In 1986, I moved from Roanoke, VA to Winston-Salem, NC. My parents were in the middle of a divorce and my mom had gotten a job in a new city. I honestly didn’t want to move; apparently, I didn’t love big changes back then either. I was tricked by my parents telling me to try it for two weeks, and if I didn’t like it in NC, we would move back to VA. 

Fast forward to the first day at my new school. I had to go to the office for some reason, some type of official business, but as a new student I had NO idea how to get to the office from my 3rd grade classroom. My teacher, Mrs. Hepler, sent this blonde-haired kid with a bowl cut to show me where to go. We walked to the office, took care of business, and then on the way back to class, learned each others’ names: Chip and Chad. Chad was my first friend at my new school, in my new city, and new state. From that moment on, there was rarely a time when we weren’t together.

Five or six years later during summers in middle school, it was still normal for us to end up at each others’ houses for multiple days at a time so we could swim, go skateboarding, or just have someone to hangout with and not sit inside. Chad was the ONLY kid I knew that woke up before anything or anyone else on the planet. It was the norm for him to have been up for an hour or two watching TV when my parents woke up at 6am to get ready for work. I, on the other hand, enjoyed a little more sleep, before going out in the NC heat to skate.

One particular day, my parents left for work at probably 7:30am, and apparently Chad found a BB gun in a closet somewhere in the house. By then, “half the day was gone,” according to Chad’s timeline, and he’d been trying to wake me up for a bit. In my sleep, I could hear some noise that he was making, but nothing really stuck out to me about what was happening. He had been pumping the BB gun and firing it at the ceiling, and since the barrel was always pointed up, a BB never loaded the “chamber.” Somewhere around 8:30am, Chad decided I’d had enough sleep and yelled, “WAKE UP!” I wasn’t good at responding to these orders, so Chad decided to scare me with the sound and puff that it would make when the BB gun was closely pointed at me. The problem was, when he lowered the barrel toward me, a BB finally loaded in the chamber. Again, Chad said, “WAKE UP,” except this time the command was followed by the distinct sound of a BB gun being fired about a foot away from my side. 

Immediately, I was wide awake and swinging at Chad; he thought it was funny until we walked into the bathroom and I lifted my arm and shirt to find a BB solidly lodged in my armpit. Chad’s face quickly changed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone’s eyes get that big. We had a choice to make: call my mom to help us extract this BB (which would probably have ended the day of fun we had in store), or figure it out and later act like nothing happened when our parents asked how our day went. We definitely did NOT call parents! As Chad watched with his big eyes, I popped it like a pimple! Thankfully, the BB removal was way easier than I expected. It came out so fast that we lost it down the sink drain in my mom’s bathroom.

As any good, Gen-X 13 year old would do in 1991, I threw some Neosporin on there, we ate some breakfast, and then we went outside for the day to skate and hangout with the neighborhood kids. We likely went to mess around Wake Forest at some point during the day — like we were supposed to be there. 

My mom did spot the scar in a doctor’s appointment a year or so later and asked about it, but I made something up and kept moving. The truth is, I have no memory of what story I made up, I just knew in that moment that the BB story wouldn’t be as funny to my mom as it would be later in life, so for her sake, I waited to tell her years down the road.  

Chad and I still laugh about this story. I was in WS recently and saw the BB gun and sent Chad a pic with, “remember this,” in the caption. I wish I remembered what shirt Chad shot a hole in for me… it was probably one of my favorite skate shirts.