Hot girls can make guys eat garbage

No, I don't mean when a guy converts to veganism just to have something in common with her.

I still can't believe what I witnessed at the dining hall tonight. An attractive friend * and I were sitting together, and perhaps because word had gotten around that she'd just broken up with her boyfriend, guys were approaching her frequently as opposed to rarely. (Little did they know she's already got another boyfriend lined up.) Now, I've seen or heard about the desperate things guys do pro-actively to gain favor with hot girls -- one guy bought this one $80 boots during a completely casual trip to the mall (they are both 18, so that's a big deal) -- as well as hot girls' defensive capabilities, such as the ability to dodge oncoming traffic tickets.

But that's small potatoes compared to what the hot girl herself can convince beta suitors to do, assuming she has enough of a sociopathic streak to get a rush from controlling others like puppets.

There we were when some guy stops by. She called his name, but just wanted to chat for a second or two. Eager to prolong his stay next to Hot Girl, he eyed a bowl on her tray and asked, "What's that?" She had eaten a bunch of bean sprouts before, and in the bowl were the tiny inedible bits at either end of the sprout, and some other unidentifiable but still inedible pieces of sprout stuff -- like a bowl of potato peel shavings.

She jumped at the opportunity and said, "Oh, do you want some?" To make it more absurd, there were hardly any bits there to choose from. It was like offering someone a bowl with seven grape seeds. He stared at it and cracked a nervous smile but finally caved and picked at some of the bits and ate them. She couldn't believe it: "Oh my god," she said when he'd left. "Did you see that? That was, like, my trash!"

Later on, a group of betas sat down when I got up, and since I've got a deep prankster streak too, I egged her on by shooting a glance at the bowl, and then at the guy next to her, raising my eyebrows to say, "Go ahead, do it." After we laughed for awhile just at the thought of it, she offered the guy the bowl, and sure enough he stared like the previous one but soon began picking at the pieces and ate them. We could not stop laughing when it happened, and on our way out of the dining hall (without them), we talked and laughed about it again to relive the thrill.

We know from psychological experiments on conformity -- performed before ethics committees banned them -- that perfectly normal people will administer what they believe to be painful and even near-fatal shocks to unseen strangers, provided there is an authority figure in a white lab coat telling them to do so. Well, add "some random hot girl" to the list of persuasive figures.

That gives me the idea to encourage her to see how far her superpower extends -- would guys pinch themselves really hard on the webbing between their thumb and forefinger? Or slap themselves hard across the face? Peel gum off the bottom of her shoe? As long as she did it first (while faking the intensity) and gave some bullshit backstory -- "we learned the coolest thing in class today..." -- I'll bet she could. Witnessing stuff like this is definitely not something I could do if I ate with people my own age.

* She's about 8 out of 10, which because variance is lower in the Mountain Time Zone, probably puts her at or above the 99th percentile among local girls, rather than at about the 95th percentile back East.