Dare or Dare

Written in October 2013

It was the last day of classes (a day we oh-so-cleverly refer to as LDOC at UNC) and I did something naughty. I was told I am going to rot in Hell.

It was the last day I would ever walk the 0.6 miles to the J-school in Carroll Hall from 413 West Cameron Avenue, my route for the past four years, carrying a black book bag full of bell hooks’ philosophical books on gender and IRB forms. The last day I would ever be in a classroom as a student ever again. The last day I would walk past the Carolina Inn and the pink flowers by the historic Old Well or past the DKE frat boys sitting on the roof smoking pot and thinking there was nothing more important than the thrift-shop themed party they were having Friday or past the Kenan Music Building oozing sounds of violin solos. And because, as a second semester senior, it was really my last day — it was my last last day — I was feeling rather nostalgic about the whole ordeal.

So to celebrate or mourn or feel old or liberated or overwhelmed — basically to embrace the cacophony of emotions I was all feeling at the time — I suggested to my roommates that we picnic on The Quad, the very heart of the university.

Now my friends and I never really “hung” in The Quad (although we had grand plans to streak through it on graduation night); it was where super trendy hipsters chain-smoked Marlboros by the flagpole and kids with dreads strummed original melodies on ukuleles and the infamous Pit Preacher told everyone who wasn’t listening how he or she was a dirty sinner. However it was a UNC staple, and I figured we needed to spend a first (and last) afternoon picnicking in the grass on The Quad.

We gathered the necessary reinforcements: a double BLT on sourdough from Merritt’s for Julie, Charlotte and me, a Kosmic Karma pizza for Katheryn, a blanket and some Andre carefully disguised as yellow PowerAde, and we walked to The Quad.

We set up our picnic, sat down and began to eat. Then, Katheryn, my best friend who was always looking for ways to get the two of us into trouble, looked at me with her Dr.-Evil-insert-pinky-here face and leaned over to whisper something in my ear.

“Truth or dare,” she said.

Psh. It was an obvious choice. “Dare.”

“I dare you to flash the Pit Preacher.”

I choked on the bacon I was chewing. Whoa now.

That request was aggressive for two reasons. First of all, the Pit Preacher was fucking scary. Nobody messed with him. But also something you should know about me is that I don’t fuck around with the game “Truth or Dare.” I think it’s because I feel immense cognitive dissonance, an extreme and unwarranted feeling of guilt, I guess, if I say I will share or do something and then I don’t. 99.9 percent of the time, I will choose “dare,” because choosing “truth” means potentially sharing dark secrets — like the fact that I am an insomniac or that I once in my life had eight piercings on my body at one time, two of which were not on my ears — with groups of strangers. Which makes me feel entirely uncomfortable and hence why I choose “dare.”

For example, one time in the 8th grade, when my middle school’s award-winning show choir was invited to perform in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, my friend Rachel dared me to scream “PENIS” as loudly as I could at the “Welcome, Disneyland Performers!” orientation brunch. So I did it. And then Principal Hicks suspended me for a week.

Another time, during my junior year of college, my friend Anna dared me to pierce my nose. So I did it. My mother didn’t give me January OR February food allowance and didn’t speak to me for two weeks.

Oh and then there was that ONE time my best friend Stephanie dared me to move to California (with her.) So I did it. (Disclaimer: The acceptance of this dare was a bit more thought-out; I did get a job before I moved, but I still believe the initial motivator to move across the country was that phone call in February — “Kaelyn, I DARE you to move to Los Angeles.”)

You’d think I’d learn from all the trouble I’d gotten myself into that choosing “dare” was never a good choice. But those damn dissonant feelings, in combination with the guilty pleasure I derived from the “truth or dare” butterflies, made Katheryn’s request a no-brainer.

“Fine,” I said, secretly thinking, shit, fuck, balls (insert any one-syllable obscenity here).

I took a generous 7-second swig of Andre and got up, surveying The Quad for the Pit Preacher. Although I could already hear his sandpaper-molasses voice bellowing somewhere near me, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he was. Then, I spotted a large group of students hovered around something I could not see.

“You’re all sinners and you’re going to die!”

