Despite their teasing, Shane did not feel like an outcast. The one benefit to frat life — and it was a big one — was that he always had friends. The hazing and the relentless teasing and the chores and the humiliations of Pledge Week, all of that was just an appetizer designed to whet the pledges’s appetite for brotherhood. That had seemed silly when Shane got started in Kappa Kappa Pi. He thought he’d never feel like a real part of this organization
But somehow Shane had indeed come to feel like he was close to the men in his frat. Even the ones he barely knew like Kyle and Fringe, he felt he knew them so well because they shared the fraternity life. They had gone through the same struggles. They had been hazed the same way back when they were freshmen; they had gotten through it. They had made lifelong friends with their pledgemaster. Shane was sure he would feel the same when he got through all of this struggle.
Chad made them all shower together. Shane had always assumed he did that because he wanted everyone to realize he had the biggest cock in the frat, but Chad justified it by saying it increased camaraderie, which Shane had to admit was true. He had felt like an outsider among the seniors until the night they had gotten drunk together, crammed into such a tight space that Shane’s thigh pressed up against Hartman’s, making Shane nervous until he was drunk enough not to care. Then he felt so close to Hartman it was like they had been friends since childhood.
The fraternity house had three bathrooms, but only two with showers and only one with a large group shower — considering that there were more than twenty people living here, they had to use the group shower for most everything. They could have taken turns and rarely been in the shower at the same time as anyone else, but Chad wouldn’t allow that. “Real men aren’t squeamish about seeing other real men. We can bond by showering together, increasing the ties that bind us, encourage us to celebrate our own masculinity and our brotherhood.” It all seemed like a bunch of nonsense to Shane, an excuse to show off Chad’s massive hog — none of the pledgemasters before Chad required mass naked showering — but no one was willing to tell Chad no on this point.
From The Fraternity Man
