at least i won the race

i wrote a story a year ago as part of a longer post & i thought i'd cut it out, re-work it & re-post for those of you who haven't been here since the beginning.

when i was 14, i had a good friend named patti who i spent a lot of time with. sometimes i'd spend the night at her house & since her parents were somewhat less vigilant than my own, we could get away with things there that i'd never have been able to pull off at my own house. for instance, we used to go outside at night.

we generally didn't do anything other than maybe go for a walk around the neighborhood. one night we went for a walk around midnight in our bathing suits and a carload of guys drove up & stopped. they inched up close to us & asked where we were going. we were trying to be cool, so we said nowhere, we were just hanging out. cue the giggles and flirty eye contact. the boys spewed testosterone and made some macho chit chat and asked why we were in our bathing suits. they wanted to know if there was a pool nearby where we could all go swimming together. i blurted out that no, there was no pool, we'd just been playing in the hose and sprinkler earlier in the evening.

it was like one of those moments in a movie where the soundtrack is playing along nicely, then someone says the wrong thing & you hear the loud screech of the record scratching & then there's silence. the boys busted out laughing & sped off into the night. oops. i guess playing in the sprinkler may have marked us as the foolish children that we were, rather than the sophisticated women we were attempting to portray.

one night we got bored of walking circles around her block and decided to spice things up. we were out in our pajamas in the backyard, sitting on her little sister's swing set & we came up with a plan to race through a few backyards in a big loop & whoever made it back first was the winner. the catch was that we were going to take off our pants before we started running. we still had on shirts & undies, so it was only a half streak, but it certainly felt sandalous at the time. we got to our "starting line," peeled off our jammie pants, and took off running. i gained the lead pretty quickly and was feeling rather pleased with myself since running's really not my thing. patti couldn't stop giggling, so she wasn't moving very fast. i was afraid that the giggling might draw the attention of the neighbors whose yards we were running through, and i certainly didn't want to get caught running in my undies, so i was silent & determined.

i had a pretty good lead going, when out of nowhere, i tripped over a dog chain that i hadn't seen in the dark. with a guttural "oomph," i fell flat onto my belly in a full sprawl that knocked the air out of me. my face banged the ground & i had grass stuck to my tooth, but i popped right back up & kept hauling ass because by then, patty wasn't just giggling, she was laughing hysterically. i was terrified of getting busted, plus, i really wanted to win and i was afraid she'd take advantage of my unanticipated tumble. i sprinted to the finish line like a champ, with plenty of time to spare. but once i was there i realized the stupid hilarity of the moment & stood there with my bruised chin & grassy tooth & i wet myself in the grass in my minnie mouse t-shirt and days of the week undies.