An Ill-Advised Moment

A Destroyed Mailbox

It was the spring break of 2012, a warm cloudless Saturday afternoon. This was one of the only times where my spring break was at the same time as my cousin’s spring break. My two cousins (one was 15, the other was 14) and about three or four of their friends (the youngest was 14 and the oldest was 16) were all outside in one of the friends’ col-de-sacs shooting off firecrackers. We had already shot off all of the big ones and all we had were a few smaller ones.

“Hey, Drew, I dare you to tie these three together and see what happens,” One of the older friends said as they handed me three small firecrackers, one looked like a mini bottle rocket, one was in the shape of a tank even with a little army soldier inside, and the other one was one of those that looks like a plate of baby-back ribs. Him being the older and myself being the youngest, I did. I ripped out the little army dude in the cockpit of the tank, put the bottle rocket-looking one in and wrapped the rib-like one around the two and tied the fuses together. I lit it, and then I threw it as hard as I could down the road. As my creation sailed through the air, it was heading towards an old retired man’s house, and he was one of those people where no matter what was going on outside, he always had his mailbox opened.

Knowing what luck I had back then the firecracker did exactly what I didn’t want it to do, it landed in the old man’s mailbox! We all rushed to get it, but almost instantly, it exploded and left a giant hole in the mailbox. We instantly felt the heat of the small embers sitting on the mailbox. Being the boys that we were and still are to this day, we ran away as fast as we could trying to get as far away from the mailbox before the old guy woke up. Surprisingly we actually did get away, which kind of shocked me because the firecracker explosion wasn’t all that quiet, and for an old man, he wasn’t in terrible shape. The air by the mailbox smelled like melted metal as we tried to make our escape shouting out things like…

“Dude I can’t believe you actually did it!”

“That son of a b**** is going to flip once he sees that.”

“He’s going to kill you.”

 We didn’t know what to do except just sit in my cousin’s garage and laugh it off. Later that day, the guy woke up from his nap and obviously flipped out when he saw his mailbox. This wasn’t the first time we’ve done something crazy loud and/or irresponsible so he kind of knew that we did it. That next day we still wanted to have some fun with bottle rockets, so the oldest friend goes out and bought a pack. That was a bad idea. He got back and we shot a couple off, when we got to one of the last ones the bottle tipped over as we lit the rocket. To our luck it shot off and hit a bird’s nest! Ever since that day we just decided that we are not good with pyrotechnics, so that was the last time we all got together to do something like this.

One of the things that I fixed from the rough draft was I stopped rambling on about the whole day and just got to the main points. Also I fixed some generic grammar and punctuation mistakes. One last thing that I fixed from my rough draft is that I replaced some "boring" words with synonyms that sound better.