High school, for most, is a time to discover a identity and push your limits. It was in my junior year at age 16 that I found out very quickly exactly what some of those limits were.
It was a cool November night in Niceville FL and my two girlfriends and I decided to watch our schools men’s soccer team play their first game against our rival school. It was a great game and we were having so much fun that we decided we didn’t really want to go home after our teams victory and that camping out would be a much better way to spend our Friday night. So we invited three boys from the soccer team to camp out with us in a nearby neighborhood with a huge deserted baseball field perfect for pitching a tent. We formulated the perfect plan to perform the signature teenage lie and tell our parents we were all staying at another friends house. I mean we had to there were going to be BOYS there and our stickler parents would NEVER approve of that. We agreed to meet in the Wal-Mart parking lot at 9 sharp to begin our adventure and went our separate ways until it was time to put the plan into action.
That night, sitting across from my mom at the dinner table made me feel like Satan in a church. I was sweating and biting my nails. I couldn’t look her in the eyes or my heart would stop. I mean how was I supposed to lie to her? She would never believe me! Every time I started to tell her what my plans were for the night I froze up. Finally I worked up the courage to say…. well yell, “Mom in sleeping over at a friends house!” I had done it…I looked up at her as she nonchalantly said, “alright that’s fine be home in the morning.” I couldn’t believe my ears! The first part of operation camp out was a success and I raced up the stairs to pack my bag.
The parking lot of the Wal-Mart felt like an old western ghost town as I waited for the others to arrive. Finally they pulled up and we decided to take two cars to the campsite. This is where we encountered problem number one; there was no room for the cases of beer! So we decided to improvise and finish them off in the parking lot before we set off on the adventure. When we got to our campsite, we started to pitch our tent as rain began to pelt the sides of it. It was only a minor setback but we were forced to improvise once again as the rain began to flood the abandoned baseball field. We decided it could be just as fun to try to fit six people in my friends Honda CRV that was parked in the cul-de-sac across from us so we quickly grabbed our basic survival necessities (which consisted of Doritos and a case of water) and raced across the field.
When you have six teenagers in one small car camping out at night there is really only one good option of keeping entertained; stip poker. So we decided to try our hands at a couple games just to test the limits of our luck. Im sure you can imagine that after six games of strip poker not a lot was left to the imagination clothing wise and we decided to switch to truth or dare. This game got heated pretty quickly and it wasn’t long before we had each other running across the baseball field in our underwear.
Now in a small town like Niceville you wouldn’t expect police officers to be out patrolling neighbor hoods on a routine basis. Or at least see something that would catch their interest enough to make them chase one down in a patrol car. But I guess there is always that chance. Maybe the limits of our luck really had run out and as the six of us jumped back into the CRV and tried to find our previously shed clothing two cop cars pulled up with spotlights and sirens flashing.
Obviously we had scared the cops a little, because they went into instant defense mode and pulled guns on us as they pulled us out of the car and onto the wet pavement of the cul-de-sac. They took us one by one and interrogated us, with extremely colorful language I might add, to find out exactly why there were six teenagers running around naked in the rain at 2 am. The police officer yelled and spit with each word as he tried to muscle out every last bit of information from me but I still was not as scared of him as I was the consequence of my mother finding out where I was.
The police officers searched the car and threatened to take us all to jail for “out past curfew, loitering, and finally…. public indecency” and we all knew that it was an act of divine intervention that we had not had room for the beer because we would be arrested for sure. But the cop deemed another form more acceptable and called all of our parents to pick us up from the cul-de-sac at 3 in the morning.
As my mother pulled up I could see her talking to the officer behind the rain and an extremely bright spot light and I will never forget the face she made when the officer explained to her why her daughter was out camping in a cul-de-sac in nothing but her underwear instead of being at a friends house like she was told. I have never been so scared in my life. All of Cuba’s nuclear weapons could not have frightened me more that my mother as she approached me in the dark. I was shocked at how calm she was. She simply said to me “Katharine, get in the car and wait” and I jumped in her car like my life depended on it.
I guess the terrible thing, aside from being grounded for two months, was that my mother never yelled or lost her temper. She was just quiet with disappointment. This cut me deeper than any knife could have and regret and remorse filled my heart, not because of the fact that I was almost arrested, but because I had lied to my mother and it was going to take years to gain her trust back. I don’t regret getting caught running around in the rain in my underwear, or even giving the police a good story, but I will ALWAYS regret betraying my poor, overworked mother and I probably always will. I haven’t lied to her since.
-Kathrine Paton
No comments:
Post a Comment