While outwardly our mom was against staying home from school unnecessarily, I think by the time she got around to raising the last of her kids she’d lost a lot of willpower in enforcing it all. I can’t count the number of days in elementary school, junior high and high school that I spent away from school for no good reason.
Everyone appreciated our oldest sister, Trina, checking us out of Dixon Jr. High or Provo High whenever we called her because we were “sick.” We’d get to spend some quality time with a huge soda from the nearby gas station as well as with her cute babies. But you couldn’t call Trina from school everyday, and you could only coax Mom into letting you stay home from school once in a while, so at times we resorted to taking matters into our own hands by sluffing on the sly.
One of my favorite childhood memories is sluffing with Laura (2 ½ years older than me), Laura’s friend Emily Ann, and Tia (1 ½ years younger than me). Emily Ann lived down a dirt road among nearby farms, a bit behind our family’s home. Emily’s mom worked all day as a checker at Smith’s so it was easy to backtrack to her house in the morning and spend the day there instead of going to school.
One of our sluffing days was rather boring, and we remembered that there was a bookfair at school, which Emily had money to buy something from. So we tried to go back to school to the bookfair where we were caught by our teachers and were required to spend the remainder of the day in school.
We usually had spending money from our paper route and one day we decided to order pizza for lunch. We were just at that point in our youth where we were still silly, but also exploring the brashness that comes with adolescence. Here’s how it went down (according to my memory):
We called Little Caesar’s and placed our order. While Emily tells what toppings we want, Laura yells and screams from the background, making it sound like there’s a fight going on. (Both us Roskelley sisters and Emily came from homes were there was often a lot of fighting, so this didn’t seem at all inappropriate to us)
When it got pretty close to delivery time, one of us (me?) hid in the bushes that lay in front of Emily’s house with a handful of mini-marshmallows (or was it raisins?). When the delivery man came I tried to pelt him with marshmallows, stifling giggles all the while.
Laura then answered the door looking beat-up with our expertly applied rouge (to look like she’d been slapped in the face) and with tears in her eyes. She paid for the pizza and then Emily Ann came out, acting like she was handicapped.
The annoyed deliveryman left and then we hooted with laughter, imagining ourselves to be the best of actors who pulled off the most daring of stunts.
Weird, huh?
Weird, huh?
2 comments:
I asked my mom if I could skip 1st period once in high school to go to Denny's with my friends. She said no. So I went to class.
Skipping class sure would have been cool though. Especially if I was a good actor like you.
I never woulda let Joel marry ya ifin I'd knowed ya was a sluffer!
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