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By Root 238 0

beginning of the spring semester, in January. For the men it meant drinking Herculean amounts of alcohol while trying to find where to fit in—it also helped to know brothers from back home or from prep school, or to be active in a sport. For the girls, sorority rush was all about appearances—what you looked like and what you wore. Connections still mattered for the girls, but mostly connections to men. If your boyfriend belonged to one of the more desirable fraternities, then you could get the other girls invited to a mixer, thereby cementing your bid to a more desirable house. The rush process lasted weeks, until Bid Day, when representatives of each house would come to the dorms, envelopes in hand, to announce new members and kidnap them for a night of debauchery. Once you made it into a fraternity or a sorority, you were a pledge, which signified the time period before one was formally initiated as a brother or sister. Pledging was hard work. Men would go through periods of sleep deprivation, or sleeping on cold, wet floors and doing the bidding of the older brothers. They would undergo drinking contests, and some houses were associated with rumors of pledges being branded, forced to fornicate with animals, and being stripped naked and tied to trees for entire nights. Some men would be kidnapped, taken to neighboring colleges, and made to find their way back to Charlottesville without any money or transportation. Girls had it slightly easier, but were still woken up in the middle of the night to attend parties at crazy hours, made to parade around Grounds with sanitary pads taped to their foreheads, charged with stealing items from fraternity houses, and drilled on all manner of sisterhood songs. The pledge traditions were extreme, and sometimes cruel, but no one ever complained or got into trouble. Pledges would do anything to conform and belong, and it seemed obvious that the university would have stepped in to stop it if anyone were actually harmed.

But it was also clear that the administration turned a blind eye to the sacred traditions of the Greek system. The lion’s share of alumni support came from Greek alumni. Who would want to mess with that legacy?

My first few weeks at school were idyllic. Everything seemed wonderful and exciting, if a tad daunting. It had been hard to say good-bye to my parents, but college was a new adventure, not only for me, but for my family. My dorm, my new home, was “cinderblock chic.” There was no central air conditioning to relieve us from the heat of the Shenandoah Valley in August. We had one communal bathroom on our floor, which housed about sixty girls, and it was in a constant state of mess given our schedules in those first frenzied weeks—trash cans overflowed, shaving cream dotted the tiles in the shower stalls, toilet paper was frequently in need of a refill and toothpaste scummed the basins. My roommate, a bruiser of a girl named Alice, was a soccer player who missed her boyfriend back home in Pittsburgh. We spent virtually no time together, as she was always at soccer practice when not in class. Weekends, she visited her boyfriend. This was a terrific arrangement for me, because it meant I basically had a room to myself. As an only child, that was all I had ever known.

By January, Alice had left for good, to get married. My friend Caroline, whose own roommate had gone home with psychological issues, moved in with me. By that time, I was glad for the camaraderie of a roommate.

At the beginning of the school year, going to class was a celebration in itself. We woke up early, got dressed up in filmy sundresses and sandals with gold shrimp earrings and pearls or add-a-bead-necklaces. (As the weather got colder, we transitioned to fresh jeans and furry Benetton sweaters, with leather flats.) After dressing, we would march to Newcomb Hall for breakfast. The dining hall breakfast spread consisted of coffee, muffins, eggs, bacon, grits, all manner of cold cereals, fruits and juices, waffles, French toast, and pancakes. We all sat at tables with our new dorm friends, and if we