Spring is creeping around the corner and the weather has been teasing us here in Portland. I was out grabbing a coffee the other day when I heard a group of high schoolers talking about their spring break plans while standing in line behind me. Ahh I forgot what it was like to be excited for a break. I wish adulthood still came with mandatory winter, spring, and summer breaks. But paid. Every time I think of spring break in particular, this one story pops into my mind. A lake house. A prank. A boy.
It was spring break, the year isn’t important. My boobs were Amazon Prime delivered just in time. I had finally graduated from a training bra to the real deal. I remember other girls making the first time bra conversation with their mothers sound horrifying. I was lucky enough to have the kind of mom I could tell most things without ever feeling embarrassed, especially when it came to my changing body. She took me to Target without hesitation. We picked up a few new swim suits while we were there. My body finally filled out a bikini the way my young mind had been programmed to think it should. My braces had FINALLY come off weeks before, but unfortunately… they’d be back. I was so ready to put my mosquito bite era behind and turn into the woman I always wanted to be… a Pamela Anderson and Lara Croft hybrid. The removal of my braces clearly got me one step closer.
A friend’s parents were taking us to their lake house for a weekend over the break. It would be me, my best friend, and our other close friend. My best friend’s older sister would be bringing her friends as well. The pressure was really on because they were much older and much cooler than us in every way possible. They had their licenses. They went to music festivals un-chaperoned. They had belly button piercings and sex. On top of everything else, he was going to be there. He was my best friend’s older sister’s closest male friend. Stay with me. We all knew he was in love with my friend’s sister at one point, but he had been majorly friendzoned over and over, so I think he eventually got the picture. He was far too old for me, but that was just my type. I never understood the obsession with the hot boy pick of the year in my own grade. Year after year it was usually this guy named Chad. One of my friend’s even made a shrine of him once. I wonder what happened to Chad? That’s the only name I’ll put in this story because I have identities to protect. So Chad - wherever you are, you were worshipped by everyone but me in grade school. I had a crush on Christopher Walken in Sleepy Hollow. Or Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge. I didn’t have time for grade school boys. But I did have eyes for him.
He was smart. Not just 4.0 grade average smart. He was witty without being a smart ass or needing to draw attention to himself. He was well traveled at a young age. He was emotionally mature and sensible. He wasn’t like the football players or any of the other boys in school. It’s just that. He wasn’t a boy. He was the kind of student that teachers wanted to hang out with outside of school but had to refrain for obvious reasons. He was beloved. He was handsome but not in a typical 2000’s David Beckham wannabe sort of way. He dressed like an adult who was a sexy journalist in a movie. He wore scarfs and always looked clean and meticulous. He carried a messenger bag instead of a Jansport. There was something so sexy about how he stood out from the rest. The sexiest part of it all, was how kind he was. To everyone.
The older kids would pick on me and make fun of all of us younger kids. It was the natural order. He would always come up to me, knowing I had a fat crush on him, and he would tell me he liked my Rolling Stone’s shirt or strike up conversation about a band. Or he would simply say hello in his gentle voice while passing me in the halls. This respect wasn’t just extended to me. He was just this way with everyone. Back then, I was tortured by our age difference. I knew he would never look at me as anything more than a child.
I remember being so excited about this trip to the lake. I even watched countless videos of pro wakeboarders doing backflips and other intimidating tricks just so I could be prepared to show off when my time came. I had some experience wakeboarding, but I was definitely bound to break my neck if I were to attempt anything like this. I even packed my Sally Hansen self tanner just so I could make sure I looked extra sun-kissed and chiseled for him. I think I stole it from my mom’s bathroom. That and her Great Lash mascara. My friends and I treated my mom’s bathroom like our own person Sephora. If you know, you know. I thought to myself, despite our age difference, he will love me if he sees my sick backflip or my perfect tan. One is bound to it.
The long weekend in itself wasn’t as eventful as I had hoped. We barely saw my friend’s older sister, her friends, or him. I spent most of the days moping around, shoving Tostitos in my mouth, and wishing we would get our alone moment. The old kids spent most of the trip going to parties with other kids in the area and getting home at 2am and then sleeping the next day away, rinse and repeat. My friends and I spent our afternoons making these beaded word bracelets with my best friend’s mom. It was awful. I wanted to be flirting out by the lake and showing off my splotchy, faux tanned legs. I was sick of the crafts and the s'mores and the bullshit. I wanted my first real kiss.
