A Queen's Pain

Messy

As a special treat for my newest book "A Queen's Pain" dropping this Black Friday, check out this free chapter from the book! "Messy" talks about HBCU Pettiness in a real way and is the first fictional account of expose pages and the impact that it has on students and the social atmosphere on a college campus! "A Queen's Pain" is available on Amazon now! Follow HBCU Pulse on IG: hbcupulse

Enjoy!

Going to an HBCU is a different type of experience. Sure, it's rich with culture and it's great being around so many people who look like me. We love to be messy though. I hate to say it but it's true! We care so much about other people's business and what they're doing with their lives. It doesn't take long for people to start being nosey and spreading around what they think you're trying to do. Laketon is only but so big so everybody's name is in somebody's mouth. You know, if that makes sense.

Not even a whole 24 hours after my meeting with Tyler, an anonymous Twitter account called the "LSU Tea Spillers" popped up on the school's hashtag. According to the page, its purpose was to "expose who's real and who's fake on the yard". No one knew who was behind the page, as it wasn't linked to anyone. The AVI was a picture of Kermit the Frog drinking tea with a Laketon State purple and gold shirt photoshopped onto him.

This wasn't the first time an "expose" page has been made. It happens every school year, especially in the Spring. The pages content is always the same. It tweets out allegations about people who are in the closet or cheating on their significant other. A couple of weeks and a little buzz on the yard, the page will get deleted after people start reporting it. Things were different this year though. The tweets were really direct. They were calling people's names out and even adding their profile handles to the tweets if the person they were talking about had one.

If they didn't say your name, they'd say everything about you but your name. People who knew of you would immediately link what was tweeted to you. They were even posting screenshots! I don't know who was running this expose page but they were ruthless. Normally, I didn't care about the expose page. Sure, I'd look at tweets but I'd lose interest quick. This year was different though. I knew somehow, someway I'd be mentioned .

I know it sounds negative and like I was inviting problems to myself but you have to think about the timing. Election season was coming up and we had to write a letter declaring our candidacy before Fall Semester ended. The list of the candidates would be out the first week in January when we return from Christmas break. Election season is when Laketon State is at its messiest.

Plus, the page popped up at the start of probate season. Everybody is trying to find out who made what line, who got dropped from line and who didn't get accepted right off. The Eta's bringing out a new line was a huge topic on the yard so I knew my name would be circulating around as the few who didn't make it. Plus, I'm double connected to Laketon State's Greek Life. My boyfriend Josiah is a Lambda Phi man.

Tyler brought him up the day before she was trying to make the argument to me that Lambda Phi runs the yard. I met Josiah in my engineering class last semester. We got close after we did a group assignment together that required us to spend about two weeks going to the library to put together a presentation. He was trying his best to talk to me the whole time we were working together. He was cute, sweet and really funny but I wasn't feeling him at first. He kept trying to get me to go on a date with him.

He finally talked me into going to the Georgia National Fair with him one Friday, which turned into us spending the whole weekend with each other. We even went to church together. That's when I really started liking him. I started to have fun being around him. He was sweet and he seemed generally interested in me.