Dexter
Twenty-six-year-old guys should come with a warning: Prone to making colossally stupid decisions.
I’m serious. We shouldn’t be let off leash until we demonstrate that our brains can focus on more than Bimmers, babes, brews, and bling.
Yeah, it’s that bad. Really. The minute we’re given a little bit of freedom, we go hog wild. It’s like we’re genetically programmed to scrub years of parental cautions as soon as we leave the nest. We party too hard, get friendly with girls we’d never bring home to Mom, and pull daredevil stunts that would make Evel Knievel call us fools.
To be fair, maybe not all guys deserve this bad rap. I’ve known guys with wives and children by their mid-twenties. Like my eldest big brother, Gideon, for one. Kudos to them. I just wasn’t one of them.
Nope, after my undergrad years, I stayed in the ivory tower four years longer by going to vet school. Why not? Who doesn’t like animals? I always did. My other option was to go back to working the family raspberry ranch with my older brothers and father. Thanks, but no, thanks. I’d had enough brambles, thorns, canes, and juice stains to last a lifetime.
Besides, that meant I could still cut loose between study sessions, labs, and final exams. One of the favorite, colossally stupid pranks my lab partners—three other like-minded idiots—and I liked to pull was to hang a clear plastic bag of our latest dissection specimen on the doorknob of a girls’ dorm room. We’d laugh ourselves sick when girls’ screams and curses echoed down the halls.
That prank was how I met Amy, though. The girl was a business major, still an undergrad, but she didn’t scare. Skinned cats, baby sharks, fetal pigs? She never screamed. In fact, more often than not, she’d gut the critter and return its empty carcass so we had nothing left to study.
Lesson learned: dissect first, then prank. And let Amy join us for dissections. The girl was wicked-handy with a scalpel.
When we asked if the formaldehyde bothered her, she smirked and said it covered up the boy fumes. Then she grabbed one of our beers and grilled us on equine anatomy. Even young and dumb, I recognized Amy was a superior girl. The kind moms hope sons meet.
So, with yet another dazzling error in judgment, I took Amy back to Seattle with me Thanksgiving of my senior year. Taught her how to pick raspberries and prune canes. She was a big hit with the family. They smothered her with hugs. My brothers’ wives took her shopping and whatever other things women do together. She made my favorite pear and raspberry pie with Mom. Even my dad was more jovial.
The whole time, I sat back and watched, a knot growing in my stomach that had nothing to do with the raspberry mochaccinos I’d been slurping down like a junkie.
My family liked her. Really liked her. Treated-her-like-one-of-them, liked her. She fit. Hand in glove, kibbles with bits, hot dog and mustard, fit. I got it, but at the same time, it felt surreal. I’d had friends through high school who were girls. We’d mucked barns together, milked cows together. One girl even sheared a sheep with me at a livestock show. But none of them was invited to bake a pie with my mom. What made Amy so different?
That question plagued me all the way back to school, where I took off the protective eye gear long enough to really study my unofficial lab partner.
There was nothing all that special about honey-blond hair in a messy ponytail, hazel eyes that sparkled (usually at my expense), or full raspberry-stained lips talking so much smack.
But the longer I stared at Amy, the more she seemed to glow. It burned my retinas and gave me a headache. The ache radiated down into my chest and choked off my breath. What was it about this particular girl that made me want to chuck the books and abandon farm animals to follow her around?
Suddenly, I saw Amy in another light, the way other guys probably saw her. As a girlfriend. But I didn’t want her to be their girlfriend. I realized one of my life’s great truths: I wanted Amy as my girlfriend.
That’s when the panic set in, complete with denial, disavowal, and distress. How had this happened? I wasn’t ready for a serious girlfriend. What I needed was distance. With a capital D.
So, one night, during a particularly intense bout of partying, my lab cohorts and I got the colossally stupid notion to join Veterinarians Without Borders. Oh, there was nothing colossally stupid about the VWB. It’s a great outfit with lofty, commendable ideals. Comprised of trained professionals dedicated to advancing health and livelihoods of underserved areas through animal health and husbandry.
No, that wasn’t the problem. The fact that we weren’t entirely sober when we decided that it would be a great way to see the world and work with some exotic animals was the problem. We even went so far as to get a couple of professors to send in letters of recommendation for us.
Through a beer-induced fog, I recalled the way my family embraced Amy, and the shock of realization it brought on struck me again. That acceptance letter I’d stuffed in the back of a desk drawer was looking more like a bright-yellow life preserver tossed to a drowning man. An escape artist’s secret key. The getaway car for a bank heist, with me as the driver. I was a rip-roaring bottle rocket, primed and ready to blow.
Which is why, after graduation, when Amy asked what was next on our agenda, I, twenty-six-year-old Dexter Maddox, made perhaps the most colossally stupid decision of my life.
“Amy, the guys and I joined Veterinarians Without Borders. I leave for orientation tomorrow.”
