Happy Retro Day!! To go with our current them of “back to school”, we decided to re-post this great story from Halee about her hilarious high school debacle. Enjoy!

By RTF Editor Halee Matthews

It was a rite of passage – a mean, painful initiation. Nearly every person at my high school suffered through it at some point… except me. I managed to dodge it until the end of my junior year, when it found me in the place where the stairs lie in wait for their next victim.

Yes, the stairs.

You see, my high school was really old. Like, “Wow, indoor plumbing? What an idea!” old. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but not much.

Clearly the builders didn’t have very advanced tools or else each step would have been the same size. As it was, the stairs were warped, crooked, and differing in depth. It was no wonder every student missed a step or two occasionally. It was a particularly fun experience when the stairwell was full. (Think dominoes.)

Sure, I’d missed a step every now and then, but despite a few minor incidents, I’d never taken a flying leap like so many other people. I was proud of such an achievement. Oh, how foolish I was!

That fateful day was like any other. Laden with a massively heavy backpack, I’d just retrieved my lunch from my locker and was on my way to the cafeteria, my rumbling stomach urging me on. I reached the stairs and rushed down them as I did multiple times a day.

Only this day things were a little different.

As I was descending, I missed a step. No problem. I thought. I’ve taken two steps at a time before.

What I didn’t realize until a nanosecond later was that missing a step had completely thrown off my rhythm. Not good.

I began to pick up speed, my arms flailing in the air in an attempt to regain my balance as the top half of my body descended faster and faster, until my legs could no longer keep up and I took flight. (Who knew I could fly?!) But that’s exactly what I did… until my flight path delivered me directly into the mural at the bottom of the stairs. I slid to my knees with a thump.

I gave a prayer of thanks for my life, or tried to. It ended up more like Lord, I’m alive. Thanks, but I wouldn’t mind if You wanted to take me now… I waited a moment to see if the floor would swallow me. Alas, it did not. I guess that’s a no.

I jumped to my feet and glanced back to see who had witnessed my defiance of gravity. One girl stood at the top of the stairs, her mouth hanging open. “Aaaare you okay?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah, I’m good. Great. Fine. See ya!” I turned and continued down the next set of stairs, a bit more carefully than the last, my knees aching. Hey, at least it was only one person… maybe no one else will know…

By lunchtime, everyone was asking me how I was. (Oh the joys of a small school!) I was unscathed, except for two brilliantly-colored bruises on my knees, which were painfully obvious when I put on my dress for the end-of-year awards ceremony.

So, like any girl who is concerned with her appearance, I found a solution: makeup. Yes, I put makeup on my knees.

In spite of my wounds, I survived my initiation and even learned an important lesson from it: in spite of what you may think, embarrassment can’t kill you. We all fall – sometimes in amazing, wildly unique ways. And it hurts. And we wonder why we should get up. (That really is the hard part, isn’t it- getting up to face life again.)

The only way to keep your head up is to embrace a sense of humor. If you share your story, people will respect you for showing your humanity. Who knows? Maybe your story will encourage others to share theirs, and we’ll all learn to laugh at ourselves.

Or maybe we’ll just learn to avoid the stairs.