All the drama of near-break-ups and near-expulsions finally faded with spring finals.  Summer was upon us, and once again, Lukus and I were to be parted for three months.  My plans for the summer were even less exciting than the previous summer’s adventures in a sub-sandwich shop with a lusty-eyed creep for an owner in California.  By now, my parents had tired of Tulsa (they never stayed in one place for very long) and had moved to Tyler, Texas.  My 30 hours a week of waiting tables at a pizza joint had somehow missed the mark of paying for my college tuition, so my summer prospects were: waste money on a summer apartment in Tulsa….or….slowly kill my soul and my self-respect and go spend the summer with my parents in Texas.

I chose the latter, labeling me forever as a “wannabe” gypsy.  Lukus, likewise, went back to his parents’ for the summer.

Jobs were scarce in Tyler that year.  I worked at three different places before I found my summer’s calling to work for my dad, who was building a boat-house for a client.  It was actually kinda fun: getting up just past dawn (okay, 8 0’clock), dressing in my grubbiest clothes and spending the day carrying 80 pound bags of cement (no seriously, 80 lbs. of dead weight) to mix and pour for the foundation.  Plus, my dad paid pretty well.  He and I had never gotten along all that well, but when we worked on a project together, it seemed surprisingly pleasant.  It still wasn’t a sexy summer globe-trot, but my arms got pretty toned and I got a great tan framing-out that boat house.

Lukus and I fulfilled our civic-duty and kept the Postal Service in the black for yet another year with our constant love letters.  By now, I had his parents a little worried.  They really wondered about this girl who had managed to make it to Round 2 in their son’s life.  I still hadn’t spent much time with them (except the one time I went to visit them and humiliatingly fell out of their younger son’s treehouse, almost breaking my back on a cinder-block, lying painfully paralyzed on the ground as I whimpered “I’m okay, I’m okay”).  This was their singular impression of me thus far, besides the abstract crayon drawings that I’d color on the envelopes of my letters to Lukus.  They must have thought me odd, indeed.

Lukus came once to visit me in Tyler and we made up for lost kisses time.  But he high-tailed it out of there pretty quickly, hating to watch his girlfriend wallow in such a boring locale, and went back to the much more glamorous Oklahoma City.  Meanwhile, I s..l..o..w..l..y passed the summer pining for the excitement and busyness of college-life, my life to cycle back around again.

I warned ya in the title: this was a boring time.  But the good stuff’s comin’, and boy, it’s good!

Amidst all the soul-crushing atmosphere of sophomore year as reality settled in on us, there was a single shining moment, a brief, but unforgettable triumph of my very own that redeemed the year for me, if only in part.

Remember the beloved campus pastor I mentioned before who got canned, stirring up even more angst among the student body with the administration?  I got my own taste of that action, and I’ll savor that moment forever:

As an editor for the school paper, I was called upon by the administration to write a fluffy, un-controversial farewell piece on the campus pastor.  They didn’t want the truth of his firing to come out, but they didn’t want it to look like they didn’t want it to come out.  Knowing that I’d have to hold my nose as I wrote the piece, I still jumped at the opportunity to take the pastor and his family out to dinner and get the real story for myself.

And boy, I got it:  trumped up charges that he could verify were false, and the insider’s view of the inner-workings of the administrative politics.  Apparently, he had dared to vocalize his disagreement on a policy, and was fired, just like that.  Never mind that he was the only administrator who had his finger on the pulse of the student body, that he heard us, that he pastored us, and well, basically did his job.  He had said, “I don’t agree with ______,” and that was the end of him.

I wrote the article, a grateful farewell, a “what’s next for Pastor so-and-so”.  It was exactly what the administration had asked for, but it too, got canned.  I was furious.  Not only were they tearing away one of our heroes, but they didn’t even have the decency to let us say goodbye and for the students to be informed of where they could look for him next.  Considering the overall climate of the school at that time, it was an appalling action, and had me enflamed.

