“Rachel?”
“Hang on,” she said, and hopped out of bed, pulling on a robe and walking to the sitting room. Andy half dozed as he heard Rachel and another woman talking. “Everything okay?” Andy asked when Rachel came back to the bedroom, and Rachel, rolling her eyes, said, “I don’t know what part of ‘French manicure or a short, neutral nail’ they don’t understand.”
“Are you kidding?” he asked, but she shook her head. She was adorable, with her soft brown eyes, her pert little chin, the sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks. Andy even loved her little white teeth. My little honey, my little sweetheart, he would call her, and she’d stand on her tiptoes and say, “I’m full-grown!” Now she was looking at him, trying to look authoritative, not adorable.
“It’s important that people really commit to this. If the sisters don’t take it seriously, the potentials won’t take it seriously, and we won’t get the best girls.”
“The best girls,” Andy repeated. He’d known that was a mistake even before Rachel raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth, then shut it, turning calmly toward the makeup mirror at her desk.
“How is wanting the best girls for our sorority any different than a track team having cuts?”
“But what does the best mean?” He had wondered, ever since she’d rushed the year before, how his funny, merry Rachel who could make a joke about everything could take all of this, all the rules and guidelines, so seriously. Not to mention how thin she’d gotten, and how he never saw her anymore without a full face of makeup. He could picture the evening yawning ahead of him, all those long, empty hours to fill, Rachel off at the rush party downstairs while he stayed hidden in the bedroom like some kind of male Anne Frank. Guys weren’t invited tonight, not until Saturday’s formal. He saw himself trying to get some homework done in this frilly, scented girl-den, trying to make a meal of the yogurts and SlimFast shakes that were all Rachel ever kept in her fridge. (“What would happen if you put a beer and a burger in there?” he’d asked her once and she’d said, completely deadpan, “They’d take me out back and shoot me.”)
But now her feathers were ruffled. “We do charity work,” she’d said, spacing her words out, speaking each one distinctly. “We volunteer. We tutor. While you’re off running laps . . .” She paused and made her index and second finger take a little jog around the edge of her desk, “we’re trying to improve the community. We want girls who are committed to what being a Gamma means, to what it stands for.”
As far as Andy could tell, being a Gamma stood for being one of the pretty, popular girls at Beaumont, a girl more interested in having the right clothes and dating the right guy than she was in tutoring inner-city kids or raising money for the battered women’s shelter, but he knew better than to say so. It wasn’t an officially Jewish sorority, but plenty of its members were Jewish, and almost all of them were white.
Once, he’d asked why the sororities were so segregated, and Rachel had acted like he’d accused her of something awful. “The black girls have their own sororities,” she’d said. “They don’t even want to join, but if they did, of course we’d treat them the same as anyone else.” Andy had nodded, but he’d wondered. A few times he’d started asking Rachel whether she’d told people that he had a black father, and every time he’d stopped himself. Of course she did, he’d think. It doesn’t matter to her. Still, he thought about it, when he walked through Beaumont by himself and felt strangers looking at him; when he saw, or imagined that he saw, the security guards watching him with special interest when he went into the coffee shop or the convenience store at the center of town; when the guys who joined Rachel and her friends in the dining hall always wanted to talk about rap music, assuming he’d bought every CD and knew every song; when in fact, in his experience, it was the nerdy Jewish guys who could quote every N.W.A. lyric perfectly.
Maybe his race didn’t matter to Rachel, like she’d told him every time the topic came up, but he was sure there were girls in the sorority to whom it mattered a great deal. Even if Rachel had never lied about it, she could have used a little strategic silence here and there, let people think that Andy was Hispanic or Israeli or Greek. She’d told her parents, and they’d been nothing but polite and nice to him when he’d been visiting during Parents’ Weekend last spring, but he wondered about them, too, and whether they wouldn’t be happy if Rachel ditched him in favor of one of those Dr. Dre–quoting Jewish guys.