The Cannibal Counterpart

Time Frame: February, 2011

Growing up, I had a lot of crushes on boys. It started like most first crushes do, with boys in my classes. I had a crush on the cute blond boy in my kindergarten Sunday school class. We use to pretend those little hollow, plastic shape blocks were actually cups full of kool-aid and we’d carry them around to our friends and teachers like a good little host and hostess. Then there was that other blond boy from my third grade Sunday school class, the wannabe bad boy from my church youth group, the awkward but cute nerd from my high school biology class, the track star from my high school track and field team, and all those old celebrity crushes. 

All little kids have those first crushes. Not just girls. Boys crush just as much as girls. For instance, one boy I know –who shall remain nameless –once pursued his childhood crush so eagerly that she pushed him down the stairs. To this day, he considers the encounter to be worth bragging about.

As time goes on, however, crushes soon turn into romantic interests and dating. Each gender has their own check list as to what constitutes as a date and how one should behave on a date. Likewise, each gender looks for those unspoken signals given to them by their companion. The signals that let them know whether or not there will ever be a second date, or if a second date is even something they want to go after.

Consequentially, along with dating comes dating horror stories. Everyone has them. Everyone has that one date that they look back to and shudder at the thought of. Some are just worst that others.

In February of 2011, with Valentine’s Day approaching fast, romance and crushes was the talk of the university. Everyone was gossiping about who was going out with who and whether or not what’s-her-name would get her ring by spring. Really the whole university was reduced to being a thirteen-year-old girl. Seriously, even the boys. Love was in the air, it was toxic, and people like me (I happened to be boycotting Valentine’s Day pretty hard that year) pasted black hearts on our doors and windows as if it were the blood of a lamb.

Just because I was boycotting all things pink, didn’t mean I didn’t occasionally listen in to the conversations going on around me, though. Really the romantic gossip was all one had for entertainment when stuck at work on a particularly slow day. 

Porsche –my best friend –and I had a dinner shift on Valentine’s Day. Neither of us had dates or plans so we were perfectly find leaving ourselves to a night of subs and salad bar. Only a handful of people actually showed up to eat that night, anyway. Most of everyone were out on dates. We weren’t particularly bummed about it, though our boss seemed to be.

“I wish I had a date,” our boss was practically laying on the counter of the sandwich station as she whined. Her name was Maria and she was a short curvy girl with pale blond hair and blue eyes so big that they belonged in an anime. A pair of earrings dangled from her ears and her makeup was done to perfection.

Maria was pretty quiet about her personal life. We knew little about her family or friends. She was nice, though, and we all loved talking to her. She was always dressed up in slacks or a skirt with a cute top. Always appeared to have her life put together.

“Even a blind date,” Maria grumbled then stopped and blinked as she stared at Porsche and I. “Well, maybe not a blind date, and absolutely not a blind date set up by my best friend. She’s a great girl but a horrible judge of character. Have I told you girls about the time she and I went down to New Mexico?”

I shook my head, Porsche said, “No. What happened?”

“Okay, it was spring break, right?” Maria grinned. “Oh, you’re going to love this story! Perfect example why you shouldn’t just go out with any guy off the street. Anyway, it was spring break and my best friend and I thought we’d take a trip to New Mexico. We’d never been before and going back home for a week sounded lame. So we saved like all of our paychecks for six months to go on this trip. We bought plane tickets, talked a few other friends into coming with us, and took off. It was supposed to be great. I mean, we had just turned twenty-one and were totally ready to spend the week bar hopping. Another thing you really shouldn’t do. Alcohol is bad,” she gave us a pointed look. “Stay sober.”  

Maria was serious for one a moment before bursting out into laughter. “Seriously though, we really just wanted to party.”

“I’m guessing you did,” I spoke up. 

“Oh, absolutely! We hit this one bar that was kind of a Mexican luau typed theme. I’m not actually sure how to explain it. There were a bunch of tiki torches, and lanterns, and stuff like that. Anyway, my friends and I drink a little bit and this guy comes up to us. He was real cute. Dark hair, to die for eyes, broad shoulders, and all perfectly tanned, right?”

“Uh huh,” Both Porsche and I respond.

“Well, this guy asks my best friend to dance. She says yes, naturally. The two of them dance for a while. We have some more drinks. Our plane back home left the next day, so we were trying to end spring break with a bang. As the night went on, we made sure not to have so much to drink that we’d be totally plastered. Eventually, we decided we should probably head back to the hotel. So, my friends and I called a cab and I went to find Jessica –my best friend –who was still dancing with mister oh-so-hot.”

Maria paused as one of our coworkers approached her. 

“The nacho cheese is almost empty, but there is no one here,” the girl who’d walked up to us spoke, “do I have to replace it?”

