A jet-black night led to my friends and I running from a dog, a crazy old man, and his wife.

I was in the eleventh grade when a group of friends and I decided to ding dong ditch some people for fun. It’s a classic prank where you rang someone’s doorbell late at night then run away without being caught, while you watch from a distance to see their reaction. It was pitch black outside and the time on the clock read nine-thirty, my friends and I decided to prowl the streets and act like we owned them for amusement. We all started to gear up, we needed dark black or grey clothes and hats to blend in with the dark night. After we geared up and decided it was time to leave, we made a plan. We decided to ding dong ditch an older couple and thought they would be asleep at the time, but we were all wrong. We walked two blocks down the road with me in the lead, being the quickest out of us all, to a neighbor’s house. When we arrived at the small white house, I slowly started creeping towards the door carefully sliding my feet past one another, and my friends copied my movements. As we crawled our way closer to the door the amount of butterflies in my stomach grew.

I slowly crept up the freezing grey cement driveway right next to the landscape, which had a variety of green bushes, and bright red flowers bundled together. With every inch gained, time passed by slower and slower until I finally reached the white door. In an almost snaillike motion I raised my finger towards the bell, and my heart started racing faster than ever before, like it was about to jump out of my chest and run away faster than a dog who’s on their way to get a treat from its owner. As I pressed the button to ring the doorbell the big white door flew open. My heart sunk to the bottom of my chest and I felt so scared I froze like a pond in the middle of winter. Towering above me was an older lady who looked just as shocked as I felt to see her. I brought up the courage to run around the house like a freak train with no brakes, and decided the best option was to dolphin dive into the tall dark green grass they had in their backyard. My friends followed me into their backyard and the sliding glass door flew open. I thought for sure that we were going to be skinned alive for bothering them in the middle of the night. Out came an old man with a huge black dog at his side. He screamed for us all to “come on out or he was going to let the dog loose,” I knew this was a bluff so I sprang up like a spring and ran through the alleyway built with about a three foot gap between the fences. My friends started ahead of me and when I reached the road I darted right by both of them.

I stopped to take a break and gasped for my breath when I heard a car engine roar. I began running again and said to “meet up back at Noah’s house.” I sprinted as fast as I could down the road and through the streetlights, as cold air was running through my hair back to the brick house. I arrived first and wondered when they were going to arrive. A few minutes after Noah shoed up and, finally Levi arrived after Noah. At first we all were worried but that soon turned into laughter and giggles. By that time all the fear that ran through my body turned into adrenaline and I no longer had butterflies in my stomach nor was I wound up about the situation that just took place, we all started talking and laughing at the image of the old lady’s face the moment she flung the white door open. We went a few more times, but not to that house. We learned to check to see if lights were on and thought about what could go wrong instead of how funny it would be.