Rush.

When did you get your best rush of the year?

Every year, BC shuts down for the Boston Marathon, since it goes right through our campus. Hundreds of our students run, so most people know friends that will be going by, and we spend the morning at pancake and champagne (or Natty lite?) breakfasts before we line Comm. Ave, waiting for the runners and our friends to come by. This year, one of my best friends and roommates, Kaitlin, was running, fulfilling a promise she had made offhandedly when we were sophomores. She’d been training for months, along with a few other close friends.

My other roommate and I promised her that we’d jump in with she arrived where we were waiting, and run with her until Cleveland Circle (about a half mile away) before peeling off and heading back to cheer on more runners. As planned, we joined her around BC, but by then, she’d lost her other friends and was running alone. Without having stretched, drank water, had a good breakfast, and having no ideas about how we’d make it back to BC from the middle of the city, no money, and no phone, Elle and I agreed: We’d run till we couldn’t go any further. Kaitlin had run close to 20 miles before she reached us, and there was no way we were going to let her finish this alone if we could help it.

In my "KAITLIN" shirt, getting people to yell and cheer for her.

So we ran, and we screamed, and we pointed to all the places we had “KAITLIN” written on our shirts, backs and sleeves to elicit cheers from the crowds, we spoke words of encouragement, we told ridiculous jokes, we remembered hilarious anecdotes from all of our years as friends, and we stuck with her till the end, watching her complete something totally amazing. Getting to be a small part of that day in Kaitlin’s life was a huge rush for me. It was one of my favorite days of college, and the biggest rush of the year.