“That might be the last dare I ever took”

“Am I a person who gets convinced to do dares?” No. But have I been convinced to do a dare? Yes, and it fills me with great regret to this day. It was so stupid. No one even was – no one was hurt during this dare. So yes, I have been convinced to do a dare. And the first one that came to my mind was when I was in fourth grade, maybe fifth grade, and my mom’s boyfriend was in the kitchen with me and my brother and the phone rang. I was a very shy child, and I’m still afraid of the phone to this day, talking on the phone, just – I get so nervous. The phone rang. And for some reason, I have no idea why. I don’t know why he said it, I don’t know why I agreed to it. But my mom’s boyfriend dared me to pick up the telephone and just say in a – like the meanest tone, not yelling, but like louder than normal – to just pick up the phone and say, “What?!” And I think the presumption is it was probably my mom calling home from, from work because she always did right around that time, you know, to check in or to let us know what’s going on. So, I picked up the phone in the kitchen believing it was going to be my mom. And so I went through with it and picked up the phone and I go “What?!” And it was my fifth grade teacher and I have no idea why she was calling ’cause I was a good kid and teachers don’t usually call home in my house. I just know that I melted with embarrassment. I handed the phone off to my mom’s boyfriend. I don’t even remember what became of it, but it was the worst. It might have been the last time I ever took a dare, ’cause it was just – I died of embarrassment. And in hindsight I wonder what she thought. I mean, at the time, I wondered what she walked away thinking. But now that I’m a teacher myself, she had to have gone and gossiped to her fellow co-teachers like, “I just called like my sweetest boy, and he answered the phone by just yelling “what” into my ear. He didn’t even say hello.” She was probably so confused and flustered. I don’t know. So yeah, that might be the last dare I ever took.

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