Undercover Lover: An Affectionate Portrait of Idiocy

“Oh shit, Bianca! This isn’t a road,” I laughed, crunching through the snow towards the passenger window with an icy chunk of grass and soil in my hands. “This is someone’s yard!”

“What the fuck, Amanda?” She started laughing.

“I don’t fucking know!” My abs began to hurt. “But we have to get out of here before they see us and call the cops.” I ran to the back wheels of my car and continued to dig vigorously.

The two of us, as was common, had an impossible time determining if we were hungover, still drunk from the night before, or dreaming.

After nearly giving into the consequences of feeling eternally fucked up (i.e. calling for help), I managed to pull my car out of the trailer park lawn, and we continued on our mission.

Before I had decided driving through a snow covered trailer park would serve as a scenic shortcut, Bianca and I spent half an hour or so raking around Tabasco-drenched rubbery eggs with our forks, having inappropriately loud conversations about the party before, and complaining about how awful Denny’s truly is.

“You know what we should do?” Bianca looked at me with hooded eyelids. “We should buy mustaches. We should wear mustaches today.”

“I love mustaches,” I said, knowing exactly where to find a twelve pack of adhesive mustaches for a dollar.

“We should buy mustaches, and,” she paused. Her brain paused, and she stared into space for a few seconds. “And heads of lettuce. And we should walk around, eating heads of lettuce and wearing mustaches.”

“Fuck, Bianca. I swear you always have the best ideas.”



“I am a child of God, and He has sent me here,” the two of us sang rigorously and off-key in the back of a chapel of an LDS church. “Has given me an earthly home with parents kind and dear,” our voices cracked first from the lining of ash in our throats we had collected the night before and again with blasphemous laughter.

We had entered the church wearing last night’s skirts and shirts, once again unable to decipher whether we were drunk or hungover, but smelling drunk all the same.

We had joked about going back to church for weeks, solely for the hymns and the irony, but never worked up the courage and disrespect until that day.

I was driving Bianca home from a Saturday night party. Neither of us wanted to face our Mormon families who had no need to question what we had done or where we had done it, but would anyway.

We made a quick stop at an Albertsons for giant hangover-curing water bottles and a bag of salad mix. “Alright. Let’s go home. I’ll cook you some food,” Bianca said, half-awake.

I drove with no sense of direction. Bianca’s home was located in middle-of-nowhere, Utah County, and neither of us could figure out how to get to her house from the Albertsons. I set towards the freeway to get my bearings, but I couldn’t find the freeway either. I drove aimlessly for miles until we were lost in middle-of-somewhere, Utah County. “I’m kidnapping you, Bianca! You’re never going home!”

We cruised the quiet streets of a seemingly hidden, wealthy neighborhood, perfectly content for the loss of direction. “A kitten!” I slowed down. “Two—no three—kittens, Bianca! Three kittens and a pond! Are those quail?”

“Look at those trees, Amanda!”

“We have to stop. We found it. We found the Celestial Kingdom!” I pulled over, and the two of us sat under the trees by the side of the road, baffled that we’d stumbled into such an immaculate place. We dug our ash tray fingers into the sticky bag of salad mix and watched the neighborhood’s pristine families walk their dogs. Towards the end of the bag, however, we heard a helicopter overhead. “Do you know what that is? That is Jesus, Bianca. He’s mad that we found our way here and is trying to kick us out. ‘What are those cunts doing here?’” I mimicked the booming voice heard on church videos about God. “Oh, he’s pissed, Bianca. Good thing we’re under these trees.”

“That’s it, Amanda. We have to go to church today. It’s a sign.”



I met Bianca at my senior prom in 2006. She was one of six girls in our group of seven, but my boyfriend and I were too infatuated with each other and too triumphant with the knowledge that we no longer had to put up with the bullshit academic requirements of high school to get to know her as anything more than “Mallory’s Spanish Fork friend.”

I didn’t see her again until New Year’s Eve, the first day I ever allowed myself more than three drinks. The two of us drunk danced into a dizzy oblivion, falling over with laughter and helping each other up again, occasionally unsuccessfully, which resulted in us toppling onto one another. “How cute,” our friends said sarcastically. “The two drunkest girls here are helping each other out.”

“Oh my god. I fucking love you, Bianca,” I spewed out my drunk pull-string catchphrase, but for once it resonated. It endured.



“Bianca,” I said, taking a drag of my cigarette. We had just finished crying together. “You are my best friend. I know I tell Joe that he’s my best friend all the time, but we don’t have what you and I have. We don’t cry like this. I don’t trust him as much as I trust you.”

“I know.” Then Bianca whispered, “Don’t tell Mallory this, but you’re my best friend too. I can’t tell her everything I tell you anymore. She’s supposed to be my best friend, and we have the history, but it’s not the same anymore, you know?”

“Yeah, and all the adventures we’ve had Bianca,” I paused as she passed me the Yellowtail. “No one has adventures like us! Who the fuck else ends up at a poker party with the Denny’s staff? And remember when we took a bath with Cory? He had to boil pots of water to fill his parents’ bathtub cause the water cooled off too quickly. We just sat around drinking fucking whiskey, wearing Cory’s shorts and t-shirts.”

“He thought he was such a pimp,” she laughed, taking a swig. “Do you remember when we met those old Palestinian guys at Coffee Break?”

“Oh my god, yes. And they wanted to take us to fucking Nevada right then! To Windover,” I slurred. “One of them taught me how to say ‘fart’ in Farsi!”

“And remember that time we went to my graduation party shitfaced? And you insisted on lighting a cigarette in the pavilion.”

“And they called the cops on us!” I laughed. “Do you,” I continued, “remember when you tried to order all our food for us at Denny’s? ‘And she’ll have—what do you want again?’ The night fucking Dakota kept calling you Tootsie Pop.”

“Dakota! Damn it. I miss getting wasted at Coffee Break.”

“I know. My trunk was a god damned alcohol cabinet!”

“Oh my god,” she laughed. “Do you remember our two day binge at Joe’s while he was out of town? And the Lego penis cart I made?”

“Yes! We woke up, and I was too fucked up to want to drive you home on icy roads. You called in sick, and we hit the box around eight in the morning.”

“Do you remember when you ordered two Slamburgers?” she laughed.

“Oh god. I don’t know how I did it.”

“The waiter was like, ‘Are you sure she can handle it?’ And I told him, ‘Oh. Don’t even worry about it. I’ve seen this girl eat.’”

“Jesus. And I took a bike ride once we got home to work it off and ended up passing out on my porch. My mom found me passed the fuck out in a lawn chair in the morning, while you were sleeping in my basement.” I laughed and continued our endless drunk rant, “Do you remember when I DJ’ed your and Ben’s make out session, and I kept rewinding that Devendra Banhart song so that ‘Bianca’ repeated like eight fucking times?”

“Yes! That was the best! Do you remember Man Man and Grizzly Bear, and the time I made that band sign my glasses case?”

“Of course! And I kept accusing you of not knowing the band, ‘You didn’t even watch them!’ But you kept insisting, ‘I could hear them from the outside!’”

“Hey, I could fucking hear them. They were good, god damn it,” she laughed.

“Bianca, let’s elope together.”

“Okay.”



I made it out of Utah’s vortex. I eloped without her. But the distance has yet to constitute a notion of expendability, a notion I’m accustomed to feeling after any change. There are only two things I miss about Utah enough to occasionally feel desperate to return: the mountains and Bianca.