Hide the Fire!

 

When I was 11 my best friend, Joy, was having a sleep over at her house.  It was just Joy, our friend Ashley, and myself. It was a pretty typical night. We created dramatic situations with dolls, that probably resembled One Tree Hill or the old soap opera Passions.

Also, we played truth or dare. I do remember one dare from that night in particular. It involved duct taping cheese slices to my leg, and then our friend Ashley pulling them off with her  mouth… 

In our minds it looked something like this…

It actually happened like this….

(I was NOT that hairy, by the way, and there was a lot more cheese than that! It did talk, though.)

By the time we had taped what we figured to be “enough” cheese, it had started melting due to my body heat. This was also before any of us learned what shaving was… Needless to say it was a bit of a hairy situation. Instead of her pulling it off with her mouth it was decided just getting it off of my legs was optimal. After that we decided that it was time to quit playing.

This is where the night takes a turn for the worse… We had wanted to go camping originally. However, for whatever reason we hadn’t been allowed to or it didn’t pan out. That didn’t deter us. After midnight at some point we decided that we could still have our camp fire.

By George we could use a candle!

But wait, there’s more! Not only could this candle be our camp fire, but we could roast mini weenies over it! The one little flame didn’t suffice, though. So we, of course, decided that putting a bunch of matches and starting a fire in there would work!

Well it didn’t, and we were pretty disappointed that the mini weenies weren’t actually cooking.

We were even more disappointed when the glass the candle was in decided to break, taking half of the candle with it, and sliding onto joy’s carpeted floor.

That was a bummer. It also really sucked when that patch of carpet went up in flames.

What did we do, being logical 11 year olds who had only been taught to stop drop and roll, at this point? Pour water on it!

Unfortunately that somehow made it worse.

Logically, the next step to putting it out was to grab joy’s hair dryer and blow on the fire. Duh. You blow out birthday candles, right? Same thing.

Burn, baby, burn, Joy’s room inferno! We were panicking at this point, and of course we didn’t wake her parents, because we wouldn’t want to get in trouble! Finally, in the commotion, Ashley grabbed a towel and threw it on the flames, stamping them out.

(There wasn’t actually a towel length of fire, it just seemed that way.)

The room was filled with smoke, the most we could do was open the window to air the place out. We put a bean bag chair over the patch of burnt carpet, and when Joy’s mom came in an hour or two later asking what that smell was, she answered “We lit a candle”.

That patch of carpet stayed hidden for a couple of years, however her mom found it and had to get the carpet replaced.

The moral of the story? LET US CAMP!!!!!!