Kitchen Too Far

Never trust the mystery edibles your friend steals from her dad in 8th grade.

You will be left thinking you invented the concept of dipping Ritz crackers in Nutella, locked in bed, red-faced, while simultaneously fantasizing about scrubbing the high off your body in the shower. You will also end up drifting apart after the sheer embarrassment you both felt after the comedown.

I never felt really inspired to try drugs growing up. Maybe my first watch of Skins was edging me towards it, making me fall for the extreme glamorization of British youth culture. It was impossible not to envy Effy Stonem’s sleazily chic energy as she railed lines of every substance imaginable in her high school bathroom.

I already suffered from deep paranoia and anxiety; I didn’t need anything to exacerbate that. There was also the fact that I had this intense fear of getting in trouble, having been grounded enough as a kid to nullify my bad girl urges. The craziest thing I had done was a small act of theft: stealing pot from my brother to smoke in the shower. Or so I thought. What I believed to be weed was actually just oregano he was using for a short film.

Going through all the trouble of sneaking drugs around, and getting high in the first place, didn’t feel worth it to me.

But when my friend, let's call her Becky, came up to me at school with the proposition of an after-school hang involving edibles that she stole from her dad, it felt like this might be my only chance to live out my Effy Stonem fantasy. Becky and I weren’t great friends—we just shared a mutual friend who brought us together. We got dropped off after school at my house with no real plans, riding the high of potential mischief before actually getting high for real. We awkwardly hung out like we were on a first date before she finally broke the seal and said, “Should we do it?”

It was a random weekday at 4 PM, a deeply inappropriate time to try getting high for the first time, expecting it to wear off before my dad came home around 7 PM. Obviously, I knew nothing about anything, especially not that edibles take at least an hour to kick in before the fun begins. We each broke off what I now realize is a massive dose of chocolate, cheersed the weed-infused wedges together, and chomped away as we went outside to hang out under the L.A. afternoon sun.

It’s hard to tell how long we were out there. There was a moment where my thoughts were normal, and then the next, we were bent over the kitchen counter, using Ritz crackers as shovels to mine as much Nutella as we could into our mouths. It wasn’t like: oh let's make little Oreo-style sandwiches. There was more Nutella than cracker, and we sat there with hazelnut lining our lips, genuinely convinced that we were the first people in the history of the world ever to try this combo. At that moment, I didn't realize the edibles were kicking in. It was a slower, calmer process than I expected. Our brain chemistry softly shifted into pandemonium as the THC took hold. It felt like that Spider-Man scene when Venom starts to take over, and he turns into a maniac walking down the streets of New York, hitting everyone with the finger guns. We possessed an immense amount of artificial confidence that wouldn’t have been present without our own THC-induced Venom. This confidence really took hold when we hit the ping-pong table. We started playing with our eyes closed, paddling balls into the pool and at each other’s bodies.

Once we officially realized that we were indeed high, everything went off the rails. I don’t know what threshold we crossed, or if the mere acknowledgment of feeling different made us more aware of our impaired state, but it went from about a 20 to a 200 in mere minutes.

We hobbled back to my room, haphazardly throwing the gold mine snack into the kitchen sink, immediately plopping our melting bodies into our resting positions: mine on the bed and Becky’s on my desk chair. It was nearing 6 PM.

The realization was starting to hit that this was indeed happening and was not going away. “Maybe I should just shower this off,” I stated, as if being high was like being sweaty, and I could wash it right off. Becky sat there squint-eyed, staring right through me. Becky and I were showing ourselves to be two different types of high people. Me: more of the chatty type, wanting to fill every second of dead air, fearing silence would turn my smile to a frown. Becky: more of the self-reflective, quiet type, keeps you wondering if she has fallen down the rabbit hole of her own mind.

Showering suddenly seemed too daunting, so I grabbed my laptop and opened iMovie. I immediately pressed record. A part of me knew this was insane, and wanted to capture a moment like this—something for an older version of myself to look back on and laugh at, a relic of the good old days of being naive to things like weed and its inability to be washed off in the shower.

As I sat there, face beet red, talking to the camera aimlessly, I couldn’t move my body. The weed had seized my body’s motion, rendering me frozen in the fetal position with my laptop balancing on the side of my butt. It was 6:30 now. I remember this really well because up until that point, Becky had said nothing but, “What time is it?” Every 30 seconds, she hit me with that same question that sent me into a laughing spiral. In those moments of chaotic laughter, I ascended.

No thoughts.

Just body.

I was awoken from my peaceful float when I remembered that my dad was indeed coming home in 15 minutes to two stoned teenagers. I didn’t know what else to do but tell him what happened. See, I am not cut out for this bad girl lifestyle.

I explained that we ate weed chocolate and were basically tweaking. The texts were more or less legible. My dad hit me with his classic, “What?!”, something that had become his go-to response for anything crazy, telling me to go to the kitchen to grab some water and that he would be home soon.

As if this was the most obvious thing ever, I responded, “Kitchen too far.”

I was aware of every beat of my heart, the blood rushing through my veins. Every brush of my arm hairs against my skin from the blasting A.C., I felt my heartbeat through my cheeks, in a way that turned from fascinating to freaky as I thought too deeply about how interconnected my body really was. And in that moment, I knew it deep inside: kitchen was in fact too far.