When everyone starts middle school, we all begin with amazing hopes and dreams. For me, my dream was to have a huge underground clubhouse. See where this is going? Yes, shovels, two, three, maybe four of them to begin tearing into the ground of my backyard. It started out as just me the first weekend, and if it had stayed that way I wouldn’t have a story to tell. At school the following Monday, I told my best friend, Jason, my dream about having the most spectacular fortress underground. How we’d rock out down there, invite our friends over, and most of all have electricity for a refrigerator, a fan, and, of course, a television. He seemed stoked, but just having him to help wasn’t enough. We needed Corey, the brains, to finish up the escapade of burrowers.

We started the next day. We had our plans laid out, the exact dimensions we wanted, and now we were ready. My mother was working in our garden, on tulips, roses, and such; so we snuck into the garage and took the four shovels collecting dust in the corner, got something to drink, and went to town on that despicable dirt. It all went smoothly; we even had a bridge to cross the creak in my forest that everyone else called woods. Jason, Corey, and I must have dug for almost two hours straight; we were waist high in this small pool-sized hole. It was probably only two feet deep considering that’s what waist high was for a sixth grader. That was when we decided to be done for the day, I mean, we all wanted to have energy for school tomorrow…uh well… what I really meant was that we all wanted to watch T.V. and play on Corey’s X-Box. We left the shovels where they were, jogged up to the top of the hill and burst into a sprint the last one hundred feet to Corey’s house. The next day, Jason and I got home early from school. We decided to start without Corey because he wouldn’t get home for another few hours. That could have been one of the worst mistakes we ever made, and trust me, we have done some pretty stupid stuff. To begin with we cleaned off our utensils. Do we sound professional or what? The next thing we did was observe our work from the previous day. Once our work satisfied us, we started on our project again.We must have been working for almost an hour when we started running into some problems. The ground we began to dig on was harder than yesterday’s. It started to be a strain just to work ten minutes longer. Jason hit something as he came down with his shovel for the first time after our break. We decided to dig around it because it might be a treasure chest. Come on now, we were only like ten or eleven years old at that time. We were almost all the way around this strange rectangular shape when Jason’s shovel got stuck on whatever that object was. Our first mistake began when we faced each other while digging. The second mistake, I made, trusting Jason with a shovel. I kid of course; I’d trust him with my life, but never again with a shovel. The square object just so happened to be a wet, rotten wooden board. What happens when wood gets wet? It’s slippery. Faster than his shovel got caught, it came up and caught my right eye. The adrenaline that pumped through my veins at that very moment made me immune to the pain I knew I should have been feeling. I will never forget the look of utter horror on Jason’s face as he dropped the bloody shovel in shock. I cupped my hands to my eye and slowly pulled them back in blood. Jason ran up the hill screaming, “MRS. HOUGHTON!” Luckily, my mom was up in the garden again so I didn’t have to walk far. Yes, I said walk, because that is all my shocked body could do. Jason was so horrified, he became giddy. He spouted out silly things like, “Every time you blink the gash closes!” and, “You look like one of those witches off of Hercules. You know, the one with three eyes!”

An ER visit and six stitches later, I learned my lesson the hard way. Never face each other while digging. Eventually, kids at school thought it was cool because they thought it looked like a battle scar. My parents coined a phrase within a week of this accident. “Two boys and a shovel,” became a popular saying among everyone in the house. Of course, I would correct them saying, “Excuse me, let’s get it right. It was two boys and four shovels, thank you very much.”