Judging by the title, you might think that this is going to be a story from my childhood. Well, this is where you would be wrong, and also where I would thank you for giving me so much credit. Clearly, I don't deserve it. No, this is a fairly recent story. And by recent, I mean last year; my freshman year of college when I was 19.
It was the spring semester at Bloomsburg University, which is ironic because it doesn't feel like spring in the town of Bloomsburg until summer time by calendar standards. However, it was fairly late in the school year which had allowed me enough time to make some awesome friends. I had three best friends on campus, and they were all dudes. (As a caveat, I am using the past tense not because I am no longer friends with said dudes, but because I no longer attend school with them, regrettably. But that's a different story.)
Anyway, Ted, Dan, Matt, and I were a super awesome gang of amazing and we would get into all kinds of shenanigans including Busty Cops go Hawaiian, topless keg-stands, and arguing over who has better control of their butt-holes. Unfortunately, our shenanigans also included scary movie night. Which only happened once, and I'll tell you why:
My roommate was gone most weekends since her family lived about 15 minutes away, so I would have the room to myself. One weekend, after a midnight trip to the Weis, the four of us decided that it would be fun to watch The Zodiac Killer in my room, and then sleep over. Now, I don't do well with scary anything, but I figured since I would be in a room with three mostly grown men, it wouldn't be a problem.
We started the movie at around 12:30, and were talking and eating through most of the beginning. It wasn't until the creepy meadow scene that we actually started paying attention. Now, if you've ever seen the movie The Zodiac Killer, you'll know that this is probably the most disturbing movie scene of all time. I still have nightmares regarding this scene, and it's over a year later. Naturally, I was petrified for the rest of the movie that I was conscious for, since I fell asleep before the end.
As I'm sure everyone knows, falling asleep during a scary movie is probably the worst thing that you can do because you don't get to see how the movie was resolved, and you deprive your imagination of the closure that comes from an ending that makes things all better. But The Zodiac Killer is a long-ass movie, and I fell asleep before the killer was caught. (Actually, I don't even know if he ever was caught because I never saw the end. He could still be out there, waiting...with his goddamned creepy puzzles...)
The screams and intense background music faded into my equally turbulent dreams. I was in a constant state of running or hiding throughout my nightmares, and you know how in your dreams everything is a thousand-jillion times scarier, even if it's not really scary at all? Well multiply that by eleventy-thousand and you might begin to comprehend how insanely terrifying my dreams were.
At about 4am, I woke up and had to keep checking to make sure my arms were still attached. It was still pitch black outside, which meant that there was still a real possibility that monsters, serial killers, or orcs could come and kill me in my bed. I kept trying to tell myself that I was being ridiculous and that I should just go back to sleep, but I was having a hard time calming myself down. After about 15 minutes, I started to get tired enough to drift off to sleep again, but just as I was about to fall totally asleep, I was jolted awake by a loud, blood curdling scream.
Or at least that's what it sounded like to me. It turns out, my good friend Dan, who I had never spent the night with before, was a night screamer.
It took me a minute to realize that we weren't all in mortal danger and that The Zodiac Killer wasn't stabbing my friends to death and saving me for last. But by then, it was too late. I was laying in a puddle--a small, insignificant puddle, but a puddles nonetheless--of shame and failure, and I continued to lay there until the sun rose and all of my friends departed so that no one would ever find out the terrible faux pas I had committed.
Naturally, I gracefully declined invitations to all other scary-movie nights for the rest of my time at Bloomsburg.
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