When I was 19 years old, I went to Cancun, Mexico for spring break with eight of my girlfriends. They all flew together and I trailed them like toilet paper on a shoe because I was broke and the cheaper flights got in later.
I remember panicking as the plane descended into the airport. What if I’m the only person on the hotel shuttle? What if the driver decides to take me to an abandoned parking garage and cut me up into small cubes.
After being dropped off at the resort without so much as a single flesh wound, I booked it to the beach where my friends had been all morning. I waved to the group frantically as I dragged my roller suitcase through the scorching hot sand.
I needed them to know right away that a.) I had not been murdered and b.) I was committed to having fun above all else. Which is why I did not put on sunscreen and how I subsequently burned over 80% of my body.
Unwanted sexual attention would not be an issue for me on this trip. I was Freddy Krueger in a bikini.
When women travel as a pack, we take on the energy of the most attractive people in our group. I certainly wasn’t getting any action on this vacation, but guys didn’t seem to mind talking to us just because I looked like a scab. My friends were sun-kissed and dewy and I gleefully leeched off of their good fortune.
Guy to my friend at the swim-up bar: “Can I buy you a drink?”
Me treading in a collection of my own skin flakes: “Make it two!”
I can’t remember the name of the club we went to on our second night in Cancun, but I’m sure it was something cool like Luxx or Rehab. As soon as we walked in the door, we were ushered to a VIP section that had zero other women in it.
This was where we met a very hairy man who urged us to join his table for bottle service and titillating conversation. He wasted no time and poured a singular drink in a massive bucket that he shoved toward us so aggressively he might as well have yelled, “drink up, pigs!”
But Grey Goose in a trough is still Grey Goose, so we lunged at the liquid feedbag like the greedy hogs we were.
“Alrighty, time to go,” said one of my friends.
“Wait, why? We libb-ery jess sant down,” said another, whose speech was impaired by the three neon straws jutting out of her mouth.
“He put something in our drink.”
“I saw him dump some powder in the bucket.”
“Then why the FUCK are we drinking it????”
“I didn’t want to be rude! I figured we’d all take one sip and then jet.”
Never in your life have you seen eight women and one gender-ambiguous burn victim sprint so fast out of a room.
Did we leave the club? Of course not! We wanted to watch the wet T-shirt contest that had been advertised on the billboard outside. Plus the roofie wouldn’t kick in until much much later.
When the roofie kicked in minutes later, I started to feel like the DJ’s subwoofer was womp womp womp womping in sync with my heartbeat and was unnerved by how slowly everyone around me was moving. I quickly confirmed with my friends that they, too, were experiencing these sensations, and I was not, as I originally had thought, having a stroke.
The wet T-shirt contest started out lighthearted enough. Our understanding was that each braless wonder would be brought out in a giant white T-shirt and doused with a generous amount of water. Then every man, woman, and child in the crowd would cheer and the contestant who received the loudest praise would win the love of her father.
I knew we were in trouble when the first contestant ripped her shirt clean off (Hulk style) before the water even touched her body.
“She’s set the bar too high!” I screamed to my best friend who looked just as overcome as I was.
Now all of the women would have to come out melons blasting or face utter humiliation.
When one wet-T-shirt contestant refused to remove her shirt, the crowd — with zero irony whatsoever — started chanting “PRUDE, PRUDE, PRUDE, PRUDE.”
We had left the resort that night so we could dance without being mowed down by the gaze of dads on vacation with their families. Yes, we may have been roofied and completely overwhelmed by the spectacle of the female breast, but we refused to go home until we’d done what we’d come to do.
The dance floor we settled on was less of a floor and more of a collection of hole-laden crates tied together with rope. The mega-crate formed a dock that was ever-so-slightly submerged in the crystal blue waters of the Caribbean. There were jets under the crates that were seemingly powered with rocket fuel because every few minutes a volcanic rush of salt water came blasting from below the dance floor creating an enema of Poseidon-like proportions.
Once our bodies had been danced and our bowels sufficiently cleared, we decided it was time to head back to the resort.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a wet blanket (see various anecdotes above), but I’m also not not cautious. Sure, we could get into this unmarked cab at three in the morning, but then we would be sold into sex slavery.
So when half of my girlfriends piled into the back of some guy claiming to be a taxi driver’s Jeep Cherokee, I called the hotel shuttle service with my other not not cautious friend, and we waited. And waited. And waited until it arrived.
Naturally we were the first ones back to the hotel because all of our other friends had been murdered.
I started daydreaming about which Z-list celebrity would play me on our episode of Brutally Slaughtered Abroad.
“Liz sat up for hours waiting for her friends to come back to the hotel. But the sun rose, the tides changed, and her skin molted. Time to face la musica — her friends were dead.”
I was jolted from my fantasies as, one by one, my friends came storming into our hotel suite.
“I met the HOTTEST Australian guy.”
“ I have no clue how I got here.”
“I found a bag of bread in the elevator.”
“There’s still water in my butt.”
We spent the rest of the morning improvising each others’ eulogies and eating day-old ciabatta — collectively aware that we had cheated some kind of death.
