Not a cloud had been seen in the skies for months. The birds weren’t even flying, preferring instead to sit nearby in the shady branches of the hundreds of trees populating the city of Lafayette. The bugs were moving especially slowly, as if suffering from heat fatigue as they lazily cut their way back and forth through the air. The sweaty people who passed by on the streets seemed to be on their last legs, so to speak. An old lady walking her dog looked like the exposure might soon kill her.

I could see all these things very clearly. You see, I was stuck on the roof of my house where I sat in a dormant state in the same fashion as a piece of bacon might sit upon a frying pan. I sighed with the surprising effort of turning my gaze upward. The glaring sun poured forth gallon upon gallon of ultra violet heat from its perch in the summer blue sky as it had from 7 in the morning until 8 at night every day without fail. I think I was running out of sweat.

You might be wondering how a massively intelligent soon-to-be college sophomore like myself became marooned in such a peculiar way. That’s a funny story, but first I should get the basics out of the way.

My name is Seamus O’Riley; which means Supplanter Son of Riley. This is odd because I am pretty sure that I am neither a supplanter nor the son of anyone by the name of Riley. In fact, although I considered becoming a literature major I am not really even sure what supplanter even means. Let’s say it means “one who becomes a prisoner atop his own house.”

Although it would be bold to claim the quaint, blue, two-story colonial was my own, it belongs, rightfully, to my parents. Apart from the temperature atop the roof, it was a fine house in a safe neighborhood. Don’t get me wrong, though, I have no intention of living in Lafayette on purpose. In fact, aside from trees and lack of excitement, the only things that Lafayette seems to have been built to sustain are old people and a plethora of very conceited upper-middle class families. This afternoon alone I was able to count seventeen power-walking soccer mothers passing my house, adjusting their visors as their fanny packs full of money, Chuck-E-Cheese tokens and Prozac jangled pleasantly above their surgically enhanced backsides. I watched the girl’s volleyball team of the nearby sports camp jog by. I even counted two unchaperoned toddlers in the street pushing dolls in tiny strollers. I didn’t even bother counting the passing minivans.

If you hadn’t guessed by now I have never been very fond of Lafayette. True, it beats living in a crime ridden neighborhood or in California’s central valley but Lafayette’s inactivity and self obsession were enough to make me wish desperately for something interesting to come its way… Maybe a catastrophe. Oooh! Like a tornado! That would be sweet… Until then, however, the boredom of the town was eating me alive.

I don’t know whether it was the intense heat, the dehydration or an actual mania reached by continuous boredom but it was as I sat there on the boiling rooftop that I made the vow. I vowed to find some interesting thing to do before going back to college even if it meant time, money, complete dedication or intense danger. That was when my summer story began. Perhaps it is not the most harrowing of tales or the most heroic, but I guarantee that the adventures my friends and I partook in that summer were unlike any other. Seriously.