“You two didn’t sleep out here all night, did you?”
I look over at my girlfriend, who is still wearing her Wolverine body suit, and then back to the AAA worker again. Our sleeping bags are clearly visible in the backseat. I’m wearing cutoff overalls and Converse, and my front tooth is still blacked out with eyeliner.
“Absolutely not,” I answer. My girlfriend cooperates by nudging the empty bottle of Smirnoff under the back wheel.
“Well, you’re gonna need a whole new battery,” says the AAA guy.
My girlfriend chose that exact moment to start dry heaving onto the sidewalk. We were officially stranded a hundred miles from home, hungover as fuck, with no money and a dead car battery.
It had all started the night before. My sister was a freshman at college and for her first Halloween she’d invited my girlfriend and I to come party with her.
“Wear something cute,” she said.
No shit, I thought. I knew the drill. I knew I was expected to fit in by wearing some form of lingerie, animal face paint, and handcuffs, and I wasn’t complaining.
“I’m thinking a sexy ballerina?” I said to my girlfriend as I flipped through my enormous costume box. “A sailor?”
I turned around and she was dressed in a full Wolverine body suit and face mask.
“No,” I said.
“Yes.”
I was talked into the hillbilly outfit. I’m sorry, but there is nothing funnier than a semi-adult running around in pigtails with blacked out front teeth.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” were the first words my sister said when I jumped out of the car in front of her dorm waving a straw hat. She was in hooker boots, and a firefighter hat. One of her friends was wearing a thong and literally nothing else I could use to discern her costume. We downed a fifth of fruity-flavored vodka and headed downtown.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you two in those outfits,” said my sister as my girlfriend shotgunned a beer on the sidewalk with two guys dressed in gorilla suits. “You’re not going to get into any of the parties dressed like that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, slurring a little as the black eyeliner from one of my front teeth slid onto my lower lip.
“Wolverine!” frat guys started shouting from the house balconies as we passed. “Sick costume, bro!”
Turns out, frat guys love Wolverine. Front of the line, past a hundred girls and their bare ass cheeks freezing in the cold, every single time. I credit the fact that the boys got to watch Wolverine and a hillbilly make out every few minutes, which would normally be weird, but since there were still boobs involved under the costumes we got away with it.
We didn’t get back to my sister’s dorm until past three in the morning, when the Dorm Bitch wouldn’t let us inside.
“No visitors,” she said. “And no drinking.”
“We’re not drinking anymore,” was not a sufficient excuse.
The trunk of a car is not that uncomfortable, as it turns out, as long as you don’t mind sleeping in what feels like a metal coffin closed off from light and air. When I woke up, around six in the morning, I burst out of the back door with such violence that I fell onto my face out onto the pavement, like I’d just been catapulted out of the depths of Hangover Hell. I dragged myself into the front seat and turned the key. Nothing. I tried again— nothing. My girlfriend emerged from the trunk with her Wolverine mask covering half her face at the same time the AAA guy arrived.
The event ended the way these things always do— with a phone call to Daddy asking for money.
“I need three hundred dollars,” I said, holding my girlfriend’s hair back as she retched.
“Are you a— what do they call it— a hot mess?” said my loving father. “Is that the state you’re currently in?”
“Minus the hot, Dad,” I said, adjusting my overalls so the AAA guy couldn’t see my whole boob.
Still true..
Nice Move331
Respond
Shannon Layne
My favorite things are tiaras, compliments, and free drinks, which are becoming harder to come by the more I tend to show up at the bar in sweat pants. The proudest moment of my life so far has been landing an actual, paying job that allows me to Facebook stalk people for a living. I tweet about my mom way too often, who is constantly trying to remind me that I'm not nearly as cool as I think I am. Please send me funny stories to read at work here: [email protected]
@shannonlaynee
@shannonlayneee
