I checked in with a group of students in matching green polo shirts, received two thick folders welcoming me to my future, and was told to make my way to Willits Hall, where I’d be living for the next year.

I moused around the campus, scanning the scene like a trespasser anticipating getting shot down at any moment. When I reached Willits’s open glass doors, I heard a woman scream “Howdy” and I stopped short, staring at the lanky body that appeared in the building’s lobby like I was a deer in headlights, waiting to see if her intentions were good or if she was going to run me over for the venison.

“How are ya?” She waved me inside and I approached slowly. She was also in a green polo shirt, a gold LU embroidered above her pointy nipples.

“I’m good,” I said, dragging my bags across the bright lobby and toward the fold-up table she’d covered in a pressed gold cloth and even more stacked folders.

“Welcome to Covenant!” She spoke exclusively in exclamation points, employing a kind of genuine glee I’d never experienced before, and her entire body seemed to pulse with the same enthusiasm. “I’m Brigid! Let me check you in and then we’ll get you all settled into your new home!” She beckoned me closer to the table. “What’s your name?”

“...Elizabeth,” I remembered after a brief brain freeze.

She smiled kindly. “I’m going to need more than that. We’ve got a lot of Elizabeths this year. Must have been something in the holy water.” She laughed at her own joke without any reservations.

I watched pleasantly until she was finished. “Elizabeth Bennet.”

She gasped. “Like Pride and Prejudice!” I nodded slowly and faked a smile. This was the first of what would prove to be an utterly endless number of times I would hear this reference upon saying my name. I’d never read the book or heard of the author and when I tried to check it out of the Covenant University library later that week, I learned it was banned. “That’s so cool,” Brigid continued. “Iconic.” She tapped her black marker down the line of female names until she found mine and pressed the felt tip into the E, crossing it out until it disappeared altogether.

“Follow me!”

She plucked one folder from each stack on the table and started down the hallway as another student entered. She had brown hair in two thin braids that stopped abruptly at her collarbone, and she stood smiling, flanked by an older man in khakis and an older woman in a floral sundress. I had no idea parents came to this kind of thing. Mine certainly wouldn’t have.