by Shelby Curtis |

Once upon a time…I took a trip to Wichita. I know that a trip to Wichita does not sound extremely exciting, but of course, everything bad happens to me, so it actually was an exciting time. It was two summers ago and my first year enrolled in the George Caleb Bingham Academy of the Arts in the Independence school district. We were travelling to different historical sites to get inspiration for our creative writing stories. No, this is not the exciting part. Hold on, I am getting there. So we roll into town with some time to kill and our particular class was made up of all girls and one boy, so we decided to go to the mall. We spent a few hours there and we were about ready to go to the hotel when we heard tornado sirens. Everyone in the mall looked around in confusion and a few mall cops (the kind who think they are real cops) ushered us into a random hallway. At first, it was a plain white hallway, but the longer we walked and the more corners we turned, we realized we were heading deep into the bowels of the mall. It was disgusting. All around us was damp, green concrete, black cockroaches and screaming children. The children were the scariest of all. So naturally, I called all my loved ones and told them I was going to die by tornado and to go ahead and sell all of my valuables. They told me I was being overly dramatic. I told them they obviously had not seen The Wizard of Oz, Twister or Tornado Alley. Hours later, when the terror had worn off and the boredom set in, we tried to entertain ourselves by sitting on the floor playing games. That quickly changed when a bug crawled across my foot. It was a long, long time before we got out of that smelly hole. Okay probably only like 10 minutes but it felt like days. Moral of the story is, do not travel to Kansas in the spring, you WILL be held captive in a mall basement.