Bold and Simful

“Hey Pops, what are you doing here?” Xavier greeted his father when he ran into him in the hallway on the second floor of Wingate Hall.

“Ah, Xavier,” Francis greeted in return. “I dropped by to see how everything is going. I must admit that I was most pleased, and surprised to be quite honest, with your grades last semester.”

“Uh, thanks, I guess” Xavier answered, wondering why his father couldn’t give him a compliment without adding a nasty caveat.

“Where is your sister? I’d like to talk to her,” Francis asked his son, not bothering to consider that he and Xavier might have things to talk about.

“She left for class already,” Xavier sounded slightly dejected.

“Shouldn’t you be in class too or studying?” Francis either didn’t hear, or chose to ignore, the tone in his son’s voice.

“Yeah I could write my paper, but don’t you want a tour of the dorm while you’re waiting for Elizabeth?” Xavier responded with a touch of hope.

“No, I toured the dorm while it was being built. Remember our family’s money built this place,” Francis answered, puffing up his chest, “You go and do what you need to do, I can entertain myself.”

Walking by the lounge, Francis noticed Maleena and Jodie studying together. ‘Nice shirt,’ he thought to himself, ‘must be one of the scholarship students. I’ll have to talk with the admissions committee about the kind of people that should attend Hunter.‘

Her father looked so worried and anxious that Elizabeth was sure he knew something, but her fears were relieved when he started talking about her mother.

“Hopefully she will no longer be an embarrassment when she returns, but our foundation’s reputation has taken a hit thanks to her inability to control herself,” he concluded. “I will not allow her to continue as the head of the Mendenhall Foundation, which means that I will need a replacement to carry on our family’s charitable work. Your brother, while he is improving, is in no way prepared. You, however, are.”

Elizabeth stood stunned, wondering if her mother was going to be ok and trying to comprehend the assignment her father was placing on her shoulders.

“You’ll need to repair our relationship with some of the charities that your mother contacted while under the influence and you will, of course, continue our current works while expanding our donations into other areas. You will be in full control of the finances of the Mendenhall Foundation, for that you will need to speak with our CPA.” Francis concluded his instructions and grabbed his overcoat without waiting for a response from his daughter.

Elizabeth wasn’t sure how she would handle this new responsibility on top of her course work, but she realized that she had no choice. She bid her father goodbye and promised to work twice as hard to accomplish what he had set before her.

Everyone had noticed a change in Elizabeth over the next few weeks, but Jodie was concerned enough to ask Veronica about it one night.

“She’s always been studious, I think it’s because her dad puts so much pressure on her,” Veronica answered.

“Yeah, but she’s always studying now and when she’s not studying, no one can find her,” Jodie protested, still uneasy with the change in his friend.

Veronica was less concerned, “it’s the way she is,” she said simply as though that answered everything. “So what’s up with your frat brothers? The one is pretty cute,” the topic changed and never returned to Elizabeth.

Veronica intercepted Randal Winfield, the previously referred to cute frat guy, on his way to visit Jodie and began flirting immediately. Randal, like most guys, responded favorably.

“Well, look at you, Princess! Doesn’t take you long to get over someone, does it?” Xavier and Veronica had broken up over a month ago and he knew she would start dating other guys, she wasn’t the kind of girl to be alone for long but he hadn’t expected to be so angry when it finally happened.

Veronica stared at her ex, fully satisfied that she had finally gotten the reaction she had hoped for when they broke up. Now that she had it, she was done with Xavier and they could go back to being just friends again, it was like closure for a shallow person.

“Why can’t they shut up?” Elizabeth cringed at the noise in the dorm. She had been to see the CPA that day and had arrived home late, still with homework to do. With only a few days left in her sophomore year, her term paper was unfinished and she had class and another meeting the next day.

With the end of the semester approaching, Randal was more than ready to blow off some steam with a toga party.

The frat house was soon full of students dressed in togas. Monica Drysdale and Turner Ignatowski separated themselves from the rest of the party and gossiped together in the corner. They had first met when Turner came to Wingate Hall to pledge Xavier, but that hadn’t gone so well and they hadn’t seen much of each other since. They would definately be seeing more of each other from now on.

The student Randall most hoped would accept his invitation to the party arrived and hopped in the hot tub with him. Apparently, Splashy - splashy is a perfectly valid form of flirting because by the time the pair got out of the hot tub, love was in the air.

Almost everyone had left and they were on the last pizza when Jodie asked Xavier if he still wanted to pledge Lamda Chi. As a brother Jodie had the right to do this, but it still caused Randall to choke on his crust. Xavier wasn’t exactly his favorite person, but he quickly realized that as a pledge, Xavier would have to do everything he was told to do.

Posted on June 11th, 2008 under Wingate Hall. Tags: elizabeth, francis, jodie, monica, randal, turner, veronica, Wingate Hall, xavier. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.