At one point in my life, I was a good student. By no means was I a genius, but I was always willing to do my homework and I never handed in anything late. I also never skipped school, never skipped class, and was even occasionally considered the teacher's pet. This wavered slightly during the fourth grade, through a game of telephone, but it wasn't until the ninth grade that I had any real taste of defiance.
I had been good friends with Paige for a while now, and had reignited my once-dormant friendship with Isabelle, and spent almost all of my time with the two of them. They had a good friend, Theresa, who would, on occasion, tag along with us when she wasn't mixing with a higher caliber of people. I imagine that she saw speaking to me as an act of charity, and it's her snotty attitude that made me dislike her right off the bat.
We were in the french immersion class, as we had been since kindergarten, but it was only in middle school that we were mixed in with the regular students. Still, we rarely saw any of the english-speaking students outside of our elective courses, so we acted as a kind of dysfunctional family most of the time.
It was the first P.E. class of the month, which meant we had to do a road-run. We were told which streets to run down, the path to take back, and how long it should take us, and then we were off. Normally, on road-runs, I would find myself running with my friend Jesse, and I can't remember why this day was different, but I was running with Isabelle, Paige, and Theresa.
Once we were out of sight of the school we stopped running, as we always did, and Theresa looked around us suspiciously, then said "I have an idea."
Her idea was to skip the road-run and find an alternate route back to the school, though she worded it as a shortcut. We waited for the rest of our class to pass us, and then we cut off of the road and into the woods. At a leisurely pace, we trudged through the woods, wondering how we were going to explain the fact that we were slowly getting covered in mud when we should have been running across pavement, and came to find ourselves down by a creek.
"I don't remember this being here," Theresa muttered, though we all knew she had never actually gone through this way and just didn't want to admit that she had gotten us lost within ten minutes of abandoning our class.
We followed the water for a few minutes until Theresa spotted a few rocks that she thought we would be able to navigate. Before any of us could express our dissent with her plan, she had hopped onto the first stone, and was calling to us by the time she had managed the third. The three of us stood on the other side, watching her a moment, and exchanged glances as if to say we weren't following her.
And then Paige hopped across.
On the other side, while Isabelle and I watched in awe from our own side, and Theresa stared slack-jawed from the third stone in the middle of the water, Paige called us over, "it's not so bad!"
The next thing I know I was following closely behind Isabelle, and there was a sharp scream followed by splashing indicating that Theresa had fallen in. There was a brief moment where I considered turning to help her, but instead I jumped to the other side while Isabelle turned to help her and ended up getting dragged down onto her knees in the water while Theresa struggled to stand.
The four of us, two of us soaked and all of us covered in mud, continued through the woods until we finally saw a light at the end, and Theresa, who had been complaining about everything since we'd followed her off of the road, said "see? I told you it was a shortcut!"
We cleared the edge of the woods, and realized that, while the road-run would have taken us in a circle, we had gone in a straight line, so we were quite far away from the school, and would be unlikely to make it back to class any time soon.
Theresa then began ranting about how much she didn't want to walk back to the school and how we shouldn't have gone off the road, which made me wonder why she had even bothered to fake us out with a fake shortcut anyway, and it wasn't long before a van stopped just ahead of us. The window slowly rolled down as we came up upon it, and this skeevy guy leaned out and asked where we were headed.
My instinct would have been to just...keep walking and not get in the van. Theresa's instinct was to tell him what school we went to and ask if we could get a ride.
Isabelle, Paige, and Theresa were all too happy to climb into this dude's van to get a ride to the school, and I certainly wasn't going to walk alone through an unfamiliar part of town to find my way back to school, so I went with them.
In the end we got back to school just in time for class to end, and our teacher never said anything about the mud, but considering the fact that he routinely ran the road-runs course backwards to check for anyone trying to skip out, I'm pretty sure he knew that we had taken the longest shortcut in the history of his class.
I'm just glad we didn't get murdered.
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