“Uhhhhhhh,” Maria drew the word out and bounced on her heeled feet a bit as she thought. “Nah, don’t worry about it. We’ve only served about twenty people tonight and there’s only a half hour left until close anyway. If anyone says anything about it, send them to me.”

“Okay,” the girl said.

“Hey!” Maria called out before the girl could walk away. “You’re not terribly busy right now, right? Of course you’re not, there’s no one here. Stay for a second. You’ll want to hear this story.”

“What story?” the girl asked. 

“I was just telling these two,” Maria motioned to Porsche and I, “about this trip my friends and I took to New Mexico. To catch you up, we were at a bar, my friend Jessica was dancing with Mr. Perfect, and I was trying to find her because we needed to head back to the hotel and get ready to head back home the next day.”

“Okay,” the girl leaned against the counter, absentmindedly playing with a towel resting there.

“So, I’m looking for Jessica and I eventually find her and the guy making out in a corner of the bar. It was tongue, and teeth, and sloppy, and gross. And I was all like, ‘Get a room, you two,’ and he was all like, ‘that sounds like a great plan’. Jessica and I laughed a little and I tell her that we’ve called a cab and are going. So, she starts to say good bye to the guy and the guy pulls her in real close and asks her to go home with him for the night. Well, Jessica very politely tells him that she can’t, that she’s not from there, and that she has to fly home the next day. He was really bummed about it and tried to persuade her to stay, but she was adamant and didn’t give in.”

“Probably a good thing,” I stated. 

“I don’t like him,” the new girl responded. “Something seems off here.”

“No, duh. He could have been a murderer or something,” Porsche agreed. 

“Funny you should say that,” Maria smiled. “Now, here’s when things get really crazy. We go back home, right? And over the next few days Jessica breaks out in a rash. It was red and painful. Allergy medicine didn’t help, so she went to the doctor. The doctor looked her over a bit and then gave her a worried look. With a dead serious expression, the doctor told Jessica that the rash she had was commonly associated with eating human flesh.”

“What?!” Porsche, the new girl, and I all exclaimed. 

“Yeah!” Maria nodded vigorously. “Jessica freaked out and told the doctor that she’d never eaten a human being in her life. That’s when the doctor told her that she could have gotten the rash from being in intimate contact with someone who had. And that’s when Jessica realized that she’d been making out with a cannibal.”

“Oh my!” the new girl exclaimed.   

“Seriously,” Maria nodded. “That’s why she’s not allowed to set anyone up on blind dates. I mean, she made out with a cannibal. Just think what would have happened had she gone home with him! She’d probably be stuffed in his freezer!”

“Maria!” our conversation was interrupted by the cook yelling from the kitchen. 

“What?” Maria was yelling back as she headed away from us. Her high heels clicked on the tiled floor. 

Once Maria was gone and the other girl was off wiping down counters while mumbling to herself about never going to New Mexico, Porsche turned to me and said, “If I ever make out with a cannibal, you are not allowed to write about it, and you are required to save me.” 

“If you ever make out with a cannibal, I’m not going to let you live it down.”

“Likewise, sister. Likewise.”

Besties

Time Frame: January 2011-2016

            It is entirely impossible to sum up a five year friendship in just a single short story. It is even entirely impossible to sum it up in a novel. You see, no matter how many adventures I tell you about my best friend and I having, you’ll grasp the bare minimum. That’s not my fault or your fault. It’s simply the way it is. This is because a friendship in and of itself is complex, but a friendship with one’s best friend goes beyond all friendships so much that it’s as if the two people are the same person.

            My best friend’s name is Porsche. That’s not a fake name for the sake of this story series, either. Her actual name is Porsche and Porsche is probably the best person I’ve ever met. She’s never had to earn my trust, it was always there.

      

      The day we met was my first night working at the university cafeteria. I had traded that horrible Café shift I had in for a dinner one in the main building. No more 9-to-1 shifts for me. I was excited to be working from five until eight. I was also nervous because I didn’t know any of my new coworkers. I’d heard of a few, and had classes with some, but I’d never actually talked to them.

            That first night, as I arrived at the Cafeteria at 4:30 to eat dinner with my new coworkers, I didn’t expect to meet the girl who would quickly become my best friend. Still, as I sat down, with an empty seat on either side of me and my fork pushing peas around my plate, she appeared.

           Porsche had been working at the cafeteria a couple years before me and I’d seen her on occasion when I went to dinner with my roommate. To be honest, I never thought to go up and talk to her. I was pretty sure that no one at the university actually wanted to be my friend and that the friends I had were strictly because we saw each other so often. So breaking out of my bubble to talk to random people in the cafeteria was a no-no. I didn’t want to look like an idiot is basically what it came down to. I was afraid. Luckily, Porsche had the courage I lacked.

  

          I once asked Porsche, over a few episodes of Downton Abby, if she remembered the first day that we’d met. She’d chuckled with a little laugh before saying, “You were wearing combat boots and those horrible hippie jeans.”

