When
my parents bought a new freezer for the garage, it came in a huge cardboard
box. Wendell and I made it into a fort.
One
day we went to our bedroom and noticed that the fort had been tagged. When we turned around, Lynette stood there
laughing.
Wendell
and I tore the thing down, so there was all this cardboard sitting out in our
garage. I figured out the perfect use
for it.
After
Wendell went to sleep last night, I used the cardboard to turn our stairs into
a slide. You see, our room is the first
door at the top of the stairs. I wanted
to see if I could get Wendell to fall down the stairs and slide to the bottom.
I
rested a bucket of marbles on the ledge above our bedroom door, hoping that the
marbles would fall near his feet and cause him to lose his balance. He would then land on a slick nylon sleeping
bag placed at the top of the stairs. The
sleeping bag would carry him to the bottom of the stairs into a wading pool
filled with ice cold water.
The
door swung open as marbles landed on the wooden floor with a loud CRASH and the
bucket went over Wendell’s head.
I
waited for a second to see if he would lose his balance from walking on the
marbles, but he didn’t, so I decided to push him down onto the nylon sleeping
bag. His instincts must have kicked in
because he grabbed me just as I gave him a shove. I fell on top of him. He grunted, “Oof!” We sailed down the cardboard slide trying to
grab onto anything that we could, but nothing could stop us. We were sliding too fast.
We
plunged headfirst into the icy waters of the wading pool. We both flailed to get out of the freezing
water. As I looked up, I saw my sister,
Lynette, standing there. She asked with a smirk on her face:
I
said, “Nothin’. What do you think?”
She
responded, “I think you’re pathetic.”
And walked away with her nose in the air.
And
I felt pretty pathetic sopping wet in a wading pool. I was at a loss for words that my trap had backfired
on me. I looked at the slide that still
said “NERD HOUSE” and suddenly felt like I was picking on the wrong sibling.
Then
Wendell said, “Hey, let’s do it again.”
“Huh?”
I replied.
“Let’s
slide down the stairs on the sleeping bag,” he said, “without the pool at the
bottom this time. C’mon that was
fun. Let’s do it again.”
It sounded to me like a slick idea, so we
spent the rest of the morning sliding down the cardboard with the sleeping
bag. We took turns pushing each other,
and we even went down together a few times.
Although
I was having fun, I was still upset that the trap didn’t go as I had
planned. I didn’t like getting all soaked
when I didn’t want to, and I definitely didn’t like it when my sister called me
“pathetic”. I don’t really know what
“pathetic” means, but it didn’t sound very nice. I thought to myself, “She’s going to eat
those words.”
So
I had a little talk with Wendell. “Ya
know, Lynette thinks she’s all that. She
has no respect for us. What I’m trying
to say is that I want you on my team from now on, no strings attached. Together we’ll get her back for tagging our
fort, calling us pathetic, and all the other ways she acts like she’s better
than us. We’ll show her…and her dorky
boyfriend while we’re at it.”
Wendell’s
eyes lit up, “That will be awesome!
You’re the best brother in the whole wide world!”
His
reaction made me feel proud, but I didn’t want him to know, so I said, “Cool it
before I change my mind.”
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