Thanks to Vodka

It all started on a Friday night in the middle of May. That night my entire universe came crumbling down, only to reveal something more amazing than I could ever imagine.

My boyfriend of more than five years, Kendall, had just returned home from college out of state. Of course he would decide to go to a school five hours away while I was stuck in my hometown going to the local school, that was just how he was. But I wasn’t entirely alone. Most of my friends still lived at home, so it was basically like nothing had changed, even though we were all in college and Kendall was practically out of the picture.

--

Kendall and I had met during our freshman year in high school. He was the new kid in a small town where everyone knew everybody else, where all the girls were tired of dating the same boys they’d grown up with. Kendall also happened to be an amazing football player and had no trouble making the starting lineup of the varsity team. In my hometown, good looks plus mysterious background plus football automatically equals popularity.

I wasn’t exactly as high up on the social ladder as Kendall, but I was definitely not a loner or a freak. If there were one word to describe myself during high school, it would have been average. Average height, average weight, average hair color (brown), average eye color (also brown), and even average friends. The only thing that I really had going for me was my intelligence, especially when in came to science.

Thanks to biology, I snagged the new boy.

You see, all athletes have to maintain a certain academic standing in order to play in the games, and Kendall wasn’t the best when it came to our bio class. Actually, I’m not sure anyone did extremely well in that class because we had a teacher that was ancient and stubborn as hell and refused to give anyone an A. That was before she had me, of course.

I would spend hours every night studying for that class, reading over the textbook and memorizing terms like homeobox, helicase, and replication. All my hard work was repaid when I aced every test thrown at me.

I was still a little thrown off when Kendall stopped me after class one day.

“Hey Kandi, what’s up?” he asked, leaning up against the locker beside mine.

“Nothing much. How are you?” I replied as smoothly as possible, even though I was shocked he actually knew my name.

“Good, good. What are you doing after school today? I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind helping me out with this whole biology thing. Some of it just goes right over my head,” he laughed, swiping his hand over his head.

“Sure, I’m free. Just ride the bus home with me. My brothers and mom don’t come home until five, so everything should be pretty study-friendly,” I said and flashed him a quick smile as I stuffed my book into my locker. “Study-friendly?” What the fuck does that even mean? He probably thought I wanted to bang him or something.

That’s probably why he made out with me that afternoon in my bedroom on top of our textbooks and spiral notebooks.

Living in a small town, everyone knew about it the very next day, even though I’d only told my best girl friend, Autum. Our names were on everyone’s lips, and to be honest, it sounded kind of good: Kendall and Kandi.

From that point on, my status became elevated. I no longer ate lunch in the library while doing my homework. I ate lunch with Kendall and some of the other football players and their girlfriends, who quickly became new friends for me. My school wasn’t like all the schools on television, everyone pretty much got along with everyone else. The popular girls weren’t blonde and bitchy and were actually very kind. And unlike every other girl on T.V. that suddenly gets a taste of the popularity limelight, I did not abandon my friends. I still hung out with my best friends Autum and Logan on a daily basis, and they also gladly accepted Kendall into our circle.

So that was how the great romance of the twenty-first century that was Kendall and Kandi began, and this is how it ended.

--

Fast forward five years to the more recent past, after our first year of college apart. To celebrate surviving freshman year with our G.P.A.s and scholarships intact, Kendall had rented us a lake house for the weekend in a town about an hour away from our home, and we were both looking forward to spending the weekend alone together with only the peaceful view of the lake from our back porch to distract us. Everything was set to be the perfect weekend, but of course things went horribly wrong as they tend to do.

We were lying in bed. Kendall’s fingers were tangled up in my hair, and I was clinging to his broad chest.

“Kandi, this probably isn’t exactly the right time, but…we need to talk,” Kendall mumbled, pushing his hair out of his hazel eyes.

“About what?” I asked, looking up at him. “I mean, what do you mean?”

His eyes were wandering out the window and skimming across the lake. There was no way whatever he had to say could be good.

“I think we should take a break.”

I laughed at him for a second. “We are, this is our vacation.”

He sighed. “I mean, I think that we should go on a break.”

My eyebrows furrowed as everything began to sink in.

