The All-Nighter

In high school, the summertime was a wealth of parties for my friends to go to. Actually, any time was a good time for a party, but there were more of them in the summer. What made the summer parties better than any of the others is that it would always be so warm outside that we could pretty much crash anywhere, whether it was the middle of our friend's kitchen floor, or the middle of an empty field. This particular party was great for a different reason.

As we all got to the party, we ditched our sleeping bags and pillows in the living room and headed out to the front lawn. There was nothing to do on the front lawn aside from sitting and talking, but we somehow managed to keep ourselves entertained for a number of hours. I don't remember all of the early events of the party, but I do recall that this was right around the time that Rachel was trying to get into John's pants, and I also remember that this was the day we realized just how dumb he was. John was jogging around doing something, slipped, skinned his elbow, and then started running around the house to "dull the pain." He refused to clean it or bandage it, and it ended up getting infected. There was puss. It was gross.

Anyway, there was nothing all that exciting about this party, it was just the same kind of party that we always had. The main antics of this night, however, involved the unholy creation of the devil's sandwich.

The devil's sandwich started out as any regular sandwich, with two slices of bread. This bread was then decorated with green and blue and purple food colouring. Then peanut butter, mayonnaise, Nutella, raspberry jam, strawberry jam, and honey were added for flavouring. And then a slice of ham, a spoonful of tuna, a slice of turkey, eight slices of cheese, marshmallow, potato chips, and so forth. A game was made out of figuring out what next to put into this sandwich, and it got to the point that we added a few pieces of crunchy cat food, something we couldn't identify (but knew had been in the fridge for at least a year), and numerous other things.

The devil's sandwich became so foul that you could smell the concoction from the next room, and as soon as we had finally built it, we all stood around it, staring at it, and, finally, Dee asked "...so, who's stupid enough to it the damn thing?" A few of us tried, oh, how we tried, but we could only get it so close to our lips before we chickened out. But not John. John was a special kind of stupid.

We watched with baited breath as John took a bite. And it was a big-ass bite, too, his mouth was completely full, and he slowly chewed it, considered it, and then nodded his head. "It's not that bad," he said, as he took a second bite. it was the second bite that did it, we found, as he immediately dropped the devil's sandwich to the counter and threw up in the sink. "Dude, that's gross," we said, though we made no effort to help him. John spent the next few minutes (read: forty-five minutes) in the bathroom spewing into the toilet while the rest of us considered our unholy meal.

"I'm throwing it out!" Dee declared after an uncomfortable amount of time in which we had all been silently staring at our enemy. "NO!" we all screamed, though we all actually just wanted to be rid of the monster meal. "It's just gonna go bad! The cat's going to eat it! AND THE CAT'S GOING TO DIE!" Dee pleaded, emoting with her hands as if that would get her point across.

Finally she pointed a finger at me. "Would YOU eat this?" I shook my head, but that's also when I had an idea. "But I bet someone would drink it." If you've ever been standing in a cramped room with fifteen other people, and had each one of them look at you as though you'd just said the stupidest thing in the world, then you know exactly how I felt when thirty eyes fell upon me questioningly. "...how...what?" was pretty much the question that every single person asked.

"How do you drink a sandwich, idiot?" Rachel politely asked. I pointed to the blender, and moments later, the devil's sandwich had become the devil's milkshake. Naturally, since we were blending, we had to add milk, ice cream, chocolate syrup, maple syrup, coffee grinds, and so forth. It somehow became even more putrid than it had started out as.

By the time the sandwich was finally...liquid enough to...satisfy our impulse, Rachel poured a big glass, waved it around the group, and Dee asked "anyone stupid enough?" We heard John throw up again, as if on cue, and Rachel wandered toward him with the milkshake saying, in a sing-song voice, "Jooooohn! I've got something to make you feeeeeel better!!"

It did not make him feel better.

By the time everything had calmed down, most of us had retreated into the large living room upstairs, and there was a pile of thirteen of us sleeping in a row with enough space for about...nine of us. It was understandably warm up there, and, as everyone was starting to fall asleep, Dee turned to me and said that she was going downstairs for a drink of water, and I told her I wanted one as well.

The two of us retreated to the kitchen for a while, drinking our water, sitting at the table, and staring out the window. We mused about something, just talking about how, even though John was stupid, we both felt a little bit guilty for letting him drink the milkshake. We then moved on to other subjects, including her boyfriend, and how I wished that I had gotten to her first.

It was actually kind of odd that we were so open about the fact that we were attracted to one another, and everyone knew (including her boyfriend) but no one really spoke about it. At least not directly to me. Even though we were attracted to one another, we also had an unspoken understanding that nothing would happen between us (because she wasn't the cheating type, I wasn't the home-wrecking type, and her boyfriend would have murdered me).

It was probably four in the morning by the time we had finally gotten back upstairs, and we found that her place on the pile of pillows and mattresses had been usurped by someone else, leaving just enough room for one of us. I'm not sure how we came to the conclusion that it would be appropriate for her to sleep on top of me, but...that's how it ended up, and when I woke up in the morning, she was still sleeping soundly on my chest, while most everyone else had woken up and gone downstairs for breakfast.

The only people left in the room, aside from the two of us, were a few late-sleepers, and Rachel, who sat watching us, drinking her coffee.

"Comfortable?" she smiled. I rubbed my eyes and muttered either "good morning" or "go fuck yourself," but she laughed either way and said something about how she wouldn't say anything to Dee's boyfriend. "There'd be nothing to tell, we didn't do anything but sleep," I responded, but she just nodded her head and continued smiling.

"Sounded like a good sleep, too," she whispered as she headed for the stairs. Clearly she saw the lack of comprehension in my expression, so she chose to follow that up with "you two made some interesting noises..."

I'm not aware of any noises, but I do remember that being a very good sleep.