It was so nice to be back home, drinking Smirnoff in my friend’s bedroom while her parents slept downstairs. We bought the liquor with a fake ID, my little brother was lucky enough to be designated driver for the evening and we were playing lame drinking games. We couldn’t find anything else in house besides Connect Four and Trivial Pursuit. I seemed to be the only one who found the drinking form of Trivial Pursuit interesting.
“So guys, how many Confederate states were there?”
It felt like high school all over again.
“Eleven. I knew that.”
I’m not home very often, so when I am I spend all my time with my friends. Our every waking moment is spent together, in hopes that intoxicating each other with our presence will be enough to get us through the next semester, that these few days will make up for all of the times that we aren’t there for each other. But when we’re together, it’s like we never left, right down to the midnight cosmic bowling, drinking and playing Connect Four. Maybe I wasn’t drunk enough to appreciate it, but Connect Four, in my book, goes down as the worst drinking game ever. Thank God it only lasted as long as the vodka did.
So it was just like old times, making fun of my brother’s ex-girlfriends and coming to the conclusion that, yes, Jimmy Fallon is hot.
My friends and I went to a public high school in Florida, a state well-known for being ranked 49th in education in the nation. My high school, which had a nationally ranked band and solid sports teams, also had a 35% drop-out rate and enough pot smoke in the upstairs bathroom for one to get high just by walking past. Even for those on the college-bound track, the true mark of achievement was just to get out. Florida recognized that all of its top students left the state to go to better colleges, so it instituted the “Bright Futures Scholarship Program” to encourage the best students to stay in state and give the poorest students a chance to go to college. Bright Futures gives all students that meet GPA and SAT requirements a full scholarship to the state school of their choice. It’s hard to pass up a full scholarship, and I very nearly didn’t. But for my friends and me during high school, the one goal we talked about was to get into an out-of-state college—and go.
Back then, we had a system. Not only did we have to get into an out-of-state school, it had to be good enough to sacrifice a free education for. My friends who got into second-tier schools decided against bankrupting their parents for a school they didn’t love as much. That’s how Richmond, Duke and Brandeis got turned down for Miami, University of Florida, and Florida State University. It all amounted to money. A few of us were lucky enough to overcome all that stood in our way. Some went to Emory, one went as far north as Williams.
Don’t get me wrong, my friends love where they are. Kristen and Emma are enjoying the sorority life, Ancy is about to start in a competitive seven-year-med program and Becca is going to take the Florida State/Tallahassee theater world by storm. I think Bright Futures a remarkable program; it truly does help those who can’t afford to go to college. But for us then, it was just another obstacle to overcome.
When I got into Georgetown, my friends stopped calling me by my name. I became “Georgetown.” I don’t know if this is their way of poking fun at the fact I know how many Confederate states there are, or whether it’s just a symbol of how we used to measure success. Knowing my friends, it’s probably the former, but I’m just happy to be called “Georgetown” at all.
“Hey Georgetown, have another drink.”
Maybe I will.
Hannah Powell is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service. She used to work at Disney World.
