Synopsis: Allison learns more about Alpha Gamma and the story takes a surprising twist.

“Okay so I notice something,” Laura said as we walked back into the house. Okay, rather as I limped back into the house. “When Lucy was waxing you I got a look at your feet and you have like, a nasty case of athlete’s foot.”
“What seriously?!” Cassandra exclaimed, grabbing me by the shoulder and turning me around to face her. “Do you not know how to take care of yourself? Like at ALL?”
“I…” I started to speak but they were talking about me again like I wasn’t even there. Jeez.
“I have a pumice stone I haven’t opened yet,” Michelle offered. What the hell was a pumice stone?
“Oh yeah, that’s a good idea,” Casandra nodded. “I think we should get started on that like, right now. It’s going to bug me. We should get it done before she goes to class on Monday anyway. I mean what if we want her to wear strappy sandals or something?”
Wait. Class? I was going to go to class dressed like this? Seriously?
“That reminds me!” Laura said. “We need your school ID; I have to go talk to the dean later about changing your name for class and stuff.”
“What…what do you mean?” I asked nervously.
“I mean if you’re going to go to class, as a girl, then your name needs to be Allison for attendance purposes. You don’t want them to call out ‘Miles’ when they do attendance or call on you in class, right?”
You know, up until this point I thought that I was only going to be dressed as a girl when I was in the house. Going out in public was easy enough, because I passed – or at least I thought I did, but hey, they’d shown me pretty good, hadn’t they?
“I don’t know…” I started stammering. “I mean…”
“You mean nothing,” Laura said sternly. “You’re doing this. Don’t worry, a sister will be with you at all times. We checked your class schedule, we have people in like every one of them. You’re going to be fine.”
A sister would be with me all the time? ALL the time? Seriously? Was I ever going to get any time to myself? No. The answer was probably no.
“Come on,” Cassandra said. “Upstairs, we’re going to get a look at those feet. Hey, remember what I told you about walking up the steps.”
I remembered, and I tried to do it as best I could. I messed up a few times and she would make me walk back down, starting over and walking back up the steps, slowly. Finally, we made it up, and this time they led me to the bathroom. Okay, this bathroom was big. Really big. It looked like you could have fit ten people in here. Marble floors, full length mirrors, a glass enclosed shower, storage cabinets for days. It was like being in a hotel bathroom but better.
Cassandra immediately pointed to a chair beside the shower and instructed me to sit. I did.
“Shoes off,” She said, towering over me with her hands on her hips. Once again I obeyed and she grabbed my leg by the ankle and lifted it up so she could see. “Oh my god, what have you been doing to your feet? It’s like…have you been pumicing with a cheese grater?”
She suddenly poked a part of my foot with her finger and I winced. I didn’t realize they could hurt like that. What was she doing? She hadn’t even touched it that hard.
“Does it hurt to walk?” Laura asked me, looking over my feet.
“I mean…sometimes?” I said. I thought about it, yeah, sometimes it did hurt to walk but it was something I had gotten used to.
“Okay so this is something we have to take care of like, right now,” Cassandra said. “Michelle, where’s that pumice stone?”
“Right here,” Michelle handed her what looked like a brown spongy rock wrapped in plastic. Cassandra tore the plastic off and Laura filled a tub of water, which they set at my feet.
“Normally I’d just have you do this yourself,” Cassandra said, her eyes meeting mine. “But since you’ve never done it before…”
She pulled my feet down, placing them in the water. They let them soak for about ten minutes, chatting amongst themselves about various things while they waited for…whatever it was they were waiting for. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on being anywhere but here. Being here I guess was…cool. Really cool. How many guys would love to be in my situation? I was inside a sorority house getting all this attention but…it was going to come with a price. I was going to be in public as a girl all the time. I would have to go to class like this. Was I even going to be able to handle it? Oh my god, was I? It might be a few days off but it was closer than I liked.
“Are you sleeping over there?” Laura poked me. I opened my eyes and shook my head.
“Don’t worry, if she was, she won’t be in a minute,” Cassandra took a seat on the side of the tub next to me. It was one of those cast iron tubs, separate from the shower, so even though she was sitting she was still a little bit taller than me. She took the stone and dipped it in the water, then took my left foot in her hand. I suddenly felt Laura’s hands on my shoulders, she was kind of pushing, no, holding me. What? Why? Cassandra suddenly took the stone to my foot and began to scrub. It didn’t hurt at first, but after a minute there was this burning sensation as she scrubbed harder and harder. I could feel pieces of dead skin tearing off. I tried to squirm a bit but Laura held my shoulders tightly. So that’s why she was there. Suddenly, Cassandra moved the pumice stone to the sole of my foot, nearest the toes. I screamed as she ground down on it. I mean I really screamed, probably louder than I had at the salon. It wasn’t an angry scream this time though, I was in pain, and it hurt even more as she moved up and worked on my toes. I was just sitting in the chair screaming and thrashing like a death row inmate on the electric chair.
“Stop stop stop!” I screamed. I think I was crying. Cassandra slowed down a little bit and looked at me.
“You ever consider actually taking care of your feet?” She asked me condescendingly. “Maybe if you did…”
“Please stop,” I sobbed. “It hurts.”
“It’s not going to kill you,” Michelle rolled her eyes. “You’ll be fine.”
