If you've known us for a while, you've have heard this for sure. It's a favorite icebreaker of ours.
If you haven't, buckle in. This is a fun one.
So, rewind... many years ago, now. It's the tail end of high school. Our system is smaller, we've only just started to crack our socially awkward shell, and we actually have a consistent handful of friends for the first time in our lives.
Fast forward a bit to college. We're studying computer science (unwillingly) and daydreaming of throwing our long-term focus at the study of myth and fable. We looked at the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index with awe and wonder.
Somehow, in spite of living on the internet for years now, we'd never heard of furries. The first time went like this.
SCENE: Outside the dining hall, immediately after lunch
[our shitty clamshell phone rings]
Us: Hello?
Nyk, our then-best-friend from high school: Hey deadname, how's it going?
Us: It's... going?
Nyk: I got a weird question for you.
Us: Shoot.
Nyk: You seen anyone on campus there wearing collars?
Us: Collars?
Nyk: Yeah, collars. Like around their necks.
Us: Like, spiky collars? Like punk collars? No, I haven't.
Nyk: No, not punky collars. Dog collars.
Us: ...why the hell would someone wear a dog collar?
Cue us getting a half-hour bad explanation of what furries were. Nyk, of course, was one.
We left the call confused. We followed this up by immediately looking up what furries were on a library computer, getting the Typical Internet Horror rundown of the time.
"Oh gods," we said, taking it at face value, "my best friend is a dogfucker."
THANKFULLY we got that conception cleared really quickly. A lot of awkward parking lot conversations later, and Nyk had us interested in the idea. We flirted with something classical from our fable-leanings (which NEARLY got us out of the gates with a fox), but ultimately we couldn't resist the call of pilfering a gold-and-blue angel-wolf straight out of our one D&D monster manual.
We'll skip along the surface of the next year or two from here. Most of what happened was typical young goofy furry stuff from there. We wound up with four people total in our local crew, including us. They were the gateway to our first queer community, a big part of the slow avalanche of identity that'd find us many, many years after the fact.
At some point, Nyk wanted to call our local crew "a pack." Y'know, cute, silly, whatever.
Then, he wanted to call the pack Harmonic Ascension.
"That sounds like a name for a cult," we said. "Haha."
Nyk shot us a death glare, and that was that.
A bit later, Nyk declared that he and his partner were the pack alphas.
By now, it was becoming increasingly clear in a number of ways that Nyk was a power-tripping asshole. Sadly for us, we believed the best in people and overlooked far, far too many red flags.
This culminates in a day where Nyk finally reveals himself to be a direct descendant of Merlin. Like, Arthurian Merlin.
And that he's been hiding some sophisticated druidic practice from us the whole time.
Like, okay. We're cool with the occult. We did a lot of practice then, we still practice now. However.
Nyk was an asshole. And Nyk constantly fucked up.
He'd more or less call everyone to hang out and watch him "perform a ceremony," which never came out like he wanted.
Somehow, we got the blame. He more or less called us some kind of bad vibes spell teflon, and he used this as further cause to push us around.
Here's where it comes to a head:
It's a night in the dead of winter. It's really fucking cold and really late. We just finished a day of hanging out with Nyk's partner at their place.
Said partner's parents were extremely scary and physically abusive fundies. They knew we were queer, and we could feel the tension when we were around them.
As we're leaving, Nyk throws us his keys and tells us to start the car so that we can wait with the heater while he wishes his partner good night.
At this point, we get the idea for the most low-balled prank ever: We'd swap our house keys with the keys on his lanyard, throw it inside on the driver's seat, and "lock them inside."
We do this. Nyk comes out.
We play up being dumbasses. He immediately shoulders us aside and crawls under the car, looking for something he can twiddle to pop the door. We IMMEDIATELY fess up to keep him from damaging something.
He pushes us down, gets in the car, and slams the door. He starts swearing up a storm and threatening to leave us behind.
Our phone is dead, and we can't call our parents. The fundies for sure wouldn't let us back in. Our house is too far to reasonably walk, especially in the cold. We can't let him leave us here.
For some reason, the solution comes to us as "defuse the situation with humor." For some reason, "defuse the situation with humor" comes to "cling on the back windshield and say that if he's driving off you're going to hold on."
Being a completely normal person, he takes this as cause to floor it and gun his car down the nearby straightaway.
