Personal Narrative: My Trip To Six Flags

It was just a boring day in my hometown, a traditional, weak entrance a lot of narrative stories use to try to get the attention of the readers. This story, however, isn’t one of those traditional stories; this one involves a day that had been exciting up to that point already. The memory that resonates daily throughout my mind would have to be the time when I went to Six Flags for the first time in my life. Before I jump into my story, I should tell you my friends mess with each other a lot, almost to the point where we get into fights with each other. Now, this trip to Six Flags was the “present” my middle school gave to us eight graders for surviving through the three years we had to be there (it wasn’t really that bad there). I get to
school that morning and we get put into groups of 5 or 6 people, and I got lucky and get grouped up with some of my best friends, even though they don’t go here. We get into the groups, and it starts off quick. My friend, that we’ll call Joe, had a bit of an authority problem back then so whenever the teachers told him to get onto the bus, he would just say something clever or completely stupid to anger the teachers but at the same time they couldn’t do anything to him. For example, he would say something like “I have got to go to the bathroom”, and he would just go randomly wander around the halls, and then the teachers and a couple deans would chase him down and eventually convince him to get on the bus. We were supposed to leave the school at around 8:00 am. Because of him and his antics, we left school at around 9:45 or 10:00. None of the 50 plus kids on that bus was too happy about that routine he had just pulled off, so right as he got on the bus, everyone took out some paper, crumpled it up into a ball, and threw them at him. It may not seem like that bad of thing now, but in eighth grade, that was the funniest thing someone could have done to him. Now the real trip begins. We are on the way there, and another member of my group (we will call this one Mike), thought himself to be something of an eighth grade womanizer. So, he would keep trying to talk to all the girls on the bus, and about 5 or 6 girls into his “seducing”, one of them slaps him. I still don’t know why she did that or what he said, but it doesn’t stop there. Three girls later he gets kicked in the shin, now by this point, I’m laughing at him because he is doing so bad, and he is starting to get angry about this. So another member of my group, I am going to call him Schroeder (who is a very nervous kid at this time). Mike decides to write his number on all the back seats of this bus and Schroeder is almost in tears right now because by now everyone is calling him with call id showing as private. He would answer the phone saying “What do you want I’m busy” because he was still trying to figure out how so many people got his number, so he didn’t care about the person calling him; half the time it was Joe and I calling. It was funny, because I’m pretty sure he heard himself on the phone every time he answered because he was yelling into his phone when the class was half way to Six Flags. That goes on for another half hour or forty five minutes, and then we finally arrive. Six Flags, I have been waiting for this moment for as long as I could remember.
The smell of the hot dogs being grilled, there was the smell of funnel cake everywhere, you could hear so many excited screams from the people on the rides, and the sight of some kid puking in a garbage can next to the ride Déjà vu. I’m thinking this day could not get any better, but so much more ended up happening that day. First ride I run over to is the Batman ride, where your feet dangle beneath you as the ride flies down the track, and I get into this very long line, not knowing how slow those lines move. I was in line for three hours, for Batman (which I didn’t think was even that good), but the wait was entertaining. My friend, called Bob, decided to mess with my buddy Schroeder again, so he decides to go up to this black kid and asked him to be in on this joke. We tell him and he just starts laughing, ”Yea, I’ll do it”. So we get Schroeder into line, and Bob goes to this black kid, “Yo man, this little kid just called you the n-word,” and the black kid was half laughing and acting half angry, and Schroeder has a miniature breakdown during this, I just want to say Schroeder is a friend to me; but his reactions to these things are the funniest things I have ever seen. But back to the current event, Schroeder just bolts out of there, and we had to chase him down and tell him it was a joke, which would have been easy if we weren’t laughing so hard at this. Then we head over to the Super
man ride, and we tell Schroeder to get into the test seat they have just outside the line to see if you fit. We said we weren’t sure if he could go with us, and he really wanted to go on this ride, so he hops up into the seat, buckles himself in, and he is saying that it fits fine and he will be fine, but Joe decides to put a bottle under the little kick stand that releases the seat, and Schroeder doesn’t see Joe do that, and he starts to freak out about being stuck so, (one of my low points of being a friend), we tell him we are going to find someone to help him out. We end up instead running off and getting some food and leaving him there for half an hour. We came back from eating with some random college kid, and he acts like he does something to the seat but just knocks the bottle out of the way, and Schroeder gets out of the seat and thanks us for helping out, and he bought us some more food.
These shenanigans go on for the rest of the day, and by 8:00 pm, the teachers start rounding up all the students to take them back home, and Joe decides it is a great idea to run off into the park right as he is about to get on the bus.
That stalls us for half an hour, and then we leave. The bus gets half way back home, and the chaperones realize something. They forgot one of the teachers and the group he was watching that day, so we drive back and call the teacher, turns out they somehow got a ride home right after we noticed them missing. The bus didn’t get home until around 10:00 that night. My mom was about to unleash on the teachers and deans for getting back so late. We were supposed to be back at 7:30 pm, she was there for two and a half hours waiting for us to get back, but then they explained what happened, and that didn’t help much. She just told me to get into the car and go home. I get a call right after I get home from Mike saying he took Schroeder’s wallet, and I was just like “Leave the kid alone, man, he already had a rough day”. That was the understatement of the year, he had the worst day of his life, but he wasn’t mad at us at all. Even after we told him about the Superman seat, he just blew it off and was in a good mood. He is the most resilient kid I ever met; he takes so much from those guys, but he still likes to hang out with them. I got to show some respect for
that.
So that day was one of the craziest days I ever had, at least before high school and college. I will always remember the things I saw and heard that day. I will take those memories to the grave with me. That’s how much fun I had that day.