Ah, 14 years old. The time in any young teenage girls life where everything revolves around boys. Everywhere you go your looking over your shoulder hoping to see that perfect boy. You seem to have this fairy tale vision in your head: you and said perfect boy lock eyes realizing at once that you two were meant for each other, he runs over and sweeps you off your feet (literally) and your lips lock into the most perfect kiss you can imagine (which really isn’t that perfect considering you haven’t even had your first kiss yet so you really have nothing to compare it to – but that’s beside the point right?).
I was the epitome of previously described 14-year-old girl. It seemed everything in my life revolved around boys. The nice thing about having this be my obsession was it was also my aunt’s obsession and she was only about a year older then I was. So at every family outing the two of us were always ‘on the look out’.
My family has a time share on a house boat down at Lake Powell and so every summer we would spend a week down there ‘catching up’ with each others lives. This also turned out to be great ‘guy watch’ time. Pathetic, I know. I remember many times cruising down the channel, with my grandparents no less, and checking out the guys (I guess we can’t really call them ‘guys’ at this stage of life right? Should I use ‘boys’?) in other boats.
The summer after my eighth grade year was no different. Darcy (my aunt) and I spent our days down at Lake Powell lounging on top of our house boat waiting for any ‘hot boys’ to pass. There seemed to be a drought of ‘hot boys’ that year so I think we got to the point that any boy within our age rage would pass as eye candy.
This year was also my first year wearing a ‘two pieced’ swimming suit. It was a strange and exhilarating feeling all rolled into one. I finally felt like a woman. I was finally going to get the attention that I deserved… all due to showing my stomach… or at least that’s what my 14-year-old mind was telling me.
One exceptionally hot day Darcy and I were lounging on the top of the house boat after a nice dip in the lake when we saw a house boat about the size of ours pull onto the beach across the canyon from us. We watched as a plethora of boys piled out of the cabin onto the top of their house boat. We took one look at each other and immediately knew what we needed to do. This called for the first ‘real’ shower we had taken all week and possibly firing up the generator to blow dry and curl our hair.
Darcy was the first to be done getting ready, spending a good 55 minutes as opposed to my 65 minutes, so she was already sprawled out upon our air mattress that we were going to use to ‘accidentally’ float across that canyon to said boys house boat, when I appeared on the back of the boat. I kindly asked Darcy to paddle back and pick me up seeing as the mattress had floated a good five feet away from where I was standing. Darcy politely refused (we were always so nice to each other…) and I was left with thinking up some brilliant plan as to how I could get from the back of the house boat to the air mattress completely dry.
I pondered for a moment as I looked around and took in my surroundings. My uncles friend Brian was sitting in a lawn chair watching my predicament as were the ‘cute boys’ across the canyon. I knew I had to do something awe inspiring. After just a few more moments of pondering a light bulb went off in my head. I would commence to jump belly first and land on the air mattress gracefully. I once again looked around to make sure that everyone was watching and then launched myself from my dry stable ground hoping that in a few brief seconds I would feel the air mattress underneath me.
I closed my eyes as soon as I was airborne and looking back that was probably a good idea considering had I seen what was coming there would probably have been a loud shriek followed by some thrashing of limbs. Instead of feeling the softness of the air mattress as I landed I felt the ice-cold smack of the waters of Lake Powell hit me and knock the air out of me. This was not what I had expected. I sucked in a breath feeling the cold water fill my lungs as I quickly scrambled to the surface. My head popped out of the water and I sputtered water everywhere. I could quickly tell that the mascara that I had so carefully applied to my eyelashes was running down my face.
And then I heard the laughter. It was coming from the air mattress, the back of our house boat and across the canyon. I looked around to see the source of the laughter but instead my eyes landed on my swimming suit top floating a couple feet away from me. How it happened to dismantle itself from my body and float a couple feet away I will never know. All I do know is that the blood quickly drained from my face as I grabbed it and tried to cover myself.
This was quite possibly the most humiliating experience I had yet to have and the next thing I heard made it almost unbearable. From the back deck of my house boat my uncles friend who had seen the whole debacle loudly stated:
“Now Megan, that is something I will NEVER forget.”
Apparently I won’t ever forget it either.
