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I grew up in Southern California, just about an hour or so north of Los Angeles in what is, in my opinion, one of the nicest cities in the world (though I'm sure everyone will say that about where they feel most at home). My mom was a teacher at two private religious schools - I attended each of them while she was working at them, until about halfway through eighth grade when I transferred into the public school system for certain reasons.
When I started high school, my friends and I were convinced that we had everything all planned out. Forget what people said about it being difficult to stay friends with people all through high school, we were the best friends ever and we were all going to graduate together and then go to the same college and maybe even move in together after we finished school. We definitely had a very "Well, maybe it doesn't work for other people but it'll work for us" mindset at the time.
And for awhile, it actually looked like things were going according to plan. We were friends all through freshman year and sophomore year. Junior year, however, brought some changes: My mother, who had stopped teaching the summer after I switched schools, was quitting the job she'd gotten at a pharmaceutical company and was taking another job, in an entirely different state. What's more, she wanted my brother and I to come with her. She was in the middle of a feud with my grandfather and disagreed with the way my aunt and uncle were raising my cousins, so staying with them was definitely out. My best friend in the entire world - we're still friends to this day, actually - told her parents that I would be moving and they actually approached my mom and told her that they thought of me as their second daughter and that they would be more than glad to have me live with them so I didn't have to get used to a new high school midway through my junior year and so I could graduate with my friends.
However, my mom wanted to keep my brother and I with her, so a month before my seventeenth birthday we packed up our things and left sunny California behind to move to what can essentially be described as a college town, as the university (along with one or two other nearby things) was really what kept the city going. (I'm not going to get in to exactly how disappointed I was to be leaving - looking back on it now, I know it ended up being a good thing, but I was really rather bitter about it then.)
My intention was to graduate as soon as I could and move back to California to go to college with my friends. The college we would have attended together - CSUCI - doesn't actually have a Greek Life program, though according to their website they're now in the process of establishing the foundations for it. Back then, I was completely to oblivious to Greek Life except for the little I'd seen in movies, so I didn't actually know or care that they didn't have sororities or fraternities at CSUCI. I just wanted to be with my friends. I was terrified that if I was gone for too long, we'd lose touch and they'd forget about me - which hasn't happened, but such are the insecurities of a sixteen-year-old girl.
That plan didn't actually work out, though. The half of junior year and the senior year I spent at my new high school opened me up to so many different opportunities - one of them being a scholarship that I would have had much more competition for if I'd gone for an equivalent scholarship in California. The catch was that it was only applicable to either the university that was located in the city I'd moved to, or another state school a few hours up north. I agonized for weeks over what to do, but in the end I decided to stay where I was. It was much more cost-effective, and it would have been a lie to say that the programs offered at the university weren't more interesting to me than what I had been planning to study at CSUCI.
My family lived about thirty minutes out of town, as my mom had gotten remarried and we'd moved into my stepfather's house, so I decided to live on campus in the dorms. I'm not going to lie - I was excited about the dorm experience, which probably wasn't something I would have done in California as my friends and I had planned to pool our money and get an apartment together after graduation. To my surprise, my roommate turned out to be a girl who I'd had a few classes with in our senior year. I didn't know her well, but the few times I'd spoken with her in class she seemed okay. Very quiet and a little standoffish towards the more rambunctious members of our class, but not a horrible person.
Our move-in day was about a week before classes started, to give everyone a chance to adjust. My roommate - let's call her Milan (not her real name, but it's what she always called her character in video games) - and I moved in, organized our room, and got settled down as we waited for classes to start. Most of the friends I'd made in high school had either gone out of state for college or hadn't graduated yet, so I didn't have many people over, but Milan was a different story. She'd lived in the city her whole life, so she knew a lot of people who were always coming over to hang out. Two of them came over regularly even after classes started: Tessa, who lived in one of the other dorms on campus, and Amanda, who was going to the community college for her first couple of years.
Anyway, back to the week before classes started. Tessa's roommate was... how can I put this diplomatically?... a bad influence, to say the least. She was still seventeen - her eighteenth birthday was a few weeks after classes began - but she had a fake ID and a lot of older friends who kept coming over to her room with alcohol. Three days in, they spiked Tessa's orange juice with something - to this day we're still not sure what. Now let me make this clear: Tessa is tiny, and she'd never had alcohol before in her life. Whatever they'd put in her drink was so strong that it made her really sick. She ended up going to the hospital with alcohol poisoning and we didn't see her until a few days after classes had started, when she asked us if she could stay with us until she and her parents worked out what to do about her roommate situation, because she sure as heck wasn't going back there. Of course, we agreed.
While Tessa was with us, a mutual friend of hers and Milan's - who, as it turned out, was dating one of the friends I'd made in high school (big coincidence!) - came over to see how she was holding up. While she was there, she let it slip that she was an Eevee, and asked all three of us if we were planning on going through recruitment in a few weeks. Milan said no pretty much right away and proceeded to tune the rest of us out while reading a book, but Tessa and I admitted that we hadn't really thought about it and the Eevee encouraged us to give it a try.
She came back a few times in the weeks leading up to the beginning of recruitment to see if we'd registered yet. Tessa registered after her third visit, but I just wasn't sure if I should do it or not. Like I said earlier, I'd never exactly thought about Greek Life at all until then - but after passing a few of the recruitment tables around campus, I figured it couldn't hurt. I registered with a 3.8 high school GPA and no recs (yes, I know, for shame, for shame - but the Eevee and the Greek Life Office had assured both Tessa and I that we didn't need them, since we're a very noncompetitive school). When I look back on it now, I really wonder how different things would have been if I'd thought to get them, and I sort of wish I had.
The Eevee friend, Tessa, and I all tried to get Milan to at least give recruitment a chance, but she was adamant that she didn't want to do it, so we eventually dropped it. A few days before the informational session when we'd be meeting our Rho Chi groups, Tessa moved out of our room, and the night before the session she and I met up to talk about how nervous and excited we were for this.
Whether we were ready or not, recruitment was about to begin.
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