De-pledged

Like I said before, I wasn't at school for the education, though ostensibly I was an aspiring computer science major. At Washington State you needed to be accepted into the program based on performance in non-core classes during your freshman and sophomore years, which meant a minimum grade point average far in excess of mine. My first semester at the Fiji house, I earned all of a .8 average. I was spindling out of control, and more often than not, I just stopped going to class.

The proverbial snowball was still just a flake until the day I sat in Calculus class as the professor handed out midterm exams to the students--except for me; I missed the previous class. "Oh," I thought, "this is just one of those dreams." But it wasn't. The professor wouldn't let me make it up, and I had no choice but to take it again the following semester.

Assembly language. The class could have been called How to Talk with Your Computer with Just Ones and Zeros. If it sounds complicated, you're not alone. I was on my second iteration through the class, and determined not to fall behind again. We had to build over the course of the semester what is called a compiler, which converts a computer language into binary, or the ones and zeros that the computer understands. Not only that, but we were inventing the computer language too, and the work we did each class depended on the combined work from all previous classes. So if you fell behind, or did badly on an early portion of the project, you were guaranteed to be exponentially worse off as time bore mercilessly on.

"What was that?" I blurted a little too loudly as I popped my head up. Drool had started to run down my chin into a dropper-sized pool on the desk. In a smooth motion, so as not to attract attention to it, I ran my chin along my shoulder and wiped it off on the way up.

The teacher was staring at me impatiently. "I asked you to explain to me what a FIFO stack is."

"Ok, I know this one." I ran my fingers through my hair like Jim from Taxi.

She looked disgusted and pointed to a girl sitting behind me. "Terri, can you answer the question for our sleeping friend?"

"First In First Out," Terri said.

And so another semester of Assembler was ruined. My school loan would last me through the rest of that year, and with my sub-arctic GPA, it wouldn't be granted for the next.

At the Fiji house, I had what was called a Big Brother, somebody that I was supposed to look to for guidance. I don't remember his name if you can believe that, but he was very excited the day our names were put together. He wanted to help me, wanted to integrate me into the house, but his enthusiasm had its limits. He told me happily that my skirmish with two house members in the sleeping porch came to nothing.

"Don't worry," he said, "the members of the house have talked about it and have decided that you did nothing wrong."

"How very generous of them," I said. He looked at me with dawning surprise.

"It could have gone badly you know," he said. "It's serious business when pledges tangle with members."

"I don't give two shits what the members think. Right is right, and I don't need them to do my thinking for me."

A month later I was in his room to give him the news.

"Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I de-pledged."

"I see," he said.

"Sorry, I know you tried with me, but I'm not put together for this business. I can't take the bullshit."

"It's funny, but I know what you mean."

I should have just left, but for some reason, I felt bad that I had let him down personally. I patted him on the shoulder. "Listen, you're still my big brother, ok?"

A wry smile curled up the side of his mouth. The lie reflected back at me from his eyes, and the elastic of my tee shirt felt conspicuously tight as he stared. On the other end of the gulf that sprang between us, he turned his back without a word.