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.