“Oh calm down. It’s probably just some kids doing the same thing we were doing back in the day.”
What we did back in the day was use The Shack as our personal clubhouse – Jeremy, our friend Daniel and I found the shack when we were five and spent countless hours there every weekend doing what young kids did until we grew too old to where it just became a shack again. However, once we started to get over the shack in our early-teens, we vowed we would all come back and stay the night there at least one night a summer each year for the rest of our lives.
To commemorate the creation of the yearly reunion, when we were 12, we wrote down how we thought our lives would go for the next 20 years, sealed the predictions in old rusted coffee cans and buried them behind The Shack with a promise to dig them back up 20 years later and whoever had the prediction that was closest to the truth would get 100 dollars from the other predictors.
This year was the golden 20 year celebration and Jeremy and I carried a shovel out to The Shack this year to dig up those beat up old coffee cans. Unfortunately Daniel was not with us, but that’s a longer story I will get to later.
With the used toilet paper passed us and Jeremy already a couple of horns deep, we grabbed our shovel and headed out to the soft earth behind The Shack. I let the much more strapping Jeremy handle the digging and within just a few minutes, we were staring at our childhood cased in rusty tin.
We ripped open the tin and picked the millipedes off of the faded scraps of paper we covered with ink so long ago. Jeremy and I dove into our predictions. It wasn’t long before we were both laughing hysterically.
“I thought I would be married to Allie Sharp,” Jeremy said with a laugh. “Thank God that didn’t happen.”
“Holy shit, I can’t believe I seriously thought I was going to play in the NBA,” I said with genuine astonishment. “I guess scoring 20 points a few times in middle school means you are going to be the next Jordan.”
I read on through mine and not a single thing even remotely came close to coming true. About as close as it came was I predicted having a job in Seattle and I did have a job in the suburbs of Seattle at least, about 25 minutes away.
“Anything even close to be right in yours?” I asked Jeremy.
“Nah, I thought I would be a fucking lawyer.”
“I guess maybe neither of us gotta bust out that hundred dollars.”
“Well, let’s take a look at Daniel’s.”
