were escorted out toward the lunchroom, where we prepared for the feast we felt entitled to after paying $30.00 for the weekend’s festivities. I found Mari and we finally made our way to the front of the line where we chose between a disgracefully small portion of fruit and yogurt and a grilled chicken filet on a bed of lettuce. There wasn’t much space so we found an empty spot outside, and leaning on a metal bar that felt warm from the sun, we exchanged tales of the first three sororities.

Mari had two that she felt excited about, but I still felt like I had walked into some parallel universe and I just wanted to find out the secret to having perfect straight hair and get the hell back to reality. But Mari nudged me in the arm and told me I hadn’t been to meet the Alpha Xi Delta girls; we had discussed this weeks earlier. We felt that learning about all six of the sororities was just a formality as we knew we were Alpha Xi Delta girls at heart. So I swallowed the last of my fruit salad and smoothed down my hair, which was gradually getting bigger from the heat.

“Let’s go, we have just enough time to touch up our makeup before we meet the next set of girls” I told my friend, to which she replied, “Now you’re thinking Greek!,” to which I amazingly did not barf up my 300-calorie lunch.

The next sorority had claimed the biggest room I’d been in that day and they seemed to have enough girls to fill it. Delta Zeta, they answered to, and they introduced themselves with a camp song gone bad. But the fact that nobody grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me allowed me to forgive the girls for a song that had to have been written way back in the day. A pleasant and professional looking girl approached me and led me toward a chair; serious brownie points were being earned- we didn’t have to stand, and she had natural chestnut brown hair.

A girl who I recognized from my Lit class perused the room with a tray extending from her right palm that held twenty tiny plastic glasses of water with lemon wedges. I sipped a glass of water and looked around expectantly to hear the same chatter as the other rooms, but my ears were met with a mellow tone of conversation. There were more Delta Zeta’s than there were hopefuls so I found myself surrounded by three girls with three entirely different hair colors- it was exciting.

After another glass and a half of ice water and a few more introductions, it was time to set out again into a room where instead of meeting seven or eight girls, I met one. Her name was Jane or Kim or something and God was she boring. She must have spent twenty minutes trying to pitch Delta Delta Delta to me, telling me how cool it was that it was new and that I’d be one of the founding sisters—actually, not even the founding, but the little sister of the founding sisters. I felt like I wasn’t getting it. I wanted to tell her that sounded about as exciting as being the first person to take a new untested vaccine, but instead I just smiled. If I was going to go Greek, I told myself, I was going to go Greek- I wasn’t going to go experimental Greek and jump into a sorority with only 20 girls, at least one of whom was excruciatingly boring.

Finally, after waiting all day…I waited again as the other girls were led into the last room until it was my turn for an Alpha Xi Delta girl to introduce herself to me. From the end of the line I watched each A-Xi-D girl as she greeted her “hopeful” with a smile. Finally it was my turn and Isabel, an approachable-looking Latina girl gently put out her right hand which I shook gently, but with conviction. I followed her across the room where we walked and talked, looking at various photos of the sisters at their formals and events.

I told Isabel that it was my fourth year in school, but that I’d be around for at least two years because of my double major. I asked about the organization’s philanthropy even though I’d already done research on it, and Isabel told me about their last event with zeal. I smiled the most comfortable and real smile of that day and told her I thought it sounded like they were doing a lot of good in our community. Then I caught the eye of a girl I knew in the sorority and she brought her “hopeful” over to join our conversation.

After a while we were interrupted and even though I had finally found an interesting dialogue, I was relieved to see the day coming to an end. Isabel gave me a hug and wished me luck and I thanked her gratefully, practically telling her that our conversation restored my faith in the whole “rush” process.

Mari and I spotted each other outside and ran toward one another as fast as our sore little feet would let us. “A- Xi-D was great!” I told her.

“I told you!” she replied with excitement.

We kept our debriefing short that afternoon as we’d just learned of the schedule for Sunday morning—6:45 am call time to see which houses we were invited back to.

“I don’t think that new sorority is going to invite me back,” I told my friend… “I almost fell asleep when that girl was telling me about their house.”

Mari laughed…” That’s ok…you can only choose four to go to tomorrow, so it’s actually good if one decided not to invite you back.”

