This story was originally posted to DeviantArt on April 27, 2010.
The day started far earlier than Meghan would have liked. College students were supposed to sleep in until noon, not crawl out of bed at 4 am. If it were just a simple class she needed to attend, she'd have slept until twenty minutes beforehand, thrown on some clothes and left. As it was, she got up, took a shower, got dressed, and fastidiously did her hair and makeup-- much to her roommate's chagrin, judging by how she started tossing and turning. Her roommate was a pretty Indian girl named Rana, who always seemed to be buried in studies… a lot like Meghan before she had met Renee, actually. Meghan hadn't mentioned Delta Theta to her roomie yet. She probably wouldn't care.
Meghan arrived at the sorority house about ten minutes early, just as the other pledges began arriving, too. The girls all looked tired, and a few were clutching coffee cups, although most of them were too new to college to have developed a healthy caffeine habit yet.
When they were finally invited inside, Mara's face lit up in an ill-disguised evil grin at all the fresh meat… er, "aspiring sisters," as she carefully worded it in her welcoming speech. As Mara took delight in painting a grim picture of the oncoming week, Meghan looked around at the other pledges, hoping to reassure herself that everyone else was as nervous as her. She noticed Gina, the girl she had met the morning after the party, standing halfway across the room and cracking her knuckles nervously. The butterflies in Meghan's stomach faded a bit.