            I’m ashamed to say that yes, yes I was wearing combat boots with hippie jeans. In fact, I wore combat boots to work nearly every day that first semester of working in the cafeteria. It was for strategic purposes. The heel on them made it easier for me to reach the hooks the whisks hung on. Of course, I eventually gained the skill of scaling the table beneath the whisks so I could wear my favorite pair of converse instead.

  

          Still, I was wearing combat boots and hippie jeans the first day Porsche and I met. She was wearing what I would soon learn was her signature style. She’d been wearing a pair of sneakers and jeans with a brown hoodie. Her black hair had been pulled up in a ponytail and secured with a clip for work.

            When she took a seat beside me, I was shocked. I hadn’t expected anyone to sit beside me. And I absolutely hadn’t expected anyone to sit by me and immediately start talking to me like we’d known each other our whole life.

            I didn’t know Porsche’s name for the whole first week of our friendship. All I knew was that this girl, whoever she was, was one of the coolest people I’d ever encountered. From the first night when she’d sat down and immediately started asking me if I’d seen a movie and if I liked Supernatural, to the second when she told me about her roommate troubles, to that first weekend when she’d invited me over to her dorm room for pizza and a movie, she kept getting cooler.

 I knew that she was one of my kind. She was a nerd, but she wasn’t closeted. She was proud of her fandoms and willing to talk about fanfiction. She helped show me the ropes around the cafeteria and our mutual roommate troubles helped us bond.

At the close of my first year at the university, Porsche and I decided that we wanted to be roommates and signed up for a room together. That summer, she and I talked on the phone frequently and were planning a fun filled year. I was actually excited to go back to school because I figured rooming with Porsche was bound to go better than rooming with my last roommate had.

            Porsche and I currently live eight hours away from each other. I live in a little town in Nebraska and she lives in a city in Kansas. Distance has done nothing to harm our friendship. We’re still as good of friends now as ever. We still talk on the phone and message each other. Whenever the other person is having guy issues, or life issues, we’re both on the phone.

           When I was preparing to write this I texted Porsche and I asked her one simple question: What was your favorite adventure of ours?

            Her response was quick and ever growing. At first I received a text that said, “My Criminal Justice project.” Then followed a text that said, “And the pop bottle incident, and supernatural marathons, and getting ice cream.”

   

         She and I have had so many adventures together that it’s impossible to pick a favorite. If I had to, though, I’d say it was that Criminal Justice project too. Why? Because that story out lived our time as roomates and became part of someone else’s story.

            My  1^st Junior year at the university was her 2^nd Junior year. She was studying Criminal Justice, I was studying English. Neither of us completed those degrees. Both of us are going back to school for completely different things. She’s now studying History and I’m now studying Education.

 At the time that Porsche was studying Criminal Justice, however, she was given an assignment to set up and document a fake crime scene. Being the creative people that we are, we asked our Residential Educator for a roll of masking tape and used it to put the outline of a body on our dorm room floor. She laid down, I taped around her. Then we took some plastic bags and filled them with fake evidence. We put some footprints down and evidence signs. We photographed everything and she wrote a paper on it like it was a case report. The story was that a husband was killed by his wife after catching her having an affair. We did well and she got a good grade.

We left the body outline on our floor all year and when it came time to check out of our room we finally pulled the tape up. The tape cleaned the carpet beneath it and left our friend outlined on the floor. We’d giggled about it for a bit and talked about what would happen if we got fined for leaving a mark on the floor. We didn’t get fined. And the next year she transferred to a school in her home town, due to financial issues. 

My 2^nd Junior year, I had a room to myself for half a semester. I was still working at the cafeteria and one night, while I made a burrito for someone, I heard two girls talking by the ice cream machine.

“You should come to my room sometime,” The first girl had said. “But if you do, don’t be freaked out.”

“Why would I be freaked out?” the second girl asked. “You that much of a slob?

“No, there’s just this…there’s kind of the outline of a body on my floor.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know. It was there when I moved in. It looks like one of those chalk outlines from those detective shows.”

“Weird.”

I giggled inwardly the rest of that night until I was able to text Porsche and tell her that our friend was still laying on the floor of our old dorm room. I kind of wonder if it’s still there today or if they’d managed to get it out with carpet cleaner or something.

That was a good adventure.

Then there’s my second and third favorite adventures (I told you it’s impossible to pick a favorite!). Which came about from Porsche’s habit of talking in her sleep when stressed.

The first favorite happened after she’d spent almost a whole day studying for a final. She’d been out of it from exhaustion and had nearly passed out when we’d gotten back from work. She fell on her bed and I fell into mine after an hour or so of fanfiction reading. The lights were off and the room was completely silent. I was almost asleep when it happened.

