How I lost a 100 dollar bet.

Everybody knows masochists are notorious for making bets they intend to lose so that they can suffer the consequences, but when I said offhandedly to this girl "I'd give you 100 bucks if you could make me puke right now" I honestly did not expect to be sending her 100 bucks the very next day. I felt fine, we were just talking online, and even though I'm squeamish, I'm not generally so squeamish that I can go from feeling fine to kneeling over a garbage can during the course of a single anecdote.

She immediately began telling me a story about her high school days, when she was given a defective fetal pig to dissect. I'd retype the story in full, but I'm honestly not sure I'd make it all the way through.

What got to me wasn't the gore or the guts of a dissection--the insides of lab animals are one thing that has never bothered me. I was always the kid who blew the curve in biology. What killed me were the sensory details. She typed four or five solid blocks of text, each one getting a little more graphic than the last. It was when she started to really emphasize the smells and the textures of the pig (which hadn't been treated properly before being shipped off to be dissected and was full of blood and fecal matter and all other manner of fluids) that I realized I might not make it.

For me, there aren't many more helpless feelings than throwing up. There's a point where I know I am not going to be able to hold it in, no matter how hard I try. When I hit that point, around the time she started describing what the air around her lab table smelled like, I said something like "Okay, seriously, mercy" and in response received a "Ha ha ha" and then another chunk of text heavy on sensory details.

I'm insanely suggestible so when someone tells a story, I tend to experience everything. The more she went on, the worse it got, until I finally just lost it in a garbage can next to my bed. It was the most sickened, the most helpless, I have ever felt from just reading text and the more I pictured how much she must have been laughing as she realized what kind of effect the story was having on me, the more helpless and drawn in I felt.

So, less than 24 hours later, I went to a Wal Mart near the hotel where I'm staying and sent her 100 bucks. She'd totally earned it, with about five minutes worth of typing that was so vivid, so cruel, so sickly funny that it left me, literally, on the floor (head hung over a receptacle).