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Rathdrum, Idaho

A t the end of spring break, Kaylee and Maddie both receive emails containing the same instructions: Don’t come back to the sorority house. School is going remote.

The girls are home in Rathdrum and the neighboring town of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and for them, it’s like old times. They have each other. And given the stress surrounding the virus, they decide that pretense, even on social media, is no longer important.

Later that summer, Kaylee gives Maddie a shout-out: @maddiemogen thanks for always being my personal photographer.

It’s a source of pride to Kaylee that Maddie has been asked to run the official Instagram account for the Pi Phis. It’s a huge honor.

It’s also an irony. Maddie, initially disappointed to be joining Pi Beta Phi, is now responsible for attracting recruits and making the house look as appealing as Alpha Phi.

She’s good at this.

Thanks to her pretty pictures, despite the isolation of COVID, the number of freshmen women interested in joining is climbing.

Few people in the Goncalves family think COVID is the big deal that UI administrators believe it is. The Goncalves children have been raised not to trust the government or institutions. They are libertarians. They live to bet on themselves.

Kaylee’s dad, Steve, works in IT at the hospital in Coeur d’Alene, an hour and a half north of Moscow. Over dinners at home, he tells his family that the only people who are dying in the hospital are those who have preexisting conditions. Mostly, they’re obese.

He thinks the university is making a mistake not letting the kids back.

So does Kaylee. As the weeks stretch on, her frustration grows. Paying to take college classes over Zoom is bad enough, but bills keep coming in from APhi. She’s livid that she and her APhi sisters are paying live-in dues for the house they’re not allowed to occupy.

Following orders unquestioningly is not a Goncalves thing to do.

So Kaylee queries the chapter president. Why are they paying for nothing? If they can’t get some of that money returned, Kaylee says, she doesn’t want to go back to the house in the fall.

The rules are the rules, the president tells Kaylee.

The house won’t negotiate, especially with a new sister.

None of the sisters can move out of the house until they’re juniors and have accumulated a certain number of service points.

Even then, the APhi admins add another hurdle: Sisters need to pay for both living in and living out.

So in late August, Kaylee’s stuck returning to the APhi house and its litany of COVID health and safety protocols.

Kaylee doesn’t want to do the physical distancing or the regular testing or the mandatory quarantine procedures. Not any of it. But she’s Kaylee, so she faces the reset head-on, posting: Now let’s get back to it!

This year, the girls who are rushing sororities have their smiles hidden behind masks. Coffee meetings are held on Zoom. Hugging is not allowed.

Still, Kaylee takes a liking to two of the freshmen: Emma Tyger, a beautiful brunette from Vancouver, Washington, whose soccer career was sidelined by an injury, and Jaden Anderson, a blonde from Spokane.

One of the most important rituals among sorority sisters is choosing Bigs and Littles. A Big mentors her chosen Little through college, academically and socially.

Emma and Jaden are eager to become Kaylee’s Littles partly because of her extraordinary enthusiasm and can-do attitude.

When Kaylee hears there might be an in-house quarantine one weekend, she whisks Emma and Jaden off home with her to Coeur d’Alene.

She takes them shopping, to concerts, for drinks, to coffee. She makes them baskets of goodies.

“She also was a girl you don’t mess with,” Emma recalled. “Nobody would ever say a bad word about me in front of her because she was not okay with it. If there was some guy that was being rude to me at a party, Kaylee was the first one to say something to him.”

On Big-Little Night in October, Kaylee surprises the two by waiting for them, shrouded in pink wrapping paper, in the parking lot by a large off-campus apartment building known as the Whites. When the two freshmen find Kaylee and unwrap her, their screams of delight echo several blocks away.

At this point, the two younger girls are still caught up in the excitement and honor of being accepted into APhi. They don’t yet know about the pressure that comes with being in the “pretty girls” house.

Darker times are just around the corner.