I was drinking a mocha at The Low Ground Cafe, shielding my mug from a bee and wishing it were warmer——the weather, I mean, not the bee——and there I was, taking in Nature and Culture and swatting the one away from the other, when I spotted a familiar face at the next table.
It was a triangular sort of face with a trim reddish beard and kind of pointy ears, and it was attached to a boy I’d gone to school with named Rey, who was an absolute genius for pranks. He was pecking at his almond Danish like a man with a burden, and I was debating whether it would be better to say hello or to slink off and leave him to his private sorrows when he noticed me and his face changed completely.
My grandfather used to have this cuckoo clock above the kitchen stove, and it was pretty plain as cuckoos go——just some simple vines and leaves and things carved into the frame——but on the hour a whole chorus of birds would bound out the front and twirl in a circle and it was all very dramatic, and I’m mentioning it now because Rey’s face shifted in a similarly striking fashion.
He called me over to his table and ordered some more pastries, and we spent a half hour reminiscing about old friends and the time he set gerbils loose in the auditorium during the spring musical and that sort of thing. We both laughed so hard that I started to think maybe I’d just imagined him being glum before.
“You know, Izzy,” he said, with the grin I remembered. “You’re just the person I was hoping to see today.”
Which was extra nice of him to say because I hadn’t seen him in four or five years, and there was no good reason for him to be thinking of me at all, but he swore that he had been and here’s why.
“Listen,” he said. “You know how you’re always wanting to get out of town and spend more time in nature?”
Well I didn’t really, not until he mentioned it, but come to think of it, it would be nice to spend some time outdoors. Rey’s family had a cabin up in the mountains, and he was heading up that very weekend with some high school friends, as it turned out, and wouldn’t it be fun if I came along? Well, of course it would.
The only catch was that we’d have to air out the cabin, since it hadn’t been used all winter. That’s the deal Rey had with his parents, who were outrageously strict. They had the cleanest house I’d ever seen and never ate dessert. Once I tried to tell his dad a joke, and when I got to the punchline he didn’t even laugh, just nodded very slowly and said, “thank you.” They were committed birdwatchers, and had pet names for all their backyard birds, and they were just very intense, is the point I’m making, and I was a little scared of them. But Rey said they wouldn’t be there until Sunday night, so it wouldn’t be a problem.
It would just be a handful of friends in the woods, hiking the lakes and roasting graham crackers and so forth. We might have to wipe up a teensy bit of dust first, but that wouldn’t be a problem at all, and the more he talked about it, the more fun it sounded. It wasn’t long before I realized that a weekend in the mountains was exactly what I’d been pining for all this time.
“Can I bring my roommate?” I asked. Bex had been working overtime making costumes for a children’s theater and for weeks, everything at our place had been whipstitches and sequins and rainbow suspenders. A break would be good for everyone.
“Of course!” Rey said. “Many hands and all that. It wouldn’t be any fun all by yourself.”
“But you’ll be there too,” I pointed out, and he laughed and said of course, so we worked out the details and I rushed home to tell Bex the good news. Rey was so excited he left without paying, but I was happy to pick up the tab. It seemed a fair enough exchange for a weekend of fun in the great outdoors.
Bex was kneeling on the living room rug, surrounded by a dozen fuzzy horse heads, when I got home. She was plucking glittery wire horns from the coffee table and screwing them onto their foreheads, though I didn’t see any wigs yet. She had a row of bald unicorns stacked by the fireplace, and the rest of the room looked like some kind of agrarian crime scene.
“Hey!” I said, shoving some tutus to the floor and plucking my dog Deefer from the rumpled cushion where he’d been surveying the assembly. I skritched his ears, and he curled into a dozy little ball on my lap. “You know how we’re always wanting to get out of town and spend more time in nature?”
“I don’t recall that conversation,” Bex said, swiveling a horn into place. A light mist of glitter settled over her.
“Well, sure, but we’re always thinking it.”
“Are we?” She frowned. “What’s so great about nature? Spiders live there, and everything poops on the ground.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” I said. “We won’t be camping in a tent or anything.”
She shifted onto her heels and raised a sparkly eyebrow.
“This conversation has taken a troubling turn,” she said.
It was clear she’d gotten the wrong idea, so I quickly explained all about running into Rey and how he’d invited us up to the cabin and all about the fresh air and woodland creatures and s’mores and whatnot.
“All we have to do is help him air it out a bit,” I said.
“Fantastic,” she said. “Will he let us whitewash his fence too?”
“I can ask!”
