We Roamed After Midnight

We had a lot of sleepovers growing up. On the weekends, me and my friends (read: our parents) would take turns hosting. When they happened, anywhere between 4 and 9 teenage dudes would figure out rides to each other’s homes and spend the next 16 hours trying to figure out where the girl equivalent of our group was staying, what they were doing, and conspiring to meet somewhere in the middle. When those plans inevitably derailed, we resorted to junk food, video games, and movies. After midnight, we’d sneak out of the house and roam our neighborhoods.

Call it strength in numbers, because these neighborhoods I’m talking about are creepy after hours. Suburban housing developments in Maine don’t have a ton of street lighting. The copious amount of tall pines make certain stretches feel synthetically dark. Nervous energy kept us chatting as we walked, drowning out the crack of a branch just out of sight, the ruffling of leaves, or eerie plops from the marsh. We were never really alone, which made the adventure fun. We were together and nothing could touch us.

When people slept over my place, we’d spend the majority of the night in the TV room on the first floor. The room is lined with tall windows to let the sun in during the day. At night, things get more interesting. Instead of looking out on pine trees, grass, and marsh, there’s nothing but blackness. The more lights turned on, the easier it is to forget about what could be lurking in the shadows on the other side of the windows. After my parents went to bed, we turned off most of the lights to convince them we were trying to sleep. We kept the TV on and that was bright enough.

But it wasn’t bright enough from seeing my backyard and night. We could make out the trees, the marsh line, and other nature silhouettes. On one occasion, one of my friends decided to escape from the first-floor bathroom through the window, sneak around the side of the house in just his boxers, and run up onto the porch to scare the rest of us. It worked. So well, in fact, the rest of the night turned into a half-dozen or so young adults taking turns trying to escape to the bathroom undetected, just to climb through the window and scare everybody all over again.

Part of the fun of these stunts was convincing ourselves that something more was going on. It kept the nights from dying. On this night, people took turns saying they heard something in the backyard. One of my friends thought he saw somebody. Naturally, we ran with it, telling ourselves that we could see movement in the shadows beyond my porch--the outline of a person, perhaps. The legend we were building became an excuse to recommence trying to scare each other again. We were teenage boogeymen in boxers keeping a sleepy neighborhood awake.

We exhausted ourselves and eventually went to bed. In the morning, we were treated to Eggos and bacon as if we deserved it. Turns out, maybe we did.

Over the next couple of days, after this particular sleepover, rumors started to trickle out that my next-door neighbor had been robbed. Apparently, they were out of town that weekend and the break-in took place in the middle of the night. None of us, to my knowledge, has ever been given a straight answer about the reported break-in, how the alleged perpetrator pulled it off, or where s/he might have disappeared to after the event. All I know is, it made all of us at my place that night pause when we spread the story at school. Those sounds we heard and shadows we saw while running around the house that night seemed to take on new meaning. Maybe we really, really weren’t alone, and I like to think we were heroes. We were nothing to mess with and maybe someone took notice.