Kim Jones Carter
Sister
Nate and I were what you might call incompatible partners-in-crime growing up. There were so many hijinks we got up to, and got in trouble for, and our personalities when it came to owning up for our crimes were never quite sympatico.
While I don't really remember the event as I was maybe 3 or 4 at the time, my family has often delighted in repeating the story of how when we were little Nate and I took a tin can full of water and two broken twigs to use as stirring sticks and snuck into mom's garden to make a "witches brew." We giggled as we picked the red peppers from their stems and dumped them into our muddy pail and mashed at them with our sticks, chanting nonsensical phrases that to our young minds sounded magical.
I don't know how long we played, but apparently when we stumbled into the house with our red and puffy burning eyes and our tear streaked faces, we were put on trial by mom to find out what we'd been doing, and whose idea it was to make witches brew out of her jalapenos. Nathan was ever the stoic warrior, arms crossed over his chest and lips clenched tight, but at that point I cracked and immediately confessed to the crime, and was awarded with a shower to wash out my burning eyes.
While the actual memory to me is faint, Nate never let me live down the fact that I betrayed him.
Nate was always the first person to tease you, and that was absolutely the truth growing up. I suppose you could say I got my revenge against his teasing by watching my favorite movie, The Lion King, on repeat excessively. While I'm fairly certain I kept my watching a to a maximum of once per day, which is admittedly a lot, Nate would swear I watched it four or five times a day. And while he didn't dislike the movie itself, apparently I drove him a little mad with it.
Until one day, when the VHS mysteriously disappeared. Being the avid watcher that I was, it was a complete mystery to me what could have happened to it, and when it could not be located and I asked my parents about the possibility of replacing it, their response was essentially, "it's here somewhere, we're not buying another copy."
It was many, many years later as we were redoing the basement in our childhood home into a movie room that the very large, very heavy entertainment center got evicted, and what did we find behind it but a very dusty VHS case nestled between the cobwebs.
By that point, probably ten years later, I'd almost forgotten the disappearance, and assumed it must have fallen behind it on its own. Only then did Nate fess up to the fact that if he had to listen to "Hakuna Matata" one more time, he was going to go insane, and had thrown the VHS behind the stand. He laughed, saying at the time he'd been sure it would only stay there for a few days before it would be found and he would get in trouble, but that he was so desperate for a break in the never-ending repeat of the "Circle of Life" that he hadn't even cared that he'd get in trouble.
We laughed often together about it, and he remained adamant that his actions were justified because of the torture I'd submitted him to.
