Andrew Duffy

Memoir
U3
{A-Paper Title}

Six million years of human evolution, morphing color, shape and size, to create the

ultimate environmentally equipped creature, but in that moment I was out of my element.

Unprepared for what turned and swashed before me, the brown sludge that made me question

what it meant to be Andrew Duffy. Was I a 6th grader? A Tae-Kwon-Do champion? Sure, but

this new sub-zero foe had plans to change that.

The trek began once a week, if we were lucky. Wonder, gluttony, maybe even childish

ignorance gave way to solid state whining, until my Dad, the driver, would give in and take us to

McDonalds. It was always on the way home from Tae-Kwon-Do, the unholiest and most hated

of our childhood routines, that moans of pain and shrieks of greed echoed throughout the drivers

eardrums, forcing a left, another left, two miles straight, then right, and finally pulling into a cow

line of metal contraptions, all equally shitty for the environment.

My two sisters and I had ordering down to a science. As the tin-like call rattled from the

rusted speaker, asking for a user input, the driver would turn to us, huddled in the back, and we

would spew out, Two chocolates one vanilla! We got comfortable with these shakes. So

comfortable that after a while the driver stopped asking us, he knew what we wanted. Until the

day he didnt.

Ill admit, I was impulsive that day, I had already had two Snickers and was hyped off the

sugar. I was quick, strong, on top of the world. I was immortal. Or so I thought. This time as the

metallic voice rang out I stopped my father from responding. I wanted a chocolate milkshake that

day. We all make mistakes as children, and I only wish that as that moment hung on the clock,

the grace period that lay between the order being placed and the carton of frozen brown sugar
arriving at my lap, I would have told my father to speed off; leaving the past behind, as Drake

put it, ... like a ponytail.

I sold out. I was a vanilla guy in a chocolate world, the last bastion of hope for the

creamy goodness that was McDonalds Vanilla Milkshakes. Peer pressure, curiosity, and most

definitely self-destruction was on my mind as I threw away my old friend, with it my moral

code.

But it arrived. On a cardboard chariot, laced with a chocolatey must, a smell of

cheapness, a perfume whose name spells like S-E-L-L-O-U-T. The chariot hurdled through the

open window and into our tiny paws; I snatched up my newfound treat. I could feel the eyes on

me, judgement for my deeds, turning me paler than the drink I used to order. My hands were

shaking, not because I was nervous, although I was nervous, but because the milkshake was very

very cold. And as I peered down at that cup, that vessel, I realized that I had to drink it, too much

was at stake.

So I did, every last drop. I scarfed down the whole coco ocean that had been served to

me, and as the concentrated sucrose seared through my veins I questioned, Why have I done

this? What made me switch to the dark side? And at that moment of inquest I gazed upon my

siblings, savagely attacking their respective blends, and knew. I knew that I chose to abandon the

vanilla dreamboat to be more like them.

I was tired of being an outcast, shunned by my peers for having a different pallet. Every

time the V-word passed my lips and entered the ear of our robotic friend my sisters silently

snickered, they thought they were better than me. If you live your whole life getting beaten down

for your beliefs even the strongest resolved person would crack, and this was my way of

shattering.
 It left me alone and broken. As I saw what I had done, the crest of the once flowing

chocolate stream brought to the base of my Styrofoam cup, I vowed to never again sell myself

out for the approval of others. Vanilla was what I drank, it was and still is the fuel that makes

Andrew Duffy Andrew Duffy. Now I comfort myself with the idea that I wasnt me on that

dreadful day, and just as a successful business man would take a break from work to deal with

the stress of life I took a vacation from being Andrew, just to see what it was like. As a survivor

of being such a blatant follower and putting others opinions above my own needs, I learned to

live in my own individual strangeness. Although objectively vanilla milkshakes might be the

less-popular option, I still firmly believe that they are superior to their chocolatey associate and

will forever stand by that statement.