Stitch

Whenever I see a post about how people are uncomfortable with being shipped with each other, I immediately think of this one horribly awkward incident. It was my tenth grade year in high school, and at the time my best friend was a male. I was assumed to be a girl. We were violently shipped by our friends, other students, and even teachers. We had never been shipped, that we know of, by strangers until this incident. My friend-let's call him Duke-and I decided to go to this winter amusement park thing. The park itself was actually a water park, but they just turned off the water and let you go down the slides in sleds. Duke and I had just grabbed some hot chocolate and were buying time until the show that all the kids went to started, so the line for the zip line would die down. The only ride available, much to my chagrin, was the ship ride. Everyone and their mother has been on a ship ride. They're usually painted to look like a pirate ship and the ride itself is just two or three minutes of swinging back and forth. Duke and I were hesitant to go on the ride. The ride itself had no line so we wouldn't have to wait, but it was freezing and we knew the wind from the ride would only make us colder. We talked for a couple minutes, and decided to go on since it was a short ride and I was being uncomfortably ogled by a couple other male high schoolers. We hurried over to the ride, but before we did we made our first mistake. To avoid the creepy teens that had started to walk over, Duke and I had started holding hands. It probably would have been fine if we had let go before the ride operator saw us, but we didn't know if the boys were still behind us so we didn't want to take a chance. The ride operator was a skinny and tall middle aged man. He looked really upset until he saw us. The second he saw our hands he lit up and asked us how long we had been dating. This wasn't the first time someone had assumed this, so we just calmly explained we weren't dating. That was our second mistake. The second those words left my lips his eyes filled with determination. He immediately let us on the ride, and put us in the very back. A good amount of people saw us get on and came over to ride as well. The first hint that this ride wasn't going to go well was revealed when he didn't let everyone on so we could have a row to ourselves. All of the other rows had at least five people so we knew something was up. The second hint that this was going to only get worse was when the attendant told Duke that the bar on our seat had come loose the day before, so he would have to hold on to me. This would make sense if I didn't know that the park had strict safety standards, because it was in a really wealthy area. I had been there a few weeks prior and they had shut down a ride for a week because the same thing had happened. I am a very small person, maybe a hundred pounds at most, so to Duke this made perfect sense. The attendant lit up when Duke awkwardly secured me, and climbed back off the ride and walked over to the control panel. Once he left I explained the situation to Duke and we both had a laugh about it. We didn't laugh for long. The ride started up in the basic slow start mode, but it didn't start going faster like it did when I had ridden it a few weeks prior. I was a tad bit confused, but didn't say anything until it had been a solid three minutes and we hadn't even gotten to a third of the height the ride was supposed to. Duke looked equally as perturbed when I mentioned this, and when we looked over at the attendant to see what was going on he was staring at us with an expression I'd only ever seen on my stepbrother when he met Tony Hawk. We realized at that moment we were being shipped, both metaphorically and literally. This continued for a full fifteen minutes. At first we thought we'd just sit through it and it would be fine. We were hit with the reality of the situation when we realized that the wind was making us so cold that my fingers kept the imprint of my jacket zipper when I zipped it up. We realized that the only way to get out of the situation without freezing was to give him what he wanted. So with "no homos" falling from our lips every five seconds, we began to cuddle and share hot chocolate. Everyone on the ship began to aw at us. One girl took a video and shouted goals. The attendant, after five minutes of us wanting to hang ourselves from the ride scaffolding with our scarves, finally shifted the ride into gear. Two minutes later the ride was over. The attendant winked at us as we got off. After we had both walked a decent distance away from the ride, we burst out laughing. While he certainly wasn't the last stranger that ended up shipping us that day, he was definitely the most memorable.