Porsche, in her sleeping stressed state said, “Ashie, Do you know that they use to tar and feather people? They’d cover a guy in hot tar and put feathers on him. Sometimes they’d even tie a guy’s limbs to four horses and send them running in different directions. That’s called Quartering.”

For nearly an hour Porsche rattled off one medieval torture method after another and then started in on some that came after the medieval period. I heard about every kind of death penalty known to man that night and when morning came she didn’t remember telling me any of it.

The second stress induced sleep talking incident happened about the same time. Her favorite historical event was the sinking of the Titanic and she’d spent some time that night watching the movie of it on television. She’d needed it, she was so stressed with finals.

Before we went to bed I received an email saying that my first class in the morning was canceled and I was excited to get an extra couple hours of sleep. Porsche had other plans for me.

At about 5:30, the next morning, I was woken up by my roommate. Her eyes were closed and she was sitting up straight in her bed.

“Ashie! Ashie. Wake up!” she was calling out.

“What?” I’d ground out, wanting nothing more than to go back to sleep.

“You have to get up! You’re going to be late!”

“Huh?” I checked my clock. “Porsche, my class is canceled. I’m fine.”

“No, no. You’ll be late,” she whispered in a hiss. “We’ve got to go. I promised them we’d play poker with them on the Titanic.”

“Poker? Titanic?” I laughed to myself. “Porsche, you’re sleeping.”

“No I’m not. We’ve got to go!”

“Okay, okay, we’ll go. Just let me find my fancy dress first.”

That seemed to please her as she nodded and laid back down in bed. Again, when morning came she didn’t remember saying anything about poker on the Titanic.

Another favorite was on her birthday one year, when we spent the majority of the day at an arcade and then got ice cream. Then there’s all the times we binge watched our favorite shows for hours –okay, it was days –on end.

We also had an incident where we bought glass bottles of pop to celebrate rooming together and we couldn’t get them open. We looked up ways to open them online and ended up trying to use paper, the door knob, the corners of our desks, and each other’s bottles. In the end we pried the caps off with knives and the next day we went out and bought a bottle opener.

I could go on and on about all the adventures we’ve had and you could learn all about the times I lacked a filter and she found it hilarious, and of all the wired places she has witnessed me sitting in (The rotisserie oven at work and my laundry basket are just two of them), and the time we were walking on the trail by school and ran into a cop chasing a thief,  and about all the trips we’ve made to each other’s homes, but –like I said at the beginning –I can’t possibly hope to sum up our entire friendship in this one post. It’d take me a lifetime to write about everything we’ve ever experience with each other.

Porsche and I share the bond of best friends. When she hurts, I hurt. When she’s happy, I’m happy. We’re soulmates in the unromantic aspect of the term. Separate we’re fierce but together we’re unstoppable.

I thank the Maker that He gave me such a wonderful friend. I seriously don’t know where I’d be without that girl. 

The Snow Apocalypse, Part 2

(The Snow Apocalypse, Part 2)

Time Frame: December 2010

            My freshman year at the university I was told that hoping for a snow day was a waste of time. The school hadn’t had a snow day in over twenty years. So when the sky started to darken and soft flurries began to tumble to the ground everyone expected their prayers for a day off to go unanswered. Most of us just really wanted to get out of tests or quizzes. The end of the semester was just around the corner, which meant that finals were coming up. Which, in turn, meant that all of our professors decided that it was the perfect time to give everyone tests, quizzes, and to make major papers due.

            The last thing any of us wanted to do was study. We would much rather build an igloo colony, which was quickly becoming a favored idea among the students. People had actually started making runs to Walmart to purchase shovels, buckets, and sleds. Coffee was nice and passing classes was nice but the idea of living in an igloo and going inside only to get hot food was even nicer.

            

By the third day of constant snow, we’d gathered a depth of six inches of snow. The idea of a snow day was becoming increasingly realistic. Especially as local schools started shutting down. On that third evening I was laying on my bed and staring out the window of my dorm room, watching a couple people building a snowman in the dying light outside, as my roommate sat on the sofa. She had a horror movie on and her laptop open on her lap. Her fingers were typing away at the key board as she hurried to finish a science paper she had due the next day.

I had an open British Literature book in front of me. The words of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales did nothing to keep my interest that evening. I knew I should have been reading it and highlighting things to talk about in class the next day, but I was more fascinated with the frost on the window and the couple building the snowman.

“Frick, have you guys been outside?” one of my and my roommate’s friends walked into our room through our open door. Snow clung to her boots, coat, and brown hair.

“Not since dinner,” my roommate stated, looking up from her laptop.

Our friend shed her wet coat and shoes, “Well don’t go back out. It’s like the freaking ice age out there.” She plopped down on the sofa. “What is this movie?”

My roommate gave her the name as blood trailed down a wall on the television and a girl screamed.