I set my alarm for 5:45, just in case I couldn’t get out of bed immediately- and I was right. I lay there, anticipating another day of hairspray and gossip and smiled, for once, thinking “I can do this…these girls are 18 and I’m almost 21. I know how to sell myself by now.”

I found Mari leaning against her car sleepily. I reached for her sunglasses to see if she was awake and she flinched, coming back from being half asleep. “I really hope this 6:30 am thing is a one-time deal,” I said and she nodded.

From the parking lot, it looked like we were approaching a line for tickets to a boy band concert. Mari and I followed the strappy sandals around the building until we saw the end of the line. Almost thirty minutes later, we stood at the doorway of a computer lab where we were to enter our names and ID numbers to be greeted with a list of groups that invited us back. At my computer I waited as my information came up. Delta Delta Delta and Kappa Kappa Gamma were listed on the screen above a whole lot of blank space.

I looked around nervously at the other girls who were scrunching up their faces trying to eliminate two of the six houses many of them were invited back to. I quickly pushed the escape key so that no one would see the shameful results of my clearly unsuccessful Saturday. Mari and I met outside the door and I wiped tears before they smudged my eyeliner.

She glared at the list in front of her, explained that A-Xi-D hadn’t invited her back, probably because of her less than glowing GPA. But my grades were fine, and even if they weren’t- what were the excuses of the other four sororities who didn’t want me past first cuts?

As the other girls paraded back to their respective cliques, I took my own personal walk of shame over to where my group had been directed to meet that morning. I had a while to wait, so I fancied a new version of “Where’s Waldo?”- finding girls who still had their natural hair color.

I reapplied lip gloss and checked my hair before I went in to make my second impression on the Tri-Delts. I watched wearily as girls got sucked into the vacuum of cheer squad energy one by one, trying to embody the Delta spirit, whatever that meant.

The girl who I’d met the day before, smiled at me from across the room and joined the conversation I had begun with Amy, a short blonde girl. Looking back, the hour of talking about school, boys, and community service seems like a blur, but I remember leaving the room feeling confident about attending DDD’s final event the next evening. Next for me was Kappa Kappa Gamma, who assembled in three rows and sang a rendition of some very girly “we’re best friends and we want you to know it” song. I envisioned myself doing a solo number and being backed up by the rest of the group in rush the following year, and then I got back to my senses where I had somehow already begun a conversation with a petite black-haired girl called Candace.

Candace Martinez- she was Latina- the second Latina girl I’d met during rush- although to be fair there had to be at least seven or eight Latina girls in the six Panhellenic sororities. I was too young to see what a problem what was.

After awhile, our circle expanded and we were joined by a wide-eyed freshman girl named Coco or Bebe or something froofy that seemed far more suitable for an expensive puppy than an eighteen-year-old girl. I wondered if she had fancy French socialite parents or if she came from the Valley like I did. Froofy girl decided to take the opportunity to tell our circle her life story, supplementing like and you know in the place of actually saying anything. After ten minutes of listening to her I had learned that she liked shopping and didn’t eat meat…oh and that she was, like, in fact, totally from the valley.

I met Mari outside as promised and joined her for the mandatory lunch meeting where a dazzling display of Greek pride was further illustrated by an informative skit. The troops were gathered up again after the girls had eaten (and for some, thrown up) and reapplied their makeup. I escaped out the side door, hoping no one would ask what room I was headed to next. Then I waited outside the building, just for a minute (or five) hoping to see anyone else leave- which they didn’t.

Back at my dorm I intended to do the homework I’d put off all weekend, but I also had some serious soul searching ahead of me. Despite the general embarrassment of the morning, the reality stood before me of “Preference Night”-which would be held the following evening. The next morning I would repeat the process of finding out which houses I got invited back to- then I would choose two to visit. So really, other than feeling like the only kid who didn’t get invited to the biggest party in school, I was the lucky one. No decisions to make- I could just go to the two houses I spoke to that day. That is, unless only one of the groups asked me back- in which case, what if it was my second choice? And on that note, which group was my second choice?

I finally got to sleep at around two with my Preference Night outfit laid out on my dresser. I had this vivid dream that I was in a demonstrative fashion show like the one the hopefuls had seen during the informational night event. In my dream I was modeling a cocktail dress, but it kept falling apart. Very blonde girls would strut past me and rip at the material which seemed to only be stuck together with tape or Velcro. Then all of the runway lights were turned to me and a loud high-pitched siren came out of nowhere…I thought maybe it was the fashion police. I opened my eyes and reached for my cell phone, which was ringing.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Bonnie?”

