Page 4 of Love Legacy
Sage
“ G et up, Oregano. It’s time for Day One of Rush!”
I roll my eyes, twisting onto my back in bed.
Like normal, I’ve been awake for the last hour.
I always have a hard time sleeping coming into Rush Week.
Call it nerves, call it excitement, but alarms are pointless during this week.
That never stops my roommate and sorority sister, Gabby, from dubbing herself my personal alarm system.
She gets a kick out of the fact that my name is an herb, so any time she’s messing around with me, she starts going down the spice rack for inspiration.
I lay in bed for a couple minutes more before getting up and heading down the hall to the bathroom.
“Gabs, let me in. I just need to brush my teeth and wash my face.” The deadbolt slips back into the door as she unlocks it, and then I hear the shower curtain move.
I enter the bathroom, walking over to the sink to freshen up.
“Are you excited? First day of Rush as president,” Gabby projects from behind the shower curtain.
“Eh, mixed emotions, honestly. I’m excited, sure, but nervous. And kind of sad. It’s our last Rush Week,” I say, garbled, my mouth full of toothpaste. I rinse my mouth before I start to wash my face.
“Word on the street is that we have at least one upperclassmen PNM,” she says, turning off the water and sticking her arm out the shower curtain. I roll my eyes, handing her a towel from the hook on the back of the door. “Do we know anything about her?”
Gabby steps out of the shower, wrapped in her towel, grabbing a smaller one from the linen closet and towel drying her short, curly hair. “She’s a late transfer, Maeve’s roommate. Her name’s Naomi. Maeve said she transferred from High Valley U,” she says, giving me a mischievous grin.
“No fucking way. Isn’t that one of those uber-religious universities run by a mega church?”
Gabby nods, putting mousse in her hair before finger-styling the short locks. “Yup. She says she’s basically been living under a rock. Didn’t know what Star Wars was and never had sushi.”
I gasp, drying my face off. “How is that possible?”
“That’s what I said when she told me. She’s from Georgia apparently, here on a scholarship and taking an extra year. Might be worth extending her membership if she gels well with us. She’ll be able to put at least another year into the organization before graduating.”
“A church girl? I don’t know. The way we do things might not mesh well with her beliefs. Especially our sister bonding night.”
“Maeve said Naomi’s trying to branch out from her religion and have a bunch of new experiences this year. Who knows, she might surprise us,” Gabby says, finishing off her hair with a little oil and styling butter.
“Well, we’ve got maybe twenty minutes before we have to head to the house. Go get dressed,” I say, heading back to my room.
“Back at ya!”
I grab one of the outfits Cora set aside from me in my closet, throwing it on the bed.
A white halter v-neck bodysuit, camel-colored tapered dress pants, and black ankle strap heels.
I get dressed, putting on a gold chain, a thin watch with a small face, and my dad’s gold class ring I had resized to fit my middle finger.
Looking in the mirror, I run a brush through my previously straightened hair, pulling the top half of my hair back and twisting it into a smaller-sized claw clip.
I apply some light natural makeup before grabbing my phone and purse and heading out into the living room.
“Okay, let’s go meet some underclassman!” Gabby says, standing up from the couch. She is wearing a red short sleeve button down blouse, white dress pants and tan gladiator sandals.
On the first day of Rush Week, we usually dress in business casual for members. Tradition states that to make a good first impression on potential new members, we should dress to impress, so we’ve kept this tradition up through the years, even as we’ve modernized some of our recruitment practices.
Some people regard sororities as sexist and archaic cults, but joining Kappa Theta Alpha was honestly one of the greatest decisions I made when I came to Pinebrook University.
As a foster kid, I always wanted to find some sort of community, a family, and KTA gave me exactly that.
Granted, I met my two best friends through a freshman housing lottery, but my KTA sisters are my ride-or-dies.
Over the years, we have acknowledged that our practices were a little outdated, and since have updated our policies.
We got rid of some of the more cloak-and-dagger traditions, bowed out of the whole preference system that our Panhellenic Council used, created new traditions, and removed any of the religious and “traditional” wording in our bylaws and rituals.
We’ve been trying to make the sorority a more inclusive organization, and I think we’ve been doing a good job.
