With school having come to a close, the girls and I decided to kick off summer in our college town. We met for brunch at a hip new restaurant for mimosas and egg whites, but what we were really serving up was gossip. So far, everyone’s summer had been shaping up differently.
Miranda had her plate full with a spinach omelet, summer school, half a grapefruit, and a side of summer lust. A cutie from her economics class had caught her eye. Jonathan Cale was a Sigma Chi, which meant there was only a 50% chance he’d be an asshole, but a 100% chance Miranda was interested. She told us he sat next to her every day and asked her to form a study group. A guy showing even the slightest interest in Miranda was a rarity, so we took what he supplied and encouraged her to make her demand.
Charlotte had opted to spend the summer nannying for one of our sorority’s alumnae. The two girls she looked after were well-mannered and well-manicured. On her daily trips to the country club pool, Charlotte allowed herself the fantasy that the perfect girls were her perfect daughters, making her even more eager to find the perfect man to picture as her perfect husband to complete her perfect delusion. Not even an hour into her first afternoon poolside, she spotted him. Callahan Townsend Yates III had just finished his first senior year and his second round of golf and decided to take a dip in the pool to cool off. He was just what Charlotte had had in mind.
While Miranda and Charlotte were working toward their futures as a lawyer and a housewife, respectively, Samantha and I were taking a more leisurely approach to summer. We’d spend our days tanning and our nights drinking, leaving our parents under the impression that we were taking a statistics class. The only statistics we’d calculated were the ratio of hot girls to hot guys at the bar on a given night, and the odds were coming out to be favorable. With so many guys staying in town, it looked like we would both be getting an A. Samantha had already signed up for some extra credit.
After a few minutes into her first study session with Jon, Miranda was pulling out all the stops, in an effort to switch their lesson from economics to anatomy. Unfortunately, the market for their potential romance crashed when he told her he actually wanted to study with her because she took good notes. Miranda went back to the books, knowing she would never see this dick’s dick.
On the other side of town, Callahan was a little too eager to show Charlotte his Callahan, Jr. They had started making daily rendezvous behind the snack bar when the girls were too busy playing to notice Charlotte’s absence. When things got heated, Callahan whipped out a present Charlotte wasn’t ready to receive just as the girls came around the corner looking for her. His dad was able to get him out of trouble, but nothing could have gotten him into Charlotte at this point. His tryst with public indecency just wasn’t what she had in mind when she said she wanted a man who was “giving” to children.
Later that night, Samantha and I hit the bars. We were a great team, and tonight, Samantha’s position was jersey chaser. As she hit up a football player in town for summer training, I ran a few plays as the funny friend before giving individual sports a try for the night. I spotted Todd at the bar and I made my move. I recognized him from a few intramural games and later found out he was the captain of his fraternity’s lacrosse team. I was impressed that he maintained his high school athleticism through college and wondered if it carried over to the bedroom as well. Forty-five minutes later, I decided he was the MVP at the wrestling we’d been doing, until he kicked me out, claiming to have class in the morning, without even asking for my number.
On my walk home, I opened my purse to get my phone, when I found one of the tiny straws from the vodka sodas Todd had been buying me all night, when suddenly, it dawned on me: to Todd, I was just like the straw — used once, then thrown away. Should I start reusing my own straws so just maybe someone would eventually reuse me? And is it possible to eventually become one of those stainless steel, BPA free, dishwasher safe straws that Charlotte uses? I couldn’t help but wonder, are any relationships really dishwasher safe?
The next morning we all went to Starbucks. Nobody was surprised by Miranda’s shutdown. She’s the one who insists on keeping that dykey haircut, after all. This didn’t stop us from consoling her, because pretending to listen and silently judging people for their decisions is what friends are for. During our chat, I kept looking at the Starbucks cup holding my skinny iced vanilla latte. This cup was plastic, just like the little bar straws. It probably wasn’t dishwasher safe, but it was full of the thing that makes me the happiest in life. I started to realize that maybe I could be happy even if my love life was more like a Starbucks cup than a reusable straw. After we all headed our separate ways for the afternoon, I walked back to my apartment, as full of hope as my venti was of iced latte.
- Image via Zuuz Style
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