Adolescence

Shamus Young at Twenty Sided offers us the tale of Seven Springs: “Naked Girls, A Hotel-Sized Prank, The Terrors of Room 102, and Lessons Learned.”

We’re exactly the sort of oddball group that populate John Hughes movies. High-school pecking order and social norms would have prevented us from interacting under normal circumstances. We could look at each other and know that we are from different groups. Dennis would hang out with the other preps. Jay would hang out with the other kids clad in denim and heavy metal t-shirts permanently infused with cigarette smoke. Chip would look for the other honor students. I would look for a place to be alone on purpose so that it wasn’t obvious that I was alone by default.

But in this context we try to relate to each other. It’s Friday afternoon, and we’re going to be here until Sunday morning. Might as well pretend to be friends.

We complain about the cold and the rain and our fate of being dumped into this separate side-building away from everyone else, like lepers. After a while the last of the students check in, and we notice our room is lacking in something very obvious: We don’t have a chaperone. I can only extrapolate, but my guess is that while there were enough chaperones to go around, there weren’t enough male chaperones to cover all of the male-occupied rooms. Suddenly our room is a stroke of fortune. We are unsupervised, forgotten, in a nominal luxury room, and in a hotel full of girls. We suddenly feel invincible. Our social differences evaporate. We are four guys who have fallen into this good fortune together.

It's a true story, so their resulting adventures are not quite like a John Hughes movie, but not entirely unlike one either. And the Lessons Learned are good ones.