After much deliberation, Jeremiah and I concluded that there was no reasonable explanation that my mother would believe for the condition of the Swiss cheese that I was pretending were pants. No roving hordes of starving moths had been spotted in the area, no acid rain of sufficient strength had fallen, and we had heard of no news headlines recalling pairs of rapidly evaporating denim pants, at least not in my size.
So instead of a cover story, we decided it would be best to hide it and pretend it never happened. I left Jeremiah on the porch and ninja-stalked my way into my room for a fresh pair. It wasn't easy. Every footstep and creaky board reminded me that it was one thing to be caught with abnormally breezy britches, it was another to be caught trying to sneak into the house to destroy all evidence of said britches right under my mothers nose.
There were two elements which played out in my favor: First, the rung'achik machine was working overtime, doing its very best to ensure that legions of little old ladies would remain conspicuously fashion impaired. This fact allowed me to time my steps, each one taking my weight exactly as the next line of doomed yarn was being knit into its predecessor. Second, almost all of my pants were pretty much exactly the same, which meant that I could slip into one of many convincing doppelgangers and be on my way, free and easy.
By my calculations it took me about an hour to weasel my way up the stairs into my room. My room, of course, was directly above the room my mother used as her knitting station. As such, my heart was gripped with a terror that only a kid who is guilty of heinous crimes against laundry, and who is exactly one creaky floor board away from being caught and ultimately destroyed, can feel.
Somehow, against all odds, I made it. I threw my holy pants out the window and got the attention of Jeremiah who had become preoccupied with a bucket of baseball bats on the porch waiting for me. He maneuvered over to where they had fallen and picked them up, trying in vain to hide in plain site by bobbing and weaving, all the while glancing furtively around like a chipmunk in a room full of hyenas. Once he had them, he didn't know what to do with them and stood there on the porch holding them out at arms length as if they were some sort of sorely injured poisonous snake. I motioned that he should run. He ran.
I listened. I didn't hear anything. The rung'achik machine was silent! Had my mother seen the passing shadow of flying pants graze her window and gone to investigate? Had she seen Jeremiah running like a guilty chicken around on the lawn, obviously up to something? I didn't know, and wasn't about to find out. Rather than risk the unknown dangers that lurked in the kitchen, I opted instead to tango with gravity. We had tangoed before, with mixed results. I'd won a few rounds, gravity had won a few rounds. I had never, on the other hand, won a round against my mother.
New pants in hand, I wormed my way out of the window and onto the roof of the little shed that was attached to the house. It's lucky that we were in rural Vermont instead of in some suburb somewhere, because the site of a skinny kid in his tighty-whities shimmying out of a second story window while waving a pair of pants around wildly probably wouldn't have gone unnoticed. I closed the screen behind me, scooted rather uncomfortably down the shingles and jumped down onto the lawn.
I landed in a crouch that I imagined was like that of a cat, but what was undoubtedly much more like a gangly, pale kid with a bad haircut, a serious wedgie, and shingle-grit in his butt squatting awkwardly on the grass. I donned the pants, rendezvoused with Jeremiah who hadn't gone far, and we bolted again into the relative safety of the woods where we'd left our remaining rocket engines.
We buried the pants in a shallow, unmarked grave in a sunlit clearing there in the woods. No words were spoken, but there was a sense of loss, of relief, and a sort of collective understanding that we must never speak of what had happened there. Only now some twenty years later am I secure enough to talk about it. Amazingly, as testament to just how unbelievably stupid we were, we continued to want to play with fire. Jeremiah had been formulating a new terrifically bad idea, and we decided to try it.
Previous: Part 3: The Second Mistake
Next: Part 5: The Final Mistake
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