Thread Tools

QueenBee
*^_^*
n/a
2812.05
QueenBee is offline
 
#1
Old 04-15-2007, 09:21 AM

So I just started a novel and here's part of chapter one/intro. I'd love thoughts or constructive criticisms!


The Secret Life Of A College Girl


So here I was freshly uprooted from a glamorous beachside city in Southern California to a college in Podunk town, Oregon, and suddenly people wanted to know why. What do you tell them? Because it felt right? Because I was running away? I usually bored them with the fact that my mother had read about the college in Newsweek and since we were in the city looking at schools it was a short drive. What I really wanted to do was ask why they’d exchanged one Podunk Oregon town for another or why they thought going to college forty minutes away was a good idea. But one look at their beater car and their residence hall quad told me the answer. That’s what we were supposed to call the dorms, residence halls. The name implied that we were one big happy family in our ant infested hellhole and had amenities like two-ply toilet paper. We were not and did not. Two-ply was reserved for public buildings where staff and guests might use the restroom. We were the ones making money for the college and they were the ones in ass-wiping luxury. But I suppose since that was one of my only complaints I was riding high.
I have always been a bit of a conundrum to myself, a sort of contradiction wrapped up in muscle and skin. I was raised by a Presbyterian mother who only attended church on holidays anymore. My father is an atheist who disguises himself as a Jew. They never agreed on what to raise me so I found my own path. A Jew by appearance and a Wiccan by faith…what two-toned food works with that? Let’s just say I was a watermelon, religiously speaking that is. In high school I had been relegated to the social outcasts, the nerds and the freaks, of which I was neither. I tried to fit in by shopping at Hot Topic but eventually realized that would never change the inside. By college I had given that up. Like most girls looking for a home away from home, I went through fall rush. Imagine my surprise when I found a sorority full of social outcasts who also happened to be beautiful and intelligent women. Sure they had better things to do then to pancake their faces every morning before class and follow style magazines but don’t we all have those days?
Speaking of those days, my Grandfather died during rush so I didn’t accept any bids. I flew to LA to attend his funeral and sit Shiva. He was buried in a Jewish cemetery with the grotesque motto ‘keeping Jewish families together’. Inside the small room off of the stage reserved for family was a plasma screen so we could watch our friends and acquaintances mourning. After the usual family drama we sat down to watch the service. Since it was so close to the High Holy Days we had a secondary rabbi presiding. My grandparents had moved from Florida to a house two doors down from my Father several years prior and religiously attended his temple. Thus it was a bit of a shock when the rabbi mispronounced the deceased’s name. My grandmother made a kind of choking sound in the back of her throat at that and I remember squeezing her hand. Afterwards we followed the hearse up a sunny hill and to the gravesite. Two Hispanic workers cranked a handle and my grandfather’s coffin was lowered into the earth. In the Jewish faith it is a custom for funeral attendees to shovel dirt over the dead. The family always does this first. My grandmother shoveled that wet mud over her husband and nearly collapsed. My sister and father carried her back to her seat. My father, stepmother, older sister, Aunt, Uncle, and cousins shoveled. I reached for the shovel handle only to find a hand already on it. The hand belonged to that rabbi who claimed to have known my grandfather but couldn’t remember his name. She shoveled before me. I lifted the shovel, full of mud, in my hands and tossed it into the gaping hole where my grandfather now lay. The sound of it hitting the coffin below was sickening. I dissolved into tears and distanced myself from the site so my Grandmother wouldn’t see me. Later when all the dirt had been shoveled I stood over the hole and whispered that I had forgiven him for bringing abuse into my bloodline. It was a lie but I felt better for saying it. We drove home through the city and ate from deli platters and cookie plates my father provided. People joined us throughout the day and into the night. All I could think was that my grandfather would have enjoyed this. He had always loved cookies. My father suspects that, in his later years, Grandpa only ate meals to get to the dessert. I think he was right. I called him my Cookie Monster.
Shortly after my return to school I went through COBS — continuous open bidding. I joined that sorority full of women like me and I never regretted it. After a few weeks of classes filled with pre-Stalin Russian literature, bell-shaped curves, and supply and demand, it was time to become an official pledge. After cooking a meal for the entire sorority (how I got stuck with this duty alone in a pledge class of 11 I will never know) I flew to my room to get ready and anxiously awaited my Big. Luckily, she being her usual self, was slightly late to pick me up. To my joy my Big was a curly-haired redhead full of what can only be described as spunk. Sure she was admittedly an alcoholic, probably a chain smoker, and enjoyed smoking a bowl before bed most nights (all of which I was and am morally opposed to) but I loved her instantly.
__________________

 


Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 

 
Forum Jump

no new posts