#i had sassed bullies of all ages including basketball coaches and religion teachers

[recalcitrantlycaffeinated]

Let me tell you a fucking STORY

This is a long-ass story but it’s maybe the most insane thing that I can remember happening to me.

Once upon a time, as a homeschooled high schooler, I was a part of my church youth group.  On a lock-in retreat, a neighboring youth group leader came in to run the most batshit insane icebreaker that has ever been icebroke.*

I had never met this youth group leader (let’s call him Matthew) before, so when he said he needed ten volunteers, it didn’t immediately send off alarm bells in my head.  His own youth group members had volunteered willingly, so when my youth group leader (her name doesn’t matter) volunteered me when there weren’t enough enthusiastic guinea pigs, I just went along with it.

Matthew, possibly the most chaotic evil individual ever to be put in charge of youths, who presumably took this job solely in order to cause suffering in children to an extreme degree, informed us that the game was called “Kiss the Fish”.

Not one of us raised our hand or stepped forward to say, “Excuse me, what the FUCK?”  None of us said, “I’m out.”  We were high schoolers.  We were sheep.

Even when Matthew pulled a very real dead fish out of a cooler he’d brought an hour and a half from his city, and informed us that nine out of the ten of us were literally going to have to kiss this slimy wet cold being, nine out of ten of us kept our thoughts of “like HELL I am” to ourselves or resorted to quietly whining to one another.  (One girl very logically pointed out to the adults that she was deathly allergic to fish, but some brave soul had to step in to take her place in order to satiate Matthew’s desire for human suffering.)

Thus began the worst game of Hot Potato I have ever taken part in in my life.  Every time someone was eliminated, by being caught holding the fish when the music stopped, they were forced to kiss the fish before being ousted.  Everyone else in the audience, and still in the game, as well as all of the adults present, was told to chant “KISS THE FISH! KISS THE FISH! KISS THE FISH!” until the hapless loser gave into the overwhelming peer pressure and planted one on the smelly aquatic corpse.

Now, you may be saying at this point, “hey, Robyn, you’ve worked with teenagers for a church before.  Can’t you see where this is going?  This is clearly all just a plot put together by the tricksy adults, who were trying to teach you about the evils of peer pressure and the courage it takes to be the smart person who says no to a situation that’s obviously akin to jumping off a cliff because your friends are doing it!  The adults were hoping that one of you would say no and refuse to kiss the fish, or at the very least, they were planning at the end of the game to turn the whole thing into a stern lesson!”

Well, stranger, you would be 100% wrong.  Not only were all of the adults committed to putting the pressure on us to do something we were clearly uncomfortable with...partway through, they legitimately went full Jigsaw and decreed that the person who came in second place would need to french kiss the dead fish.  They did not see anything wrong with any of this.  If one of us had pointed out that this was exactly the type of situation adults normally told us to avoid, they would probably have called that person a pussy and dunked their head in a toilet.  The grown-ups had gone straight insane.

Now here are some things you need to understand:

I hate peer pressure.  I have always been pretty fucking immune to peer pressure, going all the way back to childhood, where I refused to play parachute with the other toddlers because I wasn’t into it, and boycotted the Farmer in the Dell because I didn’t want to take the chance of becoming the cheese.  In 99.9% of my life, put in this position, I would have laughed in the adult overlord’s face and said no and walked away.  You could have chanted “KISS THE FISH” at me for three hours straight and the closest I would have gotten was maybe accepting the fish and then spiking it into the ground or yeeting it into some adult’s face.  

However, unfortunately for the drama of this story, I had an ENORMOUS crush on one of the guys who had also ended up in the Doomed Ten.  There was a much-less-than-zero part of my brain that thought secondhand kissing him via a fish was...worth it?  Let me once again remind you I was in high school and thus had a lot of learning still to do.

I’m not saying EVERYONE in the Doomed Ten had never kissed a person before, but the fact that we were all Catholics lame enough to go to youth group meant that for probably a majority of these people, kissing the fish was the closest they had gotten up to this point to a real kiss.  I can almost guarantee that none of us had even considered french kissing a person, so the idea that whoever came in second place would have to french kiss a fish was not only insane, but probably counted as some kind of emotional cruelty on the part of the adults.

The fish was sharp.  It had teeth.  My hands were bleeding because of this fish and its teeth.  What kind of monster was Matthew to suggest that some teenager french kiss the demon fish??????  Did he not realize he would be liable for the inevitable damage this would cause??  Was he planning on skipping town right afterward to become a youth group leader somewhere else so he could execute this scheme again?  Was he planning on keeping the bloody fish as some kind of trophy?  I have a lot of questions.

It eventually came down to me and one of the boys from Matthew’s youth group; the kind soul who had stepped up to play in the allergic girl’s stead (possibly because he was a BOSS at Hot Potato?).  Matthew was in charge of turning the music on and off, and his back was not turned, so he deliberately waited until a moment when the fish was on its way through the air to me before turning the music off.  I did not catch the fish.  The fish fell to the ground with an incredible squelching sound.  There was clear discomfort in the group of teenagers, who, when it came down to it, really didn’t want to see a homeschooled girl lose her tongue to a dead fish.  Matthew, on the other hand, was downright gleeful, and asked, “Who wants to see Robyn french the fish?”

I wasn’t going to french kiss a fish, even if my crush HAD kissed it earlier.  Thankfully, our gallant winner prevented me from having to publicly defy authority by snatching up the fish himself and yelling, “WHO WANTS TO SEE MATTHEW FRENCH THE FISH??” and chasing him with it.

There was no lesson.  None of the adults tried to tell us peer pressure was bad and they were just pretending to see how we would react.  All of them remarked on what a fun icebreaker this was.  Eight teenagers were pressured into kissing a dead fish against their will, and I needed first aid to treat my bleeding fingers.

HOW WAS THIS REAL LIFE.

*If you have ever played this game, it will blow my fucking mind, because I can’t believe that an actual adult ever suggested this even once, let alone multiple adults thinking this is a good idea.