First Semester by Cecil Cross

Keys.”
    â€œThat’s what’s up,” I said. “But what’s her name?”
    â€œAnd she’s from the D.C. area, so you know she’s got that sexy East Coast accent,” he said.
    â€œThat’s nice,” I said. “Does she have a name?”
    â€œOh, her name is Jasmine.”
    â€œOh, okay,” I said. “Alicia Keys, huh?”
    â€œThat’s what they say. She lives right next door in Tubman Hall. You’ll see her.”
    Judging by the way he’d just gotten shot down, for me to believe him, I’d have to.

CHAPTER 5
    O.G. SCHOOLING
    W e walked across the street to the Student Center just in time. The last tour group was about to leave. There had to be at least two hundred people waiting for a tour of the campus. Half of them were students. Of the hundred students, at least seventy-five of them were females. The odds were definitely in my favor. There were six orientation guides leading the tour groups. Five of them wore the red T-shirts with O.G. written on the front. The other one was a short, stocky guy with a tattered Afro, who was wearing a pair of blue Dickies, a white T-shirt, and blue Chucks. He looked older. I could tell he was from the West Coast, but I couldn’t figure out why he was leading the tour. He threw his hands up in the air.
    â€œEverybody staying in Marshall Hall, come with me,” he said.
    I didn’t want to leave the group of females, but I followed directions. About twenty other guys huddled around him.
    â€œY’all can probably already tell I ain’t your average tour guide. I ain’t hella bootsie like the rest of the orientation guides. Plus, I’m not really feeling the color scheme. My name is Terrell but everybody calls me Fats. I’m the only real O.G. out here, cuz. I’ve been at U of A for a while now, so I know the ins and the outs and the outs and the ins of this yard. I know these professors like the back of my hand, cuz. I stayed in Marshall Hall too. It seems like just yesterday I was getting off the plane from L.A. and moving in. It’s crazy how fast seven years can fly by.
    I could’ve damn near had a Ph.D. by now, but I ain’t been on my p’s and q’s. I didn’t even sign up to be an orientation guide. I just wanted to holla at y’all young playas and make sure you got the real campus tour. Feel me?”
    I was feelin’ Fats. It was refreshing to hear some of that left coast slanguage again. We followed him all around the campus, stopping every few steps for him to pull up his baggy Dickies. It seemed like he had a story to tell about each building we passed. When we passed Woodruff Library he told us about how hard it was for him to study the one time he’d gone in there to get some work done.
    â€œEverybody calls the library Club Woody because everybody gets geared up to go in there at night, just like a club,” he said. “If you’re trying to come up on a dime who can probably help you with your homework, the library is the place to be.”
    As he took puffs of his Black & Mild cigar, he told us all kinds of stories about everything from the run-down corner store across the street from the library called the Shack to all of the different ways he’d managed to fail the classes he’d taken. First, he told us about the morning he fell asleep on his Spanish final in Douglass Hall. He told us about the time he got caught cheating on an algebra test in Carmichael Hall. He said that he had the answers to the test programmed in his two-way pager. Halfway through the test, he got a text message from the teacher that said: Cheaters Never Win, Turn in Your Paper Now! He couldn’t stop laughing when he told us about the infested couch in Turner Hall.
    â€œSome breezy in Turner Hall had caught crabs and sat down on the main couch in the waiting area wearing some booty shorts. I guess the critters crawled out of her crevice and