“I know it’s not going to happen, but is it really too much to ask for one snow day?” our friend wondered aloud as my roommate put aside her laptop in favor of watching the movie and chatting with our friend, who was really more her friend than mine. To be honest, she and all of our mutual friends from that year, I hardly ever talk to anymore. The last correspondence we had was when she ‘liked’ something I posted on my social media page. I can’t even recall that last time we actually talked to each other.

Regardless, they were who I hung out with my first semester at the university. It wouldn’t be until January that would meet my best friend and actually start gaining friends that I had things in common with.

As my roommate, our friend, and I chilled in our room that night our other friends slowly joined us. First it was just the girls. Four other girls besides myself and my roommate. Then, as the sky darkened and the hour shifted to one that admitted boys on the hall, the guys joined us. Until eleven that night they all watched horror movies and I tried my best to pretend that I was actually interested in the show with the creepy hauntings and the blood curling screams. I spent a lot of time with my mind wandering though.

Eventually, I silently got up, grabbed my laptop, and logged onto our school website. My English professor had a nasty habit of sending last minute directions for the next day’s class at ungodly hours of the day. I figured I should probably check my school email to see if she had anything to say.

Sure enough, when I logged in, the first message waiting for me was from said professor. I clicked on the email, opened it, and read something that I had to re-read twice before actually believing my eyes.

“Due to class being canceled tomorrow, please read the following pages for next time…”

Class was canceled? Was school canceled?

I clicked out of the email and grinned when I found another unread one waiting for me from the school, announcing that the following day would be a snow day.

“Snow day,” I weakly called out in a false happy tone that was laced with just an edge of genuine excitement. Excitement for the day without classes, fake happiness because I knew the following day would be spent with fake friends.

A loud whoop sounded from the others in my dorm room. They all checked their emails and text messages to find that what I said was true. The cheer they let out when they found out that because of the snow day the boys were allowed in the girls’ dorms (and vice versa) for an extra two hours that night.

I was not elated.

I had to stay up until one in the morning listening to the screams of the damned. It was irritating. I wanted to sleep. I was frustrated because even though we had a day off I had no one real to spend it with and no one around that wouldn’t judge me for wanting to spend the whole day in bed writing.

When I woke up at ten the next day –an ungodly hour by the standards of my roommate but a perfectly reasonable hour to be up by my own –I left the room as quickly and quietly as possible, getting a pillow thrown at me and curses flung my way in the process. All I took with me was my student ID, so I could get food from the cafeteria, and my laptop.

It was far too cold to sit outside and write, plus it was still snowing, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing a seat by the large window in the cafeteria and watching as the first igloo of the desired igloo colony was erected.

I had decided that since snow days were rare on that campus I would savor the one I got. For the record, we received a whole week off from school that year and everyone started calling it the great snow apocalypse of 2010. Every year since then, we had snow days. 2010 broke the school’s streak of no snow days.

As I sat there watching the cafeteria workers go about their jobs and the people outside building igloos, I started to write a story that I never finished. I didn’t know at the time but in that cafeteria, restocking the oranges and refilling the ice in the soda machines, were the people that would come to be my real friends. 

The Snow Apocalypse, Part 1

Time Frame: December 2010

The month was December, the day was a Friday. It was one day into what my freshman friends and I would come to call the Great Snow Apocalypse of 2010. The snow was coming down in soft flurries and the sky was darker than steel wool. Everyone was cold. Not even the dorm heaters could chase away Jack Frost’s nipping. Coco and Coffee was starting to become extensions of the students’ bodies and there were talks of forming an igloo colony. Everyone would leave their dorms looking like fashionable Eskimos and arrive for diner at the cafeteria looking like abominable snowmen.      

At that time I wasn’t working in the cafeteria. I was working at an on camps diner called Land Café (named so because of the building that housed it), so my hours were late and eating dinner with my roommate and friends was a regular occurrence. We’d all just settled in with our plates full of piping hot food and our small white mugs filled with hazelnut flavored coffee when the talk began.

Really, people had been discussing the school skate night for weeks, but that night the talk was especially omnipresent. Reason being, that night was the night. At seven o’clock everyone who was anyone would be piling into cars and driving to Kansas City to go Ice Skating at Crown Center Plaza. I wasn’t big on society or anything that involved socializing but I had a few good friends that had been talking my ear off about the event for weeks. They’d wanted me to call into work. To find someone to take my shift and go skating with them.

Their request was flawed. You see, when everyone at school is going ice skating it is impossible to find someone to take your shift. I had, for a brief amount of time, hoped that Land Café would be closed because there’d be no one on campus to serve, but those hopes were dashed when a sign –reading, “Note: Land Café will remain open despite skate night.” –was placed above where all workers clocked in. I was probably the only person not planning on going to the event. Well, me and this other girl that I was to work with that night. Or so I thought.

