A Look Into The Twelve-Year-Old Male Slumber Party
It’s one of the most exciting nights of a twelve-year-old boy’s year. One of his friends has just turned twelve and the parents of the birthday boy have decided to throw him a sleep over party. Anywhere from six to thirty pre-teen males are invited to stay the night at a house that most of them have never been to.
When I think back to sleep over parties I went to in grade school, I tend to mesh them all into one memory. This is because all pre-teen boy sleep over parties are exactly the same.
The night always starts out great. All the guys get to the house around six p.m. with their sleeping bags, and they are so excited they almost weep. The night begins with pizza, soda, and cake, followed by presents. Present time is the first minor glitch in the evening, for each boy feels a slight hint of jealousy when the amazing gifts that their friend is receiving are opened. But the jealousy impulse is ignored and the evening continues.
The party goes great for hours and everyone has a blast, but in the back of their minds every kid knows that the real party starts when the parents go to bed. Around 10:30 is when they typically decide to do this.
At the age of 11 or 12, boys typically can’t stay up past 10:30. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain evenings where they are awake until midnight or maybe even a little later. But typically 10:30 is the time where they start getting tired. NOT AT SLEEP OVERS. It’s as if before they showed up every kid did a couple hits of trucker speed, and instead of falling asleep at 10:30 each kid is able to stay up until next Thursday.
As the parents declare that they are doing to sleep, they put on a movie for the kids to watch and tell them to try and keep it down. Then they depart to their bedrooms hoping that the kids will pass out during the film. But that’s impossible for two reasons:
1) the trucker speed.
2) there’s always one kid that wont shut the fuck up during the movie.
Even if the movie is the greatest piece of cinema ever produced for a twelve-year-old crowd, there’s always one annoying prick that wants to show off his comedic talents during it. He’ll make fart noises, talk like a midget, pretend to snore… he’ll do anything to ruin this for everyone. Each kid gets mad at this little bastard, but his defense is always, “this is a sleep over, we should be doing something more fun!” So even though 99.99% of the population was intersted in watching the movie, they are now forced to keep the annoying kid entertained.
So everyone starts playing with the best present that the birthday boy got. Each kid is having a blast, but after a couple minutes of quality playing time tragedy strikes: someone breaks the toy. Unfortunately it’s typically by the kid who is struggling the most with his weight (as if he didn’t have enough problems). He vows to get a job washing dishes so he can buy a new toy for his friend, but that doesn’t stop the birthday boy from getting extremely upset on his special day. This leads to constant at any twelve-year-old boy’s pajama party.
Crying. Someone always has to cry. You are all dudes about to enter middle school, but that doesn’t stop at least one of you from shedding a few tears. This usually happens after the the best toy ever invented was destroyed by fatty right in front of the birthday boy’s eyes. Maybe it will be Mr. Birthday that cries, or maybe it will be Mr. I-Ruined-My-Friend’s-Birthday. It could even be the kid whose parents bought the toy who does the crying. Either way someone must cry, and it typically happens at this point of the evening. But not always.
At some point in the night everyone decides that there should be wrestling. This is already a terrible idea, but it gets worse when the wrestling matches are chosen. The two boys that have the biggest problem with each other are always paired up to fight. Everyone knows they slightly hate each other, so it seems obvious that they should wrestle. This is sure to be the match-up of the evening and because everyone is so eager to see what happens during it, this pair is always the first and last fight of the night.
The fight always begins playful… a little pushing, maybe a comical body slam. But at some point one of the kids gets slightly hurt. Although it’s nothing serious it changes everything. The once playful wrestling has now turned into scratching, headlocks and body jabs (luckily twelve-year-old boys aren’t masculine enough yet to feel comfortable with punching another kid in the face). Unfortunately there are no Gandhi peacekeepers in the crowd, so the fight ensues for what seems to be hours until either one kid gives up and starts crying or the mother comes downstairs.
At every slumber party a mother has to come down wearing a nightgown that they’ve had since the Nixon administration.
She’ll tell you to go to bed, but because you’re seeing your friends mom in such an unappealing outfit for the first time it’s hard to take her seriously. So the noise continues, and after a while she comes down again looking even worse.
The second time she comes down everyone pretends to go to sleep, but giggling and fake fart noises (made by the same asshole kid from earlier) makes it obvious that no one is sleeping. But on the second trip the mother brings out the big guns.
“Next time there’s noise I’m sending my husband down here!”
This is typically enough to calm kids down. Although twelve-year-olds are somewhat intimidated by their friends moms, they are terrified of their dads. Even if their dad was Mr. Rogers himself each kid would want nothing to do with him coming downstairs. 
So at this point of the night the boys start to calm down and watch television. That’s when the first person would actually fall asleep. And when one kid falls asleep, all the other kids turn into assholes. Kids gather up all the excess snack foods and start putting them on this poor souls head. After a few minutes of this the victim will lightly wake up and innocently tell “his friends” to stop. Then he’ll go back to sleep, prompting his friends to put different objects on his head such as couch cushions, napkins and paper plates. The kid wakes up again, and slightly more annoyed but still polite he will request that everyone leave him alone.
This is the point in the evening where someone wants to attempt to pull off the most popular sleep over myth of all time: putting the victims hand into a warm bucket of water to see if he’ll pee himself. They’ve already treated this kid like a captured terrorist, why not see if they can make him urinate all over his sleeping bag?
For some reason or another a bucket can never be found, so the kids decide to put the warm water into a cup and try to shove the unfortunate child’s hand into it. Although twelve year old hands are small, they’re never small enough to fit comfortably into a normal sized cup. When the kid’s hand is attempting to be shoved into such a tiny space it wakes him up… and he’s mad. “LEAVE ME ALONE! GO TO BED YOU JERKS! I HATE YOU!”
The kid screams this at a volume that rivals most tornado sirens. The neighbors neighbors neighbors neighbors even heard it. Everyone is shocked. They didn’t know they had it in him. Each kid rushes to their sleeping bag and immediately pretends to be asleep knowing that the dad is sure to come down.
Within a minute the dad arrives, and he is PISSED. “Who is making all the noise?!?” he’ll demand, but everyone is too scared to say anything. “I know you’re up!”
This is the first time a twelve year old can tell if any of his friends are going to be in the high school drama club. Each kid opens their eyes slowly and tries to act as if they were sleeping. They’ll even state that they were asleep and pretend that they didn’t what was going on. Most performances are poor, but one kid always pulls it off perfectly. This kid is going to have a bright future in acting. Nothing proves that better than the kid in my class that could always do it perfectly.
Two Time Oscar Winner Mr. Daniel Day Lewis
Because getting yelled at by a friend’s father is the scariest thing ever, no one has a problem with obliging to his request to go to bed. And although the evening is over, there is still one more thing that always happens.
When everyone wakes up in the morning, one of the kids is not there. It’s like The Blair Witch Project. No one has any idea where this dude went. After some investigating the mother reveals that the missing child wanted to go home at 4 am and had his parents come pick him up. It’s always the kid that you wouldn’t expect this from that does this. After everyone passed out, he mustered up the balls to walk through a dark house he is not familiar with, go into his friend’s parents room, both of which have yelled at him within the last two hours, wake them up and request that they call his parents so he can go home.
It blows everyones mind that this kid left. But he is quickly forgotten about once breakfast time begins, and all the kids get to see the odd cereal collection their friend has.