It was the last day of the short trip. Our hosts wanted us to have a family lake day out on their boat and a relaxing evening in. This day was a blast. We went tubing. Shot BB guns. Played an intense soccer game. We had a pizza night in a kitchen Nancy Meyer’s would approve of. We played yard games. I remember playing corn hole on this trip for the very first time. Up until then, I thought corn hole was a pig in a blanket because a large pig in a blanket is just a corndog. And I had no idea what a pig in a blanket even was. Anyways, we lit sparklers. We did all the things. It was an evening filled with youth, pure joy, and I think maybe I snuck my first ever sip of Bud Light. No one ever forgets their first sip of Bud Light. Or, maybe they do?
We all piled up in the living room and watched a movie. Once the movie ended, the parents went up to bed and told us all to do the same. We had to pack up in the morning and head home. Everyone went to their rooms. My friends and I stayed up in her dad’s upstairs office and probably looked up fucked up shit on the internet or flashed our push up bras to old men on Omegle. I remember me and my friends being addicted to seeing old dicks on Omegle and screaming at the top of our lungs. What a time. An hour after we were all fooling around, we heard noises coming from the roof. Mountain lion? Bear? Serial killer? No. It was the older kids sneaking out again to hit another bonfire or house party. I turned to my friends and told them we had to follow them. They protested and called me crazy, but after I explained that this might be our chance to kiss cute boys from other schools and prove just how cool we could be, they agreed. We changed, brushed our hair, and snuck out her window.
Everything in this town was walking distance for the most part. I remember you could walk from their community into town in about 20 minutes. Walking from dock to dock was also a breeze. You could see the different docks that were lit up and filled with teenagers and coolers. Dingy boats would taxi kids across the lake from party to party. Spring break on this lake was hectic. If people weren’t making out, they were fighting. If you weren’t upside down on a keg, you were being thrown upside down off a dock. The three of us agreed to act natural and if any high schoolers or college kids asked us who we were and where we went to school, we gave fake names and a fake school somewhere out of state.
We saw the dock where my best friend’s sister and her friends were. We knew she wouldn’t tell her parents we came, because she would be in heaps of trouble for being out herself. That and all the rest of the blackmail my friend had on her untamed sister. When we walked up to them, she was surprisingly excited to see us… because she had a little too much Franzia. She offered us red Solo cups of Sunset Blush Franzia. A week long hangover in a box. I’m sad that the kids these days are all about mocktails because they will never know boxed wine. If I drank that now, my organs would most definitely explode. As the hours flew by and the boxed wine continued to magically flow into my mouth, I built the courage to walk up to him and strike up conversation. Before I could make my way over to him, my friend’s sister and her friends stopped me. She had a dare in mind.
She told us that if we didn’t take our clothes off and jump into the lake, that we weren’t being properly hazed and we would never be welcomed back here. She told us they all had done it and it was simply tradition. Our other friend friend in our tripod was scared out of her mind and told us she wanted to go back. Before I could attempt to convince her to stay, she handed me her cup, and she took off back to the house. She ran for her life. She was always the goody goody of our group so I was proud of her for making it as far as she did. We were tipsy enough at this point that we agreed to follow tradition, of course. She told us to follow her and for whatever stupid reason, we did. 10 or more minutes later, we were at an empty dock. The homeowners must have been gone or the house must have been for sale, because it was dark. The house looked vacant. The dock was lifeless in comparison to the rest. From this viewpoint, the lake looked infested with crocodiles and monsters.
She told us to strip and when we stood there shaking in our bras and panties, she told us it wasn’t enough. She said we had to skinny dip. We told her there was absolutely no way and she followed that with the fact that we would be cursed. Our names would be spread around as the girls who broke tradition. People would single us out, boys would never look at us, we would be a disgrace. People back at school would hear about this and would have to face it. We just couldn’t let that happen. He wasn’t there, luckily. No older boys were. My friend’s sister promised no boys would see us naked. We just had to jump off the dock and climb back up. Easy. After a lot of hesitation and many false starts, we stripped butt ass naked. We held hands and ran off the eerie dock and jumped into the lake. I remember we burst into laughter once we came up for air. We felt so mature and liberated. We felt so damn cool. We were legends. Until we heard a dirt bike start.
