“Well, it wasn’t that she thought I was too young per se, just that we were in different places in our lives. Which is true. Kind of. But, yeah, she pulled her head out of her ass and realized that if we liked each other, then it was stupid to manufacture reasons not to be together. I mean, it’s not necessarily going to be serious or anything. But we… yeah, it’s good.”
“I’m happy for you.” And I really, really was.
Gretchen’s grin—complete with brownie in her teeth and whipped cream in the corner of her mouth—lit up her whole face.
BACK AT the dorms, things were underway for what I was informed would be the most epic sugar eating competition I’d ever seen. I informed the boy who told me this (a strange, jockish guy with red hair and eyebrows so blond they were nearly invisible against his ruddy skin) that since I’d never seen any eating competition, it wouldn’t take much to impress me.
As it happened, though, even if I’d seen a lot of them, I still would’ve been amazed and borderline horrified as I watched my peers consume volumes of sugar so great that I actually feared for their lives. Gretchen, uninterested, went to change because she was going over to Layne’s later, but I found Milton, Thomas, and Charles standing with some other people from my hall, all of them watching the action with varying levels of bemusement and anticipation. There were six categories of competition, each bizarre and ridiculous in its own way.
“So, like, I heard this premed guy actually went into a sugar coma a couple of years ago,” Thomas was saying.
“Should’ve known better, shouldn’t he?” Milton joked. “Never gonna get into medical school with an oversight like that on his record.”
“A sugar coma is not a real thing,” Charles offered in clarification, and Thomas and Milton rolled their eyes affectionately behind his back.
The first contest was to see who could eat the most marshmallow Peeps in one minute. There were three competitors, all of whom were friends and apparently proposed the contest because they legitimately liked Peeps and wanted to redeem the much-maligned food. The second was a couples’ challenge involving truffles and clothing removal that got so messy and scandalous that one of the couples quit. The third challenge almost turned my stomach. It involved the consumption of marshmallow fluff using sex toys as vehicles of delivery in a truly upsetting manner.
The fourth was a team challenge that required each team to construct a house of cards out of chocolate bars and then eat it piece by piece without knocking the rest of the house over, removing the bars of chocolate, Jenga-style. Piles of wrappers mounded underfoot as the constructions grew, nearly tripping one girl and sending her sliding toward the table where she would’ve knocked over all the houses of chocolate if someone hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her shirt at the last minute.
The fifth challenge was really a drinking game, since that hot chocolate was definitely spiked with something stronger than Mug Shots’ Hearts Afire cayenne-cinnamon syrup. I knew because they invited audience participation, and Milton pressed a full cup (clearly smuggled out of the dining hall) into my hand with a wink.
But the final challenge was my favorite. Teams of two unrolled yards and yards of licorice around the room in a madcap game of follow-the-leader where they took turns placing and consuming the licorice while crawling under tables, jumping up to tap doorframes, and, once, following the path of licorice that snaked up the leg of a blushing boy’s jeans.
By the time Charles and I were heading back to our room, I felt almost cheery, and distinctly more amenable to Valentine’s Day. It didn’t hurt that I was tipsy from the hot chocolate and that since the event coordinators had given out all the unused candy to the audience at the end of the competition, I was now in possession of enough snacks for a week.
Charles gazed thoughtfully at the pile of candy I put on the dresser, hands in his pockets and a pink lollipop making a comical bulge in his jaw.
“Do you think the Student Activities Board is in cahoots with the parent candy company that owns the brands they just consumed downstairs?” he asked seriously.
THE MORNING of my twentieth birthday, I woke up before my alarm for once, shutting it off before the train whistle could blast through my tender early morning brain. I called my mom to thank her for the birthday card she’d sent with a gift card to Olive Garden in it. “I figured you could take your friends out to a nice dinner after all that dining hall food,” she said. It was such a fundamental misunderstanding of my life on every level, but so very like my mom that I was overwhelmed by a sudden and unexpected rush of affection for her.