Later that night, as my friends all readied to leave in cute little outfits with scarves and matching gloves, and little hats with pompoms on top, I was slipping on my pink pea coat and cursing the weather for being so horrid. I was just stepping out my dorm door, popping my coat’s collar up to help protect against the blowing snow, when I got a call from my friend Ally.

Ally was two classes higher than me -making her a Junior- and was studying nursing. She was a nice girl with hair as light as moonbeams and eyes the color of ice. We met in our New Testament class, at a pizza party our professor threw for extra credit and social reasons. He was a cool professor. Outside of having to memorize the beatitudes, in Matthew 5, he was pretty laid back.

Anyway, I digress. That night, when Ally called, I was heading out my dorm door to work a shift I absolutely loathed. I hated working at the café. I’m not exaggerating either. I really detested the place. I’d been considering quitting but I didn’t really want to call my parents up and tell them that I left a paying job.

“Hey, Andy, are you sure you don’t want to come skating tonight?” Ally tried to persuade me. “It’s only $5 to get in and there’s supposed to be hot coco.”

“I have to work,” I reluctantly ground out.

“I know,” her voice was defeated. “Well, if for some reason you suddenly don’t have to, I’m not leaving campus for another half hour. Give me a call.”

Ally wasn’t about to outright suggest that I skip work and I wasn’t about to just do that. So, I ended the call and continued to trek across campus in the cold. The building the diner was in wasn’t that far away, only a two minute walk from the dorm, but it was long enough and the weather was frightful enough that by the time I reached the building my face was frozen. At that point I was actually looking forward to getting inside, even if it was just for the sake of warming up. 

When I reached for the door I expected it to be unlocked. It was supposed to be. The other girl I was to be working with had the keys and she was supposed to unlock the door when she got there every night. I pulled on the door, it didn’t budge.

I thought that maybe she was just running late, so I waited around for a good ten minutes before I tried calling her. Her phone went to voicemail…twice.

I couldn’t get into the building. I was freezing. I tried calling our head boss and she didn’t answer. I didn’t really want to go back to an empty dorm building either, so it was then that I made a choice. For the first and only time, I decided to pull something that some of my other coworkers were famous for. Despite it being frowned upon, I made a choice to skip work.

“Hey, Ally!” I spoke into the phone with a grin. If I couldn’t get into the building to work anyway I might as well spend the time doing something I wanted to. “Have you left yet?”

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the brightest decision I’ve ever made.

“No. I’m in the parking lot by the caf. You coming?”

“Yep?”

“Did you find a cover?”

“No.”

            

“Okay! See you in a few!”

            I only had to cross a small street before I reached Ally’s car. She and a boy she’d been talking to from one of her other classes was there. She’d mentioned the guy before; said that he was cute and that she kind of wished something would develop between them. As far as I knew, though, nothing had.

           “Andy, this is Sky,” Ally introduced the dark brown haired guy. “He was supposed to be going to skate night with some friends but they ditched him. So, he’ll be riding with us.”

            “Cool,” I said and greeted the guy.

            That night, the three of us had a blast. We went ice skating, drank hot coco, ran through blue colored fountains, and hung out in a Christmas themed playground. To be honest, it was the first time since starting the university that I had felt fine.

            No anxiety or worry could touch me that night. I had one of my all too rare moments when I just threw all my cares to the wind and stuck my tongue out at them. Nothing could bring me down. Not how creepy it was being in a parking garage at night for the first time, not how I fell on my butt several times that night skating, not even thoughts about how my boss would react come morning.

            In fact, let me tell you a little secret. If anyone had shown up at the café that night, which I’m pretty sure no one did, there would have been no one there to serve them. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to go skating. That other girl I was supposed to work with was at the rink that night. She looked at me, I looked at her, and we went separate ways. We didn’t really like each other. We hadn’t since we’d first met and we still don’t to this day, but that night we had a mutual understanding. That night we didn’t want to be stuck in some corner of the Land building, waiting on no one but the air. We didn’t want to be cooking pretzels and listening to the blaring TV that was mounted to the red wall. What we wanted was to be a part of the student body. We wanted to be a part of society.

           Yes, in retrospect skipping work probably wasn’t the best idea –though I never did hear anything from my boss about it –but over all, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. You see, sometimes in life we get too caught up in the world around us. We get too caught up in our routines. Some days it feels like our only purpose is to wake up, fulfill our responsibilities, go to bed, and repeat it all over again the next day, but there’s more to life than that.

            I’ve probably said this before, but participation is not just something you do to pass a class. Participation is something you do to live.

            I was never any good at participating in class. I’ve had more than my share of teachers ride my case about needing to talk more. There was even a time that I would say that I wasn’t any good at participating in life, but things change. The university and the friends I made there changed me.

