a crash in the night

Our house had no air conditioning, so the heat hit me like a fury whenever I left the frigid St. John's University after a day of class to come home. Some nights were awful--I pulled up a small fan next to my bed and set it on a chair to cool me off point blank, but that didn't always make sleeping easy.

One particular night, I was dozing off and on until something like 3 am, when I thought to myself, this is the last straw, and pulled the fan up even closer. I woke an hour later (or maybe I never fell asleep again) by a tremendous crash. I sat up, bleary eyed and feverishly hot, wondering if the crash came from outside or inside. Then, as I sat debating what to do, I heard whispering and giggling from the hallway. I cracked my door and peeked out, and saw that Naomi's door was open, and so was Lisa's. I stumbled down the hallway as I put my glasses on, and saw that Naomi was in Lisa's room, peering out the window into the front yard and...giggling.

I stepped inside the room and they both started and shrieked a little, and then they started telling me what was going on. Our neighbor next door, who is renting a room in the large house there, decided to install a contraband AC window unit in his room. Who could blame him? However, his landlady does not allow them because they drain so much electricity, so this guy thought he'd be smart and install his unit at 4 am. So he put it in his window, and it promptly fell out...and smashed in our tiny flower garden three stories below, between the two houses. Yeah. Naomi was basically falling over herself, just laughing and laughing as quietly as she could, because the man could probably hear us since we had all the windows open. It was such a pathetic sight, that AC unit all smashed up. I can only imagine that the man was wringing his hands or shaking his fist at the sky.

Then, the doorbell rang. And rang again. But we stayed upstairs, giggling and still feverishly hot, because we weren't about to go down there and answer the door at 4 am. The poor man probably thought we would call the cops on him if he didn't alert us first, but he eventually gave up. And left the broken thing in our flowerbed so that he wouldn't have to deal with it.

We all went back to bed, and I think I slept after that. All I know is I needed loads of coffee the next morning.