This is the tale of a harrowing dare: A double-dog-dare-you dare. A dare to put Double Dare 2000, as well as all of Nickelodeon, to shame. It was one of those dares that evoked the 12-year-old challenge taker within each of us, the whiny baby voice that couldn’t accept defeat even when it was ringing our doorbell. It made your heart pound harder than during the commercial breaks after the unlikely champion answers the million-dollar question. It was the kind that induced more nail chewing than the season finale of America’s Next Top Model. It was the dare to end all dares, a slumber party nightmare.

But before I can indulge you in the details of such a dare, I have to clue you into the preceding story line. Enter freshmen Jasmine McMasters and Hayley Mumaw, circa 2006. On one our frequent movies nights, Hayley enlightened me with the experimental documentary, Supersize Me, which features Morgan Spurlock eating McDonald’s three times a day, every day, for a month. Now speed ahead to two years later when Hayley and I reached AP English 3, and the required reading was Fast Food Nation, a book by journalist Eric Scholosser that investigates the American fast food industry.  After the thorough educating of the wrongs and faults of the factories, distributors, and consumers of fast food, Hayley and I got to talking, only for me to realize, alarmingly, that Hayley, aghast, had never, not ever, eaten a Big Mac in her life, and scarcely ate at McDonlad’s. Right then and there we decided to forge a pact, a plan, a dare: Hayley had to consume an entire Big Mac by the end of summer.

I was a Big Mac veteran myself (the number of carbs and fat percentages of any given food is a topic too mundane to make my list of priorities), but I decided I wanted to be a part of such a tremendous first for my best friend. Despite the grease-covered turmoil and rancid meat fest drama featured in Fast Food Nation, coupled with the health risks and gain weight that took place in Supersize Me, Hayley and I took the plunge. We made sure to do it right, ordering a “Medium Number One, with Fries and a Coke.” Diving into the concoction of lettuce, cheese, hamburger meat, and “secret sauce”, in that order, sandwiched between not two, but three slices of hamburger buns and then lightly sprinkled with sesame seeds and doused in a fine coating of grease, Hayley took her first bite of the rest of her life.  I could see amidst my own Big Mac scarfing that this meal was like no other Hayley had ever experienced. This was one tinged with the lessons of Supersize Fast Food Nation and Me: the potato farmers whom the industry bankrupted, poor Kenny who had been handicapped in a factory, the obesity that raked modern America. It left a bitter after taste and burned on the journey down the esophagus.

All in all, it was pretty good.

With Hayley’s Big Mac virginity cast away, we were proud of ourselves, until we realized our fatal mistake. McDonald’s of Mansfield will have to take our order one more time, because we forgot to Supersize it.