From my writing class.

my assignment was to write about something awful that I've done. True to my form, I wrote about something not so awful but in my memory it's "totally the worst thing i've ever done." I knew other people in my class would write about suicide attempts, adultery and abortions but seeing as I couldn't fake my way through one of those *thankfully* i stuck to my guns and wrote what i knew to be true. It is, afterall, a memoir class. That didn't stop my teacher from responding with: "this is your something awful??" which confirmed my guess that others wrote about really crap things they did. She went on to say that she was just kidding and indeed liked the piece. It's not my best work but it's still writing and I think it's good to broaden my "audience" and since you're all so supportive to even be reading my blog, here's a bone:

Just a few days after my older brother left for college, he suffered a collapsed lung. Though the doctors assured my parents that he would recover fully, they caught the next plane from New York to Georgia to be by his side, as he regained his strength in the foreign southern city of Atlanta. Being the good girl, always trying hard to please, I was inherently trustworthy. I was left alone in suburbia to care for the beloved family dog and given the task of keeping myself alive for the long weekend while my parents were away. This all seemed easy enough and a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to my parents, my friends, and the rest of the world that my maturity had truly peaked.

It was late August and my sophomore year of high school would be starting soon. The air was thick with humidity and each day was spent with friends, driving around from one food establishment to the next in search of air conditioning and something exciting to do that might extend the afternoon and the impending start of school. Boredom was at the root each activity but so was a deep love for one another; we were bonded together, sealed by sweat and teenage angst.

After two months of riding shotgun, I finally had the offer of something somewhat new and stimulating to offer my closest girlfriends: a sleepover at my parentless house. The empty house meant the chance to drink the two beers we could stomach at our leisure and it also meant money (that we didn’t have to earn babysitting), for a pizza delivery. No, it wouldn’t change our lives or make us grow up any faster but it was a little taste of the freedom we had worked hard for all summer – the wind thrashing through open car windows, red faced and singing until our throats grew sore.

It was a win-win situation, really. My parents had the peace of mind knowing that my well-rounded, dependable girlfriends were keeping me company in their absence while my friends had a refuge from their own guarded and inhabited homes.

I don’t remember how it all got out of hand, as I have the tendency to block out whole parts of conversations or events where I’m guilty or at fault. In this case, over a dozen fifteen year olds, girls and boys, ended up spending the night at my house while my panicked parents were off tending to my injured brother. I suppose I must have invited a few friends over and before I knew it, their boyfriends and their friends, were coming over too. We spent the night listening to jam bands with our eyes closed, scavenging through the pantry for sweets and reveling in what we thought was adulthood. No sex was had on that night, no hard drugs were consumed and there were no emergency trips to the hospital for a stomach to be pumped. I only found out the next day that some of my friends had been smoking "hash," as my father would later refer to it. And they smoked it out on the deck, not even inside the actual house. We were good kids, after all.

The thrill soon turned to dread when my guests’ parents became suspicious about the many conflicting stories being told regarding where their children had slept the night before. Slowly, their whereabouts had been placed and before I knew it, I was the demon child who had selfishly hosted a wild underage orgy while my selfless parents were out of town with my brother and his one functioning lung.By the time my parents returned home the next day, all the details had been leaked by the other parents and even by me, dripping with a guilt so deep, I was sure I would carry it with me throughout the rest of my inadequate life. I hung my head in shame when my parents grounded me for an indefinite amount of time and told me how surprised and of course, disappointed, they were with me. I had hardly ever been grounded in my life and if I had, the punishment had faded quickly. This was different. This one was going to stick. In orchestrating and executing a co-ed sleepover at the tender age of fifteen, I had officially crossed over from good girl land to the dark side and life would never be the same.