Bex sighed and shook her head, setting off a mist of glitter.
“It sounds like a lot of work,” she said. “My parents used to have a summer home near the shore. Something always burrows into the walls and dies in the off-season.”
“It’s just a little dusting! Then we can spend the whole weekend outside with Rey and his friends.”
“Or we could stay here and spend the weekend inside, without strangers. Are these even good friends?” she asked. “I don’t remember a Rey.”
“He’s an old friend from high school. We used to play cards at lunch sometimes.”
“Did you ever, by any chance, lose money to Rey while you were playing?”
“Of course! He was very good.”
“I’ll bet he was,” she said.
“Please come,” I said. “It won’t be any fun without you. And we can go hiking!”
“Just stop,” she grumbled. “I regret it already and I haven’t even said yes yet.”
“Yay!” I said. “You’ll see. A weekend in the mountains is just what we deserve.”
“If a weekend in nature is what we deserve,” Bex said, “I think we need to seriously evaluate our life choices.”
We set out Saturday morning for the cabin. It was a beautiful cool morning and the sky was full of puffy white clouds all edged in yellow, like a giant had sneezed on a blue tablecloth while eating mashed potatoes.
Bex might have been reluctant, but Deefer was one hundred percent on board. I’d given him a little plaid neckerchief to make him look sporty, and he spent the entire drive strutting around the back seat and stretching his snout out the window to snap at the breeze. We hit a little traffic near the Arena, which was kicking off a big music festival, but it hardly set us back, and we crunched up the gravel path to the summer house well before noon.
It was a cozy little house, tucked into the hill and framed by maples and pines. One side faced the woods, and a thin trail hinted at our future hiking adventures. The nearest house was separated from Rey’s by a wide lawn and a thin line of birch trees, which didn’t offer much privacy. It had a dozen towels flapping on a clothesline and a pack of feral children trying to tackle one another in the yard. “If this place doesn’t have functional plumbing, we’re getting right back in the car,” Bex hissed as we lugged our bags toward the weathered porch.
“Oh, stop fussing. You know what they say about not kicking a gift horse in the face.”
“Not k——what? Izzy, that’s crazy.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So, let’s not do it.”
Deefer dashed up the steps and Rey threw the door open as if he’d been waiting for us.
“Come in, come in!” he shouted, yanking Bex’s bags from her hand and chucking them toward the kitchen. “So glad you made it! I’ve just gotten started. Slight hiccup though——some of the gang got stuck on the way up and need a spare tire.”
Bex looked like she had some thoughts on that situation, but she’d also drunk about a gallon of coffee, and so she settled for making very expressive faces over Rey’s shoulder while she hustled to the bathroom. The flat tire was a terrible bit of bad luck, Rey explained, his face even pointier and sadder than it had been at the cafe. He was heading out to help them when he realized his own car was out of gas. Of course, he’d much rather stay here and help us clean because his parents had been quite strict about that. They’d gotten it into their heads that he wasn’t pulling his weight, if you can imagine, and had threatened to change the locks and bar him from future cabin use if he didn’t come through this year and clean it out. His eyes got misty at the injustice of it all. Anyway, now his poor friends were stuck on the highway with no way to get help, and it was a terrible shame because Rey himself was such a champion tire changer and just bursting to help, if only he had a car to get to them.
Well of course I told him to take ours and with a trembly voice he thanked me and was squealing out of the driveway, sending gravel skittering into the ferns, before I even realized I’d handed him the keys.
“OK,” said Bex, wiping her hands on her jeans. “What did I miss?”
I wouldn’t say that silence followed my explanation, because Rey had left the stereo going full blast, but there was a bit of a conversational lull where you couldn’t hear much except hipster pop-folk blaring in the living room, and some snufflish noises as Deefer investigated the kitchen. You know how you can sometimes feel somebody trying very hard to make meaningful eye contact with you even though you’re staring very intently at your suitcase zipper? That was also happening.
Finally Bex sighed and set our bags by the entrance.
“You’re just letting this guy walk all over you,” she said.
“He’s not even here.”
“That’s the point! You don’t think he invited you just because he remembered you were super gullible and he knew he could trick you into cleaning the house?”
“He’s not tricking me. I offered to help.”
“Izzy, has anybody ever told you that you look at the world through rose-colored glasses?”
“Well maybe you’re just using mud-colored glasses. Maybe the world’s naturally rosy but you’re just thinking the worst of everybody because you’re using these super-dark, cranky glasses all the time.”
