think his parents feel right now? If you take him home right now, I won’t tell anybody.”
“Don’t fight,” said Warren. He was thinking of the way his mama and daddy used to get so mad at each other.
“It’s all right, Warren,” said Natalie. “We’re at a party. We’re having fun.”
“I had a dream,” he said, the happiness of that dream coming back to him. “Aunt Tate was making a rainbow in the yard.”
But somebody tapped Natalie on the shoulder and she turned away, so it was Roma who bent down to listen to him.
* * *
IN the breaks between parties, when there were only sisters in the house, the kitchen was the place to be. Girls shrieked as they plunged their bare feet into a tub of ice water, churning it up and down, yelling as they slipped ice cubes down each other’s backs. Climbing out of the tub, they groaned as they rubbed ice across their cheeks and foreheads and arms.
A current of fire ran from Roma’s heels all the way to her scalp—exhaustion or adrenaline, she didn’t know which. There had been seven parties in five hours. One more, only one, to go. She ordered two sophomores to drag the tub out and dump it in the yard. The others scurried to find their shoes in the heap on the kitchen floor.
She closed her eyes as the bell rang again, the next-to-last rush bell she would ever hear. The bell at the end of this party would be the last.
It was her senior year, and life as she knew it was ending, swift as the ice water was melting into the soft earth out in the yard. After the last party, there would be the grand finale, Porch Routine, when all the sorority girls tried to out-sing and out-dance the other sororities, and the audience, hundreds of bedazzled rushes, rocked back and forth in the courtyard, yearning, trying to sing along with the house they wanted to join, there in the searing sun of a September evening. Roma had drilled her girls all week, limbering them up, so they could line up on the old stone porch and cheer their lungs out, always smiling, luring the ones who would be campus stars, who would keep it all going next year and the year after that and forever.
The ice water had worked. Roma could no longer feel the blisters on her feet.
All around her, girls whooped, smoothed back their hair, and raced to their places in the living room and the front hallway to greet the final group of rushees. Yet Roma couldn’t move. She heard fifty first-year women thronging into the house, their earrings rattling as loud as their greetings. The smell of hair spray and nail polish was a drug in her nose, the owl nametag on her chest beat its wings as fast as her heart, her period announced itself between her legs, the roof of the house lifted off—and there she was in the kitchen with Warren, who said, “Natalie went to wash her hair. Do you like green peppers, Roma?”
* * *
WHEN it was all over, after Porch Routine had gone into encores and their throats were raw, the sisters swept back into their houses and left the courtyard full of applauding rushees. All the porches emptied at the same time; it was the rules. The rushees streamed away in hope and despair to await what the next day might bring: coveted white cards in formal script, inviting them to smaller, more select parties, whereas the initial round, strictly timed, was open to all.
For many, there would be cards from the wrong house, or no cards at all.
Inside, Roma listened for the next stage—exhausted silence. Sighing, the girls headed upstairs, where they peeled off their party clothes and put on denim shorts with their red-and-gold T-shirts. Roma had already called the pizza man, and he had delivered a sizeable order. The girls crept down to the kitchen, opened the warm cardboard boxes, heaped their plates, and retired to eat on the porch swing or the balcony. Cicadas chanted in the courtyard trees.
Some of the girls ate in their rooms, where the twilight breeze lifted the curtains up and down in time with their breathing and floor fans blew across the shag rugs so photos of boyfriends, stuck in mirror frames, took wing. Wearily the girls traded mushrooms and pepperoni like charms. There was beer, too, in icy bottles that they rolled gratefully across their necks.
Roma had allowed Warren to watch Porch Routine from Natalie’s window, and then she had shepherded him out to her car, intending to take him home, or maybe to the police station, she hadn’t decided. But Natalie ran out begging, Let me, please let me. And Roma had given in.
Back in the kitchen, she trembled all over.
A few of the girls—Jennifer, Heidi, and Kimberly—carried their food into the living room and turned the TV on. Warren’s face bloomed on the screen. With a collective gasp, the girls looked at each other, jumped up, and crowded around a phone.
Roma dove into their huddle and snatched it away.
“It’s just a little mix-up,” she said. “Natalie has taken him home. They just left.”
“But he’s been reported as a missing child,” insisted Kimberly, a last-year’s pledge with a stubborn mouth.
“You let her drive away with him?” Heidi screeched.
“Go finish your supper.” Roma put steel in her voice.
“I bet you gave her your car,” Kimberly said. “That makes you an accessory.”
“It’s fine. It’s all over.”
Of course it wasn’t over. Roma’s knees were weak. She should have let them call the police, should have made the call herself. Even if Natalie did take him home, his parents would get the story out of him. Innocently he would tell about the parties and the singing. He would name names, and the authorities would come. In a few hours, maybe even a few minutes, Roma would be in as much trouble as Natalie was—and that was the best Roma could hope for.
Yet Kimberly and Heidi retreated. Roma remembered how, at the initiation ceremony, Kimberly had tripped and staggered in her long white gown, and Roma had despised her a little.
Jennifer stood her ground. “Natalie kidnapped a child.”
“She was babysitting.”
“That’s a lie. And you don’t know where she might have taken him.”
“I never want to hear another word about it,” Roma said.
“You’re covering up for her.”
Under Jennifer’s blazing eyes, Roma quaked.
Warren had hugged Roma as they walked out to her car. By then, she had wanted to hide him, to pitch everything away and run off with him, with Natalie too if that was what it took. The pizza man had arrived, pulling up beneath the crape myrtles. A little gentleman, Warren put out his hand, and the pizza man shifted the boxes in his arms and shook it, and Roma and Natalie looked at each other above Warren’s head and burst out laughing. Warren was so young and the man was so old. I’ve delivered pizza to this house for forty years, he said. They stood there with crape myrtle blossoms floating down on their heads, and Natalie said, Let me, let me, and slipped the keys out of Roma’s limp fingers.
Jennifer’s gaze skewed to the door. “The cops are here!”
Shapes of people on the porch showed through the sheer curtains. The bell rang, and three women stepped inside, matrons in pastel linen with corsages on their lapels.
