One night Scuz and I decided to spend the night in the high school. Another venture for which we would no doubt be arrested nowadays. Scuz has carefully hidden her checkered past from her three sons, whereas I have entertained my daughter with stories of my questionable character for years.
We hid in the auditorium at first, on the stage under the grand piano. We brought submarine sandwiches which we unwrapped and began to eat while we waited for everyone to leave the building. And then… Drama Club! They came in to rehearse! We had never thought about that. There we were, under the piano, and suddenly the smell of the ham and cheese and olive oil was so strong we were sure people could smell our subs two blocks away. We would surely be discovered. But we weren’t. After at least an hour of quietly chewing and crouching under the piano the Drama Club left. We got up and stretched and as we ventured out from behind the curtains we had another rude shock. The janitorial staff! The building was crawling with custodians! Something else we hadn’t thought about.
As I think back, I wonder. Did we ever think about ANYTHING?
Scuz stepped behind a stage curtain just before a custodian walked in. Her black high topped converse sneakers stuck out from behind the curtain. How could they not spot her? But they didn’t notice. We snuck out and tried to get in a classroom. It was locked. And so was the next. And the next. They were all locked! Why? Why would anyone try to get in a classroom if they didn’t have to? We had figured we would steal hall passes and look up people’s grades. Possibly leave a souvenier in a desk.
When we were in 8th grade, Scuz found a baby frog that had been run over by cars about a thousand times and had flattened out till it was like a piece of cardboard. She held it up to her lapel.
“You think it would make a nice pin?”
After 8th grade graduation we snuck in the classroom of a particularly deserving teacher and left it in her desk. I would hope that an entire summer in a hot desk would have done wonders for its odor, but the guts had been squished out of it pretty thoroughly.
Anyway, the high school sleep over caper was pretty much a wash out after we climbed up the clock tower and found a box of food to be used in case of air raids. We had done the old,
“I’m spending the night at her house, she’s spending the night at my house,”
routine with our parents. Now we had the dilemma of how to get back in our houses at eleven pm. We told our mothers we had a fight.
Heard in the Classroom 