“Would you rather have the power of flying or being invisible?” The fire burned red in the background as the glowing sun settled itself behind the towering tree line. Darkness slowly crept over the small town and late night drivers sped past the oddly colored Victorian house. We sat there, in the back yard, watching the fire grow taller and taller as we threw more and more papers into the flames.
Earlier that day I received a phone call from Taylor Holmes, who I had not seen for a while. “Do you want to come over and have a bonfire?” The first question that entered my mind was, how were we going to fit hundreds of teenagers and a wild uncontrollable bonfire in such a small back yard, but I agreed to come regardless. Later when I arrived I realized that it was not a normal bonfire. Instead there was a small fire pit in the back yard with four lawn chairs scattered around it. The fire had already been started when we arrived. My brother, my best friends and I got out of the car and wandered around the side of the house, in search of a huge party, but instead we found Taylor with a tin of gasoline and an enormous stack of notebook paper. “Come over here and make yourself comfortable. I have all of the homework that I have collected since my freshman year of high school that we can throw into the fire.” We all set down in separate lawn chairs and I sifted through the millions of papers. He wasn’t joking. Every single one of the papers had Taylor Holmes written in the top right hand corner and they were all neatly typed discussing different topics that we had studied in school. He walked over to me and grabbed a handful of the papers. Without thinking twice he threw the papers into the fire. A smile slid across his face as he watched the papers shrivel into tiny black ashes. Those black ashes were the starting gun. All three of us rose from our seats and began grabbing papers and shoving them into the crackling fire. There was something about throwing those pages into the fire that made me feel free. We could feel the power that we held in our hands as we ripped each paper into halves and fourths, and hundreds of little pieces and fed it to the fire. We stood there entranced for hours, ripping paper and playing “would you rather.”
“Would you rather live forever, or live a short and memorable life?” We tossed questions back and forth for hours and got to know each other better than we ever thought we would. Who knew that all you would need to get to know your friends was a stack of old homework papers and a small bonfire.