Hell Week by Rosemary Clement-Moore Page A

floor, and I headed there after my chat with Dr. Smyth. Dad was out of the office, and that suited me fine. I didn't need him, just a little privacy.

    I cleared a space on his desk, made myself at home, and took out my laptop. It was new, acquired this summer after my old computer had gone up in a hail of brimstone. But what the heck. I needed one for college anyway.

    Going into the application folder, I clicked on the SpyZilla icon. No red flags had popped up since I first saw that fractal screen, but that only meant that the software didn't find any cooties it recognized.

    So I ran a manual search and found, without much ef- fort, a suspicious script that the program didn't know how to identify. It wasn't known spyware or adware. It was just . . . spookyware.

    Destroy unknown script? I clicked. "Hell yes."

    "Dr. Quinn, did you see this--" Justin entered with a token knock on the open door, then drew up short when he saw me behind the desk. "Oh. Hey, Maggie."

    "Hey." We stayed frozen for an awkward tick of the clock. I was trying to remind myself we were just friends. What- ever he was thinking, his brows were drawn into something approaching a scowl. I looked at what he had in his hands. "Something interesting in the paper?"

    He held up the page with the Phantom Rushee article. "You're not really going through with this, are you?"

    I glared, gesturing to the traffic in the hall. "I don't know what you're talking about."

    "Oh, come on."

    Closing my laptop --after making sure SpyZilla was done de-fractalfying my hard drive--I stood. "I'm working on something." "In a sorority." Not a question. Just incredulous.

    "Don't think I can pull it off?" I asked, slinging my satchel over my shoulder.

    "I know you can. That's what worries me." He tapped the page. "It says right here: `Resistance is futile.' These things-- historically, sociologically--they suck people in."

    "It's a sorority, not a cult, Justin. I'll be fine."

    I swung out the door, already regretting the words. When would I learn not to tempt fate?

    F F F

    Bid Day. The drama and angst of the whole week came down to this: The sororities submitted their choices--the list of girls to whom they would extend a bid. Meanwhile, the rushees listed their top three houses, in order of prefer- ence. There was a certain strategy in what you listed. You didn't have to list three, and some had only one pick, pre- ferring to try again as sophomores rather than take a second choice. Others made sure they had at least one house on their list that they were assured of getting into. EZ, for ex- ample.

    Then we all assembled in the Student Center ballroom to learn if we'd "matched." The doors were closed and no one was allowed in or out until we'd all received our envelopes.

    Holly and I stayed together in line--Quinn and Russell are reasonably close alphabetically--an island of dispassion in a sea of drama. There were many tears--of disappoint- ment, joy, or simple relief. Mostly there was hugging and squealing. Lots and lots of squealing. It bounced from the wainscoted walls and the parquet floor. The chandelier tin- kled an echo. But the noise was nothing compared to the way the stratospheric emotion was scouring every psychic nerve in my body to a bloody, raw thread.

    No story was worth a whole semester of this.

    I had to do something; it figured it was desperation that made me put Gran's imagery book to practical use. Closing my eyes, I pictured deflector shields, like on the Millennium Falcon. I visualized the laser beams of angst bouncing off my defenses, ricocheting harmlessly back into the throng.

    Holy cow. It actually worked. The muscles of my shoul- ders began to unclench and the knot in my stomach . . .

    "Maggie! Holly!" Tricia threw herself at me, wrapping an arm around my neck and drawing Holly into the embrace. "It worked!"

    "That's great, Trish!" Holly hugged her back.

    Something had worked, until I'd completely lost concen- tration. The noise and