Free Fakebook by Dave Cicirelli Page A

understood why everyone seemed to know Ted Kaiser, or why everyone turned to him for information when a rumor got out, but we did. He was never a sports star or a class clown or anything that typically makes someone the center of their social circle…He was just a natural master of networking.
    Actually, I take that back. It sounds too calculating. He was just a guy—someone who everyone seemed to like well enough to be one of his two thousand Facebook friends. And as a result, he was the hub of all Red Bank news. So whenever someone stumbled onto my profile, Ted’s corroboration of the story was often more than enough to get them to buy in, and best of all, he was able to relay the reactions of my hometown crowd to me. He was tending to my roots.

    A lot of the kids I grew up with drifted back to Red Bank after having the college experience, and I might have been one of them…but the thing is, I didn’t have the typical college experience. In fact, I bounced around three colleges in just four years, joking that I was “academically promiscuous.”
    I started at Syracuse and dropped out after a single semester. I don’t regret leaving—I had my reasons—but I think part of me was looking to go back to the way things were. I was never the guy who couldn’t wait to leave my no-name town in the dust—I like where I grew up and the people I grew up with. I don’t carry a lot of scars from my teenage years. I had a good high school experience. I just needed to learn—the hard way—that the high school experience ends.
    For a year and a half, in between my time at Syracuse and Rutgers, I went to Brookdale, the community college located…well, a few minutes from Red Bank. Turns out there’s not a whole lot to do in a shore town in the dead of winter, especially when you’re under twenty-one and all your friends are enrolled out of state.
    And while a typical college experience is full of easy ways to make friends, meeting people at a community college is far more challenging. In fact, the experience hardly resembles anything that anyone’s ever imagined college to be. There’s very little in the way of elbow patches on tweed jackets. No pipe-smoking professors sitting at the top of the circle discussing Proust with their argyle-wearing students. There weren’t even classic panty-raiding shenanigans going on under the nose of the fun-hating dean in the snobs-versus-slobs tradition.
    At my college, it was all slobs, from top to bottom. Even the professors looked like they were just as likely to sweep up papers as they were to grade them. We were townies. We came to class, then we left. That was that. And when we came and left, it was either very slowly, back and forth from the Shadow Lake retirement community, or very quickly and very loudly, in a modified black, yellow, or purple Honda Civic. Gearheads and blue-hairs ruled the campus. The parking lot looked like the set for the next Vin Diesel movie, with a few Ford Crown Victorias thrown in for good measure.
    The blue-hairs were just trying to have productive post-career lives, and I supported that. They’d earned it. But the gearheads were breaking my heart, working crappy full-time jobs while taking only two or three units every semester, putting all their money into spoilers and neon lights for their Civics. Five years passed, and these guys could have earned enough credits and money to join me at Rutgers, but instead they got bucket seats.
    I’m not trying to damn the student body. It wasn’t exclusively coasting gearheads and stir-crazy senior citizens. It was a cross section of everyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to a four-year school. It was people taking a second shot at education or saving money or staying close to home because of family obligations. In all fairness, it really was a place that provided opportunity.
    None of that, however, reduced the drawbacks of such an