Everyone has that one person. I don’t mean in a Grey’s Anatomy way, I mean in an I’m-seriously-about-to-fuck-up-and-want-someone-to-say-it’s-fine kind of way. Maybe they’re always willing to buy you alcohol when your shitty fake inevitably got denied. Maybe they were the first person who introduced you to weed. Maybe they helped you understand that there is nothing wrong with kind of being a slut.
For me, my person is my friend Sarah. She’s the sweetest person and the world’s biggest sinner. She perfectly plays mom while still managing to be the least responsible person I have ever met. We’ll both blackout one night and she’ll wake me up the next morning with a bottle of water, a couple of Advil and a snack. She’ll give me the number of her kindest dealer and then go with me because I’m scared of going by myself.
After a very particularly lively summer visit with her, in which we did all the things we do at school but I would never do within a fifty-mile radius of my house, I needed to drive the four hours to meet my parents for a family vacation. She offered to pack me a lunch for the road, which I gladly accepted because I had blown all of my money on weed and booze that week.
We said our goodbyes, she told me to enjoy vacation, but not too much, and to call her when I got there. I started on my way, and after about three and a half hours, I stopped at a little park to eat the lunch she prepared for me. Like a perfect suburban mom, she’d packed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple and a brownie. I scarfed it down everything like a dutiful child and continued on my way.
Because I’m basically the worst driver, the ride took me a little longer than it normally should have. It was already the late afternoon and my mother informed me that I was going to dinner with her, my dad and the pastor from our church, who was coincidentally at the same lake at the same time. I was feeling kind of weird by this moment and a little bit sleepy, so I shot a text to Sarah to let her know I had gotten there safely and promptly went to take a nap.
When my mom came to wake me up about an hour later, I was extremely groggy and I felt like I was moving through a fog. My hands felt like they were not longer attached to my body, and I pawed at my phone, seemingly unable to click the button to read my messages.
I finally opened the message from Sarah.
“Glad you made it! Did you enjoy my special, special lunch? ;-)” she said.
The realization hit me in slow motion. Oh my God. I had totally forgotten about the fucking brownies. Her dealer back home had been in love with her in high school, so we’d gotten way more weed than we were able to smoke. We didn’t want her parents to find her stash, so we had baked the rest of the weed into brownies.
And I had eaten one. An entire fucking pot brownie.
I was so high by this time. I was also a little dizzy and slightly nauseous, so I laid down on the carpet and tried to think of a plan as to how I could get out of dinner. Could I fake my period? A foodborne illness? My own death, which wouldn’t be so fake once my parents discovered not only had I not been to church in months, I also regularly smoked weed?
I heard my mom coming up the steps and, not sure how I could face her, ran into the bathroom and hopped in the shower. She knocked on the door and called out to me.
“Hey sweetie, we’re going to leave in like twenty minutes or so, so hurry up and change.”
There was no way I was going to be able to come down from that strong of a high in the twenty minutes. As stared at myself in the mirror, I knew what I had to do.
A full face of makeup, lipstick smeared on my teeth, plenty of perfume, hundreds of eyedrops and one pair of sunglasses later, I emerged, walking with the confidence only a truly fool-proof plan can give you. As baked as I was, the best plan I could think of wasn’t to downplay the fact that I was high. Instead, I would draw attention to every other part of myself by committing every social faux pas I could think of. That way, people would be too distracted by the pink stains on my teeth and the toxic amount of perfume I was wearing to notice my pupils were the size of dinner plates. Genius!
I walked past my parents, each of them staring at me with shocked expressions. I nodded curtly to each of them and suppressed a laugh. No one would suspect a thing. I climbed into the backseat of the car and sat there with a smile on my face, knowing full well that my plan was going to go off without a hitch.
Getting through the meal was easy. Our pastor was so confused by my appearance, red-stained teeth and refusal to remove my sunglasses that he never mentioned my extreme absence from church, and my mother kept answering questions directed at me, I assume to save herself the embarrassment of having her daughter’s halitosis poison someone. I didn’t have to do anything, I just got to sit there. The three of them smiled, chatted and laughed their way through the meal while I quietly munched my way through three baskets of bread, an extremely smelly burger and cajun fries, all on my parent’s dime.
And everyone, except maybe the waitress, was none the wiser. .
Image via Shutterstock
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totalsistermove
Everything you want in a sister, sorority or biological - funny, hardworking, pretty but not in an super obvious way. Essentially, a funnier Elle Woods who is constantly having a bad hair day. Questions, concerns, videos of dogs and coupons for Thai food can be sent to totalsistermove@gmail.com
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