I’ll keep this one short. Gummy and I met at a party fall semester freshman year when a guy friend brought him along. We danced and drank, then took the bus back to campus with my extended group of friends. I offered him half of my last piece of Orbit gum, since I could tell a makeout was on the horizon. Back in my dorm, people started crowding into our room to watch Animal House. Someone took my bed, so we slid into my roommate’s vacant lower bunk. It was dark and we thought we were being sly while everyone else watched John Belushi, so we started quietly, slowly making out. Then something wasn’t right.
His gum was in my hair. I tried not to freak out, but the alcohol sure wasn’t helping. We ducked into the bathroom and one of my guy friends (who had incidentally asked me out on a date earlier that week) followed. The three of us set up an assembly line in the bathroom, attempting to shampoo out the spearmint Orbit from my hair without having to cut it. Sadly, scissors were needed. By this point, the other 7 people in my room knew what was up. Unsurprisingly, the gum was a moodkiller and we didn’t touch each other again or exchange numbers.
The aftermath: Gummy and I saw each other fairly often during the rest of our college careers but never could really look at each other in the eye. I couldn’t chew the spearmint flavor of Orbit for a solid year after the incident. Until a friend hooked up with him sophomore year, he was in fact referred to as Gummy by our circle of friends. Also, I didn’t see Animal House in its entirety until junior year.
