Fraternity Loser

Pi Kappa Alpha was well known for being by some margin the most notorious fraternity on campus, and not for the faint of heart. When first touring the campus, you remember how distinctly alluring fraternity row had seemed—a winding, hilly, mile-long stretch of stately, three-story brick houses with balconies and verandas—and how forbidding the facade of the Pike house in particular looked.

You remember seeing the brothers, most of them ROTC and athlete-types, luxuriating in various states of competition and play—wrestling, scrimmaging, playing pick-up games of basketball or football, washing their cars, chasing each other with squirt guns filled with water (or something nastier), performing keg stands, blasting music. Hypnotized, you watched them strut, juke, tease, and prank one another in their tank tops, snap-backs, and athletic shorts, or luxuriate in the sun; and half-unconsciously the way their suntanned skin and rippling biceps and thighs glinted in the sun became etched in your brain.

Fast forward six months, and you had made it through innumerable trials and shit-tests to the end of Pi Kappa Alpha’s notoriously grueling “Hell Week” with ten fingers, ten toes, and no **** poisoning to speak of.

You were feeling immensely pleased.

All that was left was one final meeting at midnight in the fraternity house. You confidently assumed that every other pledge had been invited separately, and would arrive in turn for some kind of culminating event or ceremony, drawing Hell Week to a close.