Will Lavigne: Best Story Ever

There are so many stories that I could talk about. I could tell you about the bunk bed girl that Alex and Fred met up with once, or I could talk about the time Phil dislocated his shoulder in the deep Pemberton backcountry and we almost had to sleep up there overnight. Or that one time Frank April got so drunk on the ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki that he almost went to jail. Or the time we played drunk Yamakazi on top of some buildings in Aomori and got escorted out by the police, but didn’t get charged with anything because we couldn’t communicate at all with the Japanese police. And instead of telling you about the girl in the restaurant bathroom, I’ll just tell you how I almost died by burning in a firebomb when I was 14.

I’m from a small town, called Victoriaville in Quebec. As a kid, you have to somehow get creative there in order to entertain yourself during the weekends. I have to say, I was a shitty kid. We liked to walk around the neighbourhood at night and play with or ruin anything we thought was funny. During Halloween, we’d walk around and mess up all the decorations, swapping them from one house to the other, and vise versa. We would hide and throw eggs at cars driving by. I once held my friend’s hands while he sat on top of a bridge and took a crap on the cars driving underneath. Then one day, we discovered gas and fire.

For a while, we were the bad kids, burning all the plastic trash bins at our school or in the park. We had to escape from the police a few times, but never got caught. My friend, Matt, had the genius idea to create a bomb, where we’d throw a container full of gas from a high elevation onto a fire below. We found the perfect zone to do it, where there was a huge agriculture grain silo with some foot-bridges going from one to the other. The silos were huge! So, we lit a small fire on the ground at the bottom, then Matt and I climbed to the top to throw the gas down. In our minds, there was no possibility that the fire could reach

as high as we were when we threw the gas, but it did. Standing at the top of the silos with Matt, we took the bucket, threw it down, and both ran in different directions. We heard a super loud, “CABOOOOM!” and the next thing I felt was the warmth of fire all around me. I closed my eyes and hoped it would blow past. After a few seconds, the warmth was gone, but the skin of my face felt burnt. I ran down, feeling like shit, and my face was going a bit numb. Some people at the bottom were saying that they saw a giant mushroom-cloud of fire go up and I was inside it. I went home in pain.

I woke up my parents when I got home and they took me to the hospital. The doctors saw me and gave me some morphine instantly. They claimed that I had second-degree burns almost everywhere on my face. Only time would tell if I’d be permanently scarred from it.

The following morning, I woke up with a brown-skinned face. I looked like I was dead. Not long after, my skin started peeling off my face. It looked awful. It took an entire month for the skin to come back to looking normal and luckily I didn’t get any permanent scars.

The shitty kid that I was kinda started to go away after that firebomb happened. That was around the time when started to get more serious about snowboarding. I’m happy how things turned out. - Will Lavigne