I can't believe it's already been 10 years since I graduated college, yet here was my invitation to the reunion. I had only recently begun practicing medicine after all of the schooling and residencies. To be honest, I had lost touch with most of my friends from those earlier years because I was so busy. Everyone tried to tell me becoming a doctor was a long road, and they were all correct; it fucking sucked. I decided to do a little snooping to see what everyone was up to now. From what I could determine from social media, most of my former roommates or friends were firmly in the middle of their careers and here I was just starting out. I know the financial payoff would be there eventually, but it was hard to watch everyone else thriving while I was still in the red for student loans.
I guess I shouldn't really be surprised though. I choose to go to a small, rural college that focused on life skills as much as education. Some claimed it was experimental, but it wasn't. It was just very progressive and the goal of the school was to produce valuable citizens to the world. In that regard the school recruited the most eclectic group of students it could find. Each class was around 100 students so it wasn't too difficult to achieve that goal.
The school had been established by a wealthy entrepreneur who left his entire fortune to the establishment and continued existence of the school. I don't know for sure, but I heard that the endowment was worth over $2.6 billion. I figured it must be kind of true because the school was free to any student accepted. A big reason for that was so that the college could truly draw from the widest diversity of students. In that respect I would say mission accomplished. I met the most interesting people of life at that school. It seemed everyone had a story from every corner of civilization.
Nay sayers say the school is just a liberal breeding ground of affirmative action. In some respects I understand that sentiment, but what they get wrong is that truly everyone is represented. If you think all races and socioeconomic levels fall neatly into one voting block, I'm here to tell you they don't. I don't know how they did it, but it seemed like for every "token" student there was an equally opposite "token". If the voting record of the student body was public knowledge, I would bet you'd see close to a 50/50 split. It was the first place I learned the age old axiom: don't judge a book by its cover.
One of the stupid games we played as students was finding your evil twin, or at least the person that seemed to be the opposite you. For instance, I was a white orphan boy who grew up in the system with no parents, living off government assistance. Half-way through my freshman year I finally met another orphan girl who was adopted by wealthy conservative parents. My roommate Raj was an Indian boy from a high caste family who's parents immigrated to the U.S. 12 years before he was born. His doppelgänger was a Pakistani refugee boy who was from a poor family and rumored not to be a legal immigrant.
Obviously the school couldn't get an exact opposite of you, but the goal was to try. They wanted everyone at the college to understand the diverse perspectives of the world to better facilitate a brighter future. Whether this always worked or not is certainly up for debate, but from what I've seen of my medical school colleagues I would definitely say I had a much more diverse set of friends, even if maybe I hadn't been the best friend to everyone over the last few years as I was so dedicated to my studies.
One of the hallmarks of the school was that everyone had to live on campus, all four years. It was paid for of course, so it was hard to complain. Also, we were in the middle of nowhere Oregon so it wasn't like we could live anywhere else if we wanted to. The dorms themselves were pretty nice and not really like what I had seen on TV. The rooms were decent size and there was a large common room for everyone in that cluster to share. The common rooms were connected to four of the rooms. Two of the rooms of either side were shared by two students and one of the sides was female and the other side male. In typical fashion we even had two transgendered kids and they were in the same cluster, opposite sides. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall of that dorm.
Basically you get eight people to an "apartment" if you will. That's how we looked at it anyway. If you met someone new, you would always ask what apartment they were in. As you can imagine, living with seven other students of wildly differing backgrounds was challenging. Everyone had their own ideas of what "clean" meant or what "loud" was. The smells from cooking were borderline torturous depending on who was doing the cooking. The mix of aromas alone should have been labeled a war crime, but you got used to it.
I already mentioned my roommate Raj. We got along great. He was fairly athletic like me so we bonded over sports and physical activity. We also really liked movies so that was something we could also share. In the room next to us were Maso and Hector. Maso was a Nigerian prince, I shit you not. He had a thick African accent, similar to the one that Trevor Noah does, but a really nice guy. He was a little naive to some Western ways so it was always fun to bust his chops and he took it well. I don't think he ever really got the jokes us giving him our bank account numbers. Hector was from Mexico City and the son of a Catholic priest. They definitely didn't have much money, but what he lacked in money he more than made up for with confidence. Hector was the Alpha male of the apartment for sure, not in a bad way, but from an outsider's perspective they would have thought that.