“Yes it is.”

“Hi, this is Michelle, your Rho Gamma… I’m calling to let you know that no one actually invited you back to preference night tonight.”

I don’t remember if she said anything else. There might have been an obligatory “sorry” or a bright “please rush again next year- we’d love to take your $30 dollar fee, your weekend, and your dignity!”

I held the phone to my ear for a few seconds after Michelle had hung up- like people seem to do in movies when they’re shocked at what they hear. Then I put it down and cried until it was time to leave for class. I waited for Mari and Liz to call and tell me which sororities they had joined. Liz didn’t call, and I found out two weeks later that she’d accepted a bid into A-Xi-D, as planned. Mari called me that evening and we compared rejection calls. She was already laughing about the whole situation, but it took me a few days to get my head straight- especially because I had told everyone I knew about the fact that I intended to go Greek.

In the next three months I managed to cross paths with at least fifty girls I recognized from rush. I knew most of their names, but none of them knew mine or acknowledged that we’d ever laid eyes on one another. I got to find out which houses each girl ended up in because it seemed they never went anywhere without their embroidered Greek letter sweatshirts.

No matter how many people told me that I never had a chance because the groups wanted girls they could push around and I actually knew who I was; no matter how many things I saw that made me want to point and laugh every time I heard the word sorority, I still felt a deep sense of personal failure in the fact that I ended up house-less. For awhile, I have to admit, I felt a twinge of resentment for each Greek girl I saw- which capped off in a climactic moment when I ended up seeing this seventeen year old Indonesian girl from rush on the shuttle bus. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt over her skeletal body that read “Alpha Xi Delta Princess”. So basically, not only had Camilla unpronounceable-last-name made it into a house, but she managed to win one of their ridiculous superlative contests.

I remembered my conversations with Camilla during rush- she knew I was an RA and followed me around all that weekend trying to get a lesson on how to do laundry- because she never had. But despite how I sound when I relive the Tonya Harding type low blow of seeing Camilla become the princess of a group I just wanted a chance at being a part of, I couldn’t be more thankful.

It’s hard to work and to struggle and to put yourself on the chopping block and be told that you are not enough. Many of us had that character building experience in junior high or high school, and my gut tells me that most of us don’t wish to relive it. This is probably why the Greek system (at my university and many others from my research) fails to inform it’s applicants of the real experience of rush. And we have to be fair- to some degree it makes sense. The Greek Life pamphlet might not look as inviting with a personal message from the president of Alpha Gamma Blonde Girl reading, “Look. If you’re a cute freshman, you’re pretty much in. If you’re ethnic, overweight, ambitious or someone we don’t feel we can push around you might want to rethink your weekend.”

So while it’s heartbreaking for the…however many girls who get rejected each year at their universities rush weekend, there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done. I thank my lucky stars for my group of friends who took me back, empathic about my experience and ready to make sarcastic comments about sororities until my soul had regained the light that was pounded out of it that fateful weekend I set out to be the girl on the cover of All American College Girl magazine.

No, I would never have sixty sisters and I would never be privy to the secret rituals of Delta Theta…Phi... whatever… But more than the influence of my friends, I thank the girls who I rushed with; especially the ones who made me feel invisible. I smile at the memory of watching that group of girls- many of whom had the same body, the same train of valley girl slang to contribute to the conversation and the same lack of independent thought.

Sixteen years after this experience, I can say, with a genuine smile that I do not regret my peek at what it’s like to be in a sorority. Eventually I recovered from the ego-blow, only growing stronger from the experience, and even growing to love the natural wave of my hair.

I’m pushing 40 now and I don’t have any Greek connections like those movies where people are able to…you know, get jobs, find spouses, and sometimes evade major crimes. I don’t have 60 girls who share a secret handshake and memories of holding each other’s hair after drinking too much. There was no shortcut to build the social life I wanted, but eventually I did find a group of friends with no monthly charge.

I wanted to “go Greek” so badly at the time, but it seemed like every one of those girls I met that weekend knew I did not actually belong in that problematic system. And honestly, thank goodness for that.

I was a sorority reject- and I couldn’t be happier.