When I was a pledge for my fraternity in my freshman year of college, I had to be a designated driver. I actually found quite a lot of enjoyment in this. I had some great conversations with some very interesting and kind people at all levels of the drunkenness scale. Driving a car of four or five women who are drunk and mumble to communicate at 2AM might not sound like the most fun thing in the world, but I enjoyed some of the people watching that came out of it and some of the lighthearted conversations as well.
That is except for one case.
I arrived at Purdue’s campus ready to pick up this group of four women for a party. It was a simple interaction.
“Hello? Ashton, right?” One of them asked.
“Yes,” I said, monotone. I was never happy to be on designated driver duty, so the best I could manage at the time was complete emotionlessness.
“Thank you for coming to pick us up. We really appreciate it!” The other three girls responded with nods and affirmation.
The girls didn’t pregame (get heinously drunk to prepare to get even more heinously drunk). They all seemed quite intelligent and respectful, which was a plus. Sometimes you run into groups or individuals who treat other houses’ pledges like dirt, so it was always nice to run into a group who seemed thankful that someone came to pick them up.
There was one girl in particular who caught my eye. She was wearing this striking red lipstick and had meticulously cared for black hair that contrasted against her clear white skin. She had makeup on that was subtle enough to where you would question if she had put on any in the first place. She was beautiful in a simply elegant kind of way, my personal preference. I’m not going to say time slowed or anything, but I did immediately begin to plan how I would get this girl’s number.
Do you see where this is going?
There was a lot of casual conversation which was fine. Still, I managed to find ways to jack up even the simplest interactions.
“So, what do you study, Ashton?” one girl asked.
“Mathematics,” I replied.
“Math-e-mat-ics, huh?” she replied. Her friends laughed; I faked one.
God, why did I have to say “mathematics?” Who the hell says the whole damn word? I wasn’t even trying to sound pretentious or intelligent! It was just the way it came out. Oh God, now this girl that I think is hot is going to think I’m some kind of prude and that I’m absolutely no fun. No one fun calls math “mathematics.”
I cringed in my seat for a moment until a cloud of smoke ran past my right ear and the scent of blueberry hit my nose.
One of my biggest pet peeves is smoking in the car. Who doesn’t know that it’s incredibly rude to do that? My main gripe, though, came from the fact that they didn’t even ask, and now they were all taking hit after hit in my backseat, even my future wife. Bless her heart, she’ll have to mature a bit more before I ask her to marry me.
Before I can even finish properly building my frustration, one of them begins to cough. It’s (who else?) the gorgeous woman in my backseat. It is no casual cough either. This is one of the ones you get when you are so sick and congested that you vomit from how hard you are coughing.
And it just keeps going. She just keeps coughing and I’m ready for her vomit to hit my right arm and for me to pull it away in disgust and for her to be left so embarrassed that she might actually accept my invitation to coffee the next morning. At some point this fit has gone on for so long that I stop thinking about her only as an object of my affection and begin to feel legitimate concern. She finally stops and is gasping for air. Her friends frantically start to check on her. She doesn’t respond at first. She inhales and exhales some shallow breaths that grew increasingly deeper.
“Yeah,” she croaks. It hurts me just to hear her vocal cords straining. “Yeah. I think I’m alright.”
I sigh in relief. That is until yet another sucking sound emerged from the backseat.
Coughing resumes.
At some point after that second, nearly as long coughing fit, we managed conversation again. She revealed that she had met with one of the people in my fraternity through a dating app, and that he was the reason that she is going to this party. That fact didn’t hurt me nearly as much as it would have ten minutes prior.
We arrived at my fraternity and the guy she matched with was waiting for us. They all got out of the car and walked towards him, exchanging brief introductions before the girls headed inside without him.
He smirked. It was as if he was gloating, saying to me, “did you see that bombshell just walk in? She’s my date tonight.” I nodded in response, not giving anything up.
He, seemingly discontented with my response, stopped me before I could walk past him, placing his arm between me and the door. He said something along the lines of, “she’s my date and I’m going to try and get some tonight.”
I placed my hand on his shoulder as I began to walk past him.
“She’s all yours,” I said. I disappeared into the house and eventually into my room.