‘Twas the night before recruitment week, and all through the house, not a sorority girl was stirring, not even a … well, you get the picture.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the week before Panhellenic Association recruitment week, it’s pretty much pure hell. Like, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m pretty sure after Hitler died, he was transported to a Sisyphus-esque (it’s a Greek myth, not an STD, you perverts) type of never-ending pre-recruitment filled with door chants, fake smiles and a form of friendship speed dating. To put it simply, all the girls in the house, myself included, were physically and mentally exhausted by the end of the week.
I was in my bed, catching some Z’s and minding my own business, when the clock struck 4 a.m. All of a sudden, the door to our room was ever so gently pushed open, a ray of light from the hallway pouring into the darkness. In the doorway stood a figure.
Woken up slightly from the hallway lights, I turned over, assuming the figure was one of my roommates. But the figure in the doorway simply walked closer and closer to my bed in a slow moving slump. At this point, I was slightly freaking out, but remained calm, trying to convince myself that it was just my roommate needing to ask me for something. But then, something unexpected happened. The figure pushed me over, and crawled into my bed with me.
I still don’t know how I didn’t shit myself at this point.
Not knowing what to do, I could only muster up a quiet, “Um, hello?”
The person, who actually appeared to be another girl, gave me a blank stare in return and replied, “Shalom!” before passing out.
I then made up some excuse about having to “go to the bathroom” (even though I have no idea why I felt the need to explain my whereabouts to this intruder), and slunk out of my bed.
“Lauren, may I please speak to you in the hallway?” I said to my roommate while waking her up, trying to keep from flipping the duck out.
Lauren groaned and rolled out of bed to join me in the hallway.
“What’s wrong?” she muttered, still grumbling about how I woke her up.
“Uh… I don’t know how to say this, but there is a fricking stranger in my bed. Like, someone literally just came in our room and crawled in my bed.”
“Oh. Oh, okay. Um, let me go check it out.”
Lauren went back in the room and emerged a minute later. She had determined upon close examination that the girl in my bed was actually someone else who lived in the house (I breathed a little sigh of relief knowing a crazed axe murderer hadn’t slipped into bed with me), and that she wasn’t planning on leaving anytime soon. In fact, when Lauren went in to talk to her, she scooted over in my bed to allow Lauren room to get in.
I resigned myself to the fact that I would not be nestling back into my warm, cozy bed anytime soon, and made the long journey downstairs to plant myself on the couch and watch reruns of “LA Ink” on Netflix until everyone else decided to wake up.
Later that day, the girl came to me and apologized profusely. Apparently, she has been an extreme sleepwalker for her entire life, and her getting confused and going into the wrong room wasn’t too uncommon. I swear, this kind of stuff only happens to me.
Lessons learned? I should probably invest in a Taser to ward off any unwelcome nighttime guests. Or, better yet, as my sorority sister Kendall always suggests, sororities should start using a sorting hat so we can avoid the crazy stress (and all the things caused by crazy stress) during pre-recruitment week.
More seriously, you can learn a lot about a person when you start living with them. Especially when you’re living with 66 other females. But living with others means you must accept them for the person they are and learn to live in coexistence with them and be forgiving of their sometimes-odd quirks.
