The Boyfriend’s™ Best Friend™ has a child. It was his child’s first birthday. Therefore, it required a celebration. A celebration that I must attend because The Boyfriend™ is obligated (and wanted) to go. So he returned from water polo practice just as I was getting dressed.

As I dry my hair, The Boyfriend™ touches his up. The scent of his hair gel turns me feral, I don’t know why. His hair’s looking fabulous. I’m looking fabulous with my long gorgeous tresses and all. Frankly, I’m feeling a bit like a lioness with an attractive mane (look, I know male lions have the manes, but just go with it, okay?), and all I can think about is pouncing on The Boyfriend™, who wanders out of the bathroom and settles down at his computer to wait for me. I pull out my makeup bag and start slapping the stuff on. He yells from his office:

“They assured me there won’t be a lot of kids there!”

Awesome mood killer, dude. I hate being reminded that half of how we spend our time is making babies, just with the safety on.

“Oh, good!” I apply some mascara.

“And you’ll know my friends that are there!”

Now this is A Story. And in A Story, there are plot twists. Things are often said that become very untrue, things where you, as the audience, get a sinking feeling and some sense of dramatic irony that the characters, which, in this case, are The Boyfriend™ and me, have no fucking clue about.

Well, I had every fucking clue about a plot twist going down as I paused and contemplated stabbing my eyes out with the mascara wand to avoid going. No child’s birthday party could be that easy. But I finished my makeup and put on this gorgeous silk sleeveless blouse and expensive jeans. There had been mention of a backyard, so I wore flats rather than my Michael Kors heels. I looked hot, okay? I’m not sure what I had to prove to The Boyfriend’s™ Best Friend’s™ one-year-old kid, but I really needed to have some confidence before descending into the hosting pit of my enemy.

The Boyfriend™ drove. He did a fine job of distracting me with the rules of poker and a deck of silvery Battlestar Galactica cards (you know, girls and shiny objects). We neared the House of Despair. He parked across from a school with delicate and happy pictures of seals in the window and other trappings of childhood. My legs quivered and I was grateful for the flats I’d chosen. An Elmo balloon attacked me as we went through the white picket fence gate.

I should have taken that as a omen because, in the next ten minutes, I discovered why I spent so long looking fabulous: I was spitting in the face of Fate, looking gorgeous before being shoved as an unknowing sacrifice into the pit of vipers.

And what a pit of vipers it was: crawling, waddling, running, some even carried by servants. Worse yet, there was prearranged torture before they descended upon my flesh and consumed me to fuel their lifeblood. They had dined on sugar: an Elmo cake with icing piled as high as my favorite stiletto’s heel. And it was…

Oh God, no.

My silk blouse was white…white…white…

Elmo is red…red…red…

And these vipers, with their wobbly, bendy bodies and lack of any sort of quality equilibrium were bounding and rebounding off each other––and parents––like a horde of balloons. But a demonic horde of balloons with blood red hands.

Everywhere…red stains…licking pink fingers, eying me up…eying the pure white of my blouse…Somehow assessing the price tag and importance of my jeans…

The fence was eight feet high. Even if I could escape the The Boyfriend™’s vice grip on my hand––I frantically looked for anything sharp, but the knives were plastic––I would never be able to climb it, even if I used the Kangaroo Climber slide as a ladder. They would just laugh and reach for my scrambling legs with their sticky sweet hands, pulling me down into the sunny backyard abyss.

I had no escape. Only eight weeks together but I never thought he’d make me a human sacrifice.

Oh, the betrayal. His hair gel suddenly reeked of it.

“Christie!”

Stiff hugs for the traumatized girlfriend from two friends of his I’d met prior. Then they passed around, like this was some G-rated Sesame Street orgy:

“So-and-So, this is Christie.”

Shake hands, exchange polite hellos. I’m sure my strained smile looked relatively plastic, further enticing these monsters to reach for me.

“And this is…”

I felt like the freshly unwrapped gift of a Barbie doll, being passed around from person to person. I wondered how much longer it would be before they saw through my fake smile, to the anxiety writhing beneath, and I was tossed to the old toys box, quickly becoming Ex-Girlfriend Barbie.

At one point, there was an enormous––and enormously expensive––digital camera going from guy to guy. It landed on my man, and I stared him, eyes wide not from shock but glazed over from some nameless horror presented before me: he too had fallen into the Bacchanalia. He spun the camera’s knobs, adjusted it’s buttons, all while licking red icing from his fingers. He too had abandoned me and become what women dread: the eight-year-old that lurks inside of every male.

Twenty minutes later I was semi-comatose, and I’m sure I’d met everyone who’d known The Boyfriend™ since that awkward summer when his voice cracked, but I still evaluated my situation: everywhere I looked I either saw someone I did not know, or diseased vermin with blood-like sugar smeared across their mouths and caked on their hands. I was sure that when the sun disappeared down behind the sea, they would fall upon me in a sugar-fueled reverie that resembled South Pacific cannibalistic rituals where children consume adults in order to facilitate some fucked up view on the circle of life.

Obviously, I made it out before sunset, because this is nonfiction. If it were fiction, well, I’d probably be done with my thesis by now instead of procrastinating and finishing it over the summer.

Anyway, this morning I tumbled off the wrong side of the bed, and I left The Boyfriend™ sleeping while I got ready to face the age group that I prefer: college freshmen. I was banging things around as consciousness quickly replaced the dreamy anxiety that clung to me. Those little creatures had plagued my mind as I slept, chasing me with their bloody hands and gaping sharp-toothed maws.

I rummaged through my overnight bag for my toothbrush, still seeing red over twelve hours later. And where the fuck was my toothbrush? I dumped all my toiletries out onto the bathroom counter. It wasn’t in there, and I know I’d used it the night before. That party had left me a wreck.

“Why the hell did I agree to go to that fucking party anyway?”

I looked up from the chaos of beauty products unleashed upon The Boyfriend™’s counter and saw my toothbrush.

He’d put it in his toothbrush holder.