“You’re describing sunglasses,” she said. “And they’re objectively awesome. Everybody wears them.”
She held up the case of the CD Rey had been listening to.
“Banjovi,” she said, like it was significant.
“I’ve heard of them!”
“Maybe because that’s the group that’s headlining the Arena today?”
“That must be it.”
“Or because it was the name of the band on the shirt your buddy was wearing as he dashed out the door? And on the bumper sticker of his car?”
It was a fascinating coincidence, but chatting about our host’s musical tastes wasn’t going to get the house aired out, and I was determined to get a little cleaning done and earn my keep before we went out to experience the glories of nature. I could tell Bex was biting her tongue, which was fine by me. The thing is, she was either right or wrong, but either way we didn’t have a car——and it’s much nicer to choose to stay in a house and tidy it up than to be forced to do it.
Rey had managed to open all the windows, but it didn’t look like he’d made much progress beyond that. There were cobwebs in the corners and grit on the counters and little piles of beetles belly-up between the window panes.
“At least he put clean sheets on the beds,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, most people would have gone ahead and made them at that point,” Bex said. “Not just pile them on top of the covers.”
She had a few more things to say about being a sucker, and I had a few things to say about being overly suspicious, but in the end there was nothing to do but make the best of things, so that’s what we decided to make.
“But I’m not doing his dirty work,” Bex said, sneezing.
“The faster we clean, the less dust there will be,” I pointed out, but Bex put her foot down.
“If you need me, I’ll be making unicorn wigs.”
If ever there was a person who could drag a bag of horse heads with stubborn determination, that person is Bex, and that is what she did. She dropped the bag on the rug and prodded the couch with a finger. It made a sticky sound, like sneakers at the dollar theater.
“OK, I’ll——tchoo!——wipe down the coffee table and the couch and then——tchoo!——unicorns…”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see how much we can get done before they get back. They’ll be exhausted after changing a tire.”
Bex rolled her eyes, but she did help me make the beds after she wiped off the couch. Then she spent the rest of the afternoon surrounded by rainbow yarn and felt and growing piles of multi-colored wigs and tissues. Deefer snuggled up on the couch while I swept and dusted and wiped and rinsed. Rey had very helpfully torn out a checklist and left it on the table and I’d managed to work through most of the items before Bex insisted I was through for the day.
“Pace yourself,” she said. “There’s plenty to keep him and his buddies busy all day tomorrow.”
To be honest, I wasn’t super jazzed about vacuuming beetles out of the window sills, or cleaning out the mouse traps, and I didn’t even know what “pole cat defense” meant, so I agreed. Rey had been gone an awfully long time, and I was just starting to worry about him when the phone rang.
He’d fixed the tire quick enough, but there was more trouble with the engine, he said. They needed a mechanic and it was taking forever and he was so sorry to leave us stranded and so forth. He was delighted to hear how much progress we’d made, and promised to call when they were on the road, and he hung up before I could ask when that might be.
“Let me guess,” Bex said. “He’s running late.”
“Well, yes,” I admitted.
“Mm,” Bex said, and she put a lot into it. Fortunately, before she could elaborate on that thought, we were interrupted by a knock on the door, which turned out to be a smallish child in a large rainbow sombrero——a straggler from the herd next door. Her siblings had spread out and were poking around the pines surrounding their property. It was hard to see her face under the hat brim, but she had two fat braids and red rainboots and a yellow water pistol tucked into her jeans.
“Are Mr. and Mrs. Kapra here?” she asked, tipping her head back.
“Sorry,” I said. “Rey was here earlier, but it’s just us now.”
The girl considered this.
“Do you have any peanut butter?”
“What do you need peanut butter for?”
“Bird feeders,” she said. “Mom sent us out to do arts and crafts ‘cause we’re giving her a headache.”
“That sounds fun,” I said, and she nodded solemnly.
Bex ducked into the kitchen and reappeared a moment later with a peanut butter jar.
“Last one,” she said.
The girl nodded her thanks, and the hat nearly hit her belt.
“Hey, how come you’re wearing a sombrero?” I asked.
“I’m the sheriff,” she said, as if it were obvious.
“Right,” I said. “Have fun with the birdfeeders.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, and then Bex’s unicorns caught her eye.
“Ooooh!” she squealed, her peace officer gravity replaced with childish glee as she took in their glorious rainbow manes. “What are those?”
“Next month’s rent is what they are,” Bex said. “No touching.”
