September 02: The Kids Will Be Okay

The following story, lest some of you who know me (or my sisters) think we are holding some unknown secrets, is only half made up. The rest is fiction. I've heard it said that even the most bizarre fiction has some grain of truth, and so I will let you try to figure out which is truth and which is fiction.

The Kids Will Be Okay

I’m not really sure when or why I started to fantasize about jumping out of my bedroom window, but I had become somewhat obsessed with the idea. In hindsight I’m sure it was some sort of half-baked plea for attention. I didn’t want to kill myself. I didn’t even want to break any bones or really get hurt, though I guess I knew that it would be inevitable.

My lone bedroom window happened to line up perfectly with the door to my room that also happened to be at the end of a long hallway. Some days I would stand at the end of the hallway and stare through my open door at the large window. I could easily visualize, as if in slow motion, running down the hallway and diving headlong through the window, glass breaking around me as I flew through the air and crashed down into the world.

This was the tricky bit.

I didn’t want to land in a way that would break more than one or two minor bones—preferably none—and I certainly didn’t want to land on any large shards of broken glass that could impale me or sever an artery. I also didn’t want to overshoot the lawn completely and land on the sidewalk that ran along the bottom of the short slope in our front yard.

The closest I’d ever come to actually jumping out the window was the day I’d caught one of my sisters making out with her best friend. I guess she thought that no one was home. Usually there wasn’t anyone there for about an hour after school. Dad and Mom were both still at work and my other sisters had their various practices for their various sporting events.

I didn’t do sports. I didn’t do much of anything. I usually just went over to my friend Wendell’s house. If you’re thinking Wendell sounds like the name of someone who got beat up a lot, you’re right. Turns out friends of Wendell got beat up a lot as well. That’s what happens when you don’t have any brothers to teach you how to fight or at least take a punch.

Anyway, Wendell’s dad was in town so he was spending time with him after school. So I’d ridden my bike home and gone up to my room to stare out the window. There’s no way I would have used this time to pull my window dive stunt. The whole point to a “cry for help” was that someone would be there to hear the cry.

 So I just sat in my room listening to my headphones. I’d just gotten this great new audio dramatization of Stephen King’s The Mist that was produced in 3D stereo and sounded awesome on headphones. I was about halfway through the book when thought I’d heard a sound that didn’t belong with what was happening in the story.

Pulling off my headphones, I cocked my head and strained to hear any sounds in what I thought was a deserted house. At first I didn’t hear anything, but as I continued to strain I could just make out a…presence. You know how, sometimes, you can tell when someone is there even though you can’t see or hear him or her? Yeah, that’s what I felt.

I glanced at my watch. Nobody should be getting home for at least half an hour. Part of me was concerned that a burglar had broken into our house, but I didn’t hear the sounds of ransacking, whatever that sounded like. There was a wooden baseball bat that my dad had given me a couple years ago when I turned twelve, before he realized I just wasn’t into sports, leaning against my dresser. I grabbed the bat as I began to stealthily make my way down the hall and to the top of the stairs.

I could definitely tell that someone was in the house, but it was all muffled. It was that there was anyone talking, but there was definitely some kind of sounds coming from the living room one stairway and three rooms away. I began to make my way down the stairs.

In order to appreciate just how ninja-like I was moving down those stairs you need to understand the layout. Someone who had decided to use only wood from the creakiest trees in the forest had built our house about a hundred years ago. It was virtually impossible to even look at our stairway without making noise.

However, over the past few years, through careful practice in the art of sneaking snacks, I had learned to navigate the entire stairway without making a sound. I could sneak all the way downstairs into the kitchen, open the snack cupboard, reach past the potato chip bags into a snack cake box, grab a cellophane-wrapped brownie, close the cupboard and maneuver back up to my room all without detection. This was a piece of cake, so to speak.

Once I made it into the kitchen, I stopped to listen again. I could hear some kind of whispering and…something else. I guess I wasn’t really sure what I was hearing, but it sounded like two people.

