certified florida woman

Picture a slightly babier Hope. Tiny and loud as hell, this little blonde bespectacled sophomore girl (for non-Americans, I was around 16) filled with the hubris that discovering high school theater had brought me and taking too many AP classes. That year, I took two, out of... thirteen total? (And I passed most of them, to the detriment of most of my mental health. Kids, don't take AP classes, or at least not the amount that I did.)

Obligatory fuck College Board, moving on.

That year, I had AP US History, and AP Music Theory, in that order. Both tests were on Fridays, the second a week after the first. This is important because the final review project the teacher for music theory was having us due was due a week before that exam.

This would have been a nonissue, except that this is me and I either get my work done weeks in advance or I'm procrastinating at the last minute. The smart thing to do would have been the former.

Obviously, because this is me we're talking about, I did the latter. If memory serves I'd finished the actual project with plenty of time to spare for a good night's sleep, but my mother's printer chose then to stop functioning halfway through printing it. (It was a themed study guide, I had a lot of fun making it and a lot less fun printing it.) I ended up staying up way later than usual, and by the time I finally cut my losses and went to bed...

...well. Getting up at ass o'clock the next morning, in order to drive nearly an hour to my high school for an AP exam starting at 8 AM... was suddenly looking even less appealing than usual.

It'll be fiiine, I thought, dragging myself out of bed like a zombie. I'll just chug some coffee. Tastes like shit but hey, Mom drinks it all the time and she only gets tired suddenly and coincidentally when I want to do something fun with her, so what could go wrong?

(A lot of things, as it turns out.)

(Also, babier me had yet to realize the depth of how fucked up the woman who birthed me was, and how much she'd fucked me up, but this ain't about her.)

So. Ate breakfast, yoinked a travel mug full of the coffee Mom drinks, and chugged it on my drive to school. That alone wasn't too bad, though I was getting a bit of a stomachache. I'd had worse, though. Besides, it was exam day and I didn't dress up as a lesbian cowboy with my then-crush for this class to not come out of it with the college credit I so rightly deserved.

Really, though, if a stomachache was the worst I got out of chugging a mug of crap-tasting coffee, I probably wouldn't have sworn it off for good. I would have relegated it back to the spot it had held up 'til then, which could be summed up as "drink in case of emergency."

I wasn't feeling too tired by the time I got to school. In fact, I was feeling like maybe I could actually do this. But I knew I'd crash eventually, and I did not want that to happen during the roughly four hours worth of exam ahead of me, and so I made a decision that would get me hubris-checked hard.

Y'see, some kind souls (mostly our teacher, who we'd all dubbed Mr. Bro because that's what his actual name shortened to and he was, in fact, quite chill for a history teacher at that school) had brought breakfast for our class. Which was good, because I hadn't eaten much at home, and was bad, because breakfast included some coffee from Starbucks. I didn't even know they sold it in containers you could fill smaller cups from. Apparently they did.

Within the... roughly half an hour, give or take a few, that I had before the exam started, I refilled my travel mug and drained it again twice. By then, well. I was feeling a little jittery, but I figured it would go away eventually. Jitters were good, right? Jitters meant that I'd be faster at taking the test.

The moment of truth, after a frantic thirty minutes spent desperately reviewing via Kahoot and chugging Starbucks coffee that tasted marginally less crappy than whatever my mom made, finally arrived. We all shuffled off to the gym. Made sure we had our number two pencils and water bottles and everything.

I walked into the gym...

...and then I woke up at home, in my bed, the next morning.

I did piece together what had happened later from context clues. According to my friends, I'd acted normal enough after the exam, if really, really, really jittery. And obviously I did okay enough in the exam, because I got a 4. (Scores go from 1-5, with anything above a 3 being a pass and usually only 4s or 5s being good enough for college credit.)

But, y'know. Funny thing, I don't like not remembering what I did! Even if it was probably a whole lot of mind-numbing boring shit that my brain probably did me a favor by forgetting. I'll probably be a blackout drinker, which I fully intend to test once I turn twenty-one in the safety of my own home with my dad, the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies, and a TV Tropes drinking game I've had bookmarked in anticipation of that moment for as long as I can remember.

But, uh, yeah.

That's why I don't drink coffee anymore, ever.

Because I'm a blackout coffee drinker, and it seems incredibly ridiculous to type it out now, but. That sure was a thing that happened. In fairness, that probably also happened because I chugged so much in such a short period of time, but like... it doesn't even taste good? And it tends to make my stomach hurt.