But, the deans wanted to speak to me.  They wanted to “offer an explanation” for why they’d changed their minds about the article.  My faculty advisor for the paper and I had been invited to the 6th floor for a two-on-two with the deans.  No one, under these circumstances, ever returned from the 6th floor with their student status in tact.  One student had written a rap song about the school president’s wife – a stupid move, but he didn’t publicize it.  Someone else reported it, and the rapper-kid was gone.  Then there was what happened to the campus pastor….I wondered if I’d still be a student when I exited those giant wooden doors.

My faculty advisor was visibly sweating as we rode the elevator up.  He was a “Yes Man” of the lowest order.  I can’t say that I blame him.  He was trying to provide for his family, and those were the requirements that allowed him to do so.  He expected me to keep quiet, say “Yes sirs, thank you for the time you took to explain things to us.  We understand,” and to exit the building with all haste.

He didn’t know me very well.

As both of the deans sat across the enormous table from us, attempting to explain how those events were last week, and everyone’s moved on so the article wasn’t really necessary, my advisor nodded in quiet agreement.

But my own blood was boiling.  My face turned red-hot as I stared into both of the dean’s eyes without blinking until they each looked uncomfortably away and adjusted themselves in their seats.  They knew that, even though they were deans, they were “yes men” too.  They knew that they simply carried out the orders of a dictatorial administration for fear of retribution.  When they finished with their “are we all clear?” talk, my advisor stood to go.  I remained in my seat as I said, “I have something to say.”

Of all the moments in my life that I wish I’d had a video camera!  The words came pouring out of me as I (quite articulately, if I do say so myself) ripped each of them a new one.  I told them how they, in their ivory towers, had no concept of the climate that the student-body was in; how they expected to play us all like a puppet master as we complacently accepted their manipulation; how they treated us like blind children who were expected to “obey or else” without considering that we would soon be well-paid alumni who would remember their betrayal with every school fund-raiser unless they changed their ways.  I told them how the students would be eager and willing to love them and follow them if they would simply show us the respect of being honest and let us be honest in return; how the school didn’t have to be like this: administration pitted against the students, attempting to control them, and the students bucking against the administration, seeking a voice; that they’d just fired their one saving mediator and there would be blowback, news story or no news story.

Or something like that.  Like I said, I didn’t have a video recording to catch the risky speech I unleashed on them.  But I’ll never forget the terrified look on my advisor’s face, or the shocked and shameful look on the dean’s faces.  I honestly think they’d never known how wounded the students were, but that it had clicked with them for the first time.  I dismissed myself from the ominous office, my advisor thanking them profusely for their time and catching up to me.

Once back in our own newspaper offices (not on the 6th floor, but on the negative 2 floor, underground), my advisor sang my praises to all five members of our huge staff.  He slapped me on the back as he told me that I’d said all the things he’s wanted to say for years.  I even got an applause and a couple of cheers, even though silently, everyone awaited my fate, and our fate as a newspaper.

Oddly enough, I survived unscathed.  My advisor was let go at the end of the semester, poor guy.  I felt really bad for him, and hope that he went on to a less soul-crushing occupation.  I, however, not only retained my student status and my editorial status, but from that moment on, I started seeing the deans sitting in the student deli with their lunch a lot more often.  I like to think that my speech had an impact on them, that they took my words to heart and started attempting to actually descend from their ivory tower and get involved with us plebian-students.  Or maybe they’d eaten there all along, but my precarious actions left me more conscious of their presence.  Or perhaps, even more sinisterly, they decided they needed to spy on us more.  But I doubt that’s it.  Because from then on, they greeted me in the deli with a genuine smile of respect, and actually asked, “how ya doin’ Elle?”

I realize none of this had anything to do with Mr. Rockstar – I just like this very true story, and seized the chronology of events to relate it.  I promise I’ll get back to the real, juicy reasons for which you are reading.

Freshman year had been marked by youthful idealism.  There was talk among our circle of friends of changing the world, of ambiguous hopes for the future that bonded not only our little group, but the entire freshman class.  We were going to be world-shakers, revolutionaries, and the complacency that marked our upper-classmen would never touch us!

