Don found climbing three flights of stairs strangely difficult. He was on his way up to his friend Chris's room to fetch him for dinner. The two had plans to catch a movie later, too. Don was lucky to have found someone with the same interests to hang out with in his first year of college. The two were frequent visitors in each other's rooms, where the topic of discussion was usually which girls they found attractive and why. They were each attracted to the same type of woman and had even double-dated a few times when they were able to persuade two such women to join them.
Tonight, there was no date. They both wanted to go to see LORD OF THE RINGS and knew no woman who was interested, so they were going alone. And so Don climbed the stairs to meet his friend, occasionally tripping on the steps after the first flight. On the third flight, he tripped again. It was a combination of misjudging the height of the stair, as well as having his feet filling less of his shoe and his longer pants leg somehow getting entangled in the mix.
By the time he reached Chris's floor, he paused to rest and dust himself off. Damn, these jeans were longer and baggier than he remembered. Had he mistakenly worn his roommate Scott's? Scott was larger than Don and more than slightly overweight. That must be it, but why hadn't he noticed before?
Chris answered his door at the first knock. "I been waiting, man," he teased. The conversation was playful as they went downstairs in the elevator, and when it reached the ground floor, they were laughing so hard that it took Don a minute to figure out something was wrong.
"What's the problem?" asked Chris, noticing Don had stopped in his tracks.
"My shoe is gone," the bewildered Don said. He held out his leg and had to raise the baggy pants several inches before Chris could see his sock-clad foot and confirm this.
"Where is it?" Chris asked. They looked around. It was nowhere to be seen.
"It must still be in the elevator," said Don slowly. The doors had already closed and the lights indicated it was going up. "That's weird... I must have left it untied."
"Yeah."
And then Don took a step and his pants fell down, too.