Sister Circle✔️

4. Too Interested

Lark McCormack POV

This year was all about focus. School, her classes, and keeping her grades up. Also, her extra activities, being the President of the Black Student Union (BSU) and a member of the accounting club. And hopefully soon, becoming a member of Mu Alpha Chi.

It was the sorority for her soon as she stepped foot on campus at Illinois State University three years ago. She had not known much about Greek life except what she saw in movies and television. Stomp the Yard and School Daze, various TV shows showing them as rowdy, party-going, hazing, young wild people.

Her parents weren't Greek, she did not know many Greeks and had not been to any of their activities growing up. The day she saw MAX ladies walking the yard she was intrigued. They were different. They did the same as the big four Black sororities but they were special.

Mu Alpha Chi rooted their beginnings in ladies being leaders. All of their seven Founders were Presidents of different organizations at the time. It was the first time ladies held those positions at the same time on campus. They would meet up to discuss commonality and how to be better leaders. None in a sorority at the time, the idea to become a sorority of leaders emerged.

Creating a new sorority was no easy feat but those young ladies did it. Here at ISU. She walked the very halls the MAX Founders walked twenty-something years ago. It was that kind of legacy she wanted to be in.

Except she did not consider herself a leader. She barely made it out of high school. Her grades were never on the level of a MAX recruit. She made Bs and Cs mostly with few As. She needed a 3.0 or higher grade point average to get into the sorority. After freshman year she had a 2.7, so even though she wanted it so much, her sophomore year she could not make the line.

She remembered meeting and becoming friends with Zavrina DeCosta freshman year at a MAX Sister Circle event. They thought they would be on line together. It devastated her to watch Zavrina become what she wanted. She admired her so much and wanted to be like her, even though they were the same age.

Zavrina was BSU President her sophomore year and when a member of the executive board stepped down she asked Lark to step in as Treasurer. It was something she excelled at because she was good with money and numbers. Now she had a leadership position so she worked hard to get the grade point average.

She struggled in most of her classes except math. Math came easy to her and she easily made As. It was everything else. She was found to be dyslexic in middle school and needed lots of help to just stay at level with her classmates. She had tutors, special study guides, and extra time to take most tests and hand in papers. It was the help she needed and did not take for granted.

But at the end of her sophomore year, she only managed a 2.9 cumulative. She cried like a baby. Zavrina suggested summer school to help her GPA so she could make line her junior year. Her parents were against it. So once again, she had to sit back and watch another line of MAX ladies cross and wear those letters, but not her.

This year was different. She put in extra hard work. In BSU, no Zavrina as President, she ran and won the position. She had the leadership skills and her G.P.A. 3.1 after finishing junior year and taking online summer courses earning all As.

This was her year!

Her senior year. She was going to become a MAX and nothing was going to stop her. Not her parents who did not believe in sorority or fraternity life. Not her boyfriend of three years, who was more interested in marrying her and starting a family, not what she was interested in.

She wanted to live. She felt like in her twenty-one years she did not get to do that. Her parents were very controlling, and as the oldest of three, she spent lots of time helping with her younger siblings. Their family was well off, her father owning a neighborhood store in Kansas City, Missouri that did well. She wanted to work for the family business after college. She already worked summers there many times helping her father with the financials or even working a cash register.