That Girl

Her orange hair stands at attention on her head as she talks whilst balancing a cigarette between her lips, it becomes quite evident that this technique has been mastered over a good couple of years. "It just speaks to me," she utters as she rattles on about her favorite friend, Jack, Jack Daniels. Rachel is not one for the faint hearted, she drinks too much, smokes too much and parties too hard for any ordinary citizen to keep up, however as she sits and swirls her drink around the ice blocks with an emaciated finger one would imagine that this tooth picked frame of a woman would collapse after one drink, but not this girl, she can handle her drink way too well.
Rachel is a makeup virgin; she wears a pretty floral blouse and her quietly spoken nature all present the wrong impression. If she was placed in a habit one would not think twice, although this is a character whereby "judging the book by the cover" could lead to a huge shock and possible cardiac arrest. "What? I am a walking contradiction," she laughs half choking on her drink at the same time.

"The thing that concerns me at Rhodes is that if you look a certain way, or hang out with certain people you immediately have a stigma attached to you, this is definitely not the case. If a girl is seen with a group of people who smoke weed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she does it too, just like me; just because I drink more than most girls it does not mean that I am a drunk, I just have a thirst that doesn’t get quenched easily," her blatant annoyance is portrayed through the tone of her voice which has gone from calm and mellow to slightly pinched. As she scans the crowd at the Rat and Parrot, it becomes apparent that she is well known and quite popular amongst many Rhodents, "Hi Paul, Steven, Emma, Lauren," the list just went on, until she quickly turned and announced that a particular boy that walked through the door had bad mouthed her friend.

She admits that her friend was so drunk that the thought of the gutter outside Friars seemed just as comfortable as a bed and she rested her head there for a while, but his name calling was over the top. "If that friend was male, I can take you a bet that that would not have happened," she said condescendingly.

Rachel was brought up in a household with three brothers and says that trying to be included by them required a lot of rough and tumble than most girls have to go through, "my brothers made me prove my worth, I was always trying to impress them by burping the loudest or enduring the most pain, but as I got older I started to drink with them as well and that is why I can drink so much, it was the boot camp I went through as a child." Her eyes start to light up as she recalls the past, and she opens her sling bag to present a photo, it is stored within a bag brimming with books, an on looker would seriously think this girl was a library nerd. Rachel’s education is equally as important to her, she enjoys her subject choice and says that although she parties hard, she still gets her work done, "I may not get the marks I could get if I was more focused, but university is about having fun, you cannot still act like this when you are thirty, so one could say I am getting it out of my system whilst it is still acceptable."

Rachel was initially going to study in Cape Town, but during O-week she came to visit some friends and realised that what she called her nasty little habits were the norm of the students at Rhodes. She says that the selling factor to move to Rhodes was when she got asked to join the girls drinking club. "I believe that I have broken the stereotype of woman, I hate Brutal Fruits."

She starts to turn puce, from the neck up as she laughs hysterically, Rachel has not changed for anyone at Rhodes and that is why she has been accepted with all her good and bad attributes so willingly. "Obviously there are a few men that feel intimidated by my drinking skills and go out of their way to be rude, but I could drink them under the table if they gave me half the chance."
Rachel is genuinely happy with her choice of university and encourages everyone to stay true to themselves and just have fun, "this is the only time in your life when being bad is justified by the term ‘student’, so stuff moderation, if you are going to do something bad, do it well."