The sheriff looked disappointed, but nodded again and thanked us for the peanut butter. At the door, she shot one last wistful glance at the unicorns, and whispered something that sounded like ‘steeds’ before she moseyed across the yard to the neighbor’s porch, where a posse of smaller kids had begun pouring birdseed into the baby’s hair.
“That’s cute,” I said. “Remember birdfeeders?”
“We made them in kindergarten,” Bex said. “We left them drying and raccoons got into the art room.”
“How?”
“What am I, a zookeeper? I don’t know. One of them knocked over the glitter paints. It was pretty spectacular. Anyway, dry your pinecones away from the house is the moral of that story. Come check out the pantry. He stocked it pretty well——or his parents did.”
It was true. The shelves were bursting with pasta, beans, jam, tinned cocoa, and a million cans of tomato sauce. There was a bag of mini marshmallows with one of those little sticky notes labelled OREO’S, which they obviously weren’t. That set off another rant because Bex has strong opinions on apostrophes and people who don’t know where to put them. And she was even more annoyed that Rey had clearly eaten all the cookies before we arrived.
“Let’s pack a snack and go eat it by the lake,” I said, hoping to distract her.
“You realize it’s raining, right?”
I hadn’t, but it was. Fat raindrops were spattering the porch, and outside the sheriff and her siblings were yanking towels off the line and running them into the house.
“It’ll stop,” I said. But it picked up, and all afternoon down it came plunkety plunk, and then it started to storm for real. There were only two or three leaks, and we put pots underneath them to keep the water off the floor. Deefer spent a happy hour snouting at each pot in turn, as if we’d set up some sort of exotic tasting menu for him.
Eventually the sheriff returned with the peanut butter jar. She’d lost the lid, but it was nearly empty, so I set it aside and made a mental note to ask Rey about recycling. Then there was a massive crack of thunder and the lights went out.
We bumped around in the dark until we found some candles and then bumped around some more until we found matches. I’d thought Bex might be crabby, but she seemed amused by the storm——imagining Rey out in it, I guess. We made pasta for dinner on the gas stove. Then I made hot chocolate and Bex dug through the games until she found one that was only a little sticky. We spent the rest of the evening playing Scrabble, topping off our mugs with whipped cream, and arguing over words like DULLWIT (Bex’s) and SNURFLE (mine). It wasn’t quite the outdoor adventure I’d imagined, but it was still a lot of fun.
Rey called as we were getting ready for bed.
“IZZY!!” he hollered. He sounded like he was in a tunnel where a massive party was happening. I could hear laughter and chatting behind him, and a thumpy sort of sound, like a bass. “Look, this repair is proving to be very tricky——shut up, guys——we’re working on it but I’m not sure when we’ll be back. I hope you didn’t finish all the cleaning!”
“Nope,” I said.
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Well, look, we don’t want to drive up the mountain in a storm. All those dark switchbacks, you know? So we’ll drive up tomorrow morning, alright?”
And he hung up.
Bex and I went to bed around midnight, but I woke up soon after, convinced that something was off. The rain was still battering the roof, and Deefer was snurfling cheerfully in the crook of my knees. Then I heard it: a slow, soft, scraping noise, followed by a hollow thump. It sounded exactly like what you don’t want to hear on a stormy night in a dark cabin, and I rationally concluded that it was coming from an evil burglar with a hook for a leg and a wooden eye who was definitely going to murder us in our sleep.
Deefer cocked a sleepy ear toward the door, and nosed into the covers——but he sprang up when we heard the thump again and pointed toward the door, tags quivering. My cellphone, I realized suddenly, was in the kitchen——as was the landline. I curled under my blankets, hoping whoever it was would just rob the place and leave. Deefer growled softly, and I tugged him under the covers. From my blanket bunker, I could hear footsteps creeping softly, softly down the hall, stopping just outside my door. Then the door eased opened.
“Hey,” Bex whispered. “Wake up.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “You scared the living delights out of me. I thought you were the burglar.”
“What burglar? There’s something in the kitchen.”
“It’s definitely a murderer.”
“Knock it off.”
“I’m not joking.”
“It’s probably just another leak,” she said. “And it’s daylights, by the way, not delights.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t feel daylights.”
She opened her mouth, but the scraping noise came again just then – slow and deliberate – and the hollow bump.
“That’s not a leak.”
“Come on,” she said. “A murderer wouldn’t make that much noise until after we were dead.”
Deefer had snuck out while we were discussing the deranged murderer situation, and I could hear his tags chinking as he padded down the steps. I don’t want to use the word hero here, but I did get out of bed when I heard my dog plodding toward danger, and I kind of feel like I deserve a medal.
