It was third grade summer break and my family went on vacation to visit relatives and friends. We had dinner with some old friends of my parents from way back when. I didn’t know them but because their daughter was my age it seemed appropriate to everybody else to send us both to her room for hours so the grownups could talk. It was a large house and a bit ritzy, and even though it was nighttime they didn’t have the lights on in the halls or anything. For some reason the ritziness and the darkness made it all seem like a fancy haunted house to me. We played for a bit and then my new “friend” decides to watch a movie. She takes me to some room upstairs where the lights are all off and throws in a movie. I forget which. But as we’re sitting together in the dark room a preview comes up for “Hocus Pocus” – a Disney film about the three witch sisters who say “Double, double, toil and trouble” and all that. My eight year old “friend” starts spontaneously SCREAMING. So I start screaming! I was thoroughly freaked out to be in a strange house in a dark room with a strange (and I also suspected spoiled) little girl next to me screaming. We frantically try to find the door in the black room, and as we get to the door knob our parents have already bolted up the stairs to save us from whatever it is that’s making us yell like lunatics. The lights go on and my little friend recovers and then starts laughing. “She just started screaming for no reason, so I did too. She was probably afraid of the movie,” she tells her parents. I was in tears from being so rattled and furious and I just couldn’t get the words out to tell anyone that she was lying. I was humiliated.

Beth the Other Admin