I don’t know how to play poker. I wasn’t very good at many card games, and whenever I was good at a game, I would insist on playing it my own way. These ways usually involved in me winning, and making up rules in real-time.

So when my birthday party came around, I predicted that there was going to be a lot of noises. Sure enough, just after it started, people started screaming. Very loudly. And running back and forth.

I could almost hear the house complaining with every annoyed creak it made. My birthday party was over at my house, and I had invited a few of my friends.

The moment they stepped in, though, I started wishing I hadn’t invited so many people. And I started thinking about all the people who I hadn’t invited, and how they were probably sitting nice and cozy, while I was dealing with hooligans.

Something else I wasn’t surprised about was when my dad came upstairs, jiggled me on the shoulder, totally made me miss my shot on the shooting game I was playing, and asked me for a “talk”.

I don’t like talks. Especially ones that have little quotation marks around them. Because these did.

I asked my dad what the matter was. He told me that we should talk about this downstairs. When we did get down, my dad asked me as politely as he could if we could perhaps play some poker.

At first, I had to bite my tongue down to keep from ridiculing my father. Here we were, in the twenty-first century, and he was asking us to play poker. It would be the equivalent of asking some gang boys if they perhaps wanted to sew.

I headed upstairs, bracing myself for mockery. I asked everyone if they wanted to play some… poker. One friend decided that he was going to jab at me with his finger and yell “Poke her!” as loud as he could. He was a great “friend”.

Finally, from the four people I managed to surround, threaten, and blackmail, I got them downstairs, sat down on a table, and grabbed a deck of cards and poker chips. (“Ah, we need to use these chips to ‘poke her’,” said my “friend”.)

And so our poker game began. Lucky for me, two knew how to play, and two didn’t. The two that knew how to play decided this was the time to win like crazy. The other two that didn’t know how to play decided they would cheat and, if caught, just say they thought it was allowed.

The poker game turned out to be all right, actually. Unfortunately, something I hadn’t expected was that suddenly there was a loud bloodcurdling scream from upstairs. Being the responsible host I was, I realized that I had to go upstairs.

I went upstairs, asking what had happened. “I STEPPED ON A SQUISHY THING!” someone yelled, running by. I groaned and went back downstairs.

I was just about to place my next bet when I noticed that I was missing some money. I had a nice stack of poker chips yet now I only had a few. I turned around to where my friends were laughing through their eyes.

“All right, all right. Give it back.” I told them. They laughed and howled.

Friend number one went into his pocked and took out my poker chips. But as he handed it over, I noticed a poker chip lying on the ground. “Hey, stand up,” I told him. He did.

That was when I noticed the giant pile of chips on the ground. I spun around, looking at the bank of tokens. It was empty.

Out of every single pocket, my friend took out money. One stood up and shook some out of his shirt. Someone else went up and grabbed some from underneath the couch. And I stood there, stunned.

What big cheaters, I told them.

“Hey,” they told me, “I thought it was allowed!”