Fraternitas

By Elizabeth Ruth Deyro

Only when you spend a year behind bars do you realize that the hazing was never really worth it.

Three Greek letters were never worth dropping out of school for, never worth going to jail for, but you did it anyway, because your seniors said so.

No, you barely touched that girl, but you were the neophyte, and neophytes have to prove their loyalty, even if it means having to own up to their seniors’ mistakes. So you say it was you, with the burden of sixty-five years of legacy, on your shoulders. It was you, and your mother still doesn’t know how to believe that her son could do such a despicable thing to a girl almost the same age as his sister. She said she thought she raised you well and you couldn’t tell her that how could she say that when she wasn’t even there for a good half of your life, that she was away overseas taking care of someone else’s children instead of hers, that there will always be a part of you that wants to belong, that you’ve finally found it and this is the price for wanting to belong to something greater than what you were meant for. You realize that this was your ultimate test, and even though you kept wondering why they’d make you confess to avoid trial when they had fraternity brothers who practice law, self-proclaimed masters in the industry, you try to keep the faith. “Trust the brotherhood” was what they told you.

So you walked out of the filthy room they made you stay in at the frat house, into the discomforts of the equally filthy prison ward, believing that things would get better, trying to conceal the shame of admitting to a crime you did not commit, to raping a young girl when you never did, letting your mother and the rest of the world brand you as a rapist when you didn’t even get to be branded as an official Alpha Phi. You kept thinking that maybe you still weren’t allowed to get visitors, because months passed and no family, by blood or in brotherhood, check on you to see how you’re coping. Only when you spend a year behind bars do you realize that maybe you never really had a family at all.

Elizabeth Ruth Deyro is a Filipina writer, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Brown Orient. She is also an editor of The Rag Queen Periodical, Minute Magazine, and Cauldron Anthology. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Ellipsis Zine, Jellyfish Review, Black Napkin Press, and The Tempest, among others. She can be found at her twitter and on her website.