He responds to a few minutes of screaming by slamming his breaks and whipping his car to send us flying into the asphalt. It was a miracle we didn't break anything or hit or neck, but our back was on fire.
Nyk comes over, stares down over us.
Nyk: You're staying here unless you apologize for overstepping my bounds as pack alpha.
We aren't. And we don't want to. But Nyk is our access to warmth and medical aid. So we lie through his teeth, and we do. He also says we'll need to pay to get our blood out of his upholstery. We do this too, anything to get to safety.
And so, he peels us off the pavement, gets us into the passenger seat, and we leave.
Nyk's house is only a few minutes away from here. His mom is a nurse. They have a HUGE collection of first-aid gear.
So when we drive past, we ask about it in confusion, mentioning just that.
"Eh," he says, "I want a burger right now, though."
And this is how we wound up patching ourselves up with the employee first aid kit in a McDonald's bathroom, lying at the cashier that we'd "gotten knocked aside by someone leaving the drive through" as this druid asshole sucked down a big mac in the other room.
Needless to say, this was the last time we had anything to do with him.
...and that's how we became furries :'D
It doesn't quite end there, though. We often finish the story there, but there's a little more.
So, just two days after the above, we're planning to go off on a date. It's not the first date we'd been on, nor the first queer date we'd been on. It was, however, a mistake in the making.
We were going off to see someone:
- As a rebound
- Who we'd only known for a short time
- Who lived in a place we'd never driven to, a few hours away
- Who we'd met over XBOX LIVE OF ALL THINGS and only communicated with through there
In other words: Perfect setup to get our organs harvested by a stranger.
Now, bonus bits of this one:
- We'd only barely started driving
- We sometimes got lost driving in our own neighborhood (10 minutes, end to end)
- We'd never driven anywhere further than 20 minutes away at this point
- Our GPS was spotty at best
- Our parents had no idea we were queer and we had no good excuse for leaving
- About a third of our back was covered in gauze due to the Car Druid Incident and we could barely sit in a chair
In spite of all this, somehow, we manage to make it there in one piece.
We meet up with our date. It's the first time we've ever actually seen him, and he was distilled shy goth twink. His hair was perfect, long, shiny, and black. It took a while to get any words out of him, but it felt like cute-gay-awkward.
And so we went on a date.
It started good. We went on a nature walk, by a stream. Some snow was still around from the recent cold, and we got some nice sunlight glittering off of it.
Then, a movie. Here's where the problems started.
See, the theater's heating was broken, and it was basically a refrigerator in there. We were the only ones there, and he insisted on us staying.
So we did. I don't even remember the movie at this point, but I do remember everything else. See, he used this as an immediate excuse to "cuddle for warmth," and that also meant getting really uncomfortably handsy. It also became apparent really quick that the sheen in his hair wasn't product, but unwashed grease. (No exaggeration: We had to get rid of the coat that he'd rested his head on a few days later because there was a permanent, unwashable stain where he'd leaned his head on our shoulder.)
There wasn't much to say about dinner, other than it being stilted and awkward. It was less cute now, more bad-tense.
On the final drive back, he leans in to try kissing us by surprise... and then rear-ends a car. He didn't have insurance. Cops showed up. Things were bad and scary and strange. (A selfish part of us was also afraid that being a witness would get back to our parents and out us.)
Thankfully, things worked out between him and the person hit, under the table and off the records.
The rest of the drive back was in silence.
As we left, it was night. We sulked towards our car.
Here's where things stood:
- We were heartbroken
- We were in a place we'd never been before
- Unknown to us, our contacts were really off-prescription and caused a lot of glare with lights at night, including headlights
We start trying to head home. Our GPS doesn't update quick enough, and we miss a turn. And another. And another.
So, scared and confused, we try another turn. We misread approaching traffic.
And get T-boned and blown across four lanes doing about 50-60 mph.
By some miracle we didn't get hurt besides a light bang on our knee. By another, the driver who hit us was extremely sympathetic, because he'd apparently done the exact same thing when younger.
Cops hauled us off to another mcdonalds (yeah, so that's two-for-two as Traumatic Life Event Destinations in this chain) and call our parents.
Some hours later, they arrive. We drive back in silence, until they start asking us why we were there.
And, in the middle of that, we came out to them.
Thankfully, in the one good note here, they took it far better than we feared.
...and that's how we came out to our parents :D
