Chapter Eleven

It was almost 8 o’clock. I zipped up my jacket, which was black. Come to think of it, I was wearing all black. I just felt like for the Prank for Just Once, I had to be a ninja, and the only way I felt anywhere close to ninja-like was to dress up in all black, and put my hood up.
I left the house. Aunt Clara didn’t notice. No big surprise there. I started to walk over to the back side of Wal-mart, keeping my hand on my cell phone in my pocket just in case anything happened.
Damien was supposed to meet me by the dumpster with all the stuff ready to go. But I didn’t see him until about ten minutes later. He was in his broken-down car. He pulled it over close to me, and smiled.
“You’re late!” I said.
“No, you’re just early.”
“You can’t blame me. I’m super excited.”
“I know. Get in.”
I walked around the car by the front, his headlights shining in my eyes for a brief moment before I found the car door. I opened the door, and put myself in the seat.
“By the way, you look sexy in all black,” he said, smiling.
I smiled back. “You can go ahead and tell Charlie that. ‘Hey, Charlie! I saw your girlfriend last night, and she was so HOT!’”
He laughed. “Exactly. Now, I’ve got all the stuff in the back trunk. We’ll get it out and everything.”
“Do you have the address to her house and the directions?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said, holding a piece of paper. “I got everything all ready, thank you very much.”
“I thought you said you didn’t believe in planning.”
“Sometimes,” he started, moving the gearshift, “you’ve got to plan for the future to live in the present.”
That made absolutely no sense to me, but I didn’t give it a second thought as we started driving through the dark streets in search for Chrissy’s house.
“Is that the place?” I asked, pointing. I had to ask because I couldn’t tell. The numbers were too hard to see in the dark.
Damien looked at the house, then at the paper, then back at the house, and then back at the paper. “Um… I think this is it.”
I smiled to myself. “Sweet. Let’s do this!”
So we slowly got out of the car, and quietly closed the doors so we would make as minimum noise as possible.
We tip-toed towards the house.
“Wait,” I said, stopping the two of us. “How are we going to get in? We haven’t even thought of that!”
Damien smiled at me, and kept going forward. He turned the doorknob on the front door, and it swung open.
“They leave their door unlocked?” I asked, slightly surprised.
“Of course,” Damien said. “You see, they leave their door opened because they’re so rich, they really don’t care if anything gets stolen, since it won’t affect them at all.”
“Wow,” I whispered to myself. “I wish I was that rich.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Depends.”
Silence.
“We should go in,” he said.
“Let’s.”
The door barely creaked as we slowly opened it and stepped inside the house.
The house was big. And when I say big, I mean big. It was extremely wide, and as I walked in I could already see another room on the other side of the huge staircase, and then three or possibly four doors already leading off into different rooms. Even though the house was as gigantic as possible, you could still smell the disgusting eu de disgusting foreign perfume around the room.
“Where do you think Chrissy is?” I whispered to Damien.
“Why, where all the spoiled rich kids sleep,” he whispered back. “On the top floor, in one of the corner rooms.”
“How do you possibly know that?”
“The corner rooms are the ones with the bathrooms, that’s why.”
I rolled my eyes, but I was impressed with his knowledge of room locations in the house.
We went up the stairs as quietly as we could. This took us a minute, because in our minds, the slower, the quieter.
And then we started peering through the cracks in the doors, searching for the bitchy princess in her sleep. Finally, we found her, exactly where Damien had said: in the bedroom on the far left.
“All right,” he said. He pulled out a bottle with the color of puke-green. Perfect. “Take this, and go into the bathroom. I’ll take this other bottle and try to find her dress for the dance coming up.”
“How do you know she’s already got a dress?”
“Paige, this is Chrissy White,” he explained. “Of course she’s got a dress already.”
I shrugged, but trusted him. As I grabbed the bottle out of his hand, I slowly crept into Chrissy’s bathroom. I saw her in bed, turned onto her side, completely still. She looked completely pale in the dark light, and she could’ve passed off as being dead.
So I went into Chrissy’s bathroom. And I looked at her shampoo. It was the same color of puke-green that was in the bottle in my hand. Perfect.
I unscrewed the top of the shampoo bottle, drained a bit of the shampoo, and poured the green dye in my bottle into the shampoo. I closed the bottle and shook it so that the green would get mixed with the shampoo. And then I left it.
I found her hair straightener, which was conveniently placed next to her shampoo, as if she knew I was going to come sabotage it. So that’s exactly what I did: sabotage it. I used a hairpin to unscrew the plastic top off, and then started fiddling with the mechanism inside. Normally I had like this weird karma for anything that needed to be plugged in, and I would always end up screwing up the device somehow. This, for once, came in handy when it came down to messing with Chrissy’s hair straightener.
“Pst!” I barely heard Damien say from Chrissy’s room. I looked out of the bathroom, and saw him putting a dress wrapped in a cover back into the closet. “I’m good with my part. You ready?”
“Uh,” I said, putting the hair straightener back in its original position so it looked like no one had even touched it. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“Good, let’s get the hell out of here before she wakes up.”
But I wasn’t too worried about her waking up. She looked particularly dead at the moment. I would have been more worried if she arose rather than woke up, like a zombie.
“Let’s go, Paige!” he exclaimed/whispered, which made his voice sound rasp.
So again, as quietly as possible, we stealthily (like the ninja I knew I was) back down the stairs, and swiftly moved our bodies out of the door.
Once out the door, we slowly closed it again, causing it to creak slightly, but once it was closed, we sprinted as fast as one who fails at PE can sprint, and flew into his car, and sped off as fast as Damien’s foot could hit the gas pedal.
I screamed. “Oh my God, that was freaking amazing!”
Damien started laughing extremely hard, and I joined him.
