One of My Most Embarrassing Moments...Ever! Part One

  I was about thirteen and my sister and I wanted desperately to go to the new water park that had opened up here in town. I loved swimming so I couldn't wait to go. Little did I know it would end up being one of the most embarrassing moments of my life...mostly because my sister will never let me live it down. My sister makes it her life mission to tell everyone we know what happened and especially any guy I was ever even remotely interested in, dated, or married. One simple word would have stopped the whole ordeal..."No!!"Did I say it? Yes, several hundred times, but you do not know my sister. She is the biggest nag I have ever known. We spent all summer bugging my parents to let us go and we had worked hard to get there. Not only did we invest serious time and much energy into our creative nagging and promising all kinds of things, we probably never did, we cleaned the house...several times. My mother's idea of clean differed from that of most women. We had to clean windows, dust every one of the five thousand nick knacks she had decorating our home, clean the oven, clean the kitchen, weed her flower beds, raked the leaves, clean the bathroom, and probably several other things that I am forgetting. We made ourselves slave labor all to go to the new, amazing water park. We had finally arrived at our dream place to swim. Not only was this a place to swim, they had unbelievable slides, slides we never in our wildest dreams imagined could be built. We were having a wonderful day, still in awe that we were finally there. We had heard about it all summer from our friends. We had driven past it all summer and it taunted us every time. The only bad part of my day was my sister's constant nagging. She was nagging me to go on the most daunting, intimidating, terrifying slide there. This monstrosity was no ordinary slide. It was easily ten stories high, at least it looked that high or higher to me at the time. Not only was it incredibly high it was a straight drop down that scooped out at the bottom and each one of it's victims was then thrust into a crystal clear, blue pool at the bottom. I had heard nothing but screams of horror coming out of the mouths of each person that dared to go down it, and when they emerged from the pool of water they came out with a look of disorientation or bewilderment. It was called, "The White Lightening" and I had no desire whatsoever to go down it. She nagged me all day long, taking me over to it several times, as if that would somehow magically convince me. When, in fact, everytime she showed me it convinced me even further this was not something I wanted to do. She was unrelenting in her nagging. I decided the only way I was going to shut her the hell up was to go down that damn, God forsaken slide. I was pretty sure it was going to be my death, but at that point I was willing to die rather than listen to one more minute of her constant babbling and nagging. Several times I tried to bail on my decision, but she was behind me on the stairs leading up to my doom and she sure wasn't going to let me back out. So, after a hour or so of standing out in the sun, on the hot wood stairs of the instrument of which I was sure was going to kill me, we arrived at the top. In that hour or so all I heard were screams of terror from every person that went down, even grown men! Several people had already chickened out and excused themselves down the hundreds of stairs and past the multitudes of insane people thinking it was going to be fun. I had also carefully examined every person that had gone down that slide, making sure they did not fly off the side and that they came safely out of the pool below. Even the person in front of us chickened out and left back down the stairs. I was thinking, "Why am I doing this?" About that time the life guard yells,"Next!" I realized he was talking to me. I walked reluctantly over to the slide and the lifeguard instructs me to sit down and then lay down when I get ready to go down. His only other instruction was to cross my arms over my chest. The one thing he did not tell me to do, which I realized later was invaluable information, was to cross my legs. It happened very fast. I barely remembered the ride down. All I do remember was not screaming. I had determined all the way up the stairs that I was not going to scream. If I was going to die I was going to be brave about it. When they wrote my obituary it would read, " Our brave daughter did not even scream as she flew off of the slide that killed her , as reported by all of the onlookers." I reached the bottom and emerged from the water not even remembering hitting the water. (go to part 2 now)