Week 10 Question

Staying with the topic of high schools, I thought I'd introduce a question that is a little bit on the lighter side (not as serious):

Tell us about a funny story/experience that you remember from when you were in high school.

While the story I'm about to tell you may not be all that funny, I always get a kick out of it whenever I think about it. Here goes...

At some point during the first semester of my senior year, my parents left town for the weekend to visit some relatives. That left me and my twin brother, Jim, with the house all to ourselves. My idea was that I'd have a few friends over for a movie on Saturday night. What I didn't realize was that Jim had already considered a far different plan for that same night.

That Saturday night, my mom called to make sure everything was fine, and I told her that Brian, Nate, Tasha, Amy and I had rented a movie and were driving home to watch it. She was happy to hear that I was hanging out with "those nice girls Tasha and Amy" and asked me how Brian and Nate were doing. Shortly thereafter, I remember turning the corner on the street where we lived (it must have been around 10 pm) and thinking to myself, "Hmmm, it looks like one of the neighbors is having a party or something." I thought this somewhat strange given that most of our neighbors were old or had little children, but I never even thought of the possibility that all of these cars were leading up to our little grey house on the corner of Campfire Circle.

My doubts quickly changed once my friend Brian quipped, "Hey, isn't that Tom Mchugh standing in your mom's flower garden?" I looked over; sure enough, there was Tom standing in my mom's poinsettas. We quickly got out of the car discovered more surprises. It wasn't just Tom standing in the flowers: there were people everywhere outside! Some the people I knew (Jim's friends), some people I had seen (at school), and some I had never laid eyes on before!

We went inside; there were people everywhere: in my parents bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room, on the patio, downstairs, upstairs, in my bedroom, and even on the roof. I saw my brother's friend Danny and asked him where Jim was. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away. My friends and I dispered through the house looking for Jim, but we couldn't find him anywhere. Finally, I went out back and there he was sitting in the grass with his head in his hands. I asked him what was going on and he replied, "It doesn't matter, Kelly broke up with me." I could tell he was pretty broken up over it, so I didn't bring up the fact that there were 60 or so people partying in our parent's house. Nope. All I could say was that I was sorry to hear it, and that he better have a plan for cleaning this all up before our parents returned the next day.

What did my friends and I do? What could we do? What would you have done? There was no way we were going to watch the movie, so we did the only thing we could do: we joined the party.

Needless to say, Jim didn't have a plan for cleaning up the mess before our parents got back; he was still pretty distraught over his breakup.

I'll never forget the look of astonishment on my mom's face the next day as we filled garbage bag after garbage bag full of trash. She kept saying to me, "Your brother is going to be grounded (can't leave the house) for quite some time." In fact, if I remember correctly, he went out the next weekend, and the weekend after that, and every weekend for the rest of our senior year.