I don’t like scavenger hunts.
I feel like I should be good at them because I like moving around a lot and have very sharp eyes, but I’m not because I get frustrated when I can’t lay my hands on things.
It gets worse if there are teams involved. Kids always picked me last. That would leave me stuck in a group of three who would ditch me halfway through, assuming I even had a partner at all. Sometimes, kids would pick inanimate objects over me. They left me on my own a lot. Since I was never allowed to participate solo, I had to stay behind.
The topic of how bad I am at scavenger hunts came up one night when we had dinner with my grandparents. I don’t remember how the conversation got started, but mom said, “Yeah, and I don’t understand why Lucy is bad at scavenger hunts, she likes to move around and she has sharp little eyes, she should be terrific at them.”
“I’m bad at them because I can’t find teammates,” I piped up, “Seriously, one time, they picked a lawn chair over me!”
“What about that scavenger hunt you went on in the sixth grade, that wasn’t a group thing?” mom replied.
“yeah,” I replied “I wasn’t good at that either. I couldn’t lay my hands on the stuff we were supposed to look for.” As I said that, it occurred to me that this was also the day I had a substitute teacher who made up a scavenger hunt to keep the kids occupied but didn’t hide the stuff, and the kids that said that they found stuff just took items out of the teacher’s desk.
“OK, Lucy,” mom piped up, “you need to do another scavenger hunt. You’ve just had bad experiences, and you need to have a good experience to undo the bad ones.”
“Why?” I asked. I could not understand why it was a big deal.
“This is important,” mom continued, “You’re gonna be going to Harvard soon, and elite universities have this tradition of scavenger hunts. Do you know my boss’s daughter, Stephanie Murphy?”
“No,” I shrugged my shoulders.
“She’s doing a scavenger hunt at her bachelorette party. I called her and told her you were excited to participate, and she said you could come.”
I had high hopes that this would be all it took to replace bad experiences with good ones. Unfortunately, it was yet another bad scavenger hunt. It was the worst scavenger hunt I ever went on.
The scavenger hunt at Stephanie’s bachelorette party took place in the park. In the weeks leading up to it, we had a lot of rain and snow, and then it got really cold for weeks on end. The footing at the park was very slick because everything was just caked with ice. Compounding that, Stephanie’s bachelorette party fell on a day when it was unbelievably freezing cold. Stephanie didn’t move the scavenger hunt inside because she saw the forecast said 8°, and she assumed it was Celsius, not Fahrenheit.
The ground at the park felt like a skating rink. Being cold already may be quite tense, and I had trouble walking on the ice. Because of that, I couldn’t concentrate on finding anything. I spent so much of my energy trying not to fall but I couldn’t look for stuff.
It got worse once you got into the woods because The snow on the path had been compacted so much. I went off the path because it wasn’t slippery at the sides of the path.
The space between the path and the ledge narrowed. I didn’t realize how steep the incline of the path was until after I slipped and fell. I rode right down that incline and into a denser part of the woods, blacking out when I got to the bottom.
I regained consciousness and found myself in Stephanie’s bedroom. I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t really remember anything that happened between falling and waking up other than a wet crunching noise and someone saying that somebody stopped breathing. I could hear people out in the hall talking about me, and not in a good way. I have no idea what I did wrong, nor did I know what they were talking about.
“You should’ve let her freeze to death, you know, she’s the one who killed your husband,” a woman said, “I can’t believe I got this on camera.”
Stephanie entered the room. “Lucy, we need to talk,” she said. She tried very hard to hide her anger with me.
“What happened?” I asked. I still felt kind of groggy.
“Come on in,” I heard Stephanie say.
A woman wearing a silver parka entered. She had a gigantic crush wound on her chest that made me wonder how the hell she was still alive. “what do you have to say for yourself?” she said in a flat, emotionless voice, “you murdered my husband, did you not”.
All I could get out was, “Oops”.
“Show her the video,” Stephanie said.
It all came flooding back to me once I saw the video. As I slipped and fell down a hill, I got enough speed that I took out two people on the sidewalk: a fat man who was so bundled up you only knew he was male because of the beard sticking out from the scarf, and a woman with a floor-length silver parka. Both people died from the impact, the man from hitting his head, and the woman from getting crushed by her husband.
That video freaked me out. The woman that showed me the video was the same woman that was in the video that got crushed by her husband. Based on what I saw in the video, there was no way she could’ve survived her injuries.
She had. Not only did she survive, she retained enough strength to drag me out of the room, despite all of my kicking and biting. She tuned out every kick, every swipe, and every bite.
“Stop it!” Stephanie shouted. She picked up the dining room table and threw it at us. That was enough to break the grip.
“OK, you win this time, but I will be back,” she said before smashing a window and walking out of the house.
Mom came to pick me up. Stephanie told Mom about all the damage I did to her bedroom and living room. I told her that none of it was me, someone attacked me. Nobody believed me.
Nobody has any memory of what happened. Mom only remembers how much stuff in Stephanie’s house I broke. Nobody else at the bachelorette party remembers anything, and Stephanie herself doesn’t even remember having a bachelorette party. I’m the only one who remembers anything.
That still meant that I had to replace all the stuff in Stephanie’s house that got broken, including the window. As for the attack itself, I chalked up what happened to a bad dream. But then, I saw somebody in a silver floor-length parka standing in my yard.