The Real ***tangle

Our Mexican friend Roanda threw a sort of end of the summer “bando party” the weekend before school started back up. Now, I'm not being racist by pointing out a seemingly pointless fact such as her race. That’s her nickname. “The Mex” or “The Mexican”. She even calls herself that.

But anyways, I honestly wasn’t expecting her party to be all that amazing. She wasn’t a very exciting person, so I didn’t think a party she was hosting was going to be very great. I was beyond wrong.

We were sitting in Roanda’s back yard behind a tree, attempting to play “sexual truth or dare”. The only problem was, the only version of it that anyone had was a very tame and very boring version. We quickly got fed up with it and started brainstorming for other things to do.

“Why don’t we just play the chicken game?” Thomas asked, his eyes lighting up at his own idea. I laughed and thought of the last time that game was played.

“What’s that?” someone piped up. The voice came from the other end of the gnarly circular shape we were sitting in that Graham appropriately dubbed the “fucktangle”. It was so dark that I couldn’t tell who spoke up. It sounded kind of like Courtney, but it could have been Cora or Nadine just as well.

“Well, it’s basically two people getting as close to a kiss as is comfortable for them. Like, you could kiss or you could not kiss. It doesn’t matter,” he explained, shrugging.

“What if it’s two girls or two guys?” Sydney asked.

“Get as close as you want,” he shrugged again.

“But I don’t want to kiss a girl,” Amanda giggle as she always seemed to do after a statement.

“Then chicken out,” I said simply. “That’s the whole point of the game, really, is to chicken out.”

“It’s meant to be between two people of the same gender. Just like Jessie said, you’re supposed to chicken out. But if you’re brave enough or you just don’t give a shit, you kiss them.”

Believe it or not, it took five minutes to try and explain the chicken game to them. They just did not seem to understand that you didn’t have to actually kiss the person if you didn’t want to. But once we got everything settles, we came up with a way to make the game more random, thus making it more fun. Thomas was about to put all of our names into an app on his phone and have it randomly chose two people. So the chicken game commenced. It would be pointless explaining every second of it, so I'll skip to the parts that matter. The very interesting parts.

There were same sex pecks – just as awkward as expected; there was plenty of chickening out – obviously going to happen; then a few couples got chosen to kiss – not like they weren’t already used to it already. But then surprises started hitting us from every angle – or at least hitting me.

“Jessie and…” Thomas stated, waiting for the next name

’Please not a girl again,’ I couldn’t help but thinking. ’Maybe Graham? That’d be nice,’

“And Graham,”

’Whoa.’

“Ooh…” about five people jeered, laughing along with it.

I raised an eyebrow and looked across the fucktangle at ‘little Graham’ (as Amanda called him), who had a really surprised look on his face. I vaguely recalled that he hadn’t kissed anyone that night yet.

“Are we going to do this?” I asked him.

“Sure, I don’t care,” he shrugged.

“What about Sarah?” I think it was Cora that asked that.

“She’s not here,” he reasoned. That shocked me; I'm not going to lie. I always knew something was wrong with them.

“What happens at the Mex’s, stays at the Mex’s,” Roanda chirped in. We had been saying that all night, but it seemed to apply so much more at this moment.

“Okay, whatever,” I shrugged this time.

So I leaned forward on my knees and he did basically the same thing until our faces were about an inch apart. I almost expected him to chicken out. Hell, I almost chickened out. I mean, he had a girlfriend; it was going to be weird on both of our parts. But when neither of us moved from that inch of separation, I told myself the same thing I told myself when it was a girl instead of Graham. It’s just a kiss. It doesn’t mean anything. Who cares? It’s meaningless.

And with that, I closed the space and pressed my lips to his. But something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. There was a bit of a spark between us. Nobody else seemed to pick up on it, which was certainly a good thing for us, but I did and I could tell that he did too because of the look he gave me when we sat back down.

Everyone got a kick out of our kiss. I'm not sure why and I was just as puzzled then. Was it because he had a girlfriend? Was it because I'm almost three years older than him? It was a bando party, so was it maybe even because we both play the trumpet? Why was everyone so amused by that kiss? I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be boring, but it just seemed like everyone got most excited about us kissing. It just baffled me.

But I let it go and we carried on with the chicken game. However, about five minutes later, the same two names were picked.

“We’ve got Graham,” Thomas started, once again waiting for his phone. “And we’ve got Jessie. Again.”

Everyone laughed, including the two of us. Hey, it was funny that we had to kiss twice in less than ten minutes. So yeah, we kissed a second time, with less hesitation but just as much of an unexpected spark.

The third time we got paired by that damned phone, people were really going hay wire. The laughter was crazy and smart ass comments were flying by at 80 miles an hour from all directions.

“You guys sure are getting cozy,”

“Thomas, are you setting them up or something?”

“Your guys’ lips are awfully comfortable with each other, aren’t they?”

