The Chocolate Caper

It was supposed to be an easy mission. Get the goods, return to base. It should've been as simple as that. It was hardly brain surgery.

Unfortunately, nine-year-olds aren't exactly super-elite agents.

It was my ninth birthday party. I'd decided to have a sleepover, and my mom had allowed me to invite four people, so I'd chosen my two best friends and two of my cousins.

We were quite the motley crew. First, there was Emma, my best friend. We'd known each other since kindergarten and did everything together. She had black curly hair that she always kept cut shoulder-length and a huge My Little Pony obsession that she'd passed on to me. At the time we were still holding onto our shared dream of starting a horse ranch together. Yes, we were that kind of horse girl.

Unfortunately, my other friend Audrey, an intelligent strawberry-blonde girl with the memory of an elephant, was unable to attend due to an event at her family's temple (they were Jewish). Maybe if she'd been there, the whole thing would've gone much more smoothly. She had more brain cells than the rest of us combined.

Lauren, my cousin who was older than me by a little less than a year, was the planner. If we decided to do something, Lauren would plan every step to the last second. She'd brush her curtain of long, dark hair behind her shoulder and get right to business.

Alyssa, Lauren's younger sister, was her second-in-command, but if she didn't want to follow orders, she would make it extremely obvious. Her curly brown hair and bubbly personality was the antithesis of Lauren's. She and I loved to match with each other more than with our own sisters. We wore matching teal nightgowns with an ice cream cone print to bed that night and identical sunset orange t-shirts the following day.

My little sister Hailey was the last guest. Even though I hadn't invited her, my mother compelled me to include Hailey in every activity. Funnily enough, it was actually her idea to go through with the Chocolate Caper.

Much to my disappointment, nobody else wanted to watch The Sound of Music (a movie, according to my mother, that I'd memorized at the age of two, thanks to my great-grandmother who always put it on when she watched me at her house while my mother was at work). Therefore, we retreated to the bedroom Hailey and I shared to turn our bunk bed into a fort. I designated Hailey's bunk (the bottom one) as our headquarters.

"Why?" Hailey asked. It was her favorite word, and every time I heard her ask it I felt a piece of my soul die.

"Because I said so," I told her.

That response usually worked, but since we had company, Hailey wasn't ready to concede so quickly this time. She narrowed her blue-grey eyes at me, put her hands defiantly on her hips, and declared, "Mommy says you're not the boss of me."

I knew this was true, but I was a manipulative little turd, and with our guests intently watching the exchange, I wasn't going to back down and lose my authority as The Birthday Girl. I retorted, "It's my party, and that makes me the boss tonight."

Hailey pouted like a four-year-old (which she was) and let us use her bunk as our headquarters. We hung our blankets down from the top bunk (which had been established by Lauren as our lookout tower), then climbed one by one into Hailey's bed.

We spent two or three minutes staring at each other excitedly. None of us had ever made a fort before. After those first minutes were up, we started to get bored. We'd left our stuffed animals in the living room where we'd be sleeping that night, and nobody wanted to go and get them, leaving nothing for us to do.

Hailey was the first to voice her opinion, since she had no filter whatsoever. "I'm boooored."

"Me, too," Alyssa chimed in. Emma, Lauren, and I all glanced at each other.

"We could play My Little Pony," Emma suggested. It was a game the two of us played at school during recess where we pretended to be two ponies that we'd made up. I was more than willing to play, but everyone else... not so much.

"Sure!" I chirped.

"No!" Everyone else groaned.

"I'm hungry," Hailey complained.

"We can go eat some of the snacks," I suggested half-heartedly, referring to the store-bought plate of baby carrots, grape tomatoes, broccoli, chopped celery, and ranch dressing my mom had prepared for us to snack on while we waited for the pizza to arrive. To five kids under the age of ten, this was less than appetizing.

"But broccoli is yuckyyyy," Hailey whined, once again stating what everyone else was too polite to say. "I want chocolate!"

Chocolate sounded much tastier than the vegetables and ranch. I remembered that we somehow still had plenty of candy leftover from Halloween, and as soon as I mentioned this, we were ready to plot a caper.

Lauren took control and made the plan. Hailey was the lookout. She would check to make sure there were no adults in the kitchen or the living room, where we'd be visible. If the coast was clear, we'd hurry to the kitchen and grab one of the swivelly bar chairs. I was the best at climbing, so I would climb on the chair to reach the candy that was hidden in the highest cabinet to prevent sneaky little girls from eating it when we weren't supposed to. While I did that, Emma and Alyssa would hold the swivelling seat still so I didn't fall. If the adults came, Hailey would report to Lauren and Lauren would stall until the rest of us bagged the loot and made our escape back to our "headquarters."

At first, it all went smoothly. Hailey reported that the adults — my mom, my two aunts, and my grandparents — were outside on the back patio chatting. We hurried unnoticed into the kitchen and set the barstool in place. I climbed up on the chair and opened the cabinet.

That was when my dad entered the house, having just returned home from work.

When I say everyone was scared of my dad, I mean everyone was scared of my dad. My cousins, my friends, even full-grown adult men were scared of my dad. A 6'3", broad-shouldered, stone-faced ex-Marine, the guy was pretty intimidating. To this day I am the only one of my siblings who isn't too scared to argue with him.

Lauren, despite being the adults' favorite, chickened out and was unable to stall him. Hailey couldn't stall to save her life, so our dad walked straight past her into the kitchen, where he found me perched on the bar stool that was being held steady by Emma and Alyssa. All three of us froze when we saw him.

Maybe he was being lenient because it was my birthday, or maybe he was just tired from work, but all he said was a stern, "No. Get down from there."

I was quick to obey, but I doubt it would've made a difference, because all he did was grab a beer from the fridge and head outside, where my grandparents were chatting with my mom and her two sisters, who were visiting for my birthday.

We watched him go, then glanced quickly around at each other, half-terrified that we'd been caught, half-relieved that we weren't in trouble.

I was the first to recover, and I looked accusingly at Lauren and Hailey. "You were supposed to stall him!"

"What's a stall?" Hailey asked.

"He scared me!" Lauren protested. "I freaked out!"

"Guys, this is our chance!" Alyssa said, effectively getting us back on track. I climbed back up onto the chair, opened the cabinet, and fished out the canvas bag in which my mom had stored the candy. Once I'd hopped down, Emma and Alyssa put the chair back, and we hurried back to our fort to begin our saccharine feast.

When my Mom came to tell us that the pizza had arrived and it was time to eat, she found all five of us huddled on Hailey's bed with chocolate all over our faces. I was chewing on a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; Hailey was in the middle of testing how many Milky Way Minis she could fit in her mouth; Alyssa was working on her eighth fun-size bag of M&Ms; Emma was rifling through the bag for more Almond Joys, and Lauren had just finished her third Tootsie Roll and had begun to unwrap her fourth.

My mom didn't even get mad. She simply burst into hysterical laughter (though I'm not sure if she was actually amused or if she realized how hard it was going to be to get us all to sleep that night after all that sugar we'd just gorged ourselves on) and went to grab the camera.

Everyone, even Alyssa, who ate like a bird, had room for two slices of pizza and a slice of birthday cake. However, right before bed, we were all instructed to put our shoes on and go run laps around the backyard until we had a sugar crash and we were too tired to do anything but troop heavily back into the house, crash on the sofa, and go to sleep.

It was definitely one of my better birthdays.