It was a courtesy invitation, and I hadn’t even sent it; Columbia did, without even checking if I wanted to see my parents again this soon. Last time my dad came to a frat party, I found him standing in a corner, drinking vodka hidden in a Sunny-D bottle and preaching to a group of freshmen I’ve never seen before about the rules of hockey and the best ways to “court” a woman. The discussions were extremely, utterly, and wildly inappropriate, and we were promptly picked up and dropped outside the event by two giant club rugby players.
My mother, however, realllllllly leaned into the campus gossip circles. SHE came to ME with information about who posted that one scandalous sidechat post, 2 new failed situationships, and the tea on that one girl who was recently quietly excommunicated from that one dreadfully frightening but iconically toxic friend group – all before I even knew about it, and I live here! She still sends me pictures from the random girls’ disposable camera dump accounts she follows. Except she’s a middle-aged woman who pronounces it TokTik and uses her phone flashlight to read menus in restaurants, so how does she have more campus steeze than me?
The fact that they are coming back for round two is keeping me awake at night, and unfortunately, there’s an event in the Diana basement, so locking them down there is no longer an option. So I’m accepting the inevitable: I’ll smile through our Hillary Clinton campus crawl, nod along at lectures on safe drug use (mushrooms should only be taken completely in nature), show up to brunch hungover, and let my mom text my friends “inside jokes.” Then I’ll spend the month post-parents’ weekend scrubbing their footprints from campus like a sinister PR crisis. Next year, I’m planning to hire that one really mean bouncer at Amity to stand between my inbox and my parents. If anyone wants to go halfsies on him…
