It can be a creepy-crawly thing. It can be a case of someone missing the toilet and not bothering to clean it up. A piece of used
toilet paper hanging out of the toilet like a threatening, unsanitary white snake ready to bite you should you step too close.
Interesting things can also come about at the sink, which can be dirtier than your hands could ever possibly be. The water could be an
odd color, the soap ironically dirty, the faucet that doesn't turn off for some mysterious reason.
But nothing could compare to what happened to me.
It's not a public bathroom horror story, really. Nothing happened to me while I was actually in the bathroom. It was what happened to me
when I got out of the bathroom that was so weird.
I stood on tiptoe, trying to pick my friends out of the crowd, first looking to the bench that they had said they would wait for me by for Beth's
glowing green hair or Theresa's soft red hair. I didn't see them there. I looked to another nearby bench. They weren't there either. I looked to the entrance
to the women's bathroom. No one I knew was standing there either.
Puzzled, I lowered myself back down so that I was standing flat on my feet. Where could they have gone?
I didn't have much time to ponder this question because all of a sudden a hand grabbed my forearm roughly and I was yanked into
a remote part of the crowd, nearer the fence that outlined the border of the theme park.
I whirled around to face the person who had interrupted my search only to have a hand slapped over my mouth. When I opened my eyes back up, I found a pair
of fairly large brown eyes staring into mine with all seriousness.
"Be very quiet," he instructed me. His voice reminded me of the higher notes on a trumpet. "We're hunting rabbits."
"Would you quit fooling around?" an annoyed voice said from behind.
The person with the hand over my mouth cackled lightly and lowered himself so that he was standing flat on his feet.
I looked down at him and realized I was faced with a little kid who couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen(okay, so he wasn't that little).
I breathed a sigh of relief.
"Scare ya?" he said with amusment.
"Guys, we're late as it is," an impatient female voice informed us. "Now get these on and hurry up."
I took the hat and sunglasses that she handed me in my hands without thinking. When I realized what I was doing, I nearly
dropped them. What was I supposed to do with these?
"Uh, do you want to get killed?" the young boy who had come closer than you'll ever know to scaring the piss out of me said.
My eyes widened at his question. Killed? What did he mean by that? Was he joking? No, he seemed pretty serious. Questions began to race though my mind, the most pressing
of them all was: Who are these people?
"Here, I'll help," he said in a condescending tone. "See this? This is a hat. It goes on your head. Like this." He put the hat on my head. I pushed it down, not quite sure
why I didn't take it off and protest. "These are sunglasses. They go over your eyes." He tried to put the glasses on me, succeeding only after he had nearly poked my eye out
and came too close for my comfort to severing the top part of my left ear off.
I looked around the park curiously, not able to see very much through dark sunglasses at a time like
dusk. I was pretty much blind to everything except for the white of the woman's shirt and the boy's loud orange and yellow shirt.
The woman, sensing my troubles, took my hand and began leading me through the crowd before I even had time to think of a way to get away. I found, as we were walking, that the group
was made up of more than just the woman and the boy. There were six more people, three males(one the same age as the woman, one somewhere in his late teens, and the other probably barely
old enough to know how to spell his own name) and three young girls, one of which I was guessing was less than a year old.
I felt like I should have been doing something. Yelling, kicking, screaming, something. But I didn't. I felt oddly attracted to whatever it was that these
people were going to do to me. I was too curious. It was like a magnet. I seemed to have forgotten that curiosity is what killed the cat.
So I let them pull me along. They didn't seem to think much of it.
"Tay, your hair," said one of the little girls, reaching up on tiptoe and attempting
to stuff my hair in the hat, but not succeeding very well because I was so much taller than she was.
At the time, I thought that "tay" was just a sound she had made like "ugh" or "um." I didn't realize that she was calling me by name.
"Oh, don't worry about it," said the woman as we dodged some people who seemed to be too absorbed in consulting their map of the park to pay attention to where they were going
or the people surrounding them.
I noticed after a while that we seemed to be headed in the direction of the stage where the concert was to be held in just forty-five short minutes. I became hopeful. Hopefully they'd stumble
upon the group I was with accidentally and we'd be able to straighten out this whole little mishap.
I looked over at the late-teen guy, who was walking next to me. The parts of his face I could see(he was wearing a hat and sunglasses too) were set in a look
of concentration as if getting to the stage was a state of mind and not an action.
Then I realized something.
I was walking next to one of the MIB kids(as I had affectionately nicknamed the kids that had been standing in front of us in line for the Mind Eraser and seemed to be following us everywhere
after that)! Wild ideas began to fly through my head, for a person like me is always unable to think rationally at times like these. Things like: Were they kidnapping me to recruit me in some weird cult?
"Don't be nervous, Tay," said the woman, obviously noticing my sweaty palms as I gripped her hand from fear of what these people were going to do to me.
Once again, I failed to notice the "tay" in her speech for what it was and thought it was just something she said out of habit while she was talking.
When the concert area came into view, I breathed a sigh of relief.
We walked along the perimeter of the shell, which houses the stage. I guessed that these people just had really close seats and didn't feel like battling their way through the crowded
aisles, but my assumption was quickly shot down and my hopes dashed when we passed everything in the seating area and actually went behind the stage to a door cleverly marked "BACKSTAGE" in large,
taut latters.
As soon a the man standing by the door opened it for us, a rather large group of people started bustling around us, whipping out combs, brushes, shirts, pants, drumsticks, capos, and a whole bunch of other
things I couldn't have named just by looking at them.
We didn't stop walking, so they all started following us. I began to wonder if it was even legal for us to be back there.
We approached a blue door that said "Hanson" in the little slot on the front and were immediately shoved in.
I gasped, expecting to be faced with the three annoying blonde-haired brothers who would have disgusted looks on their faces and call the guards to remove us and then proceed to have the people who had let us back
there in the first place fired.
But the room was empty. No one was scowling and the only people yelling were the people with the clothes and rubberbands, and they were yelling back and forth at each other.
The two boys(the only ones of the group that had brought me to this place present in the room) took off their hats and sunglasses and began to quickly get changed into the clothes that the people were handing them(how awkward...).
Then it hit me.
At first, all I could think was: Duh! How could you be so stupid, Mr. Lowell? The boy who had nicknamed himself Sherlock when he was younger because he was so good at figuring things out? Duh!
I was with Hanson. Even they had made the mistake of thinking that I was Taylor. Tay wasn't a sound, it was a name. His nickname. I wanted to laugh, I want to cry, I wanted to scream with frustration. I wanted to leave, I wanted to stay
to see how long it took them to figure it out. I wanted to tell them that they had made a mistake, that I wasn't really their brother, but I didn't.
A stylist shouted something at me, bring me back to attention. I took the shimmery blue shirt she was holding out to me and, numb, put it on.
It all happened around me like an odd dream that I couldn't awaken from. That I had no control over. I was in a daze and wondered how this could possibly be happening to me.
But, like it or not, it was. And for some reason, I wasn't doing anything to stop it.
Strange things happen in public bathrooms. Strange things that most people opt to not speak of
as if there was some written rule somewhere that told you not to talk about the happenings in the public bathrooms.