Bibi from Jupiter

A Story

When I marked on my roommate survey sheet that I’d be interested in living with an international student, I was thinking she’d take me to Switzerland for Christmas break or to Puerto Rico for a month in the summer. I wasn’t thinking about a romp around the red eye of Jupiter, which is exactly what I’d have gotten had I followed my roommate home. Apparently, American school systems have become pretty popular all over. Universities shepherd foreigners in. Anything to be able to write on the brochures, “Our student body hails from thirty-three countries and the far reaches of the solar system.”

You’d think there’d have been an uproar over the matter. I mean, here we have student funding going down the toilet and everyone staging protests to show they’re pissed. And she gets a full ride, all the amenities paid for. She comes in like a Cuban refugee, minus the boat, sweeps up all the scholarships. And why shouldn’t she? She probably qualifies as fifteen different types of minority. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against her. We were friends. I just didn’t expect her to be so popular. I figured I’d have to protect her from riots and reporters. But as it turns out, she was really well liked.