On the other side we had Kimiko, Shante, Beth, and Raven. Kimiko, who went by Kim, was of Japanese heritage, but was from Southern California. Her parents were both Hollywood agents. I think they owned their own firm and specialized in handling Asian actors from what she told us. Shante was her roommate. She was from Harlem with a pretty thick New York accent who was raised by her single mother. Her mom was a teacher for the NY public schools. Shante was the valedictorian and turned down a full ride to Colombia just so she could get outside of New York.
Beth was the daughter of Pentecostal Preacher from the Florida panhandle. Her mom stayed at home to raise her seven siblings. She had been a standout tennis player in High School and almost got a scholarship to play at the University of Florida, but she tore her ACL. Raven was of Sioux heritage from South Dakota. Grew up on a reservation there and was definitely the quietist one of the bunch.
So that was it. Now you can kind of see the diversity that the school was going for. The only thing everyone had in common was academic strength. Even that was somewhat diverse though. Not everyone was a valedictorian, some won academic competitions or wrote papers for prestigious journals and some were drama masters. I guess it would be more accurate to say everyone was accomplished in some way, driven even.
It felt like forever since I had thought about everyone and our time in the apartment that freshman year. We had all become very close as most apartments did by the end of the year. I guess that's just what happens when you throw a bunch of 18 years olds together. You learn to live with each other and by proxy become pretty good friends in the process. That isn't to say there aren't blow ups or arguments. There were plenty of those.
Beth and Hector would end up in a squabble about something religious just about every week. Originally I thought they were going to bond the most because of the shared religious parent thing. Couldn't have been more wrong. Not sure how I could have been so stupid, considering a large portion of wars have been fought over religious differences. The funny part to me was they argued over the minute details, not whether or not God existed, but more so how God wanted us to run things. From an atheist's perspective it was comical, but probably not so much for them.
The rest of us got into a normal amount of tiffs, usually over living arrangements more than serious stuff though. At the end of the day we were a tight knit group that was respectful of each other. The only rule we all came up with early on is no dating each other. Seemed like the prudent thing at the beginning, but it's hard not to develop feelings for people that spend a lot of time with you.
I had grown closest to Raven as we bonded over growing up poor and relative loners. I definitely had a crush on her. I loved her long black hair and olive skin. She had a more womanly figure than the rest of the girls my age. Actual hips and ass, which I found attractive. I'm guessing she had a large B or small C up top that she wasn't shy to show off in deep-cut shirts. When we were hanging out on the couch one time she was wearing pretty loose shorts. I spent the entire movie trying to get a sneak. I finally did and just about came in my pants. She wasn't wearing any panties and I caught a glimpse of her dark hair down there. At least I knew she didn't shave. I jerked off to that vision for months.
Raj talked to me about Shante all the time so I was pretty sure he had a thing for her. They never dated, but spent a decent amount of time together. Kim was the most popular so she spent the most amount of time with "others" as we jokingly called the other apartments. I suspected that Beth and Hector were in a love/hate situation because they never really tried to avoid each other and seemed to seek each other out just to argue. Anyway, that's just a brief synopsis of our little group so that you'll understand the story I'm getting to.
Did you get the impression that we were a bunch of over achieving nerds? Well, you wouldn't be wrong. To say that most students who showed up to our school were virgins would be an understatement. No official polls were ever held, but if gossip and the grapevine were accurate we were looking at a solid 90%. Between online lives, strict parents, academic endeavors and our generations lack of actual social contact we were all woefully inexperienced in the sexual department. Some were more willing to talk about their experiences or lack thereof, but others were embarrassed by it so you never quite knew about some people.
Beth was very vocal about the fact that she had never even kissed a boy before. She was brought up to save everything for marriage. Over those first months though, I think she was starting to question a lot of things after seeing so many other perspectives. Maso openly talked about his experiences with zero filter. He was the only non-virgin of our group that I was aware of. I wasn't entirely sure about Kim, but couldn't confirm nor deny at that time.
