With her heart and pulse pounding double-time, Bette took in the words written across the banner.  As the reality set in, her frustration with her friend and subsequently her blood pressure rose quickly.  Through clenched teeth she hissed out, “Alice!”  Receiving no response from the blonde, she simultaneously tried to quell her growing anxiety as she used her aforementioned ‘ridiculously’ long legs and strode towards her feisty friend, this time shouting out to the girl.  Alice was steps away from being immersed in the jubilant crowd when she turned back to Bette with a giant grin on her face.  For the self-proclaimed “dirty bisexual,” this was heaven – every which way you looked there were young men and women of varying degrees of attractiveness.

“Rush Week Alice, are you fucking kidding me!” Bette screeched while grabbing Alice by the shoulder to halt what looked to be an attempt to disappear amongst the throng.  Receiving a few curious glances, the brunette dragged them away from the veritable salmon stream on the sidewalk to find out what had possessed her friend into thinking this was a good idea.  Once they were a reasonable distance away from the crowd and Bette was convinced that Alice wasn’t going to make a run for it, she fixed her friend with a glare and simply said,

“Explain.”

In the eight years or so that they’ve known each other and been friends, it was not an uncommon occurrence for Alice to be in the quote, unquote doghouse with her best friend.  For a split second Alice did genuinely feel bad for her ruse and was about to apologize to Bette, but then she recalled her motivation.  And so with head held high, index finger firmly pointed and accentuating each of her points as it was thrust into the center of Bette’s collarbone, Alice made her case.

“Bette we are 19…”  She’d let it go before, but despite Bette’s ardent curiosity, she had to interrupt Alice with a slight, insistent clearing of her throat.

“Fine, I’m 19 and you will be in a few months time, oh immature one…Anyway, as I was saying, we’re now sophomores in college, it’s the beginning of the school year, so we’re not yet up to our eyeballs with projects and papers and exams, we attend a school which so happens to be located where the weather is fantastic like eleven months out of the year, and thanks to that, the people that attend this school take advantage of that last fact by displaying a wonderful amount of skin for everyone’s viewing pleasure.  Most of said people are going to be found here on Greek Row this week.  Now there’s no rule that says by coming here you have to join a house, we’re just checking out the possibilities, having fun, that is part of the college experience, ya know?!”