One day when I was 14 or so, I came home from somewhere to find my sister and her best friend Emily on the couch talking on the phone. The scene as usual. Emily lived three houses up the hill from us with her older sister Rhoda, who was my age. We became friends when my Mom sort of forced my sister and I to introduce ourselves when they moved in, which we secretly wished to do anyway. So we did.

Emily and Amy grew closer than Rhoda and I did, and in fact, are roommates this very day. Which is all beside the point. The point is it was no big deal that Emily was there; nothing at all seemed amiss. Until I sat down on the couch with them. The television was off and their phone call had ended, and in the quiet I heard noises from downstairs in the basement. My parents weren’t home, yet. There was no one there but us. The look on my sister’s face indicated I was correct–there should be absolutely no one in the basement. There was a clanking noise and then, minutes later, a bang. Amy and Emily’s faces froze solid with terror and my own heart began thumping wildly. Another loud and sudden boom from below sent the three of us into hysterics, the girls screaming wildly, me darting into my bedroom.

Once there I found letters from my boyfriend and photographs of us torn and scattered on my bed. A stuffed animal he’d given me sat gutted amidst the scraps beside a letter scrawled by a shaky hand. It read: Robin doesn’t love you bitch, so stay away.

Confused and paralyzed with fear I tried to make sense of what was going on. About that time whoever was downstairs began making more noise and my sister and Emily had taken cover in the hall closet. I found comfort in my own, as well, and went in there to freak the fuck out. I was terrified.

More noise from downstairs frightened me enough to make a bit of pee escape and it was at that point that I took off running. I found the courage to bolt out of the closet and through the living room and out the front door and right over to my neighbor’s place where I began banging relentlessly on their front door. At like, 10 p.m.

The couple that lived there was sleeping when they heard my screaming to get in. Once inside I told them how there was someone in my house and about the note and the torn pictures and nearly hyperventilated to death. The wife phoned the police while her husband headed outside with a shotgun. I was worried about Amy and Emily. I feared for their lives.

Before the police arrived Amy and Emily discovered what I had done and came running over to tell me what was happening. The girls and Rhoda and one of Rhoda’s friends were playing a prank. It was Rhoda downstairs making all that noise, while Amy and Emily played scared victims. Amy and Emily were in on the whole thing, they told me, and my nark-ass had just called the fucking police!

Then Emily and Rhoda had to inform their mom that the police were on their way because I’d just called them. Because their cruel little trick had backfired. By this time my parents had arrived home, which was fortunate since my stepdad was a deputy sherriff. He explained the misunderstanding and assured the officers the culprits would be reprimanded.

For their punishment, Amy, Emily, Rhoda and her friend each had their mouths washed out with soap. They were punished on a technicality, since a joke gone wrong can hardly be punished. They’d used the word ‘bitch’ in their letter. And for that they burped up bubbles for days.

My punishment, for being an over-reactionary, cry-baby, scaredy cat was weeks of ostracizing from the girls. That, and I kept the label given to me years earlier by my older stepsister, who still to this day holds a grudge because the beer-soaked towel she snapped at me during a game of Quarters with her friends (while she was supposedly babysitting me) left a huge red welt on my thigh, alerting my parents to the evening’s drunken goings-on.* That nickname was NarkFace, and it sure as shit didn’t go away after I inadvertantly called the police the night my friends practical joked me.

*There was also the time I broke my arm at the park while my stepsister was smoking cigarettes in the woods, thereby getting her totally busted when we sorta had to go to the emergency room, what with my bones all sticking out my arm and shit. I got blamed for getting her groundeing then, too.