sweating like they had run their own hand-marathon. I desperately turned my dresser inside out looking for anything to make me look like I could at least legally drive. My loyal friend, of course, was rolling on my bed watching me with tears streaming down her face as I anxiously waited certain conviction for my crime.
I finally settled on my William & Mary shirt, then curled up on top of the stairs leading down to my front door, muscles tense and rocking slightly back and forth.
A few minutes in tense silence passed. Well, tense for me.
The doorbell rang.
I shrieked and fell down the stairs. Isabella bolted into my brother’s room to watch me suffer below. I rushed to the door, taking a deep breath to calm myself and dispel the nervous tremors in my hands. With a serene and blank face, I pulled open the door and greeted the young man standing there in a FedEx uniform with a pleasant smile.
Through the blur that was the next forty-five seconds, I distinctly remember three points. The first thing I recall thinking was that the unknowing delivery service employee looked like a hobbit. The next point is that my signature, which I nonchalantly agreed to give, looked exactly like the sort of scribble you will commonly find in preschool classrooms. The third was that after I composedly accepted the package he offered in response to my suspicious signature, I completely lost my head.
After taking the simple brown cardboard box, I lasted about three seconds before beginning to scream bloody murder and simultaneously slam the door shut with enough force to knock out a walrus.
I watched, as if detached from my body, as hysteria bubbled up in my throat and an atrocious sound erupted from my vocal cords. The poor FedEx guy, who was only doing his job, was left looking dumbstruck on my doorstep while I turned away, still screeching as though being tortured, and ran up the stairs, tossing the package aside, and catapulted myself into the bathroom, locking the door behind me.
Isabella tried and failed to contain her enormous laughter as she unconvincingly comforted me through the bathroom door. I, in my defense, had truly thought I was going to be arrested. I was sure I had blown my cover and the cops would be barging into my house any minute to take me away. I laid on the cold tile, coiled against the base of the toilet, crying hysterically and raving about my impending arrest.
When my mother arrived just a minute later, I refused to unlock the door at first. Finally, as Isabella explained what had happened through her gasping breaths and streaming eyes, I let them coax me out where I was promptly ridiculed and turned to go shut myself in again.
The FedEx employee, apparently, had stopped to talk to my mother as she pulled up into the driveway and bewilderedly asked whether it had been her daughter who answered the door. My mother, worried and confused, though not unsuspecting that I had somehow made a fool out of myself, hurried into the house.
For the next few days, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the police showed up to imprison me. Due to my supreme ability to remain calm under pressure, of course, I evaded capture and maintained my unblemished relationship with the law. Now, I live the vaguely guilty life of a skilled fugitive, ducking behind trees whenever I see police cars on my way home from school and avoiding officers milling around in case they recognize me from the Most Wanted board.
I trust you, now, with my secret. It has been a long time since I first saw that fateful FedEx truck, unacquainted to the fact that it held the net intended to snag my youthful innocence.
Who am I kidding, it was a couple months ago. Just don’t tell anyone, okay?
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