Apparently, it’s a pretty common freshman thing and we weren’t nearly as extraordinary as we thought we were.

If freshman year was the year of innocence and hope, then sophomore year was the year of seasoned cynicism that was not merely jaded, but actually reveled in its jadedness.  Humph!  All of those little freshmen, they were mere children!  What did they know of the world?  Gosh, they looked young, and boy! were they immature!  I mean, what was with all that smiling and laughing and stuff?  Don’t they know reality from this little bubble they’re in?  Geez, we were sure glad that we knew better by now.

Come to find out from our academic predecessors, the same cycle happens every year.  Doe-eyed freshmen come in, it’s their first extended time away from their parents, they’re reveling in the new-found freedom, the mature distinction of being in college among fellow college students, and nothing will stop them now!  Then comes sophomore year, when all that new sense of freedom has worn off and reality and responsibility have settled in.  You realize that you’re almost done with your general eds and you still haven’t figured out what you want to be when you grow up.  Your parents have gotten used to not having you around and have started buying riding lawnmowers for themselves instead of buying you new school clothes and paying your car insurance.  You’re so over the college cafeteria experience.  And you realize that those college courses aren’t teaching you how to think or live or start your own business or anything you expected – they’re teaching you how to get a job as someone else’s employee for a salary that’s a quarter of what you’re paying for school and that you easily could have learned to do with two weeks of on-the-job training.

But the real learning happens outside of class.  As everyone gripes about what a fraud it all is then the real questioning begins.  Like the world-changing freshman, this too is an accurate college cliche, a necessary one, even if it is on the dark side.  We questioned authority, shook our hands at expectations and conventions, and fueled each other’s anger at “The Man”.

It didn’t help that our beloved campus pastor, friend and advocate of the plebians and proletariat student-body against the dictatorial administration, was wrongfully fired.  Or that our favorite church’s pastor was caught in unsavory conduct.  Or that there were more and more crazy evangelists speaking at chapel who were trying to guarantee us that God would give us sports cars, jet planes and plush jobs if we would give our paltry college wages to their ministry.  Our heroes were falling like flies as the vultures came swooping in.

Lukus and Brenden’s band reflected this shift in mood.  Their lyrics were a little more cynical.  Their music a little more full of angst.  My editorials for the school paper got a little more honest and prickly.  Lukus, Brenden, Renee and I started working at the local pizza joint and took a bit of solace in what we considered “the real world”.  Though Lukus and I were quite steady in our relationship, neither one of us could wait for the school year to be over.  We knew our relationship could withstand another summer of being apart, but we weren’t sure if our own souls could stand much more of the toxic atmosphere that defined the “Sophomore Slump.”

For two weeks that January, Lukus wouldn’t speak to me.  It was agony.  He got to the point where he could say a polite hello, but there was nothing beyond that.  If I happened to catch him walking to class, he would acknowledge me, but his pace would quicken.  I tried to subtly interrogate his new roommate, Andrew, who informed me that Lukus was heartbroken and too hurt to be around me.

Wait a minute….he was heartbroken?  Where did he get off being heartbroken?!  I simply said I wanted to slow down a bit and spend part of my time trying other things, and he snubs me and HE’S heartbroken!?!  The nerve!

I took the problem to my parents, who lived a mile down the street from school.  But they weren’t home.  Gone for the weekend.  I let myself into their apartment and spent the whole weekend eating junk food, watching B movies and spending ridiculous amounts of hours sprawled across their giant bed while singing sad ’80s love songs.  When they finally got home, and after my mom told me to “please go take shower, do something about that breath, and clean up the cookie crumbs from out of our bed,” I laid the situation out to them.

When I finished my sad tale, my dad says, “So…you…broke up with him?”  My mom, incredulous, says, “No honey.  Where did you get that from?  She just wanted to slow things down a bit.”  My dad says, “Oh, sounded to me like you broke up with him.  That’s how I would’ve taken it if I were him.”

LIGHTBULB!!!  Break = Break-up to a guy!

“So…what do I do now?  He hates me.  He doesn’t want to talk to me,” I asked.

