Woods. He’s not pretty, but he’s stark and golden and green like a cornfield under noon sunlight. Tennis shoes; low-cut, grass-stained socks; ropey calf muscles; blond leg hair; khaki shorts; aqua polo; and an unmatching St. Louis Cardinals hat tamping down floofy blondish-brown curls: he is these things. He is so much more. I know exactly what he’ll look like in thirty years when he’s sitting on our porch drinking peppermint tea.
Davey, elfin and punkish in smeared eyeliner, sits next to his cousin Mash, who looks nothing much like him. Fifty always appears a bit smarmy, and tonight is no exception. His dark hair is oily and he hasn’t shaved in a week. Janie Lee sits slightly apart, cross-legged and petite in a papasan chair. She takes up about as much room as a ghost. Then me. Knees up. Chin up. Happy. Taking their mischief like the gift that it is.
Some lock-ins are for staying up all night and playing shit-tastic games. This one is for parental convenience. The youth group is cleaning up Vilmer’s Barn tomorrow—early prep for the upcoming Harvest Festival—and Dad didn’t want to run a shuttle at six a.m. Tyson Vilmer, barn owner, patriarch of Otters Holt, grandfather of Mash and Davey, will be there waiting with his enormous smile and incredible enthusiasm. Despite the fact that we were supposed to be in separate rooms and asleep by two a.m., I am pretty damn excited to help. Two a.m. bedtime was wishful thinking on my father’s part. We are not true hellcats, but the Hexagon is particularly bad at supposed to when we’re all under one roof.
The other four can’t decide who will open the meeting: Woods or me.
I copy Dad’s southern drawl and say, “Let’s start with glads, sads, and sorries and then say a prayer.” They all laugh, except for Davey, who hasn’t been to enough Wednesday night Bible studies to get the joke. I gesture to the writing on Einstein the Whiteboard. “Dudes and Dudette, I predict this lock-in ends poorly.”
Woods will hear nothing of my prophecy. Einstein is among Woods’s favorite things on the planet—a medium-sized board that technically belongs to the youth group but practically belongs to him. Woods developed leadership skills in utero, and he thinks in dry-erase bullet points. Currently, Einstein says: THINGS TO DO WITH A CHURCH MICROWAVE. Five bullets follow, and most of them look like a one-way trip to a stark-raving Brother Scott McCaffrey, my father.
In the bottom corner, someone has drawn a sketch of a Corn Dolly being lifted on high by a stick figure. They’ve labeled the stick figure Billie McCaffrey, which makes me label them all idiots. The joke is so old it has wrinkles.
A Corn Dolly is only a corn husk that has been folded and tucked and tied into the shape of a doll. In the town of Otters Holt, the mayor handpicks this husk on the morning of the Harvest Festival, which is an annual event the town treats like Christmas-meets-the-Resurrection. The dolly is then assembled and bestowed during the middle of the Sadie Hawkins dance to the most deserving woman of the year.
Hence, the joke.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” I say, slow clapping.
Woods is positive THINGS TO DO WITH A CHURCH MICROWAVE is suitable 3:15 a.m. material. “You say ends badly. I say ends brilliantly,” he says.
Fifty has an opinion on the matter. “The only thing farfetched is Billie actually winning a Corn Dolly.” He laughs at himself. Too hard. We are often forced to forgive this failing since his facial hair allows him a fake ID, which allows us the beer that comes along with that privilege.
I’m eye-rolling. “You asshole.” Just because it’s true doesn’t mean he needs to say it.
Fifty stands up as if to challenge me while Janie Lee buries her face in the nearest pillow and reminds us that teenagers don’t, won’t ever win the Corn Dolly—Gloria Nix, twenty-three, was the youngest.
I wave Fifty forward with both hands, ready to wrestle him down.
“Back to Einstein,” Woods announces before Fifty and I go for a real row. This may have happened a time or two in the past.
“Back to Einstein,” everyone, including Fifty, choruses. The merriment rises to previous levels.
“This microwave thing.” I point to the first bullet point: Cook Pineapple Bob. “I do like it.”
Woods is beaming proudly. “He’s had a good life.”
I agree. Pineapple Bob is, well, a pineapple. Frozen these three years in the youth fridge. Named by yours truly.
“We’ll burn down the youth room,” Davey replies. He doesn’t say it in a distressed way. It’s more of an FYI. Like he’s maybe done something like this before. I’ll light fire to that backstory eventually and smoke out some truth, but right now, it’s all Bob, all the time.
The youth room microwave is from the eighties, black as coal, and built like a tank. No doubt donated by some senior church member who moved to assisted living. Its smell is a mix of baked beans, ramen noodles, and burnt popcorn (with the door closed). So if we properly execute bullet point number three (Melt 50 Starlight Mints), its condition will drastically improve.
Janie Lee laughs nervously, her UGGs bouncing against the wicker of the papasan. She’s sipping hard on some vodka–wine cooler concoction Fifty has made. I give her a little fist-bump love for showing initiative. On both the rebellious drinking and the microwave. She doesn’t offer me a drink. I don’t need alcohol; I get drunk on schemes.
We begin.
The first three steps are disappointing. Pineapple Bob pops pretty loudly, as does the handful of Monopoly houses and hotels we’ve stolen from the game closet. The Starlight Mints have to be scraped off the microwave walls. It’s more eventful when Mash pukes up wine cooler on a half-eaten bag of Twizzlers.
“Come on, man,” Fifty says. “I wasn’t done with those.”
“You okay?” Janie Lee comforts Mash, which is pointless. Every group has a hurler: he is our hurler. He is used to puking. She is used to babying him. They are a very good team.
“Shhhhh with the upchucking,” Woods orders.
Woods and I turn our attention to step four, which is seeing How Many Peeps Is Too Many Peeps? The answer: more than forty. It’s messy and delightful.
Woods and I clean, reload, and move on to bullet five. Fifty moves on to more vodka. Typical. Step five involves boiling a used sock—Woods’s, because he has the worst-smelling feet—in Dad’s newly purchased World’s Best Preacher mug. Two minutes in, we’ve got gym smell and no action. It’s a little anticlimactic to be bullet five.
As we watch the mug-and-sock do its nothing, Woods says, “In basically three hours we have to be in the barn.”
Fifty lifts his head from a plank position on the floor and says, “In three hours, we could be walking Vilmer’s Beam.” This makes Mash throw a blanket over his own head. Everyone is tired of hearing Fifty bellow about walking the loft beam in Vilmer’s Barn. It was a dumb dare in fifth grade. We’re seniors. We’re over it.
I say, “I hate mornin—” and the sock catches on fire.
“Heck, yeah!” Mash says, too loud, and then laughs.
Janie Lee says, “The other room!” Because there is a group of our fellow youth snoozing in Youth Suite 202.
The fire is small—barely more than a magnifying-glass-on-grass sort of spark—and entirely worth the four steps that came before it.
“Hot cup of sock, good sir?” I ask in a British accent.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Woods says, reaching for the microwave door.