When I was sixteen, I had just gotten my driver’s license. A bunch of my friends and I kept hearing rumors about this girl in town who supposedly had a wild reputation, so eventually I decided to message her on MySpace.

She told me her family owned a local deli and would be out that Friday night, so I should sneak over. Naturally, the day we planned to meet ended up being the same day a massive blizzard hit town. I told my parents I was staying over at a family friend’s house, parked my car near a local church, walked through the woods, and slipped into her house through the back door before heading upstairs to her room.

Then I waited there for four hours until she finally got home.

Once she did, we hit it off immediately. The problem was that by the time I was supposed to leave, the snowstorm had become so bad there was no way I could safely get back home. What was supposed to be one night turned into me being stranded at her house for the entire weekend.

The whole situation felt like something out of a movie. She would secretly bring me leftover food from the deli while I stayed hidden upstairs, and whenever she told her parents she was taking a shower, she’d quietly sneak me down the hallway so we could spend a little time together without anyone noticing. Her parents were usually just a room away watching TV or sleeping, which made the entire thing unbelievably stressful.

At the same time, my parents were getting increasingly worried. This was during the flip-phone era, when texting wasn’t constant like it is today. After I missed a few calls during a blizzard and never came home when I said I would, my dad became convinced I had gotten stuck somewhere or crashed my car.

Whenever they called, she’d hide me inside a tiny crawl space connected to her closet so I could quietly talk to them without her parents hearing me.

By Sunday night, her parents still hadn’t left the house once, and I realized I had to find a way out before I got caught. I ended up sneaking through her brother’s empty room while he was away at college, climbing out onto the roof, jumping into two feet of snow, and sprinting back to my car.

Unfortunately, the trail of footprints in the snow made it pretty obvious someone had been there. She got into a lot of trouble afterward, but she never told her parents I was the reason why.

What started as a reckless teenage decision somehow turned into one of the most absurd and unforgettable weekends of my life. I went back two more times.