It's Lookaway Lookaway, by Wilton Barnhart, who teaches in the MFA program at NCSU. I put it on hold at the library and just got it today -- if I didn't have a meeting tonight I'd drop everything and read it.
p. 4: 2003 -- "This led to Jerilyn's one upcoming act of proposed rebellion. She was going to rush a sorority." (at UNC)
p. 9: "Jerilyn said nothing about rush registration to Becca, so the date deadline for her to participate came and went. And what Jerilyn truly couldn't explain was that Becca was a jeans-and-t-shirt, dykey haircut kind of girl, and, sure, those kinds of casual sororities existed, but among the top powerhouse sororities, you showed up stylish and sharp...just not so sharp that it looked like you went to the store and bought the most expensive thing they had....Jerilyn was as committed as ever to Operation Sorority....
She liked the girls at Sigma Sigma Sigma; they had a Carrie Underwood CD playing the whole time in the background--Carrie was a TriSig made good....At Delta Delta Delta (on a repeat visit)...if she got accepted there (which wasn't going to happen) she contemplated the long sophomore exile to the lesser TriDelt houses, probably three or four to a bunkroom in some lightless basement, until one day, as a junior, she would summoned....to the glorious upper rooms of the bid white mansion with the wraparound porch."
Jerilyn's mother is a Theta Kappa Theta and she thinks that's what she'll settle for ("a brown brick box with narrow horizontal upper windows which made the structure look like it was squinting"). But she pledges "the legendary Sigma Kappa Nu," the wild one: "drugs, booze, and boys...in a house like Sigma Kappa Nu, you know that end of all that work is some serious playtime."
And the rest of the story? You'll need to check it out yourself!
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