hen I was 8 years old, a bunch of us went to a waterpark. It was my brother and I, along with our three cousins. As a kid, a waterpark is the equivalent of getting a good, solid drunk on. We were uncontainable, irrational, loud and obnoxious. On one of the tunneled corkscrew rides, my cousin and I hatched a plan. I would go down first, stop myself in the tunnel and wait for her. We would emerge together, victorious, in the pool at the end. Except it didn’t really happen that way.

Kids, you should know better than to try to control your waterpark experience. The waterpark is too powerful! It is a force of nature--or, at least, Six Flags. I stopped myself in the tunnel all right, but when my cousin came barrelling down the chute behind me, she was going too fast. She went right past me before we could join up. Although, apparently, my head had no trouble meeting her front teeth.

I arrived in a blood-red wading pool. It was like something from The Shining. In fact, Kubrick would have saved a lot on prop blood if he had just hung out with a couple of kids on the corkscrew ride. My cousin’s two front teeth had been dislodged, and she was hemorrhaging blood. She was tough, a real scrapper, but this had rattled her. She stood at the side of the pool, cupping her hands underneath her chin, helpless, as the blood dripped down on the cement.

A stranger ushered us to the emergency room. My aunt was paged over the waterpark sound system. And for my trouble? I had a trophy: a bloody train track that went right across the side of my head. My cousin, you see, had braces.

On the way out, one of the attendants stopped us at the gate. “Are you the girl who lost her teeth on the corkscrew?” he asked, breathless, and my cousin beamed. Here, at the waterpark, we had become famous.