I figured it was him. The Pit Preacher, although wildly unpopular on my hyper-liberal college campus due to his backwardly conservative, misconstrued Bible-beating messages, was paradoxically the hottest commodity in The Quad.

Every single day curriculum day of the year, students magneted around him to hear why every single one of us was going to burn in Hell. It didn’t matter if we were a cookie cutter Christian, or if we were Jewish or Black or Brown or Muslim or Oriental, or smoked cigs or didn’t tie our shoestrings right, or believed in no god or fourteen gods; bottom line is that Jesus was NOT going to save us.

As I approached the crowd, the yelling grew louder. “YOU STUPID BITCH. YOU’RE A SLUT AND JESUS HATES YOU.”

I penetrated the crowd, especially large due to LDOC festivities, and saw the Pit Preacher hunched over on a ragged stool and pointing his crooked, crow clawed fingers at an Asian girl who looked like someone had just killed her dog. She was wearing a crop top. Apparently that meant she, too, was Hell-bound.

“EZEKIEL CHAPTER 18, VERSE 20! ‘THE SOUL THAT SINNETH, IT SHALL DIE.’” The Pit Preacher was now wickedly licking his lips and nodding his head. “SIN AND DIE.” With that, in a dramatic “touché” moment, he removed the sun-worn top hat, once black but now a sad gray, faded and stained from decades of preaching gibberish in bipolar Carolina weather.

Taking advantage of his slight pause — he was now hunched even deeper over his stool, rummaging through a burlap sack for his Bible, I presumed — I broke the force field separating him and his bewildered audience and entered his sacred space.

I was behind him, so I tapped him aggressively with three short finger jabs. He turned to look at me. I had never been this close to him, and I noticed that his eyes were distinctly different shapes; one was squinty and nearly crusted shut with eye boogers, and one was round, eerily round, like a silver dollar. The large, circular eye was more of a floating orb, a soulless and almond-colored glass eye. It looked fake. Maybe it was.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT, YOU SCANTY DRESSING SORORITY GIRL?” Mad Eye Moody spat in my face, and I felt a loogie-thick glob of saliva splat against my left cheek.

“AND HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT MY SERMON? GODDAMN YOU!” His cheeks had flushed a deep scarlet at this point. His bushy, white sideburns were pulsing in congruence with the rest of his body, which was shaking involuntarily with rage.

“I, I…” Come on, Kaelyn.

And then.

I jumped, doing a 180 in the air, bent over, and spanked myself. Once, then again, and then again and again, faster and faster. I heard gasps from the people surrounding me and then cheers. This was all egging me on, and I knew I was just warming up.

“HOW DARE YOU — “

Now I was shimmy-ing around the perimeter of his stool, shaking my boobies in his face. He swatted at my head, missed and toppled off his stool and on to the ground. “YOU’RE GOO-OO-INGG-GG TO ROT-T-T, I T-T-TELL YOU!” He sputtered through a mouthful of grass.

I had accumulated an even larger crowd at this point, and people were chanting “GO TO HELL! GO TO HELL!” not-so-ironically at the Pit Preacher while snapping pictures and videotaping the Pit Preacher’s fall from self-imposed reign. Katheryn had joined the group and I could hear her cackling laughter, which made that much more unstoppable.

He had gotten up at this point and was on his feet, teetering back and forth and visibly disoriented. His lame eye had opened at this point, and he narrowed his gaze to meet mine. Sweat trickled down his purple, scruffy cheeks. “YOU.” He raised his right pointer claw at me.

I looked at him, with an antagonistic, “Come and get it,” look. “What?”

We stood, locked in each other’s gazes for a few seconds, as if waiting for one another to attack. I knew this was it — it was now or never — so I slowly inched my fingers down to the hem of my oversized “Gym, Tan, Party at Pantana Bob’s” tank.

He took a step forward.

I scooted the bottom of the shirt up the top of my thigh.

He took another step.

I edged the shirt over the elastic band of my running shorts.

Another step. He was walking faster now. “Jesus is ashamed, you dirty little scallywag bitch…”

That was it. My shirt came off. And with it went my black bra.

“HELL! HELL! HELL! YOU’RE GOING TO FUCKING HELL!”