Can't Arrest Me if They Can't Catch Me

First Version - "My adventure with the Po-Po"

Audience and Setting: This is the version of the story I tell you solely hoping that I can somehow convince you of how awesome I am.

My friends and I are avid fans of a certain game that we know as "Fugitive." For those of you that don't know what this is, too bad - I don't have all that many words to tell this story. What's important to know is that this game required us to be out and about into the late hours of the night, and was best played without any"geographical inhibitions"...meaning we often went though strangers' yards.

One late night, I was playing with a group of twenty to thirty people. This night, unknown to me, the police had been called out, probably because of some trespassing reports or something else ridiculous.

At roughly the same time, I was being chased by my older brother. In our escapade, we had traveled about a half a mile through a forest, across a playground, and a number of people's yards before I managed to take refuge on someone's house without him seeing.

In preparation for this exhausting game, I had ingested a lot of liquid. Like, a LOT of liquid. And now it was all coming back to hit me at possibly the worst time ever in the history of human existence. With my brother at the base of the house searching for me and nowhere else to hide, I was out of choices and I peed off the roof of the house into some sand below.

Luckily, this all went down while the two police that had been dispatched to check out the high school observed from across the street. Once lights started flashing, nothing else mattered. My brother and I got out of there like we had just been caught at the scene of a murder. We ran for what seemed like a mile, jumped off of a bridge, and ran through a foreclosed house before we felt like we had safely escaped them.

Did I learn my lesson? No. It was actually somewhat exhilarating to be chased by the law. In fact, we were almost arrested two or three weeks later for trespassing at the high school while playing the same game. But we were never caught, so did we actually do anything wrong?

Second Version - A Safe Night of Harmless Fun

Audience and Setting: This is the version of the story I tell you hoping that you don't think me any less awesome while seeing the story from a different setting.

"What you didn't know couldn't hurt you, mum.[maxim or proverb]"

My mother clearly disagreed. Apparently, my younger brother had unwittingly let slip a brief account about the misadventures of my youth around the dinner table.

"You could have been arrested! You could have been expelled! You could have been shot at, for goodness sake![anaphora] I want to hear the whole story, and I want to hear it now."

All of these were true. Running from the police is rarely a good idea. But I wasn't going to admit that to her. I could just come up with a good lie with my brothers and we would be home free. And, as hesitant as I was to tell the story, the event had long since passed and it was too late to punish me for it.

"Alright, here's how it happened. Back in high school when Daniel and I used to play Fugitive a lot with our friends, we sometimes saw the police hanging around[litotes]. One night in particular, we were somewhere we shouldn't have been and the police chased us. We didn't want to have to deal with them, so we just didn't let them catch us. We're good kids, mum, so it's not like they were going to do anything to us anyway.[precedent]"

A blatant lie. We would have gotten a weighty ticket, which we weren't able to pay, so our father would have lent the money to us. All we would have had to repay him with was a long grounding being employed fixing his weighty car[antanaclasis].

"Well, I suppose no harm was really done since you did come out of it unscathed."

Success.