millicent

Initiation recounts the events of five days of “initiation antics” (143) which the protagonist—by name Millicent—has to go through. Sitting in a cellar with her hair sticky from crushed eggs Millicent weighs the pros and cons of joining the sorority. Finally she emerges from the darkness of the basement room realising that “her own private initiation had just begun” The basement room was dark and warm, like the inside of a sealed jar, Millicent thought, her eyes getting used to the strange dimness. The silence was soft with cobwebs, and from the small, rectangular window set high in the stone wall there sifted a faint bluish light that must have been coming from the full October moon. She could see now that what she was sitting on was a woodpile next to the furnace. Millicent brushed back a strand of hair. It was stiff and sticky from the egg that had been broken on her head as she knelt blindfolded at the sorority altar a short while before. There had been a silence, a slight crunching sound, and then she had felt the cold, slimy egg-white flattening and spreading on her head and sliding down her neck. She had heard someone smothering a laugh. It was all part of the ceremony. Then the girls had led her here, blindfolded still, through the corridors of Betsy Johnson’s house and shut her in the cellar. It would be an hour before they came to get her, but then Rat Court would be over and she would say what she had to say and go home. For tonight was the grand finale, the trial by fire. There really was no doubt now that she would get in. She could not think of anyone who had ever been invited into the high school sorority and she was another celebrity in high school, pretty and dark and Vice-President of the Student Council. "You can't say anything unless your big sister asks you something or tells you to talk to someone. And you can't smile, no matter how you're dying to." The girls had laughed a little nervously,