I peered around the edge of the counter through the dining room and into the living room. The big easy chair was empty which meant that whoever was in there, they were on the other side of the room. This made it easy to move from the kitchen into the dining room.

I quickly moved around the dinner table and up against the door way that lead into the living room. Clutching the baseball bat close to breath and trying to keep my breathing silent, I listened again. I did not need to strain.

I suddenly realized what I was hearing. My mom had always liked the late night soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty and though I couldn’t stand these shows, I’d been subjected to them enough over the years to become familiar with their recursive plot lines involving betrayal, money, and sex. Lots and lots of sex. Of course, the sex on these shows was usually portrayed as aggressive heavy petting and sloppy kissing.

That is what I heard coming from the living room: aggressive heavy petting and sloppy kissing.

Now I wished I had grabbed my Polaroid camera instead of the baseball bat. All I would need to do is grab one compromising picture of one of my sisters making out with a boy and I would have some prime blackmail material. Oh well, I could still take mental pictures. Besides, I was fourteen; I could probably learn a thing or two from this guy, whoever it was. I carefully slid along the wall and around the doorframe to see what I could see.

I was not prepared for what I saw.

It was definitely me second oldest sister and she was definitely making out with someone. It was her best friend. Her best girl friend. For those few, brief moments I forgot that it was my sister I was watching. All I knew is that two girls were making out mere feet away from me. Remember, I was only fourteen. To me this was something I had only heard of, had only dreamed of. It was fantasy. I had no idea girls actually kissed other girls. My friends were never going to believe this. Let’s be realistic, I only had one friend, Wendell, but he wasn’t going to believe this. Heck, I could probably get more friends with this story.

I guess I lost track of how long I was standing there, and I must have forgotten all about being stealthy, because my sister turned her head just so and opened her eyes for a moment. In that moment she saw me standing there, mouth agape, staring at her making out with her girl friend.

My sister screamed.

Her friend screamed.

I screamed.

She leapt off the couch and came at me. I panicked. Dropping the baseball bat I ran from the room and back through the dining room and kitchen. For some reason I ran upstairs instead of outside. As I rounded the second bend of the stairs I heard my sister start taking the stairs two at a time behind me. Clearing the top steps I ran full speed down the hallway, seemingly in slow motion. I glanced over my shoulder and saw her just a few paces behind me.

I looked forward and saw the square window of glass in my room. In that instant I forgot about my fears of broken bones, glass shards impaling me, or paralysis. I was already running at full speed, it was only a matter of a few more paces and I could dive headlong through the window and out into the yard. Maybe my parents would think that my sister had thrown me out the window in order to keep her secret.

At the last second I chickened out. The problem was that I had built up significant momentum and couldn’t stop in time. I threw up hands in front of my face and sort of arched my back away from the window even though I continued toward it. I was braced for the impact. It never came.

Apparently, I hadn’t been running as fast as I thought. My sister had grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me back toward her and way from the window. She flung me onto my bed and jumped up on top of me driving her knees into my ribs.

She leaned her face down so that it was inches from my own.

“Whatever you think you saw down there, never happened. If you try to tell anyone what happened, I will make it so that you never so much as get to first base with a girl. Got it?”

“Y-yeah,” was all I could manage.

She climbed off me and left e room slamming the door behind her. A few moments later I heard the back door of the house slam shut as she and her friend left.

I never told my parents or my other sisters about what I saw that day, and her and I never spoke about it again. I never saw her with another girl. She eventually got married and had three kids.

I also never jumped out the window. I stopped fantasizing about it too. I had thought that I was the misunderstood, lone boy of the house, but I learned different that day. I learned that each of my sisters was facing their own, unique struggles to figure out who they were and where they were headed. I learned that I didn’t need to jump out a window and risk injury to get noticed. All I had to do was live my life and learn from everything.