Ratted out...

While chatting with my friend, Angie Lee, about the stories that her sibs could allegedly dish about her, I was reminded of a story of my own.

I was returning home late one night with my brother and his friend in tow. It was late. There were few cars on the freeway going east over the coastal hills, a rare occurrence for the densely populated Bay Area. We were all in high spirits, having spent the evening with youth from our church.

"Hey, 'Miah! Let's see how fast we can go!"

"Yeah! Floor it, man!"

"I don't know guys. We're already going pretty fast."

The freeway stretched away from us, straight as an arrow and sloping down into the next town. There were four lanes devoid of other travellers and no CHP cars to be seen.

"C'mon, dude! Let's break one hundred."

May I eventually be forgiven for caving so easily to peer pressure. It did indeed sound like fun.

"Okay."

Our small, manual transmission Honda Accord responded readily to the steady application of my foot to the accelerator. Soon the speedometer crested at 103 MPH. I let off the gas, and we slowly decelerated as the car coasted--very quickly--past the next offramp.

"Whoooa!"

"Cool! That was sweet!"

We made it home without further excitement. It seemed that our little adventure would soon become just a remembrance of those silly things that we do when we're kids. Little did I think of how this passing moment of glory could come back to haunt me.

It wasn't long before some friction arose between my brother and me. In a moment of heated debate in front of my mother, I accused him of using foul language--an offense not to be brooked in the Jones household.

"Oh, yeah? Well the other day Jeremiah went 100 miles per hour on the freeway!"

My mother looked shocked. She is very quick with a witty response in most instances, and not slow to mete out punishment when it was deserved. But now she just stared at me, words refusing to coalesce in the form of some matriarchal pronouncement. Eventually she managed to come up with something about me never daring to do that again.

I got off easy, but I learned a lesson that day--I could never do anything that I wouldn't want my parents to get wind of.

At least not with my siblings around....