The true and not made up story of how slime ruins sixteen-year-old lives

These are not the pearls mentioned in the story that follows

Part 1: Prelude to a Disaster

My favorite part of vacation is walking into the hotel, knowing that a bed full of clean sheets is waiting for me, knowing that when I wake up the next day, I will not make my bed, but that when I return later in the evening, those sheets will be neatly folded and a chocolate waiting on the pillow.

My sister's favorite part of vacation is buying stuff.

Fact: at the age of 18, the most expensive item I had ever bought to put on my face was a can of Gillette shaving cream. It cost $7.99, plus tax.

Fact: my sister spent exactly thirteen times that amount on a tube filled with little rubbery plastic pea-sized beads. She would squeeze these beads, and they would pop, and a pea-sized drop of lotion would come out. She would then spread this on her face, claiming that it would make her face brighter and younger.

Fact: my sister was sixteen.

Later, we would learn that these beads, expensive as they were, did not really brighten your skin.

However, they did give you pimples.

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Part 2: Villains Among Us

My cousin is thirteen years younger than me. Today, she is a nurse loved by her patients. When she was five, my mother asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up.

She said "slime."

Later, she would change this to "slime maker."

As an aspiring slime maker, my cousin knew that you could make slime out of almost anything. Her go-to ingredients were Elmer's glue and my uncle's shaving cream. However, she was also an experimenter. A brave soul, she would try anything and everything. She found that some soaps made better slime than others, and she eventually discovered that expensive soaps would often make better slime than ordinary ones. This did not please my aunt.

She then began to experiment with lotions. It started with her family's Nivea body lotion, which she claimed gave her slimes a slipperier consistency, but sometimes too slippery.

On Halloween, she came to my house to go trick-or-treating with my sister. My sister watched her get her costume on, and my sister got ready herself. Before putting on her makeup, my sister used one of her lotion beads, spreading the pimple lotion on her face.

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Part 3: The Hit

My cousin looked, but did not ask, at my sister, but her eyes spoke epics. That lotion was as good as slime.

Two days later, my cousin visited again with her aunt.

Three hours after that, my sister screamed.

Two minutes later, my mother was asking my sister why we needed to call our aunt.

Two minutes later, my mother was asking my sixteen year old sister why she would ever spend $104 on pimple lotion.

And that's the story of how my sister lost her allowance.