“Nice pajamas,” Bex whispered. They were my favorite yellow pizza pajamas. All the slices had happy little faces and were saying things like yum! and hot stuff! “I hope the murderer likes them.”
“If you’re so sure it’s not a murderer, why did you wake me up?”
Bex rolled her eyes, but I did notice that she was whispering, and once when one of the steps squeaked under her foot, she froze completely. We crept down the stairs, listening for the telltale scrape. The hallway was full of shadows and the kitchen was even darker. Deefer stood tense in the doorway, his little curly tail stiff with focus, a snarl building in his brave little tummy.
On the far side of the counter, something (someone?) was creeping – pok, pok, pok – and as it skulked toward us, I was remembering every scary story from every sleepover I’d ever attended, about things that bumped in the night and escaped from mental asylums to harass babysitters and made sinister phone calls from inside the house.
The hollow scraping noise came again, and then——pok, pok, pok——it emerged: not a murderer, but a monster. It had glossy dark fur and a jar-shaped head, which it was whacking pok, pok against the furniture. It was small for a monster, small and fat, and it had four little legs and a big bushy tail and a sinister white stripe down its back. I grabbed Deefer and dashed to the living room. Bex was already there, crouched behind the couch, whispering swears.
Having a jar-blind, cranky skunk in the house would be enough to upset a milder temper than Bex’s, and at first I assumed that was the only thing bothering her. But then I remembered the bags – bulging with about a dozen unicorn heads with their glittery horns and their rainbow wigs, representing many days of work and a solid chunk of next month’s rent – squarely in the danger zone.
There was another rumble of thunder, louder this time, followed by the now familiar pok, pok, pok. In my arms, Deefer twisted like a furry slinky and whined.
“I have an idea,” Bex whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When your friend shows up, let’s punch him in the face.”
“OK,” I said. “I mean, no bad ideas in a brainstorm, but let’s focus on skunk solutions. Do you have any of those kinds of ideas?”
Well, we puzzled over it for a while and tossed around all kinds of schemes. It was just the sort of situation where Rey would have been really helpful. Surely the boy who’d managed to get twenty inflatable inner tubes over the school flagpole would know how to get a skunk out of a jar. But Rey was far away, and there was no getting around the fact that one of us was going to have to free the thing by hand.
We flipped a Scrabble tile for it and I lost. Bex and Deefer hunkered down behind the couch and I tiptoed toward the kitchen.
I don’t want to make assumptions here. You probably have your own skunk extraction technique, and there’s no reason to think mine is any better, but if you’re looking for a strategy, here’s one I can recommend: Sneak into the room quietly and once the beast is aware of your presence, address him directly. (I went with, “Hey, there, Mr. Skunk,” though there’s no need to be so formal if that’s not the kind of relationship you want to establish.) Gently reach for the peanut butter jar, explaining what you’re about to do and why. Then slowly rotate the jar in a clockwise motion, pulling back until the skunk’s head is free. With the jar in hand, slowly back out of the room, upsetting a bag of dog kibble.
This last bit is absolutely key, as the kibble provides a replacement snack that can serve as a distraction and reduce the chances of a rage-induced attack——or at least that’s what I tried to persuade Bex, but she only gave me an 8 out of 10 because I “didn’t stick the landing.” And while it might not have been my intention to splash water and kibble all over the floor, I do think the skunk appreciated it. At the very least, he didn’t detonate. We opened the front door and waited for him to exit joyfully, but several minutes went by and nothing happened.
From the shadows of the hallway, we peered into the kitchen. Our skunk had greedy little eyes and slicked back hair and one crazy tooth that jutted out to the side like a cigar. He looked like a gangster in one of those old films where they say stuff like, “The boss says no dice, see?” He snuffled at the kibble and even ate a few pieces, but he was very pointedly ignoring the door.
“I wish Rey’s family had left us some notes on hostile wildlife,” I said. “All we’ve got is de-beetling the windowsills and emptying mousetraps. I mean, what do skunks eat? Besides peanut butter?”
“Oh,” Bex said suddenly. “Oh!” And her face changed like a cuckoo clock. “I just had a crazy thought.”
“Yeah?”
“What if that’s Oreo?”
“It’s definitely peanut butter,” I said.
“No, like on the marshmallow note. What if they’re for him? Didn’t you say the Kapras named their favorite birds? What if they name all kinds of animals? What if this fat little bully has broken in before? He must be a repeat offender if ‘polecat defense’ is on the checklist.”
