Teenage Sleepovers and Other Horror Movies
By Greg Evans
My daughter and her friends decided they were going to have a sleepover bash. It was fine with me. Kids having sleepovers is normal. I ordered them pizza and then spent the evening sitting on the deck reading until 9:45 pm. I’m a 39-year old single dad and by 7:30 I am usually exhausted, and 10 o’clock is way past my bedtime.
It was my daughter and four or five of her friends. “Listen, I’m going to bed,” I said. “Don’t use the stove, don’t go outside, no running with scissors or eating apples because kids choke on both; no boys, vampires or any other ghoulish monstrosities, and if you need me, bang loudly because I am padlocking my door.”
“Alright,” they all said in unison which meant go away so we can burn the house down.
I was tired, I fell asleep fairly quickly expecting morning to arrive faster than I would prefer. However, multiple times I woke up periodically to the sound of what I could only surmise was a herd of African wildebeests out in the hallway.
It was so loud I wondered if my neighbors were going to call animal control. I put the pillow over my head in a futile attempt to suffocate myself.
At some haunting, ungodly hour I felt myself being shaken in my sleep. I opened my eyes to two shadowy figures standing over me. Welp, this is it, I thought.
“Dad,” my daughter, Emma, said.
“How did you pick all the locks?!”
“Snap out of it,” she said.
“What, what is it? Is everything ok?” I asked, knowing it probably wasn’t.
Beside her was her friend, Claire; and in the glow of the hallway light I could see she was covered from head to foot in what could only be a gallon of ketchup, or blood, and it sure didn’t smell like ketchup. Not only that, Claire is a ginger, hair orange as a crayon, and this was Chicago Bulls red, there was no mistaking it.
The first thought that went through my mind was, “Who did she kill?” My pulse started racing. It wasn’t Emma, she was here. Was it Sidney? Or Jennifer? Or Brenna? Or one of the others? Were there others?
I jumped out of bed and stepped into the hallway. Large and small drops of blood were leading toward the living room. They weren’t dainty little drops like a paper cut, this was slasher-movie splatter drops like a Jackson Pollock painting.
On wobbly legs I followed them into the living room looking for two things.
A teenage corpse.
The murder weapon
Or one attached to the other…
My brain was having trouble focusing. I’m trying to count. Were their four girls, five girls, seven? “I can’t rememeber?” As far as I could tell in my distressed state, they all appeared to be alive. Panic-mode had fully set in.
“Where’s the dead one? Where is all the blood coming from?” I said. The girl to my right, sitting cross-legged on the floor laughed out loud. Her face painted like Jack from Lord of the Flies. This isn’t happening.
“The blood is mine,” Claire said, and chuckled. I realized then that the blood was actually fairly congealed. Did you cut yourself?! Are you ok?”
“I’m anemic,” she said.
A combination of relief and a massive adrenaline dump nearly knocked me to the floor. I suddenly felt exhausted but it wasn’t over.
Next came trying to wash the congealed blood out of her hair. Removing dried and congealed blood from the hair is way worse than bubble gum. I was doing my best not to dry heave, while gripping the counter to keep from passing out. Claire talked the entire time as if I was cleaning nail polish off her finger nails, school gossip. I simply couldn’t concentrate. I don’t do blood very well. Dawn had nearly arrived by the time I gave up. I managed to get most of it out.
The following morning still suffering a minor bout of PTSD, I called her dad and explained what went down.
“Oh yeah, it happens sometimes,” he said, with a chuckle.