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Jun 15
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Born a tomboy, I always was one of the guys. Even as a teenager I never had a whole lot of tolerance for fluff, and being that always popular combination of loner and geek, most girls didn’t want to hang out with me anyway.
My husband, who’s seen pictures of me as a teenager, says I had a look of barely controlled rage in my eyes and that they were probably afraid. I don’t see it though. I think they were all just mean. So I spent a lot of time with my nose buried in a book, adding “bookworm” to the mix and earning me a Trifecta for social annihilation.
One sweltering summer night in Arizona, I and a few of my socially awkward brethren were hanging out playing strategy games. Now, this wasn’t your typical group. No one sat around plotting world domination (probably because it hadn’t occurred to us yet) and there wasn’t even a chess board in sight. All we needed to do to win was to stay awake.
By 3:00am, the Monkees marathon had ended, we were out of snacks, and everyone had the shakes from drinking eleventy-billion pots of coffee. Only one person had fallen asleep so far; we’d already super glued his fingers together and tattooed him with Sharpie. Clearly, the situation needed a guiding voice of reason to spur some action.
Keep in mind that I was socially doomed from an early age. Because of this, I lack that filter between my brain and my mouth that keeps most people out of trouble. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Not that it matters, of course. Sometimes no one noticed; other times, they did.
But in case you’re anything like I was, probably it’s a good idea to make sure the guy you’ve insulted doesn’t have any weapons. Hypothetically, if he were to point one at some of your older brothers, things could go badly for you the next time they got you alone. Or so I’ve heard. Hypothetically.
No one else was stepping up with the ideas, and I needed to be entertained.
“Let’s tie someone to the staircase,” I proposed. “We’ll hunt each other, and whoever gets captured first gets hogtied and cuffed to the staircase.”
Okay, so it wasn’t very well thought out. But it was a much better plan than sitting around waiting for a Sharpie attack. After some brief discussion, the others agreed that a lively war game was just what we needed.
There were four of us still awake, so we split off into pairs. Teamed up with my friend, Lance, I slinked outside into the darkness to set a trap for the others. Lance and I spent the next half hour stalking them, to no avail. Then Lance went rogue.
I had almost no warning. Lance reached out to grab my wrist just as the other team tried to grab me from behind, but I darted away before they caught me. Circling around behind the garage, I slipped inside a small shed. Obviously, I needed some sort of weapon! I grabbed the closest thing I could find: a golf club.
Taking a moment to kick myself for yet another brilliant idea, I readied my defense, then stepped out of the garage into the darkness. Tiptoeing across the yard, I was careful to stay hidden in the shadows.
It wasn’t long before I could see the back door. I knew that if I could get inside and hide the rope, I’d win the game. Winning was every bit as important as avoiding being tied to the staircase, if not more so. Just as I approached the patio in my beeline for the door, two of the guys materialized, one from each side of the house. They headed straight for me. Planting my feet firmly apart, I faced them and stood my ground.
“If you come any closer, I’m going to whack you with my golf club!” In one swift motion I swung the club up and behind me, intending to hold it over my shoulder like a baseball bat. Unfortunately for Lance, his face got in the way.
Focused on the team approaching me from the front, I didn’t hear him sneaking up behind me until he screamed. After determining that the others were no longer a threat, I let go of the golf club and turned to assess the damage.
Tears streaming down his face, Lance’s nose pretty much squirted blood in every direction. Everyone else took a step back; they were moving away from me, not the blood. It was a slightly awkward situation.
One of the guys blurted out, “I think you’re supposed to yell, ‘Fore!’ before you do that.” Lance was not amused by that.
We dragged him into the house and attempted some first aid before deciding it was probably a good idea for him to go to a hospital instead.
“No one’s answering at his house,” one of the guys said. “We should call 911 so they’ll send an ambulance.”
Lance tried to hold back the tears as he shook his head, “Doh ampulanth! Mah thadth will kihl mah if I thake an ampulanth!”
We wasted a good fifteen minutes trying to convince him to let us call 911. The nearest hospital was two miles away in the soon-to-be blazing Arizona sun. Plus, he wasn’t looking so good. His face had swollen to fascinating proportions. His nose had a huge gash across it and Lance was covered in blood all the way down to his shoes.
Feeling mildly responsible for his predicament and worried that he might fall over into traffic, I volunteered to walk to the hospital with him. Which scared him a little. I promised not to bring the golf club along, but that didn’t help much either.
So Lance set out to the hospital by himself, about a two mile hike. Dripping blood off the tip of his nose.
We made up a new game to play and occasionally wondered aloud if Lance ever made it to the hospital.
Almost three hours later, Lance’s Dad came by for his things. He didn’t say much, just sort of glared at everyone. Especially me.
We found out the next day that, because he was only 14, after Lance walked 45 minutes to the hospital, they couldn’t give him anything for the pain until they located his parents. Who were stuck in rush hour traffic on their way to work. He had to wait for two hours while the hospital located them.
Lance avoided me after that.
