The Girl Behind the Light

Chapter Five: The Big Trip (Part Three)

October 18, 20-

Today was the day we go home, and already we were too sad to leave. We enjoyed this trip way too much, all except for the part where Nate got hurt. Thankfully Carrie got in trouble for it, and she had to leave early as part of her consequence. At least Nate was okay enough to come back to the hotel with us, but he had a hard time sleeping.

We followed the exact same routine we did on Saturday morning, but this time we wrapped up video games early to clean up. I actually tried to play on the game station, and I did pretty okay on a game called "Fortress Battle". We got on the bus afterward, and Filipe reminded us that we were going to visit the local mission here in Steven's Point. Mission El Puro it was called, and it was one the few missions in the Tri-State area that wasn't converted into a museum.

"It's a beautiful mission, you guys will love it. I visited here when I was 17, back when my Spanish teacher Ms. Blanco took us out here on a field trip. She was a pain with homework, but she knew how to make a good field trip." It was always kind of fun to hear Filipe's stories. I hoped we could hear more.

"You gotta tell more of your stories when we get there Filipe." His smile grew a little bigger.

"I know a good spot we can have a story time at. Remind me after we explore the whole place."

We got there and it was absolutely beautiful. It felt so authentic, and we got to really experience history at its finest. We had our fun; we would sing in harmony to emulate a church choir, we found a confession box and pretended to be priests, and we even found a little frog that we kept as a pet for like 15 minutes. Once we finished looking around, for the most part, I reminded Filipe about the story time, and we walked over to a little camp-like gathering place and sat on rows of logs. From there we got to hear some great stories. One of my favorites that he told was how he got expelled. It went a little like this:

"When I was a Junior, I had a friend named Tommy, and he knew this locksmith, and he had an idea to steal a key and copy it to access the school pool whenever they wanted. Keep in mind all the school locks back then were the same, so we only needed one. He went to our band director during Jazz Band for the gate key so he could go get something from his car, and because our band director had two school keys anyway, he wouldn't notice if the other one was gone. So Tommy was able to make a copy of it after school and he took the original key and put the replica key back on Mr. Farman's key ring when he wasn't around in his office. From there, we would come over on weekends and just relax there, and it was a lot of fun. That's not what got us expelled though.

"One day, another friend of ours, Billy, got in trouble by a security guard because he threw a ketchup packet across the cafeteria and tried to lie about it, and he got suspended for it, so he wanted revenge. He went to my friend Tommy and asked if he could help him pull off the ultimate plan. Basically, the plan was to show up during the night, go to the where the security carts were kept, and roll the security cart into the pool. We actually went through with it, with the help of our other friends of course. We never knew who snitched on us a couple months later, but they caught us eventually, and because I tried to lie my way out of it, it got me expelled. Lesson to the story: Revenge is not the answer, and lying will only make things worse."

We enjoyed it a lot, mainly because of how he told it. We got going after that for lunch. Some people next to us came up with an idea to have our own story time, but after we got our lunch just so that we had enough time to come up with something. Dillon wanted to join in, and so the rest of the group did as well.

We stopped at the rest stop in Barrington Hills, two and a half hours out from Fountain Valley. There wasn't a Chinese Express there, and I was craving it. I had to settle for a meatball sub at the Underwater Subs sandwich place. It wasn't that good, but Tori thought otherwise. Maybe I'm too used to the Uncle Mario's sub sandwiches next to my house.