Turn 9 of 26

You say thanks in your lisp and messed up speech from the braces as you and Ruth leave the frat house and walk around campus talking about computers and school stuff like nerds do. You know you’re a nerd and always have been so. You were never in a sorority, You were in clubs for academics. Ruth then asks in a lisp and messed up speech if you want to go to the dining hall with everyone from class.

"Thankth, Ruthie," you say, and the lisp wraps the words until they're barely hers. The nickname comes out of nowhere — some new familiarity installed while your back was turned — and Ruth beams like you've given her a present.

You walk campus together, and the conversation is the strange part. It flows. Ruth asks what you think of the new compiler release, and you have opinions — detailed, confident opinions about a compiler you've never touched. You talk about your clubs, the math league, the coding society, the study group you've run since freshman year, and the memories come with the words, fully furnished. Late nights in the computer lab. Valedictorian. Four-point-oh. You were never in a sorority. The thought lands with a horrible, frictionless ease, like a book sliding into its place on a shelf. Sororities are for girls like you used to be. You're an academic. You always have been.

Except you just walked out of the sorority house. Your keycard is still in your bag. Your name is still on a door upstairs, over a bed with string lights and a vanity you paid two hundred dollars to have done last month. Those facts sit in your head like items in a stranger's lost-and-found — visible, touchable, and belonging to nobody.

"Hey." Ruth touches your sleeve. "Everyone from clath ith going to the dining hall. We all thit together. Thame table." Her braces flash as she smiles.

"You thould come. You're one of uth now."

Somewhere behind you, a girl calls across the quad — someone wearing your sorority's letters, someone who was maybe your best friend — and the sound of your name in her mouth reaches you from a distance, muffled, like a radio in another room.