We couldnt quite see what was happening but we quickly swam to the dock ladder. Once we climbed up, we realized the older girls took off and our clothes were gone. We ran off the dock and saw them on the back of dirt bikes, waving our clothes in the air. We were mortified. Humiliated. We both cried and held each other while we gathered ourselves by a shrub. My friend kept crying and asking God why this was happening to us. Why were all these older, hot boys about to see her flat chest. Meanwhile, I was furious and had revenge on my mind.
We walked up the stairs beside the vacant house to the street. We walked down the street doing our best to cover ourselves with our arms. We finally got to her parent’s house. Let me tell you, scaling up the side of a house onto a roof and through a bedroom window is hard enough, but slippery and naked, it’s an Olympic sport. Once we got to her bedroom, we snuck to the bathroom and took a warm shower. In the shower, I told her we couldn’t let her embarrass us like this. She couldn’t win. We had to get her back tonight. We had no plan in mind but it was time to put our diabolical heads together.
We didn’t have much time or resources to execute something spectacular. The only thing that came to my mind was something I had seen on tv. I knew my best friend’s older sister was very beautiful and very vein. So I knew fucking with her looks in some way would be our best bet. We didn’t have any Nair or hair dye to put in her shampoo. We didn’t have a laxative that would give her diarrhea. We must have searched every cabinet in that entire house for something, anything. We were ready to give up until my friend mentioned…pink eye. Why don’t we fart on her pillow and rub our butts on it so that she wakes up with pink eye? What’s more embarrassing than that? In the moment, it was genius and we tip toed to her bedroom.
I told my friend she should do it. I wasn’t feeling particularly gassy and she was extremely lactose intolerant. After all that pizza, it was showtime. I kept watch while she climbed on top of her bed and squatted over her pillow. She tried to fart a few times but wasn’t very successful. I was nervous that they were going to climb through the window at any moment. I kept whisper shouting at her to hurry up. But then, it happened. My friend started making noises and I didn’t know what to think. I could barely see what she was doing in the dark bedroom. She started panicking. I started panicking. She started shitting. On her sister’s pillow.
It was too late. There was a steaming turd on her pillow. Her sister was going to stumble in drunk and unaware and lay her head in human shit. I didn’t believe my friend when she said she couldn’t control herself. Part of me still believes she did it on purpose. But we were scared for our lives. An innocent fart turned into so much more. A shart. We were dead. We ran out of that room so fast and climbed into her bed. We hid under the covers for our dear lives. Our other friend didn’t even budge. She was out like a light. We laid awake waiting for them to get home. We hoped they wouldn’t ever come home but we knew it was inevitable. It felt like hours went by when it reality, it must have been a half hour at most. We heard heavy feet and stumbling on the roof. The feeling in my gut was as if I was walking to the guillotine. Suddenly, there was silence, and then there was a scream. Multiple screams. We heard loud foot steps thump down the hall and into the room we were in. She flipped all of our lights on and yanked the covers we were hiding under. She started beating our asses while calling us disgusting and telling us she was going to kill us. We scream our heads off and tried fighting back. Our friend woke up. The parents came rushing in. He and the other friends came around the corner to have a look at the action. My friend’s sister shouted that we shit on her pillow and she got it on her hand. My friend shouted that we were forced to jump off a dock naked and left there without our clothes. While everyone else, parents included, couldn’t help but burst out laughing, I was so embarrassed that he saw me this way. I wanted to be seen as a mature woman and not this juvenile prankster.
I’ll never forget all being forced to apologize and hug each other. The parents really just wanted to go back to sleep and were angry that we bothered them with all of this bullshit while on vacation. We all went back to our beds. I definitely slept with one eye open. I was terrified she was going to cut all of my hair off or worse. Eventually, the sun came up and I was unharmed. Once we were all ready to leave and having our bittersweet last breakfast together, I went outside to grab my shoes that I had left. To my surprise, he was standing out there, listening to music in his headphones, staring out at the lake. I crept up beside him to grab my shoes and we made eye contact. Without saying a word, he handed me one of his EarPods. We listened to music together. There was just us, the morning sun glistening off of the water, and my heart beating in my mouth. I knew this was the last chance I had to be alone with him. In a few months, he would be going off to college across the country. This was all I needed.
So relatable because my childhood crush and I spent tons of time together with his family at a lake growing up ❤️
It's like I was there. Great story! I remember skinny dipping for the first time it was that messed up but we find out later that a couple of guys from our class almost showed up. That would have been crazy embarrassing!