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Chaos at Midnight
By Moira Sullivan
Genre: Non-fiction Level: High School 10-12
Year: 2001 Category: UAA/ADN Creative Writing Contest

An obnoxious thumping pulsated from the ceiling. Thump, thump, thump. At 9:30 at night, just more than twelve hours before Ms. Holway's geography exam, I couldn't sleep because of the pounding from above. It occurred to me that if I just ignored it, it would go away. Still, my curiosity was piqued: what could the boy upstairs be doing that would cause such a ruckus? It was always possible that I could walk up the creaky stairs and find out. Then I could politely ask him to stop. But what if, on this night, as it did on most nights, chaos ensued? No, I would just ignore the noise and minutes later I wouldn't hear it at all. Those minutes passed, and still I heard the thumps. The small gerbils in their cage by my window scrambled in their wood shavings.

Over half an hour went by, and the continued pounding never ceased for a moment. It was too much. I had to discover for myself what was going on. Throwing on my rainbow-striped bathrobe, I tiptoed out the bedroom door. I walked slowly towards the stairs, listened, and then ascended, quietly so as not to be heard. As I approached the kitchen, I had to be extra-cautious and avoid the always-creaky floorboard under the throw rug. A minute later, I was ten feet further and just in front of the door that would lead to the thump-maker. I quietly entered, but the sight was absolutely too much for me to bear. A boy, thirteen years old, was in the center of the darkened room wearing nothing but tighty-whities -- doing jumping jacks. I, only eleven years old and quite impressionable, bowled over laughing. I found the situation to be so humorous that I fell to the floor and laughed for several minutes. Alan, startled, had grabbed his bed sheet and wrapped it around himself, which only made me laugh more at his bride-like appearance.

Although embarrassed at first, Alan was soon able to laugh at the situation, and then asked why I had entered his room without permission. "Dude, you could have knocked!" he said dumbly. "Yeah," I answered, "but it was funnier this way," and then I began to giggle uncontrollably once more. "Why were you doing jumping jacks, naked, at 10:00 at night?" I had to ask. He replied, "I wasn't naked ..." "Oh right ..." I said. I stood up and plopped myself on his bed. By this time, I was wide-awake, there was no way I was getting back to sleep. He made me turn around so he could put on a pair of dirty faded jeans, explaining to me that he was trying to lose weight for wrestling, and then sat down beside me. "I can't believe you woke me up," I grumbled, "and I have a social studies test tomorrow!" Alan stared back at me, baffled. It was impossible for him to understand how anyone could hold so much importance in a test for a seventh grade social studies class. I just glared back at him. The foul stench of a boy's room was beginning to get to me, and our silence was dulled only by the sound of water in the fish tank. And then the conversation turned to matters of great import:

"So ... when are you gonna ask Christine out?" I asked. "I'm hungry," he replied, "let's go to the kitchen." Pretending to ignore this blatant subject change, I went along with him. We tried to open and close the door quietly, so as not to wake up the sleeping bear in the same room, who had miraculously slept through the earlier disruption. Alan's brother, Mike, could sleep through almost anything. We tiptoed past my parents' room and to the kitchen, where the refrigerator yielded nothing but day-old chicken. I decided this would be a good time to make a lunch for the next day. We began quietly gossiping and I put together a tuna sandwich. Alan immediately imitated what I was doing. Though usually he insisted I make his lunch for him (he was forever pretending he was too incompetent even to crush a milk carton), tonight he took on the burden himself. When I by accident put too much mayonnaise on my sandwich, a gruesome idea popped into his head.

"Hey Moira," he said. "I'll pay you a dollar to eat a tablespoon of mayonnaise." "Alan! That's disgusting!" I was truly turned off by this idea. Swallowing an entire spoonful of fatty, oily horrible tasting yogurt-textured crap, for a dollar? "Make it five," I said. Alan was always making bets and inventing dares. I never learned that not only were the dares not worth it, not even something that would build character, but that Alan never paid up. So I always fell for the same thing, and ended up doing things like jump out of a two-story window, let him hold my head underwater for a minute and a half, and eat an entire piece of strawberry cheesecake in one bite at one of the nicest restaurants in town. This was one of those unforgettable experiences: eating a tablespoon of mayo. Alan had the honor of spooning it out of the yellowing Best Foods jar. He made sure to pile as much onto the spoon as possible. The lumpy cream hung off the edges of the spoon, dripping on the counter top as he carried it towards me.

I could smell it just under my nose, like fetid rotten milk. My stomach lurched at the thought of the ooze crawling down my throat. I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a bite. I gagged, my eyes watered, but I couldn't give up now. It took all of the courage I could muster to swallow the mess of creamed raw eggs, but I did. I felt it slide into my stomach to sit there for at least an hour afterwards. Yet, through all of this, my digestive system remained stable. To my surprise, the mayonnaise never came back up. Alan however, was having seizures. His body couldn't handle the idea of me eating mayonnaise. He doubled over, crumpled from both laughter and disgust, and turned so red in the face I thought he would pass out. I got very dizzy. The two of us scrambled to the living room when we heard the sound of a door opening. We hid in the darkness behind the couch, whispering anxiously of the incriminating tuna fish still on the counter, then waited silently. After a minute, I peered my head over the top of the couch to make sure it was safe, and saw Mike standing in front of me, looking grumpier than ever. "What the hell are you guys doing?" he intoned. Alan rose up, laughing again, and proceeded to tell his brother that he had just gotten me to eat an entire tablespoon of mayonnaise. I felt a little queasy. Mike was impressed.