“What the hell, Kendall? It’s the summer! We haven’t seen each other in months, and all of a sudden you want to see other people? After five years of being with me!” I shouted, raising up from the bed and moving towards the doorway. “Why even rent out this lake house, Kendall?”

“I thought we could give it a shot, but things just aren’t the same. College has changed us, K.”

“Why couldn’t you have called me or something instead of waiting until now to drop this bomb on me? I mean, I figured it was all going to hell anyway, but you never mentioned anything being different until now.”

“You don’t understand,” he said with his northern accent, and I hated it. I used to like it because every other boy in school spoke in a southern drawl except Kendall, but now it was just annoying and foreign to me.

“You’re right, Kendall, I don’t, but whatever. Fuck it!” I said, gathering my suitcase on my way out.

The air outside was sticky and humid, even though it was almost ten o’clock. I walked five miles to the only place I knew around town that was still open. On a normal day, I would’ve been bitching and complaining about the distance, but I was fueled by rage, rage with a side of utter confusion.

Around mile three, the rage ran out, and all I could feel was numbness.

When I finally arrived at the town’s local twenty-four hour breakfast nook, I was starving. Luckily, the food was delicious and cheap. I ordered two orders of pancakes and began shoveling them down.

I had called Autum as soon as I’d left, asking her if Logan’s parents’ lake house was free this weekend and if they would come down here, at least to come take me home. She said the house was empty, so they’d be down with the liquor shortly. I didn’t have to tell her what had happened; she already knew.

I was on my fourth order of pancakes when they walked in, both drenched in sweat because Logan’s car didn’t have an air conditioner.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Autum asked as she slide into the bright red booth beside me.

“Shitty,” I replied. “But these pancakes are phenomenal.”

“Girl, you’re going to eat yourself into a diabetic coma. Let’s go!”

I threw a ten dollar bill on the table as we walked out.

--

That night, Autum, Logan, and I sat out on the pier, passing a bottle of watermelon Smirnoff back and forth and telling stories about why our lives sucked.

Autum felt like she’d never get out of our hometown.

Logan was twenty-one and still couldn’t find a job or a hobby or anything that he was passionate about.

And I was hopelessly in love with a guy who had never loved me.

After another shared bottle of Smirnoff, Autum had had enough and went to sleep in Logan’s room at the lake house.

After Autum had left, Logan and I went inside, continued to get drunk, and watched one of those home video shows that display morons being morons. We were also discussing what we would do if we robbed a convenience store because most of the videos involved morons robbing convenience stores disguised by palm leaves or something just as ridiculous.

He was laughing, his brown eyes squinted up and this humongous goofy grin planted on his face.

So I got the ridiculous urge to kiss him.

It was sloppy, and he tasted like alcohol and peanut butter. There was no telling what he had eaten for dinner. Plus, we both sort of kept our eyes open during the kiss, which is usually awkward, but we were both too buzzed to care.

As I followed him up the stairs, the thought flashed through my mind that this might not be a good decision. Did I really want to hook up with my best friend?

The answer was “not really,” but I was bored, and I had to admit that I always thought Logan was a looker.

So thanks to vodka, I slept with my best friend.

Under the liquor haze, everything felt like a dream. Logan’s parents’ room had a balcony overlooking the lake, and as the sun began to elevate over the horizon, the room filled with soft shades of peach and lavender.

I was overwhelmed by sensory overload; being with Logan was completely different than being with Kendall. While Kendall was more solid and stable, Logan moved like water. Electricity radiated from every pore on his body, and every time we touched I saw sparks.

My fingers clenched at his shoulder blades as his body tensed up. His lids fell over his chocolate eyes, and he stuttered out my name as he came.

I almost willed the sun not to raise any further as I nestled into Logan’s neck because I knew the next day it would all be over. Kendall was one of Logan’s closest friends, so there was no way that we could be together once we got home.

It was like we could only be together at the lake house, and that made me want to stay there forever, even though it was unrealistic.

I knew exactly what would happen. We would go back home, and everything would go back to normal, except it wouldn’t be. There would always be something there, whether we acted on it or not.

That was just the way life worked, like it or not.