It was an awesome end to an awesome day. I know that sounds cliché (hey, that rhymes), but there was simply no better way to describe it. We had just finished the final day of our weekend long swim meet, and my friend and I decided to go to his house and light up some firecrackers. Our families had gotten together to have some pizza with a few other folks and hang out, but since Luke, my friend, and I were the only teenagers there, you could guess we were pretty bored. But what better a thing to do on a muggy, hot summer day than paint the night sky with some, *ahem*, illegal fireworks.

We bounded outside, much to the protest of our highly illogical parents with a couple of crates of aerial repeaters, which are also known as cakes, and a high that left us feeling like nothing could go wrong. Something, in fact, did go wrong.
After a few moments of excited and probably caffeine-induced giggling, we decided it was a great idea to blow up every single firework we had at the same time. So we left the numerous little cylinders from Hell in their tight little cardboard containers, and with the graceful, slow flick of a match, it fell into the waiting box.

Now, a few things were very wrong with this picture. For one, this was the middle of the suburbs, at 10 o’clock at night, with essentially no streetlights that could’ve helped us read the instructions. Also, on our Red Bull caffeine high we couldn’t think as clearly as we should’ve. In fact, I’m pretty sure we didn’t think at all. On top of all that, we never checked which way was up. Hey, fun fact, when a cake of fireworks travels down instead of up, it’s not pretty.

So, in one of those action-movie-like slow-mo type scenes, the cake, which we soon began to realize that the cake was facing the wrong way, one by one began to detonate. As we quickly realized that this wasn’t going as planned, at all, we began to flee. We scrambled down Luke’s driveway and across the street to crawl away from safety. What we really needed to protect ourselves from was the wrath of our parents.

As the older folks began to file out of the house to see what was the matter the second cake and the tin of opened sparklers were left carelessly strewn about began to catch fire as the front door began to open.

Fortunately most of the people were people who did Iron Men and extreme triathlons resulting in very healthy hearts. Had they not been, most of them would’ve died right then and there from cardiac arrest from the atrocious sight to be held in the middle of the driveway. Right as the door began to open, night turned to day a strobe light of sparklers and second cake began to blow up. Thank the gods that the second cake was facing upwards or else we might’ve made our own little sinkhole in the middle of Oak Brook.

Timidly we crawled out from under a shrub in the neighbor’s yard, waiting to hear the massive amount of scolding we were bound to receive. And believe me when I say we were scolded, we weren’t just yelled at, we were yelled at. Fortunately we pulled off the excuse that we were tired from the day’s events and the parents, though I don’t have the ability to understand the adult mind, probably believed us and got off without too many repercussions.

Overall the incident seemed harmless, the only damage was that we weren’t allowed within a 5-mile radius of anymore fireworks. But after a few weeks of careful thinking, it occurred to me that I was extremely lucky to walk away unharmed. I learned that life is precious and I’ll never be invincible no matter how hard I try. I’m not saying that I need to live in a plastic bubble, but I should at least be more careful. A person’s life is irreplaceable and I intend to live mine to the fullest and milk each and every moment out of it.