Emily looked at Jenna, but returned her gaze back to Shali. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Well,” Shali said, shifting her frame on the chair, “Mom never met a man who couldn’t charm the pants off her.”
“Shali, that’s not nice.”
“Not nice, maybe. But true.” She nudged Jenna to change the subject. “So what’s up with you? How’s it being the sorority nazi?”
“Let’s see,” Jenna said, pretending to look at an imaginary list. “I’ve just entered battle number two with the Beta Zetas at the University of Kentucky.”
“You get all the good schools, don’t you? Seriously, what’s going on with them?”
“Just a bunch of nasty and anonymous e-mails from the girls down there. They’re mad at me because they were caught holed up in the lounge smoking pot, drinking rum shots, and watching America’s Next Top Model—a marathon.”
“I love that show,” Shali said. “That’s what I should have been, instead of doing hair or being a doctor.”
Emily leaned closer to her daughter. Jenna looked at Shali, with a stern shut up now glance. “What’s going on, honey?”
Chris seemed more interested than alarmed. He knew that Jenna could handle just about any situation. She’d proven that long ago. But whether she holds a badge or not, a mom is a mom.
“Just a big mess, Mom. I’m getting e-mails that trash the president, a nice girl named Sarah Lee.”
Shali brightened. “Like the frozen cheesecake?”
“Yeah, like that,” Jenna said.
“Mrs. Kenyon, do you have anything sweet around here?”
“You know where the freezer is, honey.”
Shali got up for the kitchen and Emily, concerned about her daughter, moved into Shali’s spot on the couch. Chris, Emily, and Jenna’s eyes followed Shali out of the room.
“What are the e-mails about? And what’s the national office doing to help?”
Jenna laughed, but it was a laugh choked with sarcasm. “First of all, Nationals does nothing. They talk like they’re so concerned about the girls, their welfare. But all they care about is a smoke-free environment and diversity as long as you’re white.” She clicked on her laptop and read from her e-mails.
“Just so you know, the president here was drunk in her room earlier this week. Three sisters saw her. I’d give you their names, but I don’t want to be dragged into this mess.”
“It came from the same IP address as this one,” Jenna said, scrolling down.
“My father’s a lawyer and he says that he can make a case against the BZs for the way they’ve treated some of the girls here. Sarah Lee is a big liar and a whore. She’s not the kind of girl we want representing any of us here. She’s also bulimic.”
“Sounds pretty petty, Jenna,” Chris put in.
“Tell me about it. I wish I never took this job. Dumb idea.”
Shali came back in the room with a frozen Three Musketeers candy bar. She was so excited she looked like she’d won the lottery. “Mrs. Kenyon, you still freeze these. I love you!”
Jenna smiled at her friend, but resisted the opportunity to say something snarky about frozen candy bars. “I was telling them about those stupid girls back in Kentucky,” she said. “I’m dealing with a bunch of whiners who feel like the whole world is against them when they all drive BMWs and have spray-on tans.”
Shali took a spot on the floor next to the fire. “Tell them about your meeting last week. That sounded so fun.”
“This is good, I guess,” Jenna said, kind of enjoying the attention of her mother and her detective boyfriend. Or whatever he was. “I thought it would die down. You know, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the holiday season. No such luck. One of the girls called Nationals saying that someone peed on her pillow and cut the straps on all of her tank tops and bras.”
“Sounds very mature,” Chris said. “Aren’t these girls adults?”
“Age has nothing to do with maturity,” Emily said, doing everything she could not to land her eyes on Shali’s pink hair.
Jenna was on a roll. “So they had this big meeting. Everything is supposed to be secret, of course. No girl who is being admonished by the chapter or Nationals is supposed to speak of it to anyone. But Sarah Lee did. I got to the meeting place—a banquet room in the back of a pizza restaurant off campus—and I had to walk past at least two dozen BZs. They glared at me and said that I was being unreasonable.”
“Sounds like a Lifetime movie. You know the part, where the girl has to walk past all of her classmates that know that she was really raped by the quarterback with the shaved pecs and sexy stubble on his face.”
“Tiffany Amber in No One Heard Her Scream.”
“Yes. That’s how it felt. A very Tiffany Amber moment.”
Chris looked at Emily and Jenna. They clearly understood Shali’s reference to a TV movie. He didn’t have a clue, but said nothing. Admitting he didn’t know who or what Tiffany Amber was, would only serve to make him older than his fifty years.
And he wasn’t doing that.
“So, anyway,” Jenna went on, “enough of that tangent. The bottom line here is that Sarah Lee’s dad, the lawyer, threatened to take the BZs for everything they had if they didn’t fix the problem. He used words that made the national office shudder with fear.”
Chris, once more, looked puzzled.
Emily touched his shoulder. “This is a shot in the dark, but is it the you’re fostering a hostile learning environment?”
“Yup,” Jenna said, “the gold standard.”
“So what happened?” Chris asked.
“Nothing. Same as usual. The nice girls get bullied by the ones who have the loudest parents with the most money.”
“Sounds like a Little League baseball game,” Emily said.
“That’s about right, Mom. The only thing that I hate worse than the drama of a dispute that’s escalated to the national level is making a road trip to help some failing house build up its pledge base.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Chris said. “I mean, it’s all about marketing, right?”
“Honestly, Chris, sometimes it feels like it’s all about babysitting. I know it isn’t much longer and I’ll be off to law school by this time next year, but I really do hate what I’m doing.”
Emily wanted to kick her ex-husband and his greedy wife Dani to the curb just then. If they had helped out a little more, Jenna might have taken another route to finance more of her education. Emily wondered if she had miscalculated and should have pushed for more college loans. She just couldn’t, having experienced the burden firsthand with her own student loans and David’s from medical school.
“Who’s hungry?” Shali asked. “Because I am.”
“You always are,” Jenna said, ending the conversation about money, her dad, and bratty sorority girls.
“Your mom can cook. My mom never met a can opener she didn’t like. What’s that I smelled when I came in here?”
Emily stood and looked toward the kitchen. “Nothing fancy. Just the best meal you’ll ever have. Come on. Let’s eat.”
“Just a sec,” Jenna said turning her attention back to her laptop screen. “I have to finish this blog post.”
“What are you doing, blogging? That’s so five minutes ago.”
“I know. The headquarters women think it is so ‘cutting-edge’ to blog. But that’s how we share the information that builds stronger sisterhood or something like that.”
She finished typing the entry:
Hi Girls,
I’m looking so forward to seeing all of you in Dixon. I might be late, so dinner might not work out. Could someone save me a late plate, just in case? We’ll have so much fun talking about recruitment and how we can maximize our efforts to ensure that we have the very best new pledges. Go BeeZees!