You Can't Scare Me

You can’t scare me. Go ahead, try it. A lot of guys have since I was a kid, but none of them ever got me. I remember Billy climbing through my window one night -I must have been about 7 or so- with his mummy Halloween mask on. I felt a finger stub into my side and woke up to see him standing over me moaning like the mummy in that old Hammer film we’d watched together a couple of days before. Billy had been scared out of his wits, but not me. He couldn’t scare me that night either. I simply said “Bill, you idiot I was asleep! Get out of here.” Totally unfazed, as if seeing him there in the middle of the night was the most natural thing in the world. God, that must have been, what 18 years ago! Stupid bastard fell off my roof climbing out that night. His folks moved away a month later. Me and my folks moved 3 months after that.

He wasn’t the only one to try stuff on me either. There was Henry, who sat behind me in 4th Grade who would pop out behind corners or under desks trying to get a scream out of me. I’d gotten pretty mad about it, I can tell you. I was going to say something to him, but… God, even after all these years, I really feel lousy about this. You see, the last time he tried to jump me he tripped and fell into the street and was run over by a passing truck. Pretty stupid way to go; it wasn’t as if he was going to frighten me anyway.

High school was more of the same. I don’t remember individual kids, just a succession of faces, all trying to outwit me, all trying to be the first to really get me. I could go on and on about it, but there’s really no point. There are lots of videos on YouTube of people trying stuff on me and you can check it out if you’d like, to see that I’m not all talk or anything. It’s all right there.

Lately I’ve been getting a little bored with it again though. I know they’re not going to get me. So I started going around trying to turn the tables on them. Just like I did with Henry. Just like I did with Billy. I went over to Roger Stanton’s the other night with a quart of gasoline. I’d thought of a pretty good prank. I poured some over all his windows and the front and back door. Then I went around and lit them one by one. I got him good! I bet he got really scared when he saw the flames outside. I swung by the coffee shop the next day to have a laugh about it but they told me he hadn’t come in. Some sort of accident or something.

And now? Now I’m at Ceri’s place, this girl I went to College with. I liked her, though she used to say that she was unshakeable like me. I can see her sitting at her computer. She didn’t even flinch when she heard the door creak. She won’t be easy to scare. But I’ll tell you a secret. Nobody’s unshakeable. Not even me. See, I kind of lied about Billy. He did scare me that night, back in ‘92. In fact, it’s the first and only time I can remember somebody scaring me. Well I showed him. I can remember his voice cracking, his pleas as I pushed him out my window. I remember his fingernails breaking as he tried to hold on. I remember five bloody trails on the shingles. And I wonder if Ceri will leave that same mark.