On Sunday, my siblings and I gathered at my parents’ house to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday. I cooked up an Asian feast and there was Thai coconut soup and sesame noodles and summer rolls and ice cream cake which is not Asian at all but Rita picked it up especially for the birthday girl and in between layers there were REESES PIECES and that’s all you need to know about that. There was a fire in the fireplace, my dad opened a bottle of Chianti and rolled merrily around in his wheelchair, my mom said grace and all of us sat around the dining room table chatting and laughing in the warm glow of candlelight.

That is, until my sister, sleep-deprived due to grad school studying and consecutive early morning wake ups announced from her seat at the table: I JUST FELL ASLEEP FOR A SECOND.

And all of us were like, I…for real??

And she was all YES.

And bleary-eyed and sort of drunk sounding said: I think I need to go to bed.

And she did.

At 8 pm.

Simply got up from the dinner table and went to her room.

We carried on, as families do, passing dishes, telling funny stories, stuffing our faces with Asian delicacies even though we are not Asian, not even a little bit, no.

And sometime later, an hour or two after Deb had gone to bed, after my older brother had washed dishes and my younger brother had put on a pot of decaf coffee and we were all basking in the warmth of our connection to each other and shared family memories, I wondered aloud: Did Debra really go to bed?

Consensus: Yes, she did.

We pondered over this as we sang “Happy Birthday” to Sophie and cut the ice cream cake and sat around the table once more, high on sugar and buttercream.

And then, as you all may expect, my little brother Jem busted out a nerf gun.

Wait. That’s probably not something that happens with any regularity around your family dinner table, is it?

Regardless.

Jem decided he was gonna go raise some hell upstairs where my poor sister was sleeping.

DEBRA, he screamed from the dining room, cocking his gun like Bruce Willis. YOU BETTER LOOK OUT.

He raised the gun in the air as if charging into battle and thundered up the stairs to her room.

I’m venturing to guess that Deb was completely asleep until Jem started screaming at her to look out and get ready. She was so deep in sleep, so incredibly out of it, that she was beyond startled and jumped upright in bed at the sound of his voice. Within seconds, Jem was in her room with the nerf gun aimed at her face and as he later told us, shot the nerf bullet (bullet? arrow? What comes out of a nerf gun?) so that it hit her straight in the nose.

She thought something terrible was happening, possibly a break in or crazed axe murderer with nerf gun in hand so she started screaming.

And thus it was, that my family and I stared at each other across the table, listening first to Jem feet thump up the stairs like a mad man, shoot a nerf gun at my sister’s face and then finally hear a drunken groggy-from-sleep voice filled with terror scream: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OH MY GOD OH MY GOD What the FUCK is GOING ON!?????????????????????

It was at this final crazed ‘what the FUCK’ that my family and I completely lost it, unable to see anything but to picture it perfectly in our minds, my younger brother effectively scaring the shit out of my younger sister.

HER VOICE, my mother howled, clutching her stomach. SHE IS SO AFRAID.

This made us all laugh harder, of course, because we are cruel, horrible people.

I leaned over the table almost putting my face directly in a piece of ice cream cake, wheezing, unable to breathe.

My father’s face was bright red as he cackled and all of us sat there for minute after minute, collectively in hysterics.

Jem marched back down the stairs and sat down across from me.

“I am an ASSHOLE,” he said, shaking his head, beginning to eat some cake. “I accidentally HIT HER IN THE FACE when I shot her.”

And…

I…

This is a normal family thing, right? Phrases like “What the FUCK is going on?!”, screamed at full volume and “I accidentally hit her in the face when I shot her”??

Deb went back to bed after the incident so I’m not exactly sure how angry she is after being woken up in such a manner.

The rest of us just sat there and laughed, reenacting the scene over and over, wiping tears from our eyes. I thought about it randomly on the car ride home and the next day, erupting in giggles all over again. There were just perfect comedic moments burned onto my brain – my little brother going all marine corps with a NERF GUN and my sister screaming her face off, unaware of what was going on, assuming the worst.

“After all my Catholic teaching, the first thing she says when she wakes up is ‘Oh my God, what the FUCK?’” my mother wondered to me the next day with chagrin.

“Hey, you don’t know what it’s like to wake up with a nerf gun to the face,” I said.

“TRUE STORY.”

Pause.

“That was one of my favorite nights of all time.”

“Me too.”

Just some quality time in the Dlug household, you know? Food, cake, wine, nerf gun, screaming obscenities.

You too, right?