3M

one of the games that my brother directed when we were young was called "spook house" or "haunted house" depending on who the current foreperson was. mike and sean would always go first, constructing a tiny tangled maze barely large enough for our little shoulders to navigate. we would always begin the adventure by crawling under a tv tray draped in the blanket that was on other days reserved as my veil. from there we would follow the path and the brothers would creep around from one strategic location to another to jump out and scare us or throw water on us or sometimes a more offensive material. it was the complete lack of natural light allowed into our basement that provided the most frightening element. that and the very real possibility of encountering a real spider. once this thought entered my mind, there was no escaping it. i would bump into some object that the brothers determined to be made of a creepy fabric or texture and i would jump high enough to nearly knock over the tv trays that were providing the structure for our labyrinth. SPIDER! HUGE SPIDER! my brain would insist. there were two reasons spook houses had any effect on me: i was a child and had an inherent fear of the dark (and a brother who liked to startle me in the dark as frequently as possible) and i was and remain deeply phobic of insects and spiders. once the idea of an encounter in the dark with something that had more legs than i entered my head, i was like a tweeker who has just been informed that the alien FBI had learned about his secret stash of power beads and was coming to collect. i would jump at anything.
the brothers always seemed to allow sara and i an opportunity to set up a spook house after we were done crawling through theirs. i have to reflect on that for a moment, because allowing sara and i to do anything was definitely out of character for the torturers. i now have to ponder their motive...
anyway. one day mike had been particularly mean to me and a few hours later announced that we were going to do spook houses. when it was our turn, sara and i came up with what we thought would surely be the most startling encounter ever experienced by someone passing under a plastic tv tray. the brothers waited upstairs where mike was probably forcing sean to make prank calls to the home of our school principal or something. mike had a lot of power.
sara and i carefully pulled the masking tape from the roll as quietly as we could. we tore off several strips of approximately 15 inches and hung them from the tv tray so the sticky side faced the visitor. i think that we pictured mike crawling into the tape and having it stick to his face and make him feel kind of grossed out. the added bonus would be if it stuck a little bit to his lip or eyebrow. any opportunity to inflict physical pain on the brothers was snatched up immediately, as we almost never found ourselves in such a position. infliction of pain and torture was strictly their calling. mike entered the tv tray first. as he was directed to do and i am sure he would have anyway. he was mike. he did things first. a few seconds into the journey a voice erupts, "SHELLY!!!" suddenly mike's whole body emerges from under the blankets and he is standing in the middle of the rec room, the whole spook house knocked over. sara hits the lights and there is my big brother with a 2-inch wide strip of heavy duty masking tape stuck to him from forehead to the back of his neck. and stuck it was. 3M is not messing around with this stuff. once in place, it really clings. i guess that is why i makes that loud sound of resistence when it is being pulled from the roll. i started laughing, initially interpreting the situation as "better than we had expected" and hoping that it hurt real bad for him to have to pull it off. my laughter was brief as i discovered that i was surely going to die that day. he had tried in the past: "jump off the roof with this plastic bag on your back, you'll fly!" "just see what it tastes like, the Mr. Yuck sticker was just a joke." but today my older larger stronger sibling was going to kill me for real.
after a few hours, when my mom had finally been able to cut the tape out of my brother's hair and return it to something that resembled a normal haricut, i was extremely grateful to learn that i had been grounded for the little prank. injustice. i finally was able to be clever enough to make him suffer just a teeny tiny little bit and he makes a big drama production out of it so i get in trouble. typical. he always struck first and made sure my parents witnessed my retaliation. i was always getting in trouble. but often it was quite a relief. when i was grounded i could not come out of my room. but more significantly, neither could he come in. i would survive another night as the little sister.