Back when I was in fifth grade, my friends and I were really into WWE. Everyday before school started, and during recess we'd wrestle each other in a little area that was tucked behind the school that was just barely part of the playground. Point is, it was out of sight of the teachers. We'd be swinging each other around, roughhousing, and shit like that, and since were kids and didn't know any better, we naturally decided to copy what we saw on TV and began trying to do actual wrestling moves.
And for the most part, it went fine. We never went full on with it. We were always careful not to actually hurt each other that much. Looking back on it, it wasn't because we were actually concerned about safety. It was more so that we knew we'd get our asses busted if we got caught wrestling and even more so if one us of us had gotten injured because of it.
So the days went by, and we went on full nelsoning, chokeslamming, clotheslining each other, having a great time. Till one day, one of the teachers caught us, and busted our asses for about ten minutes as to how dangerous what we were doing was. She was right of course, and miraculously she did not call our parents, but did threaten to do so if she ever caught us doing it again.
Did we listen?
FUCK NO.
We were kids! We thought we were invincible! We thought we were so much smarter than everyone else, and that since we were so careful that nothing could go wrong.
So literally the next day, we gathered behind the school again before class started and began wrestling again; taking extra care to keep an eye out for teachers.
At this point, I got to introduce you to two of my friends. The first one, I'll just call him John, was huge. Like an absolute unit of a boy. I mean, he was literally six feet tall. And lemme tell you, he was fucking strong. This kid had no trouble throwing any of us over his shoulder and carrying us around like we were a sack of potatoes. He was really nice, though. A total gentle giant, and he always made sure to be extra to careful not to hurt us.
Now the polar opposite of John was this kid who was ironically his best friend. I'm just gonna call Tom. Tom was, and still is, a fucking manlet. He was only about a four-and-half-feet tall back then, and has not grown much since. Like most manlets, he was, and again still is, aggressive af, and always trying to prove himself to be tougher than he actually is.
I'm explaining this, because I'm pretty sure if their height differences weren't so drastic, things wouldn't have turned out so bad.
So we were all having a good time, and Tom suddenly tells John that he wants him to piledrive him. They had done this a bunch of times before, and it was basically just John holding him upside down before gently lowering him onto the ground. It was nothing to worry about.
But that day, I'm still not sure how, John lost his grip, and Tom fell, and cracked the back of his head on the asphalt. And he didn't get up. He was out cold.
We fucking lost it. We were panicking like crazy, trying desperately to wake him up. John was crying, and all of us were frantically checking to make no teacher is coming. And no, we didn't go get a teacher, because we didn't want to get in trouble. It was five minutes before class started, and Tom still hadn't woken up. We were shaking him, smacking his face, I dumped part of my water bottle on him, nothing was working.
At this point, we all decided that we had to hide him, and just act like he never came to school. There was a dumpster behind the school in our little fighting area, and John, in tears, picked Tom up, carried him over to it, and with the help of the rest of us, dropped him into the dumpster.
We were just about to close the lid when Tom's eyes flew open, scaring the shit out of all of us, and asked us what happened and what was going on. We quickly pulled him out of the dumpster, just in time for bell to ring for class to start. We rushed over, trying to act like nothing was wrong. Tom went to nurse after complaining about a really bad headache, and while we were all really shaken up about what happened, we were immensely relieved that it hadn't been worse.
Because it could've, and it would've. For you see, not even an hour later, the teacher decided to have us do our morning work outside because the weather was so nice. My friends, and I didn't go behind the school again, but instead on a little grassy knoll parallel to the area.
So we're doing our worksheets, Tom holding a frozen sponge to the back of his head, when we see a garbage truck pull up behind the school. Turns out it was trash day, and instead of actual garbage men coming out to come collect the trash, the garbage truck was one of those kinds that could do the work mechanically without seemingly any human aid, or oversight.
And all of us watched in absolute horror as the same dumpster that we had hidden Tom in was picked up, turned upside down, had all of its contents dumped out and slowly crushed and compacted without a single person bothering to check what was in it before driving off.
It was during those incredibly painful, and chilling moments that we realized that we had almost gotten Tom killed.
We never wrestled again.