I Got Stuck on a Roof/Transcript


 * Rebecca Parham: Hello, my geeks and peeps, my explainers and entertainers, my little oo-de-lollies, Rebecca Parham here! Even when I was young, I never understood the type of kid who did stupid dangerous things for fun or attention. My grandfather, who was a rocket scientist for the Air Force, used to say that a mark of intelligence was understanding cause and effect.
 * Attention boy: If I jump off of this very high rock into very shallow water, there is a high probability that I will break something important and possibly do permanent damage to my frail human body. Hmm, maybe the admiration of my peers isn't worth risking my entire future as a- JUST KIDDING, YEET!
 * Rebecca Parham: I wasn't one of those kids. Not even close. I was the terrified one in the corner who had to muster up courage just to ask for the hall pass, so it's a jolly good wonder how I ended up in this precarious predicament that I'm about to describe to you. Let's rewind the clock, shall we? Middle school Becca, you're up! The year was sixth grade, still doing the preparatory school thing and still very much a loner geek obsessed with Pokémon video games and cartoons. But around this time, I did manage to make one friend for a short while. She was in the grade above me, which I thought made me so cool! At this school, you didn't make friends outside your grade: you stuck to your own kind. So the fact that an older girl wanted to be friends not only made me feel special, but it made me feel like I was getting away with something. We'll call her "Kay", and looking back, it's pretty clear to me why we got along so well. While I personally thought she was one of the cool kids, she was clearly the loner weirdo geek in her own class. Proof that perspective is everything. Maybe one day, I'll be as cool as her. She also liked Pokémon and video games and was really good at Super Smash Brothers, the original. She's also the one who taught me the infamous item duplication glitch in Pokémon Red and Blue. So yeah, the geek was strong with this one. One day, Kay invited me over to her house for a sleepover. Now you have to remember at this point in my life, my family lived out in the country, so most of the kids at school did too. And Kay's house was on a very big piece of property, many many acres and far away from any neighbors. Levels of seclusion that made you wonder what the hell the parents were up to. Anyways, she and I were having a lovely old sleepover and I wasn't going to be picked up until the afternoon of the next day, so we had lots of time to kill. After a very full night of trading Pokémon and playing all 12 characters in Smash, we were enjoying breakfast when her parents came in they told us they were going to the farthest stretches of their property to work on a new house they were building. "Right, new house, gotcha...". I'm ignoring the shovels and suspicious tarp. One second after Kay's parents closed the door behind them, she turned to me and gave me one of those looks that said:
 * Kay: "I'm about to drag you into something you're gonna regret. You want to go out on the roof?"
 * Rebecca: "Go what do what now?". Kay's house was two stories, but the second story was a lot smaller than the first, and via a window on the second floor, one could easily slip out and parkour to their little hearts content all over the first story roof. Kay took us up to the second story open the window that would lead to the roof and said:
 * Kay: "Don't worry, I've done this lots of times and nothing bad ever happened."
 * Rebecca: Well, she did appear to be alive, so I guess there was a good chance she didn't ever die from going out on the roof and I was not about to turn the yellow-bellied in front of my cool older friend, so I followed her outside onto the roof and just as we both made it out, she said:
 * Kay: "See? It's all fine, just as long as we don't close the-"
 * [window shuts]
 * Kay: "...window. I really hope you went to the bathroom before this."
 * Rebecca: Turns out the window locked automatically whenever it was closed, and no amount of us trying was getting it to budge. Now modern innovation would make this a non-problem, because everybody and their grandmother has cell phones that might as well be implanted into our hands, but back then, you didn't get a cell phone until you were like a teenager, if you were lucky. And whatever phone you did get was just that: a phone, not a mini-computer with access to a literal world of distractions and activities. So even if I did have a phone back then, chances are I wouldn't be carrying it on me, anyways. So that meant we were stuck on a roof with no one else around. "I vote you jump if your legs aren't broken, go back in the house and open the window.". Neither of us were going to jump first off, it would have been stupid. Secondly, her house was on a hillside with lots of jagged rocks, so if you jumped, you weren't just going to fall 12 feet, you were going to hit and then tumble down a steep rocky hill, so you know: might get a boo-boo. There were trees around us, but none of them were close enough for us to climb down, and if my childhood bully friend Jocko taught me anything, it's that twigs have a weight-bearing limit. Our next option: scream. Kay's parents were "working on a house" over a mile away, so all we two middle school girls had to do was create the same level of decibels as a rock concert in order to just barely be heard at that distance. Oh yeah, surprise surprise. Ten minutes of screaming didn't do anything: it just made us a little hoarse, so we couldn't jump, we couldn't climb, and we couldn't call for help. What is a girl to do? Well, my beautiful mind came up with a real humdinger: I started grabbing leaves off the adjacent branches and spelling out SOS on the roof (yes, I really did that!). I don't know who I was trying to flag down: helicopter, kite, a passing buzzard? "Hey! Hey! We're about to be dead soon, so you might as well stick around!".
 * Kay: "Oh come on now, it could totally be worse!"
 * Rebecca Parham: No, no, no, no, no, I will not be resorting to this Hollywood cliché of a joke! It was actually a nice day, but thank goodness it didn't happen in the middle of Texas summer: we definitely would have looked like SpongeBob and Patrick in Shell City by the end of it. We were stuck up there for two hours, but thankfully, her parents weren't away that long.
 * Kay's mother: "Must have been quite a sight to come home to."
 * Rebecca Parham: "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Kay's parents, I see you've made short work of that suspicious tarp. If you get us down, I promise not to testify against you in court!"
 * Kay's mother: "Why does she always bring home the weird ones?"
 * Rebecca Parham: One ladder later and Kay and I were safely back on the ground. Her parents were surprisingly chill about the whole thing, didn't even threaten to tell my parents. It looked like I was gonna get away with my dumb decision scot-free. Kay's parents didn't even bother to see me off. When my dad came to come pick me up, everything was coming up Becca. But just as I was walking out to greet my dad...
 * Kay: "And remember: don't tell him anything!"
 * Mike Parham: "Don't tell me what, dear daughter of mine???"
 * Rebecca Parham: The jig was up, I had to tell him. And of course, he was not happy. Got a big old lecture on the way home, because you know, I guess my parents cared about my safety and stuff. Shortly after Kay "switched schools", though I think we all know what that meant, oh poor went out for the poor murdered soul of Kay. She got to be a ghost story before me, may her roof climbing high jinks live on in infamy...
 * Kay: "Why did I always make friends with the weird ones?"