“Why don’t you let us see what we can do,” my mom replied.  “We?” my dad says.

I still don’t know what they said to Lukus.  I know he went over to their apartment.  I know that they talked a while.  But most importantly, I know that there was a bouquet of roses accompanied by a fancy chocolate box inside my car on Valentine’s Night with a beautiful letter written regaling Lukus’ undying love for me – his best friend.

I thanked him, of course, with a kiss.  Or two.  Or more.  I stopped counting.

The spring semester started and Lukus and I took an independent course together in kissing.  We studied for that class a lot, and consistently earned “A+’s” for every assignment and extra credit project.  It was certainly one of our favorite courses.

It was springtime, and we weren’t the only couple taking an independent study in romance.  Along with the tulips and dogwoods, new couples were springing up everywhere.  Some were absolutely predictable, like the beauty queen and the male model, and some were, well, so wrong that they made Spring file for insurance for the impending malpractice lawsuit (you know who you are, creepy hair-brushing trio).  ORU has an extremely high percentage of classmates that get married, and the inside jokes are usually “I’m getting my MRS degree” or “Ring by Spring!”

The entire school was twitterpated, including me and Lukus, and it bothered me.  We were only sophomores, after all.  Our freshman year was just breaking the college ice.  I wanted the full college experience (well, not the typical one of parties and booze all the time), but I wanted to get involved, whether it was a missions trip to an exotic country, or student government, or just meeting some new people (so long as it wasn’t the hair-brushing trio).  I loved Lukus, and I wanted to keep dating him, but I wanted to do other things too, not just study kissing all the time.

Okay, I get it:  I’m a fickle girl.  First I want him to kiss me, then I want him to back off.  I wasn’t expecting him to read my mind, and I wasn’t trying to play any twisted control games.  But that’s not how Lukus thought of it when I told him we needed to back-up a bit.  Somehow, he heard “stop kissing for a while” and took it as “stop seeing each other”.  It turned into Ross and Rachel’s “We were on a break!” episode before the “We were on a break!” episode even aired, and oddly enough, only weeks before it aired.  There must have been something in the air.

I waited for Lukus the morning after our talk to walk to class.  He didn’t come.  When I got to class, he was already there, and there was something dreadfully different.  His beautiful blonde hair was shaved, and the sad, remaining stubs were bleached dirty Q-tip yellow.  It was the ORU guy’s “I-just-broke-up-with-a-girl-so-I-shaved-her-out-of-my-head” signature.  He would barely look at me, and when I tentatively said “hi”, he bitterly grunted a “hello” in return.  When I tried to talk to him, he blew me off.

I was dumbfounded.  And heartbroken.  So that was it?  He was done with me?  I wanted to take a break from making-out, and he was throwing in the towel?  That didn’t sound like Lukus.  But still, as I played all the possible scenarios in my head of what he might be thinking, I still couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t fight for me?  I mean, we weren’t just dating, we were best friends!  I had no idea what to do.

So, I did nothing.  I wasn’t going to be the needy, begging girl-friend who was the only one willing to fight for the relationship.  But Lukus’ silence was deafening.  It could be felt as I walked to class alone, as I sat in class with slight acquaintances, and even as I ate with my new roommate in the cafeteria for the first time ever.  Oh, how I missed my old roommate, Mandy!  She knew how to make me laugh and temporarily distract me from my heartache.  But she was gone for the semester as an intern at a youth camp.  And Brenden and Renee were still in romantic bliss, so no comfort there.  Not to mention that Valentine’s Day was quickly approaching.  It was really bad timing for a broken heart.

“Maybe this is for the best?”  I thought to myself.  “Maybe I was too dependent on Lukus and we weren’t branching out enough.  Maybe we were better off as just friends.  Maybe we were just too different.  Or maybe, he’s a giant, cold-hearted jerk WHO NEVER REALLY CARED ABOUT ME AT ALL AND I NEVER WANNA SEE HIM AGAIN!!!”  This was followed by a torrential downpour of tears, snot and slobber.

If only there were a Friends episode that could help me now.