“This thing’s got to be rigged,”

“Look at little Graham over there getting all the action,”

“Graham? Jessie’s getting quite a bit too,”

“Jessie, it’s a good thing you’re not 18 like Amanda. This could be counted at statutory rape,”

“It’s not rape for the willing, man,”

“It’s a damn good thing Sarah’s not here,”

That threw me off slightly, but just enough so that as I leaned in to kiss Graham again, I missed his mouth and ended up (barely even) kissing the area above his lips. Our noses brushed, but the kiss was almost nonexistent.

“That wasn’t a kiss!” Herbert exclaimed as we sat back down. ’Little shit can shut up,’ I thought, annoyed as usually am by him. “Your lips didn’t even touch.”

“Yeah they did, Herbs,” Graham chuckled, settling himself a bit.

“Whatever, let’s just keep going,” Thomas shrugged.

It didn’t take a whole lot longer for the chicken game to get boring. I mean, when the same people start kissing multiple times, things aren’t going to be too fun anymore. So we decided to play a game that we’d played at my birthday party the year before that turned into a real hit.

It was a mixture between spin the bottle and…something that you pull things out of a hat for. I really don’t know how to explain it that way. But what happens in it, is that you spin the bottle (which in our case, was an app on Thomas’ phone again) and picked something out of the hat. Each piece of paper in the hat had a body part on it, within reason, like leg, arm, hand, shoulder, forehead, etc. that you would have to kiss on the person you spun. But there were also some that were things such as running you hand up the other person’s leg and blowing on their neck. Then there were a couple that said nibble – which you’d have to draw a body part for – and a couple that said make out.

I was really expecting there to be more people having to make out, but most of the game consisted of the kissing of the body parts. There were a few of the neck blowing ones and a good amount of leg rubbing, but it took a good twenty minutes to get to any making out.

“Alright, Jess, you spin,” Amanda said cutely, pointing at the phone on the ground with a bottle on the screen. I chuckled and ‘flicked’ the bottle, sending it spinning. I didn’t really expect it to land on anyone, because it was super unpredictable, but I wasn’t really surprised either when it landed on Graham. I figured I’d just have to kiss his forehead, or something harmless like that, so I wasn’t worried.

I reached into the hat and pulled out a tiny piece of paper, slightly struggling to make out what it said in only the moonlight. When I finally made out the words, I laughed at myself and hung my head. Everyone could tell that whatever I got was going to be interesting, so they all stared at me. I didn’t exactly know what to say – I was trying to come up with some smart ass things to say to Graham so that maybe things would be less awkward – so I just kept laughing and smirking.

“What is it?” Thomas asked, leaning forward to try and read the paper. Courtney was in between Graham and I, and when she saw what the thing said, she was laughing too.

“What? What do you have to do?” Graham asked, just as curious as Thomas, or probably more, since it involved him.

I figured ‘pucker up’ was too cliché, so I just laughed again as I threw the paper back in the hat, shifting my weight like I was about to get up.

“We have to make out,” I finally answered while everyone else in the fucktangle ‘ooh’ed and laughed.

“Oh,” he said, probably beyond surprised at that. “Okay,” he laughed along with the others (and myself as well).

“You two really are getting all the action tonight – with each other too!” Roanda exclaimed, clapping her hands together.

“Well go on, get at it,” Cora gestured with her hands and made me laugh again.

Courtney moved out of the way, smirking at the two of us, and I moved so that I was sitting right in front of Graham. Both of us were sitting with our legs crossed, and our knees were almost touching. I was trying to figure out the best way to go about kissing him, but I couldn’t really come up with anything that wouldn’t possibly make things more awkward than they already were. I didn’t want to make things too ‘intimate’ by cupping his face or anything, and putting my hand on his leg seemed a bit odd, so I didn’t exactly know what to do.

“So,” I chuckled as everybody around us stared intently. “How exactly are we going to do this?”

“I don’t know,” he kind of mumbled.

Thomas must have thought it was his turn to step in, because he piped up with, “Just kiss for a few seconds and then you’re good.”

“Alright, whatever,” I chuckled, a smirk lining my lips.

“Okay,” he said kind of quietly.

I could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on us as I leaned forward once more and pressed my lips to Graham’s. There were a few cheers and some laughter, but that all got blocked out in the few seconds that my lips were moving with Graham’s.

Somewhere along the way, my eyes had fallen shut and Cora had started counting the seconds. But I only realized these things after I pulled away. To be honest, I would have kept kissing him for longer than those three seconds if he didn’t have a girlfriend. I guess that even though I mentally lost everything else around me other than the kiss, there was a nagging voice in the back of my head yelling at me about Sarah. And when Graham’s mouth opened against mine, that voice told me that I couldn’t go any further, at least for her sake.

That was the last time Graham and I kissed that night, but it was like the entire moment was burned into my brain. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw and felt it happening again. In the five or ten minutes following the “make out”, I often found myself mindlessly touching my lips and smiling uncontrollably.

And those thoughts plagued me for nearly the entire next week.