The three of us headed back to the kitchen, where I continued to make my lunch even with the threat of puking looming over me. Mike and Alan reminisced of old times, when they used to have toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Mike was wide-awake at this point, and decided that a toasted PB & J would be the perfect thing for the moment; Alan concurred. The two of them got out the bread again, the peanut butter and the grape jelly. In hindsight, I should have known that this would be no good. The boys in the kitchen always lead to disaster: like when Mike melted the cutting board in the oven while making chicken pot pies, or when Alan caught a batch of Eggs Benedict on fire and threw the conflagration into the closed kitchen window, shattering it, breaking his hand and creating an incredible mess. But I was in too much of a haze to take note of anything.

The two boys spread a thick glob of peanut butter over a piece of bread, unable to do this without tearing the bread to bits. It took them three tries, but finally they got a complete piece of peanut buttered bread. This took an especially long time to do, as they continued to scoop peanut butter in their hands and lick it off. When their masterful bread was finished, they walked over to the toaster to create a toasted PB & J. I still didn't see it coming. I stared dumbly at them slide the bread into its designated slots, and force the toaster button down. It wasn't until the smoke alarm began screaming the house awake, that I jolted awake and realized my cousins had just put two pieces of bread, one with peanut butter and one with jelly, into a toaster, and almost caught my house afire. At eleven o'clock at night. Our adrenaline level peaked and we ran around, trying to find towels to fan off the alarm. Somehow, someway, the three of us got the smoke alarm to turn off, without disturbing a soul. I'm sure now that someone was awakened, but was simply too tired to get out of bed and search the premises. Each of the boys blamed the other, while I tacitly blamed the both of them for almost getting me killed, literally and figuratively.

"That's it, I'm going to bed," declared Mike, obviously a little nervous about the extremely close call. My parents, had they discovered us, would have had three hides that night. "Fine, dumbass," said Alan, who couldn't go a minute without insulting his older brother. It was so late and I was so tired, I wanted so badly to get back to my own bed, but I knew that there was no chance. I was trapped in the whirlwind of life with Alan, and we would talk all through the night. I would be lucky if I got an hour of sleep that night. Maybe the next day would be a snow day. ... Yes ... I tossed this idea around in my head awhile as Alan and I continued our usual string of gossip and the creation of new inside jokes. I was, yet again, regaled by Alan's telling of the time his friend threw a cement cutter at his head. The story just never ceased to amuse me. Eventually I brought up the snow day idea to Alan. We both agreed that if there was snow day it would be about time, and well deserved. Since it was already after midnight and my prime sleep time had been lost, and they did forecast snow for tonight ... "Hey!" Alan cried, "you know, there probably will be a snow day tomorrow, so we might as well just stay up all night!" "Hey! Good idea! Do you think we can do it? All night?" I said. I don't know how I ever could have been so dumb. "Mo, do you still have that Indian stick in your room?" He was referring to a gift my older brother's girlfriend had once given me: a large stick with feathers and beads tied around it, meant to be an old Indian tribal rain dance stick. I ran downstairs to retrieve this item for him. "What if," he asked, "we went outside and did a rain dance? It's so cold, it would snow for sure!" I was immediately won over by this idea. We would be up all night anyway, why not do something useful?

The romance of this idea was unbearable; we were both completely thrilled about going through with it. A snow day, how great would that be? Still in pajamas and Alan still shirtless, we piled on our snow gear; snow pants, coats, boots, hats, gloves and all, and entered the winter wonderland outside. With our perfect luck, there was a full moon out, which Alan said was excellent because rain dances work best in the full moon. What began as a great idea morphed into the epiphany of the century: not only would we do a rain dance, but we would make it a prayer to the cow-gods (a contemporary obsession of Alan's) and dance until the full moon turned red and a blizzard began. Alan ran back into the house to grab something; when he returned, he was carrying a long cardboard mailing tube, his own rain stick. The two of us stamped out a circle with our boots in the front yard. Then, we ran around in the circle, mooing softly, and shaking our sticks at the purple tinted night sky. The crisp air was refreshing, but my nose was beginning to freeze and I could feel my cheeks getting frost bitten. I continued, because giving up now would shame me, and it would shame Alan as well. I couldn't let him down. I just mooed louder, hoping the snow would soon begin. Alan followed in suit, and we mooed at the top of our lungs, eventually stopping to stand still and stare straight at the moon to moo directly at it.

"Did you see that!?!" I asked. "Did you see it? Did you?" Alan shook his head. "The moon! It turned bright red! You should have seen it!" I fibbed. "No way!" shrieked Alan. "That's awesome! Well, I guess our work here is done!" I was relieved. My hands and feet were completely numb. Twenty minutes of winter mooing is harder work than you might think. We two reentered the house, and dropped our boots and coats. All that work had totally exhausted me. We both went back upstairs to the living room and flopped down on the couches. Next thing I knew, it was morning. The clock across the room read 6:00, and I knew my alarm clock would soon be ringing in my room downstairs. So I walked down and began preparing for school, and the social studies test I was dreading. That night, I hunched over my diary trying to remember the details of the previous days' events, and silently stressing over the prospect of a D in Social Studies. Blue ink was leaking on my hand and I was trying to smear it off, when I suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of breaking glass in the room above me. Oh God, I thought, the fish tank? I should go upstairs and find out what happened. But what if, on this night, as it did most nights, chaos ensued?


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