Candy

Mama said she named me Candy because when I was born I was the sweetest thing she'd ever seen. But what she didn't expect was that i'd be a little bit spicy too.

Crazy spicy like the “Hot Shockers” everyone passes around at lunch. I'm the only one who can eat one with a straight face.

One day at lunch Scarlett came up to my table to challenge me to a “hot shocker” battle. She said she could pop three in her mouth for a whole minute, with no chewing and no moving it to the other side of her mouth. Everyone then looked at me for my response. I'm Candy, the smallest in my class, but my size is in my spice. So of course I challenged her right back.

"How about 4 hot shockers for 2 whole minutes." I said standing up. Scarlett squinted her eyes at me as my friend Tim set his phone to 2 minutes.

The battle was on. 

I've never eaten more than one of course. But I had to live up to my name. So now 8 candy wrappers sat empty on the table between us, and we dueled.

All the cafeteria noises faded away into darkness as I popped in 1, 2, 3, 4.

Honestly, I think I left my body during those 2 minutes. I had entered another dimension, because the shock of that level of hot was unreal. Maybe Scarlett was in the other dimension with me. Us just floating over the table doing a more realistic battle like a dance off or something. But instead, we both sat motionless with tears in our eyes regretting every second of those 2 minutes.

As the 1 minute and 59 seconds hit 2 minutes we both coughed and spit out as much of the candy as we could. I gulped down 3 cartons of milk and someone's pale floppy celery stick left on their lunch tray. Everyone's faces looked at us in shock and concern at how red we must've looked.

Scarlett stood up. I stood up. No words came because our tongues were numb. She simply nodded with respect and slowly walked away.

I used to hate being named Candy. I thought it meant that I always had to be the sweet little girl everyone expected me to be. But then I found out that the word candy is from the Sanskrit word Khand which means to divide and break something into pieces.

That's me. Breaking apart all your ideas of cute little Candy.