“Hey, sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” I followed behind him.
“It’s cool,” he allowed and gave me a look. “I just can’t laugh about shit I don’t remember.”
Yeah. The alcohol was a giant eraser to his brain that night.
But I remembered.
Every word he said.
Every detail from the darkness.
Sometimes when it was really quiet, I thought about the stuff only I recalled.
Alcohol often admits things people are too afraid to say sober.
Sometimes I wished Trent remembered that night.
Sometimes I was glad he forgot.
Trent
Alcohol poisoning.
Breaking up a fist fight.
Meetings with alumni.
Budget meeting.
A clogged toilet because someone thought it would be fun to flush a bag of marbles.
And a rubber ducky.
Okay, I admit it was kind of funny.
That was just this week, a week that wasn’t even over yet. Weekends tended to be even more hectic because that’s when all the brothers had free time and got themselves into trouble.
Sometimes I felt more like a babysitter than a leader.
Being the president of a fraternity wasn’t quite as glamorous as it appeared on TV. Or even in people’s minds. In reality, being the president of a house full of men was kinda hard.
Not that I regretted becoming the president of Alpha Omega. Even if it was sort of a surprise role. Becoming president of this frat hadn’t been on my agenda. The plan was always to get Romeo into that position.
Not only was Romeo the most popular guy on campus, but he was very respected and from a family of Omega legacies.
But it didn’t work out that way.
Zach happened. And he fucked up a lot of shit for everyone.
So when Romeo walked out on pledging, he recommended me, and people listened.
I’d been president for almost two years now. Most of the time, it was something I enjoyed, but if I were being honest, I’d admit I was burning out.
I was tired.
I felt pulled in all kinds of different directions. So many I was starting to get lost.
You’d think a guy who was about to graduate college with a bachelor’s degree in finance would be ready for more responsibility.
Wasn’t that what college was about?
Becoming an adult? Growing up?
‘Course, if I had to go by the fact I spent half the morning fishing a rubber ducky out of the toilet, I guess the answer to that question would be a resounding no.
The closer I got to graduation, the less responsibility I wanted.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to graduate. I did. If I had to write one more freaking term paper or do one more group project, I was going to scream, but still…
Part of me was hesitant to move on.
Maybe that was why I still hadn’t put my support behind a candidate for Omega president. Or maybe I was just waiting to see which candidate would do something to show me he was the right guy for the job.
I might be tired, but I wasn’t so tired I would hand this house over to someone like Zach. He’d almost been the downfall of this entire organization. Cleaning up the tarnish he put on the Omega name had taken over a year.
I wanted a president who was going to make sure Alpha Omega continued with the momentum of good standing I was helping it gain.
The “formal dining” room of the historic place we lived in on campus was at the front of the house, separated from the large entryway by two wide glass French doors.
While it was set up as a dining room with a huge cherry wood table lined with chairs and a gaudy chandelier suspended above the table, no one ever ate in here.
We used this room for house meetings. The walls above the wainscoting were dark green and lined with framed photos of all the members who came before us. At the front of the room there was a large double window that overlooked the lawn and street in front of the house. The formal plaid curtains were never drawn because, like I said, we only came in here for house meetings.
I waited at the head of the table inside the room at a podium that had been there since the day I moved in. Brothers were filling the room fairly rapidly, as the meeting was supposed to start in just a few minutes. As they came in, they took one of the chairs lining the huge table.
The two brothers running for Omega president were sitting beside me. Both had shown up early. It wasn’t mandatory they do so, but out of general respect and as a show of commitment to the frat, they did anyway.
Both candidates were sophomores here at Alpha University, which I thought was a good year to run because it meant they’d been in the fraternity for a year (and in this case, closing in on two years), so they knew what to expect here at the house and on campus. But they were still young enough at the university to be in presidency for more than a couple semesters.
Their young age would actually offer some stability to the fraternity because they would be here a while to run things.