That Time I Got Kidnapped

If you are familiar with Canadian winter, you will know that a stormy winter night can be preferable to a not stormy winter night. A calm and clear winter evening in Canada can be a ridiculously beautiful thing – thousands of bright stars, mesmerizing northern lights, and silence so absolute it takes your breath away. But what really takes your breath away is how cold those kinds of nights are.

National Geographic

Blizzardy nights tend to feel warmer. Somehow, all that cloud cover and falling snow feels like a kind of insulation. Instead of silence from emptiness, it is a muffled silence that forces you to speak louder if you want your friends to hear you. Besides, driving in the blizzardy nights feels like you are piloting the Millennium Falcon.

But this story isn’t supposed to be poetic. I got kidnapped, you guys.

My parents were gone, and so were my youngest three siblings. I can’t remember where, exactly. Possibly my parents were on a teachers’ retreat in Banff and they had the youngest three stay with friends because Hannah (my sister) and I were too irresponsible busy to take care of them properly. It was just Hannah and I. I was kind of in a bad mood because rather than going out with friends, I was sick and stayed home. Then Hannah had a friend over for a bit, and I was also in a bad mood because I might have had a crush on this friend and I couldn’t flirt with her because I was sick. So, I did what any teenager normal person does when they are in a bad mood. I went to bed early.

At some point in the middle of the night, I woke up. I think it was because the moonlight was too bright and it was lighting up the walls in my room. My room was in the basement, and the tiny windows I had faced into the back yard so I didn’t bother with shades and stuff. If somebody wanted to be a creeper, they’d have to work pretty hard to see anything, and then they’d be disappointed. Just because I was playing football doesn’t mean I had a six pack. Get your minds out of the gutter.

Then I heard the back yard gate move. We’ve got some dogs in the neighborhood and they like to come and try and play in our back yard so I figured it was the dogs. The gate opened. My first thought was that we really should have replaced the locking mechanism on that stupid gate, and I might do something nice for my parents and replace it the next day. Then shadows crossed my wall, and it wasn’t a cat or a dog. It was the shadows of legs. Of the legs of multiple people.

The unimaginable happened. These pricks started opening MY window. By this time, I covered my head under the covers except for a little spot to peak through to look at the shadows. Once the window was slid open, a head poked through and looked around. Immediately I started going through a mental inventory of every sin that I hadn’t confessed, which at this point were swear words and a few R-rated movies (what? I was a good kid, and this was only the stuff that I *hadn’t yet* confessed). This was going to be the end for me. I was very aware of my lover-not-fighter status, and I was convinced that someone with the skills to know exactly where and how to attack the wimpiest kid in my house was also someone that would have the skills to end me.

His head went back through the window. A few minutes and some whispers later, a leg made its way through the window. At this point, my lover-not-fighter disposition gave in to evolutionary instincts of fight or flight, and I jumped up and grabbed that led. My animal intent was to pull this schmuck through the window by his leg, and then rip the leg off and beat him with it, and maybe possibly feed it to him when I was done with it.

Unfortunately, the invader read my mind and didn’t let me pull him in. I took a swift winter boot to the face, and he and his buddies took off. I shut the window and crawled back into bed. No reason to freak out Hannah with this situation, I can tell her in the morning. I was shaking with adrenaline. I was just starting to fall back asleep when I heard what sounded like fingernails scratching the other side of my door. I shot up in my bed, and Mr. Hyde had replaced Dr. Jekyll. They were trying to open my door, and they were pissed that it had a lock. The scratching and the knob-turning became actually loud. The logical thing to do would have been to reach under my bead for my sawed-off shot gun and send a round or two through the door, followed by a call to the cops. But this is Canada, and guns are illegal in Canada so I didn’t have one. And I was 17.

I got up from my bed and made my way to the door. My Mr. Hyde planned take them by surprise by unlocking the door and doing the hulk smash on them. I unlocked the door, gave a massive roar and came at them. That didn’t work out so well. They picked me up and threw me up on my bed. Now I was really afraid. What were they going to do to me? They could have just shanked me right then and there. I got a glimpse of one of them – he was wearing a clown mask. This is why clowns don’t represent innocence and humor to me anymore.

They put a pillow case over my head, and then wrapped me in my own blanket and then wrapped that blanket shut with duct tape. They got on both sides and lifted me up. They brought me up the stairs, dropping me only twice.

But something wasn’t right. I mean, it wasn’t right that I was being kidnapped, obviously, but part of this whole thing didn’t fit together. Through the pillowcase, I could see that the lights upstairs were on. The lights were very off when I went to bed. But then I saw something really messed up.

Holding open the door for my kidnappers to get outside with me… was Hannah.

What the hell?

(to be continued…)