At boarding school, I always loved to play Nancy Drew, and I would go investigating with a flashlight any place that looked suspicious. Well, one day my younger sister was crying because she was homesick, so I asked her to join my adventure. I had recently scoped out a mysterious place–the attic of the girls’ dorm. No one had ever told us not to go up there, and lo and behold, the trap door was already open, and a ladder was positioned perfectly so that we had to change nothing in the room to begin our adventure.
I boldly climbed up the ladder and entered the dusty attic. I turned on the flashlight and waved it around the room to investigate if there were any bats or secret treasure. Even a trunk or chest full of old dress-up clothes would have been nice, like in the movies. But, no. It was pretty empty up there except for the dust.
There was enough room for me to stand up, and there were wooden beams across the floor. Between each beam were white rectangles separated by thin pieces of wood. When my sister finished climbing up, I told her to follow me as I leaped from beam to beam. We heard the giggles of two girls as they were playing. It seemed like we were in the same room, but they couldn’t see us because we were hidden like spies. I squatted down and looked through a crack in the floor. I could see my best friend playing dolls with another girl. I knocked on the ceiling, and they were confused. I giggled to myself.
I stood up again, jumping from beam to beam. Suddenly I accidentally stepped on a white rectangle, and CRASH! I fell through the ceiling, right onto a square metal trashcan. I knocked a clock off the wall on the way down, and it shattered on the hard floor. That floor was really hard, and it all happened so quickly that I was in shock. That split second was blurry, and I felt dizzy. One of the girls was in the living room and saw me fall through the ceiling. She laughed and went to tell our dorm mother. I knew I was in trouble. My poor little sister peered through the gaping hole at her injured sister. She must have backtracked her steps to get out of the scene of the crime. Who knows if she could be seen whistling nonchalantly as she walked to her dorm room, pretending as if nothing had happened?
I was deluged with questions from my dorm mother, all of which I answered instantly and honestly. She decided not to spank me, since my toosh was already in bad shape. Luckily I hadn’t broken any bones. However, I did not get away with it scott free. Both my sister and I had to peel potatoes for a month, and many of those potatoes had worms in them. We were just grateful that we had escaped worse punishment. For the whole month, I had to take a pillow with me from class to class to sit on, since it was too painful to sit on a hard chair. I suppose my injury punished me enough to think twice before investigating suspicious places again.
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Tags: attic, childhood, Growing Up as a Missionary Kid, Guatemala, spies
