Free Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

with the really graphic parts underlined), so I was in no hurry to get to the junior high office. Instead I dallied in the ag barn, slowly packing away the power tools and arc welder.
    The ag teacher noticed that I seemed a bit shiftless, and offered to let me tag along and help with the animal husbandry class on their trip to the local stockyard. It was a small class of boys, all wearing tight Wranglers and cowboy boots, and (against my better judgment) I took a deep breath and said, “Why not?” as I nervously climbed onto the small bus. I looked like a Metallica roadie who had been won by Willie Nelson’s tour bus, but the guys did their best to make me feel at home, and seemed quietly impressed that I’d volunteer to come along for the trip. It wasn’t until we actually arrived at the stockyard that I realized we were there to learn about artificial cow insemination. The teacher suggested that I help him, since my arms were smaller and so “it would be less uncomfortable for the cow.” I wasn’t entirely sure what constituted “helping,” but it became clearer as he rolled a shoulder-length rubber glove up my arm. He slapped an open thermos of semen in my hand, and sucked it up into the turkey baster.
    This is probably the point when I should have just run, but there was something about the way he was staring at me that made me stop. It was the look of a man waiting for a girl to run screaming so he could have a good laugh at her expense. Or possibly it was the look of a man who wondered how he was going to explain to the lunch lady that he had to give her daughter all that semen, because she was the only one around who could fit in the arm condom. Hard to tell. But either way, it seemed as if he expected me to bolt, and I’ll be damned if I was going to be judged by a man who carried semen around in a thermos.
    And that’s how I ended up shoulder-deep in a cow’s vagina, squishing out the semen baster as a bunch of teenage boys looked on. It was the closest I’d ever come to doing porn. Suddenly the cow’s vagina tensed unexpectedly and I realized that my arm was stuck. I screamed involuntarily. The teacher panicked, thinking that the sudden contraction was an indication that the cow was going to sit down quickly, and told me to pull out my arm gently, because if the cow sat down it could break my arm. This was disconcerting, both because it sounded painful, and also because “I broke my arm in a cow’s vagina” is not something you ever want to have to explain to anyone. I yanked my arm out, and the cow looked back at me in disgust. And that’s when I realized that I no longer had the turkey baster.
    This is the point when I’d like to say that I gritted my teeth and said, “I’m going back in,” with the focused determination of Bruce Willis from that movie I can’t remember the name of. The one about Armageddon. ( Editor’s note: Really? It’s called Armageddon.) But instead I took a deep breath, held my head up with what little dignity I could muster, slowly peeled off my glove, and walked away. No one called me back, probably because none of them could find an elegant way to say, “You left your turkey baster in that cow’s vagina.” Or possibly because they realized that the first one to speak up would probably be elected to take my place. I’m assuming someone went back in to retrieve the turkey baster (for the cow’s sake, at least), but I don’t know, because I didn’t stick around to see. Instead, I walked off and waited until the rest of the class finally showed up. I wasbraced for the teasing to begin, but it never did. The guys looked a bit pale and shaky, but laughed at one another as they made bovina jokes, and my ag teacher patted my back reassuringly as we got back on the bus.
    We returned to the school just as my sister was walking out of the gym from pep-rally practice. She was still dressed as Wally and was waving her tail feathers with panache. She saw me and slowed