Upside Down

Photo credit: Robsalot (that's me!)

The scream echoed down the hallway, sending a shiver up my spine. Damn, and I swear Billy was maybe, possibly, just about to kiss me.

“What the hell?” Billy cried as he ran back down the hall to his room, where he found Mary, sprawled out on the ground, surrounded by slices of pizza strewn upside down across floor. We just stared at the chaos in disbelief.

“Wha-what happened!?” Billy finally exclaimed.

Mary, looking like a deer caught in the headlights, (a dear smeared with tomato sauce and pepperoni), burst into tears.

“Okay” Billy softened, “why don’t you just get yourself cleaned up and go to bed, I’ll deal with this.”

Mary blubbered something unintelligible through her tears as she swayed unsteadily back to her room.

It was the party at Scott’s house that did it. Scott was a buddy of Billy, Brian, and Eric, the second year boys that lived in our otherwise freshman dominated dorm. Scott’s house was a typical college rental, a single story tan ranch with a dead lawn and shag carpet that probably wasn’t originally brown. I decided it was best to keep my shoes on as we went inside. A case of beer sat open on the coffee table. I eyed it skeptically while I perched on one of the stained hand-me-down couches that littered the living room. After my experience at a frat party a couple nights before, I didn’t quite know if I was ready to try beer again.

As it turned out I didn’t have a choice in that matter, because the guys announced we would be playing a game called “Never Have I Ever.” It was a game I knew from high school. The point of it was to disclose your entire sexual history to the people you were playing with. Of course my friends and I were just seniors in high school then, but now I was a freshman in college, surrounded by people I didn’t know, including a boy I had a crush on, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for Billy to know all of my, uh, history.

So here is how the game goes, one person says “Never have I ever…” and then ends it with something they haven’t done, like, oh, um, have sex in a vat of pudding. Now anyone in the group who has had sex in a vat of pudding would hold up one finger. The game ends when someone has all ten fingers up. Apparently, though, in the college version, instead of holding up a finger, you take a drink. I made it through two beers before I decided to bow out of the game. Mary made it through a lot more, and after we stumbled our way back to the dorm we decided to get some pizza, which Mary then used to redecorate Billy’s dorm room. I should really thank her though, because once Billy and I finished picking congealed cheese out of his carpet, he finally kissed me.