The lights turned on. “Who’s there??” a deep baritone voice called out. We ran out of that yard, on to the field, and ran. Regret filled in my lungs, but fear powered me to keep running.

It is safe to say that on that night, I discovered feelings in myself and in my friends that I have never felt or thought of feeling before
But let’s start from the beginning.

That day had been amazing. It was a Friday, for starters, and my family and I had just adopted a puppy. I was pretty euphoric. I had friends that came over after school, and they had all left. We were dropping off my friend at her house, so then she chose then to invite me to her birthday party. She went inside while I thought about the offer. Just as I was thinking to accept, one of my friends pulled up to the house. We greeted each other with the casual ‘hey’ and went inside. My friend and I, who had just come into the house, decided to play a practical joke on our friends, who were upstairs. They were playing miniature basketball on a hoop that was on a door. I opened the door a crack, and then we both ran in, shouting, with guns-a-blazing (literally, my friend had a gun sound app on his phone).

They screamed, and we started doubling over, laughing at their misfortune.

There was a collection of 5 kids total at the party. We were trying to come up with something to do when we all came to the conclusion that we should play manhunt. Now, for those of you who don’t know what manhunt is, it is a version of hide and seek tag played at the dark of night.

We all went outside and walked over to the Brown rugby field, which doubled as our playing field. One of our friends started to count, and we all ran wildly away to various spots that were concealed by the darkness of night.
The game itself instills a sort of fear/endorphin-induced superspeed, which was a very good tool to have, considering the stakes, which were that we did not want to lose. My friend and I  ran to a mulch pile to hide behind.

I am almost sure that I have my own personal stealth mode which allows me to move silently without being caught.
Back to the story.

My friend and I were hiding behind the mulch pile, while our tagger friend, who will remain nameless, started to walk in the general direction of where we were cowering behind the pile.

At that moment, the tagger saw a leg sticking out of the mulch pile which is an odd thing to see, anywhere at anytime. He finally realized that it was not, in fact, an abnormal mulch pile but a human hiding behind this said mulch pile. I then noticed my friend, who was the tagger, pick up in speed and realized that the friend who was sitting beside me had mistakenly compromised our hiding spot. I whispered,”run!” into his ear and we bolted, like lightning out of a cloud. He and I were admittedly the fastest runners that night and we used it to our advantage. We ran to a shadow-encased area of the field that was almost impossible to make out from even a couple yards away. We sat down and caught our breath while the tagger pursued another player. We laughed as we watched him pass by us many times, and tag other players. We started to exit our hiding place to find one where we had more cover, and that is when we were spotted.

We tore out of there as fast as we could, with 3 people closing in at us from different angles that we were trying to compensate by amping up our speed. We ran and we ran, probably faster than Usain Bolt...

But I’m getting off topic.
This all came to one solid conclusion that all you guys and girls out there probably already figured out.
We tired out fast and they caught up to us.
We were tagged, and the friend that I had been hiding with was unanimously declared ‘it’.
We were starting to debate over this matter when he finally said “fine, I’ll be it.”
The new round started and for some reason, a couple of us decided to go through this opening on a large fence that encompassed the field.
You can already tell this was a bad idea.

We snuck onto this front yard that was partially fenced and I was dumb enough to follow along, not noticing that it would be a dead end,  and, if the tagger found us, we would be dead. And the tagger did find us. I crouched down , hoping he wouldn’t notice. At first, he ran past, tagged the two other players, then noticed me and ran back and tagged me. This all happened in about two seconds. Then a light in the house which was located at the end of the yard flickered on, and we were all temporarily blinded.

This is now leading up to the point in which I started this story.

The owner of this house started to walk out of the door.

We did what we knew best.

We ran.

Now, in this exact moment, time slowed down and you could see the mixes and changes of emotion in everyone’s face. The most common emotion that I recognized was fear.

The good thing is we made it out alive. The owner, for all we knew, did not see us or our faces. We slowed down, still moving past an enclosed area which held inactive earth-moving equipment. We saw flashlights cutting through the pitch black tarp over the chain link fence. We thought it was the owner of the establishment which we had falsely trespassed on, but we were mistaken. It turned out it was 2 teenagers walking through a secret passage accessed by climbing up onto a concrete wall. They had apparently heard us but thought it to be something else and continued walking to their supposed car (I said ‘supposed’ because one of our friends speculated this at a later time.). One of our friends shouted “YOLO!” loud enough for them to hear and we heard someone say, “Huh? Who’s there?!” and we started running again.

We were still running, cutting over a fence to another field. After a while, we collected our wits and various pieces of our stomachs that we had left behind. My friend sat down, breathing hard, on the dark sandy ground of a baseball diamond. The rest of our friends had just gone over the fence and wondered why he was sitting down. I told them his asthma was acting up and he needed to sit down for a second.

We decided after that we should walk back to the house and grab something to eat.

At that time, everybody calmed down and we were sitting down to watch a movie.

Then all of our phones started buzzing. These were all texts from disgruntled friends who had seen a social media post and were angry that they were not invited. We decided to ignore most of them, continuing with the movie.

That movie, by the way, was called  Napoleon Dynamite, a hilarious comedy about a socially awkward boy who just wants to fit in. After the movie was finished, everyone had dinner and then were brought home by tired parents who were just recently enjoying the comforts of their beds.

The next day, everyone agreed that this new group of friends brought together by a single birthday party to be declared the Napoleon friday. We have since performed a ritual alike to the one practiced that one Friday.

That one night was an amazing experience for me and I am also hoping that it was just as great for the rest of my friends.

Looking back on this event and thinking about the events that happened that night, I definitely agree that on that Friday, a great event took place.