Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

acts? Did they, sending their daughters off to college, remark, as last-minute advice, “And, dearest,
remember
, when you get after the frosh . . .
do
please wear your blue-and-white-striped p.j.’s—they look the best, and they’ll stand the splinters in that floor . . .”
    â€œNo, I was brought,” said Natalie, and received for reward a push from the girl who had brought her, so that she fell clumsily against a girl sitting, and the girl said, very humanly, “
Cut
it out,” and pushed back.
    Now I
will
keep quiet, Natalie thought, knowing—and it was not, after all, any too soon to learn—the resignation of a perceptive mind before gleeful freed brutality—and let someone else get pushed.
    â€œâ€”for entering here?” the leader was asking the next girl.
    â€œI don’t know,” said the girl uncertainly, and was pushed.
    As that girl dropped down next to Natalie, she whispered, trembling, “I wish I’d never come.”
    â€œMe, too,” said Natalie inadequately.
    She found that she was thinking absurdly of Jeanne d’Arc; perhaps the next girl, or the one after that, would turn in contempt from the leader, and, addressing a dim figure in the background, drop to her knees and say, “You, Sire, are my king . . .”
    After the first few girls, their mentor was tired of pushing them—perhaps she had worn out her rage, or her arms?—and they were allowed to seat themselves quietly. No one spoke, and beyond their mutual and spreading apprehension came the sure conviction among the freshmen that their superiors had exceeded themselves, that the “
I
will if
you
will” had begun to evaporate, with the laughter and the bad puns; that the torment they had devised extended perhaps to one or two girls and could not, for sheer bodily weariness, be repeated, over and over again, for twenty. Moreover, it became increasingly clear that the party had fallen flat, that the pure number of girls entering docilely had worn thin the viciousness in the voice of the leader, that she and her cohorts were going to skim over the last few girls, relying for their effect upon the first few, and, perhaps even with discomfort for themselves, let the business go to pieces now without further emphasizing their futility; the part of wisdom lay clearly in choosing the weakest first.
    Natalie, at least, felt a grateful relief when, instead of calling upon her as the first girl, the leader waited until all the freshmen were in, and crowded uneasily onto the floor, and sitting or kneeling, then pointed to a girl in the middle and said, “You, there.”
    It crossed Natalie’s mind then that if she had stayed in her room quietly and never heeded the call to frosh, she would have been overlooked, since no one seemed to care about those who did not come. With this in mind, Natalie turned cautiously and scanned the ranks of freshmen for the red-haired girl, but did not find her. Another instance, she thought regretfully (or at least remembered later that she had so thought), of ritual gone to seed; the persecution of new students, once passionate, is now only perfunctory.
    The girl chosen was required to sit upon a low stool in what was, most of them now recognized, the center of the second-floor lavatory—the largest in the house, and the one with most floor space—and she was required further to give her name and her previous educational experience, as though that had not all been gone over before by people more qualified to know, and then the leader, hesitating and prompted, had chosen to confer with a colleague rather than to continue the questioning immediately. Then someone from the masked circle around the new students said, “Look, we’re all allowed to ask questions, aren’t we?”
    â€œSure,” said the leader, with obvious gratitude.
    â€œThen listen, Myrna,” said the girl happily,