“That was so intense,” Damien exclaimed, still laughing loudly.
“I know! Like, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, and I thought I was going to explode or something like that!”
He laughed at me, still driving as fast as he could.
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“Uh,” he looked at his watch. “It’s 9:30? Only? Well. We’ve got the rest of the night. What do you want to do?”
“What can one do in the middle of the night, driving around and doing something extremely dangerous?”
“Extremely dangerous?” Damien asked.
“Yes. Extremely dangerous,” I repeated.
“How so?”
“We just pranked Chrissy White, if you haven’t exactly noticed.”
“What’s so dangerous about that?”
I thought about it. “Now that you mention it, you’ve got a very good point, sir.”
He smiled. “You have to be able to see people for who they are.”
“I’m sure you’re a master at that.”
He shrugged. “Kind of.”
I laughed.
“Why are we so loud?” he asked.
“Because we just had to be super quiet for such a long time!”
“All right!” he screamed. “Tonight is going to be the time of your life, Paige!”
“What? Why? What’s going on?”
“The night is young, and we’re going on a joy ride just for the hell of it!”
I laughed. “We just did the most epic, thing, shouldn’t we take a break?” I asked.
“Stop living in the past, Paige!”
“Fine, I’ll forget about the Prank for the moment. But when are we going to go back to our houses and stuff?”
“You also need to stop living in the future. We’ll get home, don’t worry, but for right now, focus on what we’re doing now an enjoy yourself!”
I smiled at him. I un-clicked the buckle that held my seatbelt down, and stood up in my seat.
“What the hell are you doing?” I heard Damien scream.
“Start driving as fast as you can!”
“What?”
“Just do it!”
And I lunged back as he stomped his foot onto the gas pedal. “YES, THAT’S PERFECT,” I said loudly, because I had opened the moon roof, and all the air rushed through making it hard to hear anything.
I stuck my head out, and then my torso, and raised my arms in the air and screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even mean to get a point across or anything, I just screamed. Lived in the moment. The hard breeze flying through my locks, the subtle yet strong smell of tires scratching against the road. And the noise. The “whoosh” of the air the “grr” or the tires, and hearing everything over my screaming. It was so freaking amazing.
“All right, all right,” I barely heard Damien shout. “We get it, don’t kill yourself! Come on back in.”
I squeezed myself back into the car through the moon roof.
“My God, Paige, you’re going to wake up everyone in the neighbor hood.”
I laughed, mostly at myself. “I was just living in the present.”
“Tell me about it. You went nuts.”
I laughed again, this time at him. “So where are we off to?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. Where to, m’lady?”
“Very funny. Uh, well… I’m still unfamiliar with the area. Let’s just drive around for a bit.”
So that’s what we did. We drove. And drove. And talked. We talked to each other about things that I couldn’t really imagine Damien talking about after talking to him during the past couple days. I mean, everything he said to me lately I really thought deeply about for long periods of time. But this time, we basically flew across the roads in his beat-down car, actually having a conversation two normal people might have. Like “small talk” or whatever the hell it was called. It was nice, though, because it was something a little different. It was great to see all the sides, all the different flavors, of Damien.
“Dude, this has been one of the most exciting nights,” I said.
“Why? You know, the Prank isn’t even funny yet. I mean, just wait until we see her tomorrow and see all the affects of what we’ve done.”
I laughed. “That will be awesome.”
“Indeed it will be. So what time is it right now?”
I checked my phone. “It’s past midnight. We’ve been driving and doing nothing for hours.”
“At least it has been fun,” he said.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“I’m not ready for this night to end yet,” he told me.
I yawned. I only just realized how tired I was. “I am. God, I hate the fact we have school tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Hey, let’s go to the back seat.”
I raised my eyebrows at him, and he parked the car in a 7-eleven parking lot, which was completely empty.
“Not to make out or anything, I know you’re with Charlie and I’m still in love with Jessica, but it’s easier to, like, rest in the back seat.”
I laughed at him. “I wasn’t thinking about making out, but you have a fair point.” So I got out of the car through the door, and went to the back door and opened it and got in. Damien just jumped over the middle part of the car and got there before me.
I sat. I was on the right window seat, and Damien on the left, leaving the middle part empty. I yawned again.
“You’re tired,” Damien pointed out.
“Great observation, Mr. Obvious,” I said sarcastically.
He laughed lightly. “Here.” He lightly held my shoulders, and pulled me towards him, so that my feet kicked the car door and my head was on his lap. “Better?”
“I guess.”
“I bet you wish I was Charlie, though, right?”
I laughed. “Yeah, sure.”
Awkward silence.
“Tonight was epic,” I finally said, my voice almost gone. I only just realized that my eyes were closed, and I was in that balled up position I was always in when I was asleep.
“I thought you were asleep,” Damien said in a sleepy voice.
“I am,” I said. “Kind of.”
I felt Damien look down on me. “Your eyes are closed, and you look potentially asleep. Are you sleep talking or something?”
“No, Damien, I’m kind of half asleep.”
“I see. It’s like 1 AM. You should fall another half asleep.”
“Why are you still awake.”
I felt him shrug. “Well, first of all it’s dangerous to fall asleep in a car. And I want you to sleep. Secondly, I’m not very tired. Just go to sleep.”
“You need sleep, too,” I told him.
“Relax, Paige. I’ll be fine. I’ve pulled all-nighters before, so just go to sleep.”
“But—”
“Hush,” he said, much like how Charlie told Katie sometimes. “Sleep. Now.”
“Make me,” I said, smiling to myself.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Then too bad.”
“Paige, please, we’ve got school tomorrow.”
“You need sleep, too.”
“Fine,” he said. “If I sleep, will you sleep?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Good night, Paige.”
“Good night, Damien.”