JdotFlan

Define Functional

Chapter Two: Girls Girls Girls I’m not sure if I ever said it to her out loud but in my head, I called her Jewlz. Her name was Julie and we met during a freshman summer program at Marquette University. It was a program for students with high test scores but lower than expected grade point averages. I was again amongst a group with which I should fit. We all shared the same disease, we could but we didn’t. The program was our chance to prove ourselves and show we were capable of performing at a collegiate level. It was highly structured requiring us to take one 3 credit course and spend the rest of the day in orientation classes and mandatory study hours. I don’t remember exactly how many of us there were but we all stayed in the same dormitory with men and women on different floors. I landed on that campus, 800 miles away from home, after an eventful senior year during which I created my own half-day schedule by skipping half my classes every day. To make things fair I would alternate leaving or arriving after lunch during the week. I didn’t feel that bad about it because to make up for my freshman failure I had two periods of gym every day. I had a grade point average of 1.1 entering the year and really shouldn’t have been promoted to the twelfth grade. I remember a friend who resented my flippant attitude toward school calling me, the summer before the twelfth grade, to inform me that I had failed two classes and wouldn’t be a senior in the fall. Having grown in arrogance, due to the magic doors administrators would open to allow me to dodge consequences, I confidently replied “Well see”. And as I expected, we shared most of the same classes that next year, on the days I bothered to show up for them. When the year ended, I shouldn’t have graduated but to fit the pattern that had been established in my life my English teacher mercifully decided not to fail me stating that she didn’t want to “Hold me back” because “the world needed me”. No pressure right? But despite all the lessons I didn’t learn that year JROTC had put me in a position to go to college. A counselor that worked with our cadets was a Marquette Alumni and found this program for me. JROTC had also netted me a girlfriend and by the time I was leaving for college, we were still in the throes of passion following our mutually lost virginity. Before I left for school that summer, I bought a micro recorder to use during lectures but tested it out first recording her moans during one of our love-making sessions. I and that tape would make our way to a majority white Jesuit campus, with me nervous about leaving its star, nervous about the new world I was in, nervous about meeting the standards of college life, and unknowingly one floor beneath Jewlz.