“ROBERT PLANT?” CASEY asked in a wondrous tone as we slid into a booth at Joey’s Diner, right under a vintage eighties poster of the legendary singer himself. He picked up a sticky laminated menu from behind the ketchup bottles, and I stopped him with my hand.
“Trust me,” I said after I waved the waitress over and ordered two double cheeseburgers, extracrispy fries, and vanilla-espresso milk shakes.
Casey sighed. “I don’t know if I can afford the calories,” and rubbed a self-conscious hand over his flat-as-ever abs. Please.
As for me, all my clothes were loose, and skeletal wasn’t a good look on me. I could probably make a bajillion dollars marketing the Delta Beta Rush Diet of extra-shot lattes and twenty-four/seven manic activity, but it wasn’t sustainable or healthy. Which is what I was telling Casey when he got a strange look on his face.
“Don’t start,” I told him. “I have enough stress in my life, trying to figure out what I can possibly do to get the Sutton chapter back where it needs to be.”
“Mabel didn’t accept your resignation?” Casey guessed.
“Not only that, she gave me a raise,” I said mournfully. Mabel had kept me on the phone for over an hour, begging me to stay on as chapter advisor. She praised my leadership, ethics, and personalized sentiments in the birthday cards I sent to everyone at headquarters, but I couldn’t understand where she was coming from. I had let everything get out of control over the last week, barely pulling quota out of the mess that was Sutton rush. But Mabel was insistent. Quota was quota. We had our next generation of Delta Betas, everything else was gravy.
For her.
For me? Well, I wasn’t so sure I was cut out to be a permanent chapter advisor. The stress, the drama, the constant threat of police intervention. When I expressed my feelings to Mabel, she said she understood; we agreed that I would finish out the spring semester, then talk over the summer about my future in the Delta Beta organization.
Casey looked relieved when I related that last part. Or maybe it was the waitress sliding a small side salad onto the table that made him relax a little. We started chowing down on our dinner, and Casey agreed that vanilla milk shakes with two shots of espresso might be a sign that Jesus loved us. After he finished most of his cheeseburger and sucked up the last of his shake, he wiped his hands with a couple of paper napkins and folded them together. It was a very official gesture.
“Remember that talk we had? Before I went deep undercover? About how worried I was about the chapter’s reputation?”
I nodded, since my mouth was full of extracrispy French fries.
“And you said you believed in me and my mad PR skills to bring everyone back around?”
“Yes?”
Casey paused for a second. “You were wrong.”
What? He pushed on, past my pretty obvious shocked expression, I’m sure. “I can’t do it, Margot. It’s been two semesters, back-to-back, of nonstop illegal activity.”
“But the girls didn’t even do any of it!”
“The phone-sex line, the murders last semester, more murders this semester . . .”
“Mostly committed by alumnae,” I protested.
Casey lifted his hands a little. “Delta Betas just the same.”
Ugh. How I wished that wasn’t true. I’d never wanted to uninitiate a sister until I’d returned to Sutton College.
“So that’s it?” I asked him. “You’re just giving up? Throwing in the towel? Writing us off as a lost cause?”
“Well . . . no . . .”
I slammed my hand on the Formica tabletop. “What about the women we just pledged? How do you think they’d feel, knowing you didn’t have any confidence in them?”
“They don’t really know me, but that’s not—”
“Leticia and Mary Gerald would not accept this. When they were told they couldn’t live together, they didn’t accept ‘no’ as an answer.”
“You’re right.”
“And I’m not going to accept it either!” I glared at him. No one told me “no.” It was a personality trait of mine.
Casey bit his lip, pausing as if he was afraid I was going to interrupt him.
“I think—” he started to say, but I finished his sentence for him.
“We need to shift the paradigm.”
“The what?”
“If we can’t redeem the Sutton Debs’ reputation, we flip the script.”
A look of dawning comprehension fell over Casey’s movie-star-handsome face. “We change the parameters.”
“Like Leticia and Mary Gerald in 1879,” I affirmed. “The world had never seen a sisterhood like theirs until they invented it.”
“Maybe there is something . . .” Casey reached into his man bag, unfolded a paper, and spread it out on the Formica tabletop. I read it once, then twice, then looked back into Casey’s gorgeous baby blues. “What are you suggesting?” I asked, wanting to make sure I understood before I got too excited.
“We can’t rescue the reputation of the Sutton Delta Betas. But we can build a new one.”
I put my finger on the paper and read it aloud. “Win an all-expenses-paid spring break in Myrtle Beach. Bad girls only. Good girls need not apply.”
“It’s a contest,” Casey gushed unnecessarily. “For the naughtiest sorority chapter. It’s sponsored by this record company, and I think the Sutton Debs are a shoo-in. It’s not even fair for the other contestants.”
“Because their chapter advisor and S&M director have both been arrested for murder?” I asked dryly, the bitter truth stinging the back of my throat. This was nothing that I’d ever imagined for my chapter. When I’d arrived at my alma mater four months ago, I was proud of the ladies’ high standards, our spotless reputation, and our dedication to ladylike decorum.
But not two minutes ago, I had made an impassioned plea to shift the paradigm. Change the rules of the game. Was this what would save us?
An all-expenses-paid spring break on the coast with . . . I referred back to the flyer and the list of superstar music acts that would be performing that week. If we won, the girls would be granted all-access backstage passes and be guests of honor at the resort. Other prizes included makeovers, vacation wardrobes, and the use of convertibles during spring break.
It sounded like . . . good PR.
When I raised my head and saw Casey’s eyes gleaming, I knew we were on the right track.
“If you can’t beat them, have a damn good time anyway.”
“Living well is the best revenge?” I mused.
“Exactly.” Casey grinned.
The more I thought about it, the better it sounded, as Casey’s ideas always did. Sure, it would sting a little to put together a video highlighting our bad rep and not trying to ignore it didn’t exist, but if we won . . . The list of prizes, the fun of hanging out with A-list possibly illuminati pop stars, and glamour would bring us if not respect, then envy. And that was almost the same thing.
“I’ll have to put it up for a vote,” I said slowly.
“They’ll do whatever you tell them to do.”
“Should they?” I made a face. Like I had told Mabel, maybe my leadership capabilities weren’t what they once were.
Casey reached across the table and enclosed both my hands in his. “Mabel believes in you. I believe in you. Even if you leave at the end of the summer, this will be your legacy.”
Wow. My legacy.
I had never thought of that before.
Was this the legacy I would leave to Delta Beta? To the world?
As we drove back to the Delta Beta house, Casey and I were silent, probably both wondering whether we were bikini ready for a bad-girl spring break, and I kept coming back to the legacy of Mary Gerald and Leticia. One of the things that I had always admired them for was that they were leaders in a time when women weren’t expected to take charge of their college careers, let alone their lives. They created something new, something they believed in, and made other people’s lives better, even when everyone around them was telling them they shouldn’t. Or they couldn’t.
By the time we had returned to the Delta Beta house, I was as determined as I had ever been.
Following the example that our founders had shown us, I would recommend to the chapter that they embrace their bad-girl reputations and start a new era of Delta Beta sisterhood.
Maybe it meant we would all be wearing bikini bottoms with BAD GIRLZ emblazoned across the rear and leading a twerking competition in front of twenty thousand spring-break attendees. It probably meant I’d be drinking heavily from my Delta Beta flask.
But we’d be taking charge of our lives, doing it together, stronger than we’d ever been. Which was sort of the point of everything that Delta Beta stood for.