Killer Bubbles

The date was August 10^th, 2018. It was an unusually chilly day in beautiful York Beach, Maine. My delinquent friends and I had made a horrible mistake. To put it frankly, we were screwed.

Let’s back up for a second though. How did we get to the point where we were convinced that we were done for?  Well, in late May, I had decided that I wanted to attend Penn State. This is later than usual for most people’s college decisions, but it was especially late for me as going to Penn State meant doing the Summer Session. That means that I had decided where I was going to school a month before I had to move in. For me, it was the right choice. I made many new friends, learned a lot, and loved the summer session experience overall. However, I missed my friends, and lovely landlocked Pennsylvania was driving me a little bit crazy (where the hell are all the beaches and the lakes???)

As the hooligans we were, hailing from lovely Boston, Massachusetts, where everyone is just peachy all the time, my five best friends and I decided to scheme for the one-week break that I had in between the summer and fall semesters. We knew we had to do something memorable to compensate for the lack of adventures all summer. We had decided to go to the beach. My family has owned a condo in York Beach for as long as I can remember, and many of my friends have been up there before. Most of us have been going up there together with our families for years, so we all knew the area pretty well. After a lot of convincing, everybody got their parents on board with the plan, and we headed about sixty odd miles north. Six recent high school graduates alone without parental supervision in a condo in a foreign state, what could possibly go wrong?

The first two days went great. We went to the beach both days, explored the town, got some quality food, and even went rock climbing. As we all know, though, six broke teenagers can get bored pretty quickly, even in a lovely beach town. The third day, though, was different. It was cold and windy, so it definitely was not a beach day. There’s not much to do in York other than going to the beach and sneaking into dive bars to play pool, which is partially how we had filled our first couple of days in York. As a result, we ending up making the group decision to embark on a culinary adventure.

After hours of exploring various supermarkets and grocery stores, we had put together the ingredients that we believed would make great quesadillas. We had gathered chicken that we didn’t know how to cook, tortillas that would probably fall apart, and of course some sketchy over packaged cheese. After a few confused phone calls to our parents about how to cook chicken, we were well on our way in the fine world of food. That did not go well, and we ended up ordering pizza after our cooking failures.

Although our quesadilla attempts failed for dinner, after a few more adventures through the abandoned amusement park, and a few poorly played poker games, we ended up getting hungry again around midnight. We had some quesadilla materials left over, so naturally, we decided to try to make more quesadillas.

Those quesadillas were actually amazing. We had used a pan to cook the chicken in the quesadillas, which was a great idea at the time, and worked far better than our previous attempts. At around two in the morning, though, we had decided to put on one of the greatest movies of all time: Shrek. It was during this time that one of my friends had gotten up to make popcorn. As he got up, and much to my neighbor’s dismay, he shouted “What the fuck!!!” as loud as he could. He had spotted an ant. We knew we had to do something, as the condo had just become ground zero. My dad was coming up to go to the beach the next day, so we all thought it was an excellent idea to clean up before he got there. After absolutely destroying the war zone (the living room) with Febreeze, vacuuming the common room, and cleaning up the bathroom, our biggest challenge of the night stared us down: the kitchen. Towers of dishes loomed over us. After arguing about who would do what for a little while, we finally started to get through the pile of dishes in the sink and loaded up the dishwasher. We even found the dish soap and the dishwasher detergent. Thinking we were all set to start the dishwasher, the final thing I did was lay the pan we had used to cook the chicken earlier on the top rack. After some back and forth, I had argued that it was fine as is, and that nothing bad would happen. It was just one pan. I started the dishwasher without so much as a second thought. That was when the night went from bad to worse.

As it turns out, our dishwasher dispenses water from the top down. This means that water and soap deflected off of the pan on the top rack of the dishwasher and sprayed out everywhere.

Of course, we didn’t know that until my very angry, short, bearded friend, John, got up to go to the bathroom around 3:30. At this point, we were still immersed in the cinematic masterpiece that is Shrek. He stopped dead in his tracks, turned around, and shouted “KILLER BUBBLES!!!”. This was when we opted to pause the movie and pop up. All of us turn around to see an absolute catastrophe in what was once known as the kitchen.

We enter the room, just to see it. Bubbles. Water. Everywhere. There was no way out, as the kitchen was the only path to the common rooms and the bedrooms. We had no idea how long the kitchen was flooding for, but we rowed our way through the bubbles to shut off the dishwasher before it got any worse. At that point, I forced my way through the bubbles to the upstairs closet where we keep all of our towels. Throwing towels down the stairs as fast as I could, my friends and I became a well-bubbled cleaning machine. We grabbed mops, brooms, and anything else we could use to get the bubbles out of the kitchen. The war on the soapy foam had begun.

Towels had little effect. The mop was soaked through. I’m not really sure who thought trying to use a broom to clean up water was a good idea, but it wasn’t. We had to find a solution, and fast. We took some towels and pushed the bubbles aside, exposing the sparkling dishwasher. Bowl by bowl, we emptied the water that had flooded the dishwasher itself. Once that was empty, we resorted to using an absurd amount of bowls, towels, paper towels, and whatever we could find to clean up the bubbles. It took us an hour and a half to fix everything up, but I’ve never seen a floor shine like that floor shined that night.

By the time we had finished cleaning up, it was five in the morning. Angry John was fed up with our sheer stupidity. Half of us decided to sleep, but John, Stephen, and I had decided that sleep was a lost cause at this point. The morning wasn’t completely lost, though, as I grabbed my camera and we headed to the beach to catch the sunrise.My dad came up the next day, and never found out about the flood. It is a secret that the six of us plan on taking to the grave, with the exception of telling my mother about this. I sent her the pictures of the flooded kitchen, and she thought it was hilarious. A few more days went by, my break came to a close, and I headed back off to college, armed with tales and dishwasher knowledge that I had never knew that I needed before. After August 10^th, 2018, my friends and I became trained war veterans ready to fight off any soapy assaults that we may encounter in our future endeavors. We learned to think before we act, even if it’s about something that seems as unimportant as loading a dishwasher. I hope that by sharing our story, like-minded adolescents will cease to make the same mistakes that we did, in hopes that their vacation homes and condos remain bubble free for the foreseeable future.

*All photos used are my own and were taken on the night of this tragic event*