I am sixteen and hanging out with three of my girlfriends. It is Friday night, around 11 p.m. I have my dad’s car, and we are bored with nothing to do. We want to go somewhere, do something fun, have an adventure.
But we live in Erie. And the most exciting thing a sixteen year old can do is go to Wal-Mart, and hang around in the parking lot. Which is where we are.
“Let’s go somewhere fun. Let’s go to Cleveland!” someone said.
And so it was decided. Road trip to Cleveland. We’d stop at Wegmans and get candy and snacks first. Then we’d take the back roads to Cleveland and stop any place that seemed like it might be fun along the way.
I needed to stop at home for something first. What is was, I can’t remember now. I do remember we stopped to steal a blinking street sign on the way to my parents’ house. It barely fit in the car with us and we couldn’t figure out how to make it stop blinking, finally covering it up with a jacket so no one we passed could see.
I grabbed what I needed from my house and we left the street sign in the garage. Then we stopped at Wegmans and loaded up on bulk candy. As we brought it up to the scale, I instructed the girls to hold the candy up as they keyed in the number so it wouldn’t weigh as much.
After the third or fourth bag a voice came over the loud speaker in the nearly empty store. “GIRLS! PUT DOWN THE CANDY AND WEIGH IT PROPERLY. I CAN SEE YOU!”
“It’s God!” I said. And we giggled.
We re-weighed the candy and printed our price tags. I still remember the manager coming over and watching us at the checkout line, glaring the whole time. I remember not caring. We were having fun.
By the time we left Wegmans it was after 1 a.m. We took the back roads and were disappointed to learn there was absolutely nothing that looked interesting along the way. Even if there had been, it was 1 a.m. It would have been closed.
On the way down we talked about all the things we’d do in Cleveland. We’d find a cheap motel, and the next day we’d get up early and maybe head over to the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame.
We talked about work. We talked about boys. We talked about our upcoming senior year. We laughed a lot. We took turns writing down various accounts from the trip in a notebook my best friend still has somewhere.
We got to Cleveland around 3 a.m. and the fire was starting to burn out. Now what? Where would we stay? We had no directions, no GPS, no map, no clue. We just figured we’d find something somehow.
And we did. We drove around for what seemed like forever, and ended up in the ghetto, somewhere off Euclid Ave., where we finally found a hideously disgusting motel with hourly rates.
“Hi. We want a room,” I said to the night manager.
“Are you girls all 18?” He asked, not even looking at us.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Fine,” he said. “It’s gonna be $35 for the night. Here’s your key.” And he pointed toward the direction of our room.
We paid and headed towards the room, giggly again, having gotten away with something. Which apparently wasn’t much, we found out, once we got into the room.
It was a small, dark room, with a worn, sticky shag carpet. There was a large, crooked TV that only got two channels, both of which were hardcore porn channels. (I know – lucky, right?)
The bedspreads on the two beds had so many mysterious stains we peeled them off immediately and refused to even sit on them. There were blood spatters on the curtains. There were huge spiders in the bathroom.
We thought all of it was hilarious and we continued taking turns writing in the notebook all of the gory details on the motel room. We laughed and talked till the morning, slept a couple of hours and then decided we’d had enough of that place.
We scratched the idea of the Rock N’ Roll Hall of fame. We were tired and ready to head home. We stopped in Geneva-the-Lake for lunch on the way home and my brick-sized cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Katie? It’s mom. Why is there a blinking sign in my garage?”
“Uh.. Oh. We forgot to put that back.”
“Yeah, put it back. It’s illegal to steal those. Where are you?”
“Geneva-on-the-Lake. We’re coming home soon.”
“Ok, whatever. Put that sign back when you get home.”
Oops.
We finally made it home and dropped everyone off at their houses. I headed home with my best girlfriend, Colleen, and we talked about how much trouble she’d get in if her mom found out we’d gone to Cleveland the night before. Her parents were a lot stricter than mine and she’d told her mom she spent the night at my house.
When we finally ran into her later that day, she asked us what we did the night before.
“Oh, drove to Cleveland and stayed in a seedy motel room,” I said.
Colleen looked nervous.
“Haha Katie Fish. You’re sooo funny,” her mom said, rolling her eyes, and walking away.
Colleen might or might not have punched me after she was out of sight.
I can’t really remember.
