Banks will be hacked. Hearts will be broken. Watty Winner in the Best New Voices category!
I TOLD YOU, ELI OXLEY is a novel about guilt, money, hacking, temptation and family secrets. Set in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the story follows would-be nomad E...
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Anxious. Overwhelmed. Thousands of undergraduates converged on the quad. The throng pressed in on me as I elbowed my way through. My height made me stand out, I just knew it (I'm 6'3", by the way), but I tried to use it to appear confident. It didn't work.
I imagined Al holding my hand again. I imagined other things as I moved up the stairs to the entrance of the SAC amid riotous co-eds. Like endless lines of seemingly indecipherable code, I managed to break the melee up into more user-friendly pieces of information, deciding what was relevant to cracking into the system. I just had to look beyond the sea of suntans and Solo cups and figure out what was really going on.
I started in the center. In front of, and in the fountain, girls in long pearl necklaces and sparkling dresses danced together like a scene from The Great Gatsby.
I thought for a second about getting in between with them, but I honestly didn't want to get my clothes wet. Gamma Phi Beta.
To the right of the fountain, next to the bust of Davy himself, girls with swim goggles around their necks and toothy smiles waved their arms in unison. Delta Delta Delta. Sisterhood of Synchronized Swimmers.
To the left, beyond the plaque commemorating the graduates lost in wars past, the female representatives of the black community at Crockett practiced their step routines. Delta Xi Phi getting krunk.
On the historical steps up to the admin building was a career cover band and belt-buckles and George Strait country boys dressed country strong. The southern twang was loud. Kappa Sigma boot-scootin'. Why? I mean, why? Eighteen years in the South and I still didn't get the appeal. Anything but rap or country.
Entire quad: cracked. Focus left.
On the outer edge of the quad, straw sucking guys in flannel crowded the top of a flatbed, and bales of hay surrounded the truck while smoke rose from a grill in front. The cowgirls seemed to prefer this laid-back CCR scene to honkey-tonk. Kappa Alpha Order. A maybe.
Pi Kappa Alpha had a trampoline set up with girls in two-piecers bouncing up and down. Up and down. Up. And. Down.
To the right of the quad: a seven-foot black tower with a flame shooting from the top. Standing guard of the tower was a long-haired guy painted brown with a white hand print over his face. Next to him a wizard figure held his staff to the ground in front of him with both hands. Delta Upsilon.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Lord of the Rings as much as anyone else, but I saw immediately what my life would be like if I pledged with them. I would be more of a pariah than I was in high school.
Closer to the SAC: Omega Psi Phi. MMA octagon. Blood-lust.
Behind the octagon was an unmanned Glee Club station and the Leftists silently petitioning a mascot name-change from the Cherokees to something more culturally sensitive.
