I can't speculate with any authority on the differences between the world in which boys live and the world which greets girls every morning. What I can say with certainty is that I was an idiot when I was a kid. My world was filled with stupid things that I was doing or had already done. As it happened Jeremiah was an idiot too, and when you put two idiots heads together, one plus one equals zero. Or less.
We hit it off just fine. My mom picked him up when she went to drop off a box of those godawful sweaters and I happily showed him around to all my favorite spots. Favorite trees to climb, favorite pile of old lumber to look for snakes under, favorite things to shoot with BB guns, favorite electric fence to try to jump over without getting electrocuted (hopefully), and many more.
It wasn't long until my carton of 10 million BBs was empty, so we put our heads together and decided it would be a good idea to ride bikes to the hardware store in town some 13 miles away to get some more, and that's what we did.
It's unfair to blame the marketing genius who put the bags of smoke bombs and model rocket engines next to the BBs in the aisle at the hardware store. It's unfair to blame the kindly old woman behind the counter who sold them to us without asking questions. Tempting, but ultimately unfair. This was still the pre-terrorist paranoia age of bliss and ignorance you see.
Armed with 10 million more BBs, an arsenal of smoke bombs, and enough model rocket engines to push the world out of orbit in a sack big enough to make Santa look twice, we arrived triumphantly back at the house on a mission for strike-anywhere matches, which hadn't yet been deemed the worst thing in the world to keep around the house by the department of "Holy Crap Whose Idea Was This?" We found them, and began joyfully filling pockets of the atmosphere with brightly colored smoke that reeked like sulfur and taco farts. That's when one of us (I'd like to believe it was him, but we'll never know...) had a brilliant idea.
It rarely gets above eighty in Vermont, and nobody had bothered to install air conditioning in the house. It was kept cool instead by placing a giant fan in the window on one side of the house blowing in, and another one upstairs in a window blowing out, resulting in a nice breeze of fresh air through the whole house. It was just beneath the downstairs fan that we, giggling, simultaneously lit every purple smoke bomb in the sack.
The little fuses burned quickly, and like every other time we'd lit them nothing happened for exactly one split second; just long enough for us to wonder if they hadn't all been duds. Then, tremendously, each unassuming little purple ball began to belch thick purple smoke in rich churning clouds, every one of which was sucked directly into the house by the giant window fan.
Seconds later we recognized the telltale silence that follows when the rungachik machine stops defiling the fashion world, and we were suddenly terrified. The silence was almost immediately broken by a screen door slamming on the other side of the house and the rapidly escalating air-raid siren that could only be my mother about to rip our skeletons out and beat us with them.
Somehow, miraculously, we survived. If I remember correctly we used the "I had no idea the fan would suck up all the smoke" defense. We were ordered with no small amount of gusto not to come anywhere near the house until our early twenties and had to relinquish our remaining smoke bombs. We failed to mention that we also had rocket engines.
Instead we ran to the hills. Behind us was the sound of windows being thrown open, and the odd sight of an entire house weeping stinky purple smoke in swirling tendrils up into the sky from every opening. It was a sight to behold, but we soon forgot about it and set about finding new and exciting ways to implement rocket propulsion into our daily lives.
We were, but would not long be, unscathed.
Previous: Part 1 The Setup
Next: Part 3: The Second Mistake
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