Twas Brillig

Welcome to Flashback Friday, friends!

You asked for more Matt (you remember, my gay best friend who would come up with ridiculous things for us to do all the time and somehow I always went along with them?) so here’s more Matt.

So, it was my freshman year of college. Matt comes running into my apartment–by then he never knocked anymore.

“We are going to Cedar City,” he announces.

It was already getting dark outside and I wasn’t sure I was up to the three hour drive.

“What are you talking about?” I ask sleepily, hoping he’d get the hint and leave me alone.

“There is a Shakespeare competition going on and WE are going to go watch it.”

Yeah, a Shakespeare competition for HIGH SCHOOLERS. And not just any high schoolers, but kids from OUR old high school, where we still knew a lot of people. I felt a bit too grown up to go hang out with kids who were still in high school. But I also knew that when Matt had an idea, there was no stopping him.

I probably started packing a bag. “Where are we going to sleep?”

“In my car!” he joyfully proclaimed. (Meaning, his mom’s station wagon.)

“NO NO NO!! Matt, NO! Seriously??? Matthew, we need a better plan than that.” I only called him “Matthew” when I was annoyed…

“I don’t have any money, do you?” No. I didn’t. Fine. We’d sleep in his car. I wanted him to believe that he was asking just too much of me, but my non-stop giggling betrayed me. I was kinda looking forward to an adventure.

So we dashed out the door, with me leaving lame excuses for my roommates (my dorm was part of an exclusive in-depth foreign language study program and we weren’t exactly allowed to leave… I know. It was all sorts of screwed up… I can’t tell you how many times I was “visiting a sick friend” or there was a “family emergency” and so on).

On our way out of town, Matt pulls into the hospital. “Matthew…. what are you doing….?”

“Trust me,” he said with that ridiculous grin that made him so completely UNtrustable. So we got out and walked through the hospital. Suddenly Matt whispers, “Stand guard here in the hallway.” Okay… He dashes into a hospital room and comes back out a minute later, giddy in his joy and laughing too hard to stop and tell me what was going on. He grabs my hand and runs down towards his car, dragging me with him.

We get to his car and he starts pulling things out of his pants and shoes and shirt. Surgical gloves. Piles and piles and piles of surgical gloves. “Here, find a place for these! The glove compartment! Shove them into the glove compartment!!!” So I shoved the gloves into the glove compartment, squeezing them into every nook and cranny and was barely able to close the little door.

We had a very pleasant drive, talking and gossipping and swapping boy stories and laughing till we cried, which was our way. At one point, he looked at me and said, “your eyebrows need help.” Yeah, they did. “Let me work on them tonight, okay?” Now that was one area that I DID trust him in. He could make me beautiful. He always did.

We pulled into Cedar City, but got completely lost. Hard to believe, since there were about four streets all together in Cedar City at the time. But we were lost. And so Matt was pulling all sorts of stunts trying to figure out where we were, including a billion illegal u-turns and running red lights. Finally he pulled over, turned his lights off, and went to ask for directions. He came back a second later, still a bit lost, and headed to turn right, but changed his mind and turned left from the right turn lane on a red light. Through all of this, I was, of course, SHRIEKING!!! And then the sirens joined me. We were being pulled over.

“License and registration, please,” said the friendly cop. Matt goes for his license, and I go for the registration. In the glove compartment. I open the little door, forgetting what I had worked so hard to cram in there, and POOF. Surgical gloves explode out and fill the whole car. The cop just stares on in bewilderment.

“Uh… his dad’s a doctor,” I said, because for some reason it made the whole thing seem a little bit more logical. Because OF COURSE doctors keep surgical gloves stockpiled in their glove compartments. I watched Matt’s face turning purple–he was trying so hard not to laugh. So was I. We were both holding our breath and digging our fingernails into our arms and anything else we could think of.

“Do you know why I pulled you over tonight?” asks copper.

“No, sir,” Matt said with pure innocence.

“I’m pulling you over because you don’t have your lights on.”

And that was it. We both completely lost it. Matt collapsed against the steering wheel and I collapsed against him. Since we’d entered Cedar City, we had done ten thousand illegal things, but we were being pulled over for forgetting to turn the lights back on.

Copper let us go with a warning–forgetting to turn your lights back on wasn’t any big deal. WHY he didn’t impound us for drunk driving, I’ll never know. We weren’t drunk, though I think that spending too much time together should also qualify as intoxication. I mean, really. At this point, I don’t think there was much difference. The symptoms were all the same.

We never did find our “high school friends” that night. Matt pulled into the parking lot at McDonalds and we slept in the back of the station wagon there. SOOOO classy. But before we fell asleep, he said, “your eyebrows.”

“Oh yeah. Okay. Have at ‘em, boy.”

But it was dark and his only instrument of torture was a disposable shaver. It was only a second later that he said, “uh… don’t be mad….”

“WHAT?? WHAT DID YOU DO????”

“Um, I shaved your eyebrows off. Gone. They’re all gone.”

He then attempted to draw them back on. With black eye liner. It didn’t work, but it was the best I had. I looked horrible. And here’s the proof (this pic was taken a few days later, but the eyebrows are drawn with the same black eyeliner. BADLY drawn.)

Matt and I did eventually find our friends the next day. I don’t remember anyone commenting on my eyebrows. Maybe high schoolers were too nice, or perhaps too intimidated at that point, to mock me.

And, before you ask, I NEVER DID FIND OUT what the surgical gloves were for. But, if I know Matt, he didn’t waste them. He put them to a good (though very likely bizarre) use.