When I was in seventh grade, 13-year-old boys were representative of everything wonderful in the world: adrenaline, budding sexuality and really smelly gym clothes. Eight years ago, being trapped in a dark room for a half hour with about 30 of them would be a gift from God. Now, not so much.
Last weekend, my boyfriend Jeff and I drove to Detroit for my cousin’s bar mitzvah. Afterward, we all piled into various SUVs and headed to an arcade for celebratory pizza and 7-ticket Chinese finger traps.
What we didn’t expect was that merely 20 minutes after our arrival, we would all find ourselves in front of massive guns aimed for the heart in a dark labyrinth. That’s right—they had laser tag.
Given the small ratio of friends to family present and the even smaller ratio of friends to family that actually wanted to play, I ended up in a room with my boyfriend, my brother and sister, two cousins and 30 seventh-grade boys.
Our first task was undoubtedly the hardest: picking teams. We watched as all the adolescent boys were called, leaving the six of us on our own side of the room. My brother and my two cousins were the next to go, given their outstanding height.
“We’ll take the guy with the cool hair,” one team captain announced. Jeff, sort of embarrassed but also kind of smug, patted the top of his head and left me and my sister huddled alone in the corner flooded with horrendous memories of gym class, recess and freshman-year orgies (just kidding).
Once I split from my sister, it was time to enter the laser-zone and hide while we waited for our guns to activate. That was when I realized my one weapon I had always counted on for discreetness would fail me: my height.
I am short, barely pushing 5’3’’. This is something I take a lot of crap for in a family where my 10-year-old sister stands only two inches below me. In fact, my parents once called me Pee-Wee for an entire year.
But my height lets me be discrete—in bars, loud family functions, the wild (think bears) and, of course, laser tag. However, although these boys were louder than I could ever hope to be, except when I’m out of chocolate while menstruating, these boys had nothing on me in height, meaning I was now the tall one in the group—definitely a laser tag disadvantage.
The result of this was immense frustration. No matter where I hid, they hid better. When I found one of them, three others found me. No matter how many I beat mercilessly with the barrel of my gun, more kept showing up, like they were multiplying just to piss me off.
As my vest’s vibrations (that alerted me when I had been shot) increased exponentially with every passing minute, I became more and more angry until I crashed head-on with Jeff, who happened to be on my team.
“It’s your job to protect me!” I yelled at him as my vest began to vibrate yet again.
“What are you talking about?” he said as he slipped a passing boy a high five.
“They keep chasing me!”
“Oh you love it,” he said in a tone that made him regress about eight years. I wondered if we would have dated back then if we had gone to middle school together.
We were in our 20s and playing laser tag with a bunch of ravenous seventh-grade boys. Clearly, we both were far too dorky in middle school to be dating anyone, even each other.
I felt someone tugging at my arm.
“Do you want to have a techno dance party?” my brother asked, pointing to a deserted corner.
“Sure!” I said, having given up on winning laser tag a long time ago.
As we danced in the corner, flailing our arms and trying not to render each other unconscious with our guns, I decided that both laser tag and vertically challenged teenage boys would now be things of the past.
If you are taller than Kiera, e-mail her at wiatrak@wisc.edu to play laser tag. If you aren’t, e-mail her to make her feel better about herself.
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