Blood was everywhere. On the counter, on my friend, and on me. Screams from a clan of 13-year-old girls filled my kitchen. A bloody green apple was lying on the floor, bruised. As all of this occurred, I was still trying to get a sewing needle to go all the way through my friend Claire’s ear.

When I was in eighth grade, my friends and I did some pretty stupid things. We would come up with these ideas that we thought were great but turned out to be horrendous. We didn’t have any sense of what would be smart and what would be stupid. We were young and naive. So when my friend Claire asked if someone would give her a cartilage piercing during a weekend sleepover, no one thought twice. Of course, I volunteered for the challenge.

My friends and I looked all over my house for something that would pierce an ear. Someone found a bin of my mom’s sewing tools that had the perfect substitute for a piercing gun: a sewing needle. In an effort to be sanitary, we held the needle over the stove flame. After we used a Sharpie to mark a dot on Claire’s ear where she wanted the cartilage pierced, we were ready to go.

To us, it was a known fact that when you pierce someone’s ear at home, you place an apple behind the ear to push the needle into. Someone handed me an apple from the fridge, and I put it behind Claire’s ear. Someone else handed her my sister’s stuffed bear to squeeze. Then I held the needle up to the dot on Claire’s ear and pressed hard.

As soon as I saw blood, I started to panic. But I had to keep going. The needle was half way through; there was no turning back now. When the needle started to push through cartilage, Claire began screaming in pain.

The blood flow increased, seeping onto Claire’s neck, my hands, and my kitchen counter. At the sight of blood, my friends all started screaming.

The only thought in my head was that I needed to keep going. I pushed as hard as I could to get the needle through her ear. A loud pop announced that the needle had finally broken through.

Even after I inserted an earring, Claire’s ear would not stop bleeding. We tried everything. The only way it would stop is if we took out the earring and put a band aid over the hole. So that’s what we ended up doing. We went through all of that blood and trauma for nothing.

The ear piercing experience left Claire with a scar on her ear; her mind was probably scarred too from the pain. My friend told us later that if you pierce the wrong part of your ear, you can make one eye go permanently cross-eyed. That scared us even more and left Claire constantly checking her eyes in the mirror to make sure both were straight.

During my middle school years, I did some dumb things with friends. I now know that it’s better to think things through instead of jumping right in with a sewing needle.