I mean, where else do you get to see an out-and-proud lesbian serving as president?
Gabby and I drove over to campus, heading to the Kappa House. We did the bulk of our setup the night before, decorating the house for the group of young women who were about to show up. But we still had to set out our refreshments and make sure all the sisters were ready.
We head into the sorority house, entering the kitchen. The house is decorated from head to toe in our sorority’s colors: pale pink, yellow, and white. There are balloon arrangements, streamers wrapped around the banisters, and arrangements of pink carnations, our flower, set up in the house.
In the kitchen, we have our usual caterers set up a spread of the members’ favorite foods, as well as large pitchers of our signature sparkling pink punch made of pink lemonade, grapefruit juice, and Sprite, with muddled strawberries and raspberries.
The spread includes veggie burger and turkey burger sliders, mini mushroom and spinach quiches, veggie sushi rolls, cheese pizza, ham and cheese sandwiches, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and mini fruit tarts.
Is it standard recruitment refreshments?
Definitely not, but it gives just a bit of insight into who we are as people, and year after year, everyone says they love Meet The Sisterhood Day.
I grab a plastic champagne flute, filling it with punch.
I take a sip as I connect my phone to the house Wi-Fi, tapping into the smart home network.
I start my Rush Week playlist and shuffle it, the sound of “Bad Girls” by M.I.A playing low through the speakers installed around the house.
My phone pings, a text from our Recruitment Chair, Raven, indicating that she was on her way with the group of PNMs interested in our sorority.
Since we do things differently than the rest of the sororities, and because we’re not a national organization, we aren’t involved with the Panhellenic Council’s recruitment process.
We have our recruitment events earlier in the day, so if anyone wants to participate in formal rush, they have the chance to do so.
But we do stick around for those who are solely interested in Kappa Theta Alpha so that they can continue to spend time with the sisters.
We usually have about a quarter of the PNMs stay.
Maeve comes into the kitchen, wearing a short, soft pink wrap dress in our sorority’s colors. “Nervous for your first Rush as president?”
I grimace. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“So, that is a yes?” She laughs, grabbing a veggie burger slider off the table and taking a bite.
Her roommate, Aleka, enters the kitchen as well. “Hey, save some snacks for the PNMs,” she says, steering Maeve away from the table and handing me my name tag. I pin it to my top, grateful she remembered them. I knew I was forgetting something last night while we were prepping.
“Sorry we’re a little late, we had to drop Naomi off at Rush registration first.”
“So you convinced her to rush?” I ask, a little surprised, given the background that Gabby shared with me this morning.
Maeve nods. “We did. I don’t expect her to stay with the other orgs past day one though.”
“Well, you guys vouched for her, so assuming she connects with the rest of the sisters, I don’t see an issue with offering her membership if she’s not interested in one of the traditional orgs.”
“We have guests!” Raven calls out from the other room, the low chatter of the other women carrying through the house. I touch up my lip gloss in the hallway mirror, taking a few calming deep breaths. Gabby comes up behind me, patting me on the back. “Show time, Madame President.”
I playfully roll my eyes. “Come on, let’s meet the PNMs.”
We head into the entryway of the house, looking at the group of about forty women standing in front of us.
“Hi, everyone! Welcome to Kappa Theta Alpha. I know you’re going to speak with a lot of women and sororities this week, so we’re going to try to keep this brief and save more of the information about the organization for later in the week.
My name’s Sage Carpenter and I am President of this chapter of Kappa Theta Alpha sorority.
This is Maeve, our Vice President; Stephanie, our Secretary; Gabriella, but we call her Gabby, our Treasurer; and then last but not least, you all know Raven, our Recruitment Chair and Panhellenic Council delegate.
KTA is a smaller sorority. Our chapter here at Pinebrook has maybe thirty active members at any given time, and we have five thousand active members and alumni nationwide.
Pinebrook is the home of KTA, it’s where we were founded thirty years ago, but we have fifteen other chapters scattered around the northeast and midwest and two chapters in California.
All of this to say, we do things a little differently around here.
We try to foster a welcoming and inclusive sisterhood, and part of that is keeping our membership small.