This story is 99.99% true.
For safety’s sake I’ve given all characters a different name.
Notice & love that I named myself Princess Awesomeness

Independence Day
by Princess Awesomeness

I gasped for breath as I came out of the water in the arms of my new friend: a short, chubby, and yet incredibly strong Mexican-American boy named JoeBob. We’d met a couple of weeks before. His sister had been a friend of my family’s for a few years. On this particular weekend we were all on a camping trip to celebrate the fourth of July, which would be tomorrow.
He laughed. “Are you going to admit it now? You know I’m right.” He’d been trying to convince me that I’m prettier than I think.
“No!” I smiled, wiping the water out of my face. And down I go again. He had such a strange way of making his point, dunking me into the lake again and again until I finally broke down and agreed with him. But it’s all harmless fun. I was never under water more than two seconds – I’ve been keeping track.
When I came back up he stared at me as again I wiped the lake water from my face and awkwardly looked away from him. “You haven’t figured it out yet have you?”
“No,” I lied. I’d known all along, but I wanted him to tell me himself.
He smiled. “If I have to tell you, you’re going back under water.”
“I want to know,” I said, urging him on.
He hesitated for a minute, and then yelled out “I LIKE YOU!” as, yet again, I found myself under water. I was under longer this time, I noticed, but not long enough to hurt anything. As he pulled me back out of the water yet again, he said “I hope you heard me, because I’m not saying it again.”

A few hours later, after getting warm and dry by the fire and changing out of my short shorts and flip-flops and into blue jeans and sneakers, JoeBob and I played soccer with his two nieces and his nephew in a small field across the road from our tents. (It was really meant for horse-shoes, but we didn’t have those, and we did have a soccer ball, so why not?) It started to rain lightly, so we called it quits and sat at the top of the hill facing the campsite. “You know,” he said. “By the end of the night I’ll have asked you out”
His oldest nice, who was only about eight, sat down on the other side of him and said “If you’re going to do it, stop telling her about it and just ask her.”
He stared at me. “Okay I will. Princess Awesomeness, will you go out with me.”
I sat for a moment, staring up at the gray clouds that cover the sky and pretending to hesitate. “Well,” I said, my smile making all too obvious that I’m only teasing. “Okay.”
Then he smiled the biggest smile I’ve ever seen, which I later would fall in love with, tackled me in a massive hug, and kissed my forehead. Having a sudden change of heart, Kara, JoeBob’s niece who had so eagerly urged him to ask me out, stood and turned away in disgust, which is the expected response when a child sees anything that could possibly be related to “cooties”.

Later that night the rain hit hard, forcing us all into our tents early for bed. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep. I woke to a crash of thunder and a soggy pillow and sat up shivering, wet and cold. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light coming from the campfire outside my small tent, I felt around for my phone, wanting to check the time. My hand wrapped around a rectangular piece of plastic and I flipped open my Motorola Razor. The screen read “1:07am”. Why was the fire still burning? It should’ve gone out by now, especially with the rain we had last night.
I listened carefully and heard a voice, no, two voices. They belonged to JoeBob and his older sister, Alice. I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but at the moment I didn’t really care.
I sat on my blow up mattress and let my mind wonder. Before long I was completely lost in my thoughts. I didn’t realize at first how long I’d been just sitting there until I looked back at my phone. 2:35. I’d been daydreaming for an hour and a half. I listened for JoeBob and Alice but heard nothing. Everything was silent except for the chirping of the crickets. I figured they had gone back to bed so I slipped back into my wet sleeping bag which offered so little warmth and tried in vain to fall asleep.
After a while I grabbed my small flashlight, got up, climbed out of my tent, stared briefly into the dying fire, and started walking toward the bathrooms. On the way I was blinded by an idiot with a flashlight and I cursed quietly.
“Watch your mouth, little girl!” Angry words, but in a playful tone; the “idiot” was JoeBob. I smiled and kept walking, still a little shy around my first boyfriend.
“The lights are out in the bathrooms,” Alice warned me. I start to turn around, but decide that this is much too urgent to wait until I can see. Even a blind man can wet his pants.
So I ran the rest of the way there and when I came out, I found JoeBob outside waiting for me. He opened his arms invitingly and I wa
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