In multiple posts on my blog, I've written about kisses. Notably, I realized that I've written both a story about the last person I kissed as a freshman as well as the last kiss I ever experienced my junior year of college.
Because it was pretty neat, but also because I need things to have order and feel uncomfortable when things aren't included in specific sets, here is a story about the last kiss I had as a sophomore in college.
We were finishing out our sophomore year at the same place it started: our friend Ian’s house. This time was different, though. Instead of the raging parties that Ian usually had, there were only a select few of us at the house. By that point, most people had already gone home for the summer. Actually, to be completely honest, even Ian had already left Muncie, but he had the type of house that was “open-invitation” for his friends. (He also had the type of house that, at one point in the middle of that year, did not have any functional working doors, so in order to get in and out of the house, you’d have to climb through either the front or back window. It was the definition of a college party house and I can literally feel my mother’s horror at reading those last few sentences).
It was a small group of people at the house that night, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: I was surrounded by people I was very close to and definitely started feeling nostalgic. Feeling nostalgic on the last day of each year is something that my best friend Allie and I do very, very well. Freshman year, we celebrated our friendship and last day of school with a long lunch at our favorite dining hall, where she cried, then drew me a picture of a cat. At the end of our junior year, we created an eight minute long video of us walking through campus and talking to my iPhone about the experiences that we’d had within the year and what we were looking forward to about becoming seniors. I don’t even want to think about the level of emotion that’s going to come the night before I leave Muncie for the last time, but I’m sure that it will rival all of the feels we were having when we were sophomores.
You see, sophomore year was the year that Allie and I lived in what I like to call “The Haunted Sorority House,” although most people generally refer to it as the Kappa Delta house. I, along with Allie and one of our two other roommates, firmly believed it was haunted due to multiple incidents involving sinks, Ouiji boards and cabinets all moving on their own. Allie thought it was awesome because she loves scary things. I do not love scary things and I did not think it was awesome. Because she is a wonderful friend, Allie let me move my mattress into her room and sleep on the floor next to her bed… for three months. (Thinking back on it now, I think that may have been the moment we became somewhat co-dependent on each other. It’s fine). Although I was looking forward to sleeping in a real bed/unhaunted house again, we were basically the saddest humans about not living together anymore and the emotions we were feeling that night sophomore year were high.
Anyway, after a mouse ran in and Peter started chasing it around with a shovel trying to chop its head off, Allie and I were pretty much done with Ian’s house for the year. We decided to go home to spend our last night in the haunted house and throughly explore all of the terrifying secret doors in our rooms that I’d been too scared to open all year. She was ecstatic. I was not. But, either way, we linked arms and began our walk back to our haunted home with a few other people from our group.
Being obnoxious on our walks home is another thing that Allie and I do very, very well. There have been multiple nights that we’ve jumped off brick fences, pretending we were Jack and Rose, or got into Frog Baby’s pond, or even yelled at a stranger because he complimented my fanny pack, but called it a purse. On separate occasions, I have fallen into a bush, gotten lost in the Architecture building and laid on the ground staring at the stars, but for all of them, Allie is always right next to me, doing the same thing (which I think is the definition of us being obnoxious, but also what being best friends is all about). On this particular night, we chose to use our walk home to sing “Call Me Maybe.” This incident happened in 2012, the year that terrible, repetitive music was on the rise, allowing “Call Me Maybe” to be among the most popular songs of the year and it became the perfect song to sing on our last walk back from Ian’s.
I think the fact that it was our last night in Muncie together for another three months caused us to really give the song all we had. To picture the scene, Allie and I were holding hands, skipping down a street filed with oak trees and singing so loudly that the rest of our group ran ahead as to not be associated with us. (We thought we were gr8, they were being h8ers. Whatevs). Anyway, twirling around the street, laughing, we yelled “Hey, I just met you!,” but before we had a chance to sing the next line, I heard from about fifty feet behind me a male voice sing “And, this is crazy!” for me. I was shocked, but not as shocked as for what I did next. In what could possibly be the quickest and boldest move I have ever exhibited in my entire life, I turned around and sprinted those fifty feet behind me. When I reached the attractive guy who had sang back to us, I said, "Here's my number, call me... maybe."
Then, I kissed him and, real life, it was a pretty epic kiss. He was surprised, his friend next to him was surprised... even I was surprised that I had done it. The only person who wasn't surprised by the incident was Allie, who was still fifty feet in front of us singing the lyrics, somehow completely oblivious to everything that had just occurred. After officially introducing myself, kissing one more time, then actually giving him my number, I skipped back to Allie, yelling once again to my new friend over my shoulder, "Call me...maybe!"
He called me.