Hill of Poison by DeLorey

Hill of Poison

By: DeLorey

One weekend I was visiting my friend lila’s house in Los Angeles, california for my birthday. She has a very large hill in her backyard that is almost straight up. It is so tall,  it goes beyond their property, and you can’t see where it ends because the house behind them blocks where it stops/where it slants down.  It has a wooden staircase leading to a deck sticking out the side of the hill. There is no grass on the hill. Instead,there are little leaves  that people assumed to be Ivy hiding the dirt coated ground.

One day Lila suggested that we climb the hill instead of taking the staircase. I thought this was a great idea. However, her mom didn’t think this was a good idea.”I don’t know about this…” she hesitated, but we did it anyway. We got on our old, dirty vans and Lila grabbed a rope, then started climbing to the top. Whenever I slipped, she would throw the other end of the rope down to me just in time. plus, I screamed alot because of the black widows (they are extremely popular in L.A). Obviously, she had done this before. Eventually, we reached the top, and started hoisting ourselves over the deck’s gate. We lay there on the new wood, exhausted and dirty, letting a wave of accomplishment wash over us.

On the way down, I heard a scream, followed by a large thud!. I looked down and saw Lila lying at the bottom of the hill. I screamed (and not because of the spider crawling up my arm) and scrambled down the hill as fast as I could. Thankfully, Lila didn’t have any serious injuries. She had slipped and hit her head on an oak tree, and only had a small bruise. But that wasn’t the end of our problems, or at least mine.

The next morning I woke up covered in itchy welts and bumps,. All the leaves on the hill turned out to be poison oak, and I was allergic. Lila wasn’t allergic, so the poison didn’t even have an effect on her. But because of the black widows and poison oak, the hill in her backyard is known as The Hill of Poison.