            Skating at Crown Center Plaza changed me. It was the first real experience I had with the student body that didn’t leave me second guessing myself. Outside of welcome week (freshman orientation) –which was sort of forced on me –and the pizza party my New Testament professor hosted, Skate Night was the first time I really participated in campus life.

     

       Let me tell you this. All those responsibilities you have, all those papers that won’t write themselves and all those paychecks you’re trying to earn, won’t matter in the scheme of things. I look back at my time at the university and I can really only remember a few things that I bought with my paychecks. I can only really remember a few paper topics I wrote on and a few math tests that I didn’t do particularly horrible on. What I remember most are the moments I spent participating in life.

           

Textbooks can only teach you so much. I had a professor, the only professor I was ever on bad terms with, that once said, “No matter how much an author writes about reality, and no matter how real they make it, they will still never achieve reality.” He and I didn’t agree on many things, but on that statement we can agree.

            Textbooks, novels, they’re all great sources of knowledge. They all help us learn what it means to be human and why humans do the things they do, but in order to really understand humanity you have to be a part of it.

            There’s a saying that goes, “Everybody dies but not everyone lives.” I’d encourage you all to live. To take some time and to have a rare ‘forget-it-all’ moment. All those responsibilities you have will still be there when you get back. Take a step back, throw those papers to the wind, and say, “Tomorrow, world, I am yours, but tonight…tonight I am living.”

            You never know what can happen in the span of one night. Choosing to spend it with the right people can change your entire future. That night at the skate rink, Ally met her husband. She and Sky got married two years later and they now have a set of adorable twins. They live in Alaska now. He’s in the military. She does nursing. Because of that night, because she made the choice to give him a ride to Kansas City, he ended the night by asking her out on their first date.

            

Now, I didn’t find my prince charming at that skate rink, but I found something just as important. My spirit.

The Greatest Lesson I've ever Learned

Time Frame: 2010ish-2015

As kids we are in such a rush to grow up. We have this fairy tale view of what life is going to be like. We believe in the concept of happy endings, and knights in shining armor, and perfect princesses that always win. We look at the world with rose colored glasses.

        

    As we grow older we realize that it’s not the monsters under our beds that we should fear, but the ones that dwell within our thoughts. Yes, I just quoted Batman. I happen to be a major Batman fanatic, but that’s not the point here. The point is that its fear and doubt that haunt us. Our worst enemy is ourselves.

            I never intended to write this entry. I never planned on this vignette series (or whatever you want to call it) hitting so close to home. I never thought I’d be writing about my present in a book about the past. But you know what? Even if this is only the fourth installment in Rookie Mistakes, there are rules I live my life by –a personal code I follow –and one of those rules is to always write about what scares you and, right now, what scares me most is myself.

            I don’t know where I’m going in life, but I’m coming to peace with that. It seems to me that everything I’ve experienced has been for a reason. What I went through last year prepared me for this year. What I went through three years ago is still effecting me today. Even things that happened way back when I was a child still have an impact on my life.

It’s levels. It’s building blocks. That’s what life is. Each stage we go through makes us stronger and better prepares us for the next level. There’s a song my brother likes that says, “Life is like a video game, trying hard to beat the stage.” Despite the mild vulgarity in the song, the guy who wrote it had a point. I mean, think about it. Just for a second, really think about it. When we’re born we all start out at level one. We’re rookies. We know nothing about this world. We have our instincts, but we have to rely on nurture as well as nature to get us socialized and assimilated, and all those other aspects of integrating ourselves into the way humans live.

At the time of birth we are blank slates going through a tutorial phase. As we grow we ‘level up’. We learn more things and apply them to each new stage we face. Along the way, we’re attacked. We get hit by bosses. We get knocked over by the right hook of jealousy and stabbed by the knife of gossip. We find ourselves in situations we’ve never faced before with a big old, bad guy staring death beams at us…and we look down and think that the sword in our hand –all the experience we have stored up –is nothing but a toothpick compared to the beast in front of us. Yet, we prevail. We push through and overcome. Just like in a video game.

            The thing is, recently in life, I made a choice that lead me to a new boss. That boss has many names and many faces. She likes to attack in the night and whisper all sorts of words that make my stomach churn. She invades my dreams. Haunts my thoughts. She’s constantly telling me that I’m not good enough, that I’m making nothing out of my life, that nothing I do matters, that everything is going to fall apart…the list goes on and on.

            By this point you’ve probably realized that the tone of this particular entry is not the comical light-hearted one associated with the purpose of the collection. I’m sorry for that, yet, this must be said.

            I am battling myself. I am battling the world and judgement. I am at a stage in my life that I never wished to be at again.

