On That Day...

My name is Tamara Quinn and I'm 24 years old. In all those years I never would have thought that my mother was still such a rebel. I also never would have thought that she had such a ginormous soft spot for adorable (yet silent) animals. I knew she loved them, I did too, but by the time my 16th year of living was over, I had probably suffered from permanent shock over the day my mother suggested we break more than one law. The outcome of that day was something we had no clue how to handle. I never let her live down what happened on April 17, 2018. I can't even begin to imagine how lucky we were that it played out the way it did.

It all started on April 16, 2018. It was a bright day outside and many children were running about playing ball and chasing bugs. That was the thing about our neighborhood, it had way too many children. They would run and scream and it would be impossible to get any peace and quiet at any time of the day. And that's precisely why my mother and I were out and about. We wanted a quiet place to work. First we'd gone to the bookstore, but when it flooded with high school students and started to get noisy? We went to the place closest and most likely to not be immersed in noise. The pet store. It was a small pet store with almost no actual pets (which was why no one was there) and it was where we'd gotten the puppy we gave to my sister on her wedding day. Any way, I'm side tracking (You'll find I side track a lot when I'm telling a story). One of the pets there that day was a little, silent, baby monkey. It was a him, an adorable him too. The problem was, there was something wrong with him. He was just too silent. When we asked the sails person, he told us the monkey was depressed. I didn't even know monkeys could get depressed (I specifically did a project on that many years later, in med School). My mom immediately wanted to buy him but he wasn't being sold due to the store wanting to keep their reputation. Then she tried to strike a deal, she wasn't about to let the adorable little thing be put down. But the sails person was just too resilient, he said no to my mom before she even started her sentence.

By the time we left we were both thoroughly annoyed. That sails person had just ruined our day, and mom was practically steaming from the ears and nose. I wont repeat the things she said because well, you'd probably stop reading my story. Once we got home, I thought that it was over, there was nothing more we could do. Little did I know my mother was scheming a very devious plan throughout the entire evening, unable to let the monkey die. She told me about it right before I went to sleep, gave me the option of joining or not. I couldn't let her go by herself, so around 1 o clock that night we put our plan into action.

The entire robbery took about 10 minutes. It was super quick and very scary. We had some trouble with a police officer on our way home. The monkey was hidden in the backseat under some blankets when we go stopped for speeding. My mom was perfectly fine, she handled the situation with ease and we got off without even a speeding ticket. It was like she knew what she was doing or had done It before. Which later on led me to interrogating her about her younger years. Moving on... When we entered the house monkey in hands, we realized something. The monkey wasn't moving. At first we freaked out but then we rationalized. We figured that the monkey was probably just scared, or in shock. We'd completely forgotten about the depression thing. We remembered after the monkey refused to eat or drink. But since their was nothing else to do we decided to go to sleep.

The next morning my mother and I were sitting in the living room (where the monkey was) discussing the consequences of our actions and what we should do about it. We were still talking when my little sister Amelia decided to make a dramatic entrance. She had a running start, running from her room jumping over the couch and powering through on her way to the kitchen, not realizing that the small bundle of fur was a living thing until the last minute. There was a high pitched noise and the monkey sprinted out of the way crashing into a chair. My sister jumped in surprise and fell over backward, absolutely dumbfounded. My mother and I looked at each other, too surprised to speak. Than my sister began to cuddle and talk baby talk to the monkey slowly unraveling him and apologizing.

In the end my sister and the monkey became inseparable. They slept in the same bed, ate from the same plate, and my sister snuck him to school in her backpack as well. We often got kids coming over asking for for the little fluff ball. I also learned quite a few new things about my family, including myself. For one, my mother is a total sucker for cute furry monkeys. Second, my sister can get scary protective and even obsessive about the animals she takes a liking to. That along with her large emotional streak and I decided that I definitely wanted to be out of the house when her first boyfriends broke up with her. But I also learned that I was a huge worrywart... My heart was beating fast even days after the robbery. And I jumped whenever a heard a siren. In the long run, it was definitely a life changing experience.