The Great Powder Fight of 1990

At ten years old, I was already practicing my surly teenager skills.  I didn't want anyone touching my stuff, and nobody was allowed in my room.  So when I walked into my bedroom one evening and found my older sister lounging on the top bunk of my bunkbed, I went from zero to pissed in no time.

Let me paint a picture for you:  I was 10, my sister was 14.  My mother worked two jobs at the time and the only sleep to be had for the poor woman was in the evening.  Which was about the time I discovered my (already fully practiced) surly sister laying back with her head propped up on a pillow, on my bunkbed.  Grrr.

As quietly as can be so as not to wake my mother in the next room, I growled, "Get out of my room", to which she responded with a heaving sigh and a "Mmm.  No thanks".  Gotta love teenagers right?  Our conversation after that went a little like this:

Me:  Seriously Krista, get out of my room.

Her:  Are you going to make me?

Me:  When I scream loud enough to wake the dead, you will be in trouble.

Her:  Yeeeaahahh. Go for it.

It was the eye rolling that got to me.  I spoke a little louder, telling her to go away.  She was lanquidly petting our black cat Licorice, pretending not to hear me.  I grabbed a gigantic bottle of baby powder off my dresser and threatened the cat with it.

"If you don't leave I am going to sprinkle baby powder on Licorice!"

She countered my move by grabbing the second huge bottle of powder off my dresser (WTF was with me and baby powder?).  She told me if I put some on the cat, she would pour baby powder all over me.  We were at a standstill.  Both of us pointing our respective bottles at each other, like in an old western. 

And then, she squeezed.

Powder ripped out of the bottle at breakneck speed and poofed directly into my face.  That bitch.  That was the action I needed to let me know that IT WAS ON.

We then proceeded to get into the Great Powder Fight of 1990 in my tiny little room.  We were laughing and carrying on, shooting powder at each other and covering the room in white.  And I mean literally.  We were white from head to toe, the cat was white, the floor was white...everything in that room was full of dusty powder.  We were spluttering and coughing, calling each other all the horrible names we could think of and giggling about it, when we heard a knock on the door.

Uh oh.  My mother: who we had woken up from the only sleep to be had for her that evening.   She asked us what we were doing and we replied simultaneously with "Nothing!".  She could hear the lie in our voices and began to open the door.  We looked at each other in horror.  We were done for, she was going to FREAK. 

She opened the door, sleepy-eyed and angry-looking.  My sister and I were standing in the middle of the bright white room, looking like tiny old people before our time.  She looked around the room, looked at us, and said,

"I don't know what you two are up to in here, but please keep it down".

And with that she shut the door on us, leaving us wide-eyed and amazed that she hadn't noticed the winter wonderland we were currently standing in the middle of.  Poor mama, she was so tired her brain hadn't registered what we had done. 

We spent the next two hours quietly cleaning my room, getting powder off the bed covers, the cat, ourselves and even in the cracks of the hardwood floor.  We worked in silence, but every once in a while we would glance at each other and giggle, bound in our knowledge that we had just shared something special, something that only we knew about.  One of the many things that get's put into the bottomless sister vault, binding you ever tighter with your knowledge of each other's secrets.  The kind of thing that we would hold close to our hearts forever, and cherish to our graves.