Cassandra went back to work, rubbing the stone between my toes, and I continued to scream, and cry, and do all sorts of things that probably destroyed every shred of manhood that I had left if I ever had any. It didn’t take long for a few girls to come into the bathroom to see what was going on.
“What are you doing to her?” A short redhead asked as she poked her head in and looked. “Oh…that bad huh?”
“Yeah, see this is what I’m concerned about,” Cassandra said, looking at the girl and pointing to a spot on my heel. She pressed on it and I could feel a little bit of pain. “When we get down here she’s really going to scream.
“Cassandra,” I gasped. “Please, please let’s stop.”
My pleas fell on deaf ears as she worked her way down my foot, scraping away dead skin with Laura leaning down on me. I didn’t stand a chance. I tried to pull my foot away from her at least ten times but her grip was so strong.
“See this?” Michelle pointed, at me, looking at the girls who were now gathering in the bathroom to watch the show. “This is why we’re okay with her living in the house.”
“No kidding,” Another girl said. “If she tried to pull anything, we could just take her out with a pumice stone.”
Oh my god this was humiliating.
Cassandra suddenly let go of my foot, dropping it into the water. Thank god, we were done.
“Okay,” She said with a smile. “Other foot.”
After twenty minutes of screaming and crying, she let go of my feet and dried them with a towel. I limped out of the bathroom with Laura guiding me. It was kind of like the walk of shame with fifteen girls standing in the bathroom and out in the hallway giggling as I walked by. Were they having fun torturing me? Probably. Back in the bedroom Cassandra showed me how to rub lotion on my feet and then put a pair of pink fuzzy socks on me. Despite all of the pain I’d been in a few minutes before I actually felt pretty good now. My feet felt really, really clean. Cleaner than they had in a long time.
“Come on, there’s something I want to show you,” Laura said, offering me her hand and pulling me up off the bed. She didn’t make me put shoes on, thank god. She led me down the hallway and down the stairs. We ended up in the front room, and she walked me behind the stairs, into another hallway. How big was this house? The room we ended up in was a trophy room. There were dozens of trophies in glass cases for everything from cheerleading, to volleyball, to soccer. It was huge, and there were still a few empty cases. One wall was covered with plaques, each one filled with nameplates and a year.
“Every sister who was a part of our house and graduated from Bellcrest,” Laura told me. Okay, it was cool to look at, but why was she showing me?
“Hey there, showing her the trophy room?” I turned around. Remy was standing there dressed casually this time in a pair of jeans and a pink hoodie that actually said ‘Pink’ across the front of it in huge block letters.
“Yeah, I figured it was a good time, I just watched Cassandra torture her with a pumice stone,” Laura snickered.
“I heard about that,” Remy laughed. “Okay rather I HEARD that. Girl you are LOUD.”
I blushed. I felt so weak in front of them. I know that technically I was a girl, at least on the inside, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to be stronger somehow, because I was a man. I wasn’t stronger. I was absolutely at their mercy and it felt terrifying. Remy was someone I had seen before around campus and I’d always seen her as a sort of happy go lucky type of girl. She seemed so harmless. Now she seemed anything but harmless. She held my entire future in her hands and she was so…intimidating. The same went for Laura. I was slowly beginning to realize that I was absolutely, positively not in control here. I had nothing.
“We’re going to go by your dorm to clear it out later,” Remy said. “I went ahead and talked to the dean. We’re going to get you a new school ID and we’ve already killed the lease on your dorm room. I guess you paid a year in advance so you’ll be refunded.”
“You killed the lease?” I repeated back to her. “That’s my…”
“Not your home anymore,” Remy said. “You live here in this house. Don’t tell me about how you never asked for it, I don’t care. We put thousands of dollars into rush. The food, the decorations, the permits, you have no idea. You chose to be a part of it, and yeah, a girl can usually reject a bid but what you did was literally against school rules. Not to mention it pissed off the entire Greek system. Well, at least our side of it.”
“W…wait what do you mean?” I asked shakily. “What do you mean the entire Greek system?”
“Every sorority you visited during rush,” Remy said, moving toward me and maintaining eye contact. “Like I told you, you didn’t fool them. Even if your looks were on point…barely, you still act very male. Your mannerisms gave you away and it’s pretty much all they’ve been talking about. I talked to the president of Delta Epsilon Theta and she said she was about to throw you out the front window.”
“I…why didn’t they?” I asked.
“Because no one wants to make a scene at rush,” Laura explained. “Technically you weren’t hurting anything, it was just annoying.”
“So,” Remy said. “We knew you were coming, I talked to you and you seemed okay. That’s when I decided to look into you a bit more. You’re kind of geeky but otherwise unremarkable. You should be able to make the transition pretty smoothly.”
My god, they had me figured out from the first second I’d walked in. I hadn’t stood a chance. Hell they knew before I’d walked into the house.
“I want to show you something,” Laura said, pointing at one of the plaques. It was the 2016 plaque. Four years ago. She tapped it to get my attention until I finally walked over. “Read the names.”
I started at the top. There were thirty names on here, so it was going to take a while. I read down, muttering each name as I went until finally I came to the one that made my heart practically stop. Brianna Parsons.
My sister.
My sister had been an Alpha Gamma.