Page 3 of Perfect Mess

“Mary, you don’t have to do this.” Janet planted her cowgirl boots firmly in the road, arms crossed, eye winking.

“Oh, but I do.” You see, I knew Janet better than she knew herself. We had been best friends since the first grade. Sleepovers. Summer camps. Girl scouts. We’d had each other’s backs through thick and thin. But being friends with Janet was like riding a roller coaster with backward flips and loop-d-loops. It was exhausting.

“You need a distraction,” I said. “Don’t you want to see all our friends?”

“I didn’t have many friends,” Janet replied. She looked like a toddler who dropped her ice cream cone.

“I didn’t haveanyfriends,” said Ralph.

You see, if you stop and think about it, high school reunions are the perfect place for a hookup. With divorce rates what they are, statistically speaking, at least half the people there would be single, damaged, and emotionally vulnerable. The ones who were still married, with kids and jobs and real responsibilities and stuff, were too busy or too tired to show up. It really narrowed the field.

The ass looked back up and we all froze, backs pressed against the barbed wire. It stared at us, still chewing and drooling. Possibly foaming. Definitely pooping some more.

“How is it even scientifically possible to produce that much crap?” Ralph whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask Justin Bieber.”

“Hey, I like Justin Bieber.” Janet winked again.

“Exactly.”

I should also explain why Janet needed a hook-up. There were many reasons. But the latest one happened the week before, when she caught her boyfriend Stan cheating on her with some girl from work. I never liked Stan. If Janet would have listened to me, she never would’ve started dating him. But Janet didn’t listen to me. With men, she never does.

So of course “Stanet” had ended in a train wreck. Just like I knew it would. And not just a little train wreck. A big train wreck. Like one of those trains carrying barrels of toxic waste flew off the tracks, flipped over a bunch of times, and then exploded in a mushroom cloud. And then the people in the little town down the river glowed neon green for the next hundred years.

The past few weeks had been especially brutal. Every time Janet got her heart broken, it was the same thing. Binge watching Bachelor show reruns. Random teary outbursts. Tubs of rum raisin ice cream, spiked with real rum. She wouldn’t snap out of it until she met someone new. Hence Operation Hook-Up-Janet.

“Hurry, it’s distracted.” The ass bent down for another bite and we scurried past it.

With the ass behind us, we continued down the road. We didn’t make it far before Janet pointed at the thunderclouds forming in the distance. “I should go back and move my car before it rains.”

Parking for the reunion was in a muddy field a few hundred yards from the ranch gates. That’s why we had to trudge down the dirt road, in the heat, across ass infested territory. And Janet drove a Toyota Prius, which I was pretty sure didn’t come standard with four-wheel drive for off roading.

I looked at the gathering storm clouds and then at my watch. It was getting late. All the best hook-up candidates were going to be taken if we didn’t hurry. “Your car’s going to be fine,” I said. Worst case, Ralph and I would get an Uber.

By that point, we had reached the big iron gates to the ranch. A sign read, Circle H. “What do you think the H stands for?” I used my cheery voice to stoke some enthusiasm.

“Hell,” Janet and Ralph said together.

This close to the festivities, we could hear music and laughter rolling down from the barn. A rabidly enthusiastic “Yeeeeeee Haaaaaa!” rang out from somewhere inside. “Come on you guys, this is going to be fun.” I did my best to sound optimistic.

Little did I know how wrong I was.

* * *

“Oh!My! God! Is that Mary? Mary Burns?” A rhinestone encrusted woman charged.

Before I could run, she scooped me up in a rib cracking hug. “It is you!” I felt my feet lift off the ground as the air squeezed out of my lungs. “My word, you haven’t aged a bit!” The woman held on to me like I was her personal flotation device in the middle of a stormy sea. Who she was, I had no clue.

When the woman finally released me, she snatched a polaroid camera and blinded me. FLASH! When my eyesight returned, my shell-shocked expression of terror materialized on film.

“For our Now and Then wall.” Behind the mystery woman, photos of other surprised reunion guests were pinned on a board next to their corresponding yearbook photos from high school. It looked like a post office wall full of mug shots, except instead of taking the pictures back at the police station, the police had jumped out from behind a wall and yelled “Surprise!” right in the middle of the crime scene.

When I pulled my eyes away from the wall of photographs, I saw the rhinestoned woman looking at me and smiling. “You remember me, don’t you?”

I had to wait for the yellow and white rings to fade. She wore more eye shadow than the lead singer of Twisted Sister.

“It’s Cristy.”

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