Totally Awkward Tuesday: The Escape Plan

Once again I am participating in The Secret Life of Tova Darling's "Totally Awkward Tuesday." Today's story also features my BFF Holly in another one of our middle school adventures (I have a feeling you're going to see her name on a lot of Tuesday posts)!

Holly and I were good girls who so longed to be bad. We had sleepovers at each other's houses every weekend and we got it into our heads that it would be fun to sneak out once. Ooh, we were so bad... but not so spur-of-the-moment! We decided we should practice first, before doing it "for real." The best criminals have well laid out plans beforehand, right? Right.

Holly lived in the country and I lived in town, so we used to walk to my house together after school and wait for maybe an hour or so until my mom got home from work. That hour gave us the perfect opportunity to practice our escape!

The biggest hurdle in sneaking out of my house was that my bedroom windows were high up on the wall, close to the ceiling. So we had to climb up on my bed to get out of them. I went first. I climbed out the window like a pro, but then discovered while hanging from the ledge that the ground was a lot further away than I had anticipated. I was too chicken to jump. So there I was, hanging by my hands from the window ledge, and Holly was standing on my bed, hanging her head out of the window above me. Got that image in your head? OK. Keep it there!

Our conversation went something like this:

Holly: Christine, just jump!
Christine: (starting to panic) I can't! It's too far!
Holly: No it's not, just jump!
Christine: (screaming) No way! I'll break my legs!
Holly: Omigod, just let go!
Christine: (screaming in terror) I can't! Help me up!
Holly: There's no way I can pull you back in! Just jump!
Christine: (screaming hysterically) Omigod, I'm seriously going to die! I don't want to die this way! I'm not ready to go! I still have so much to do on this earth!

Yeah, I was a tad dramatic in those days. (OK, I still am.)

Anyway, around this time I just happened to turn my head, and there stood our English student teacher, stopped dead in her tracks on her walk home. She looked at us like we were totally insane, and Holly and I just stared back at her, totally frozen with "What? We're not doing anything bad..." looks pasted on our faces. After what seemed like a lifetime she just turned and kept walking (back to her dorm, where I'm sure she told her roommate another one of her "you'll never guess what I saw from my middle schoolers today" stories).

Holly and I burst into hysterical laughter and I eventually let go. Turns out the ground really wasn't that far away and I did survive the fall.

At the time I thought, "Why didn't she help us?!?" But I'm sure she noticed my feet were just inches from the ground, and bless her heart... she probably didn't want to embarrass us further. What a good teacher, to let us learn that lesson on our own!

(We never did sneak out, by the way... though we continued to practice other methods!)