“So you think they call him Oreo? The marshmallows are for him?”
“It’s worth a shot,” she said.
“OK, but I just got a jar off his head, so…”
“Fair enough.”
Bex handed Deefer to me, squared her shoulders and marched into the pantry. Our skunk (Oreo?) swiveled toward her as he heard the crinkle of the marshmallow bag, and his pointy nose followed Bex as she scooted across the kitchen, dropping a trail of mini marshmallows behind her.
At first he was coy, just kind of sniffing at the marshmallows like he wasn’t sure he was interested, and he ate the first one like he was doing us a big favor. He followed Bex at a distance, stopping every few feet for another marshmallow. Bex led him down the hall and out onto the porch. Oreo paused at the threshold, and refused to move.
Bex hurled a marshmallow into the darkness and he turned his head away, insulted. She muttered and emptied the entire bag onto the path. “Satisfied? You greedy little housebreaker.”
Oreo sneered at her, but after pausing just long enough to make it clear he was moving on his own terms, he lifted his tail and with quiet dignity he sauntered off the porch and into the night. We slammed the door behind him.
It was raining again when we woke up, and when Bex suggested that we could appreciate the great outdoors just as well from our own skunk-free kitchen, I didn’t argue.
“I’ve got some thoughts on your friend Rey,” Bex said as we ate cereal in our pajamas and Deefer cheerfully rooted under the furniture for midnight kibble.
“When I was in high school, I had this Mac-arsaurus tee shirt that I really loved,” I told her. “I had to eat like a million boxes of macaroni for the box tops.”
“Is this relevant?”
“And then I loaned it to my friend Jackie and she spilled beets all over it and it stained. And I figured I could be cranky about it or make it a gift.”
“I don’t get it.”
I frowned. I was having trouble explaining it in a way she’d understand. “Like, if you loan someone money and they take forever to pay you back, that’s the worst. But if it’s a gift, then you don’t have to be mad. You know?”
I wasn’t saying it very well, but I think she got it. At least she stopped saying nasty things about Rey, and when he called later that morning, she was surprisingly polite on the phone. She thanked him several times for letting us use the cabin, and said, “See you soon!” like she was actually looking forward to it. But she was still determined to leave.
We were packed up by the time Rey and his friends pulled into the driveway. They were all bleary eyed and unshaven and looked as if they hadn’t slept a wink. I thanked him for the lovely weekend, and he tried to explain about all the catastrophes that had prevented them showing up earlier, but Bex just tossed our bags in the trunk and wished him luck with the window beetles.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I said as we drove home. “And thanks for helping me with the cleaning and the skunk eviction and everything else.”
“Any time,” she said. “Or, actually, never again. But just this once, I was happy to help.”
“Well thanks for being nice to Rey,” I said. “I know he’s not your favorite, but you were really polite on the phone before.”
“Mmm,” she said, in a suspicious sort of way that made me take my eyes off the road for just a second. “Actually that was Mrs. Kapra.”
“Rey’s mom?”
“Yeah, she was calling to say they were ahead of schedule.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, they should be there in an hour or two.”
Well, that was something. The house was a disaster, what with the beetles and the mousetraps and the leaks and all the wet leaves that had blown in the open door the night before. But if they rolled up their sleeves, Rey and his friends could tidy it up before his parents arrived. Probably.
“Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if he lost his cabin privileges,” I admitted.
“Good for you!” Bex laughed. “If I’d known you felt that way, I wouldn’t have left him that hosting gift.”
“You got Rey a gift?”
“You inspired me,” she said.
“Where’d you find a gift up here?”
“I swapped the sheriff a unicorn head for a bunch of her homemade birdfeeders,” she said.
“When did you give them to him?” I asked.
“I thought it would be more fun to hide them all over the house. Like a scavenger hunt.”
“All over the house? Covered in peanut butter?”
“Yup.”
“But what if he doesn’t find them?”
“I suppose that is a possibility,” she said. “On an unrelated note, I seem to have misplaced my unicorn glitter.”
I shot her a suspicious glance, but Bex was staring very intently at her suitcase zipper. And after all, I thought, it sounded like just what Rey deserved.
A logophile who writes essays, fiction and poetry, L. Mack has a healthy appreciation for rare words and everyday absurdities. Her short fiction has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Apple Valley Review and The Saturday Evening Post. She plots her revenge in Maryland, where she lives with too many plants and not enough dogs. Her favorite historical feud is the interminable debate over the Oxford comma. lmackwrites.com