            I’m at the stage of reawakening. I’m once again trying to find my place and trying to build a reputation up within that place. The people I work with, both at my workplace and at my church, don’t know me. How could they? I’ve been somewhat of a ghost to them. I came around seasonally. Whenever the university was on break. But now there are no more breaks. This is my life. I live here. That doesn’t make the ghost any less important though.

            Before May, 2015, I went through a stage of life where I attended the university. I learned a lot while there. I learned that for an English major I have a really relaxed form of grammar. I learned that I gained more knowledge and wisdom from just being with my friends than I ever did from a text book. I learned that I probably chose the wrong major (I should have totally gone with Culinary Arts or Sociology). I had a math professor that surprisingly managed to teach me enough to get me through my College Algebra course (Seriously, that guy deserves like a reward or something. I gave up on a test once in his class and wrote on it that I didn’t ‘Math’…yes, I used it as a verb. I got that from my high school English teacher. He –the math professor -didn’t fail me for turning in the test mostly incomplete and with that little remark written next to a Batman I sketched. You know what he did? He let me retake it and sat down with me for a bit to explain –in detail- why the heck functions work the way they do. He should have totally just failed me. I would have been totally okay with it…but he didn’t.) However, the most important lesson I ever learned came from working at the university cafeteria.

            In the Spring of 2015, we were preparing for the biggest event on the University campus. President’s Honors. All hands were on deck. Everyone was expected to pitch in and work as long as they could to help out. One of our bosses had only been working there for a year and it was his second time hosting the event. His first time hosting it without someone showing him the ropes. He, a coworker, and I were sitting in what was known as the Fireside room….because, well, it was the room on the side of the cafeteria that had a fireplace. Inventive name, I know. Don’t judge. Remember the rule with this collection. No judging.

        

    Anyway, the three of us were tasked with folding napkins for the event. When there’s over four hundred napkins to fold in a bishop style it takes as many hands as possible So even the Cashiers helped when they had some down time. We were just sitting there, our hands going through the motions on autopilot as we made the right creases on the navy blue cloth napkins. Our mouths were conversing about the event itself.

            “You should have seen it last year,” Samantha –yeah, we’ll call her Samantha –said as she placed a successfully folded napkin in a crate to the side of us. “The chefs convinced me to try this thing that looked like caviar but it wasn’t. That stuff was nasty.”

            Arthur crack a smile. “What was it?”

            “Balsamic vinegar and something else…Jell-O, I think. It was supposed to go on the mousse.”

            “I remember that,” I agreed.

            Samantha looked at me. “And then all those chocolate cups broke, remember?”

            “And half of our salad dressing dishes had to be rewashed,” I added.

            “And that one chef got made because he and another chef were telling us to prepare the salads two different ways.”

            “And the dishwasher broke.”

            “And we didn’t have enough help until the day of the event,” Samantha shook her head. 

“Geesh, that was a fun adventure. Then again, all events are.”

            “So true,” I stated as I worked at unwrapping a package of napkins that needed folding.

            “Stop it. You’re going to jinx us by talking about all that,” Arthur complained. “Everything needs to go right this time.”

            Samantha and I shared a glance before bursting into laughter.

            “Oh, Arthur,” Samantha chided. “Everything’s not going to go right. Everything’s absolutely going to go wrong.”

            “Way to be positive,” he rolled his eyes.

            “No, she’s serious,” I added. “Everything always goes wrong, but then everything works out.”

            “It’s sort of how every event works. It’s like a rule they all follow. Everything will go wrong before it goes right.”

            Everything will go wrong before it goes right, those words that Samantha said that day have stuck with me even after I graduated. They are, in fact, the greatest lesson I’ve ever learned.

            Right now, it seems like I keep getting hit. Like I won’t defeat this boss in front of me and that the different children’s events I’m planning for the church are all going to fail, but I keep telling myself that one simple rule. Why? Because she’s right. Everything, even in life, will go wrong before it feels like anything goes right. That’s just how it goes. But no matter how much crud we face –I’m talking about all of you out there reading this –there will be something that goes right.

            My freshman year at the university I had an Introduction to Physics professor that once started class by saying, “Even the darkest corners of space are never truly dark.” He went on to explain that light was present everywhere in the universe. That true darkness basically doesn’t exist. I mean, it exists, but it doesn’t. Confusing, yeah. Anyway, while he was rambling about stars and planets, and the way the universe works, while ending every sentence with the word, ‘K’ (I’ve heard from some reliable sources that he’s actually gotten better about not doing that…the ‘K’ thing, that is.) I was thinking about how accurate the phrase is when it comes to life.

            We may think that everything’s going wrong, but that’s just because we haven’t found that light yet. Just because things aren’t going your way and you’re frustrated with the universe, that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up and shut off your game console. That boss you’re facing, whatever it may be, is temporary. There’s something wonderful just on the other side of it. So look for that light. Look for something to go right. Because, let me tell you, everything will seem to go wrong before anything goes right.