Harassing the Payne Girls

My good friend Dan from Higley is working in DC for three weeks, and we had him over for church and dinner a couple of Sunday’s ago. In the car driving him back to the Metro station the girls asked me to tell them a story from when I was young. I recalled a time when Dan and I gave the neighbor girls a satisfying scare:

Dan and I met in the fifth grade. His family moved into our neighborhood in Higley the summer before our freshman year of high school. We lived across the street from each other and often spent evening and weekend hours hanging out when we had time. During the summers we would often join up with the other neighbors (most often the Payne family) to hang out and play outdoor games. The Payne kids closest to our age were girls, and as boys are wont to tease girls, we found several ways to harass them.

One weekend night Dan and I learned that the Payne girls were home alone with their younger brother. Sandee, Katie, Kristy, Kelly, Mike, and Kerri were home and their older brothers were out with friends and their parents were out on a date. With parents gone the Payne girls were confined to the house, and Dan and I had to find something else to keep us busy.

The Payne girls liked to watch scary movies when their parents were out, and we knew that they could get pretty jumpy. You could tell when this was the case as every light in the house would be burning, lighting up the yard a little from the glow. One of these nights we decided to play some pranks.

Dan and I dressed in dark clothes so we could hide in the shadows. We snuck to the front door and rang the doorbell. We’d bolt from the porch and hide around the side of the house before someone could answer the door. This worked for only a couple of times. Pretty soon all of the floodlights outside the house were on and it became trickier to get to the door without being seen through a window. But, after a little while the girls would get tired of watching and would go back to their movies believing they must have chased us off. We would wait for this moment and then hit the doorbell again. Finally, whichever girl would come to the door would yank it open and yell something like “I know you’re out there Ben and Dan!” and the game lost its charm.

This last time while we were hiding on the side of the house after ringing the doorbell we noticed the circuit breaker box on the wall. We knew if we could cut the lights the game could go on. We pulled at the cover and it swung open with a little effort. But which circuit connected to the outside lights. Wait a minute! Why stop with the outside lights!?

It wasn’t too hard to find the master switch as they were always at the top in the middle of circuit breaker boxes. We grinned in the moonlight as one of us cut the power to the entire house. Three or four screams rang out in the night from the Payne’s basement and various rooms in the house. We left the power off for a good minute as we snickered to ourselves. This was good for another time or two until we say a neighbor’s door open and close and someone came walking over with a flashlight. We figured the Payne girls had gotten too scared and called a neighbor to come check it out. Dan and I barely got away unseen.

The next weekend we decided we should repeat our little game at the Payne’s, only this time, we’d go straight for the circuit breaker box. When we got there we were extremely disappointed to find a lock in the circuit breaker box lid. We looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders and walked back to my house to cook up our next plan.

I asked Dan if he remembered any stories that involved the both of us and he reminded me of the following story:

One summer around the Fourth of July Dan and some of the other neighbors had gotten a hold of some bottle rockets and other smaller fireworks. We all met at the Payne’s house one night to rollerblade and skateboard on their cement driveway to music from the radio. The Payne’s were one of the few families in the neighborhood with a cement driveway at the time, and they also had floodlights that allowed for its use at night.

This must have been another night that the Payne’s parents were out, as I don’t think we would have been lighting off fireworks on their driveway otherwise. So, we set off several bottle rockets and some black cats and skated around with sparklers. That got boring quickly so we started to look for ways to make it more interesting. It didn’t take us long to start aiming the bottle rockets using pipes and empty bottles.

The Payne family had built a bathroom onto their garage that opened only to the garage. This was handy for when you needed to ‘go’ but weren’t allowed in the house (like when the parents weren’t home). It was also the closest bathroom to the driveway. Katie Payne ducked into the bathroom at the point when our drive for new and inventive ways to light off bottle rockets was at its peak. It was when Katie shut the door to the bathroom (still in rollerblades) that we noticed the 1” gap between the bathroom door and the floor.

Dan and I quickly placed a bottle rocket just outside the door on the ground, aimed it under the door, lit it, and backed up laughing. The bottle rocket shot in the bathroom with a “SHOOOOOP” which was followed by a scream, a BANG!, and then silence. We were falling over each other in laughter on the driveway, but after another minute we got a little curious. “Katie. Are you okay in there?” Silence. Finally, two or three minutes later Katie flung back the door and shot daggers at us with her eyes. She turned and skated to the door to the house, went inside, and wasn’t seen for the rest of the evening.

After we figured the coast was clear, Dan and I went over to the bathroom to look for any signs of damage. On the back wall about six inches off the ground and about six inches to the right of the toilet was a black blast mark on the drywall about 4 inches in diameter. This set us to laughing again as we skated around the driveway another time or two. I don’t think the mark on the wall was ever explained to the Payne parents. No one wanted to admit to setting off fireworks without parents around. Even with the unspoken pact of secrecy binding us together, it took the passing of a little more than a week before Katie started talking to us again.