Page 2 of Perfect Mess

“He did!” As Janet cradled me in her arms, I realized I was crying.

“Stay here.” Ralph yanked on the bathroom door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. “It’s locked.”

Laughter came from behind the closed door. A voice, “See you later, geeks!”

We stayed there all night. Eventually, the school janitor came along, everyone else long gone.

I’d like to say what happened that night didn’t change me.

I’d like to tell you I forgot all about Jack Thompson and I simply moved on.

That’s what I’d like to tell you.

But then you’d miss all the good stuff.

ChapterOne

The ass stood in the middle of the road, munching on a tuft of grass poking out of the dirt. It lifted its head and stared at us, but never stopped chewing.

Ralph held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “It looks wild.”

“It’s not wild,” I hissed. “Probably.” Janet and I had already stopped. That was on purpose. If the creature charged, it would get Ralph first. I wondered if farm animals could get rabies.

“What do we do?” Ralph averted his gaze, as if making eye contact would set the beast off.

“Turn around and go home.” Janet had been mopey since we left.

“We’re not going home.” I pointed past the ass, where a big red barn loomed on the horizon. “We’re almost there.”

It was the site of our twentieth high school reunion, a ranch in Chuluota, land of cow gates, pickup trucks, and banjo players. Possibly albino ones. There was definitely going to be a lot of bullshit. And not just the kind that comes out of the animals’ butts.

“I don’t even want to go to this stupid thing.” Janet was growing more irritated by the second. Whenever Janet got annoyed, her left eye would twitch, then wink involuntarily. It was kind of hilarious in the right situation. Sometimes I liked to provoke her just so I could watch. But this was not the right situation. I needed Janet to be in a receptive mood for my plan to work.

“One of us should shoo it,” Ralph offered.

“Shoo it?”

“You know, shoo.” Ralph made a shooing motion with his hand to illustrate the technique.

“It’s too hot for this.” Janet winked.

She was right. The temperature was ninety degrees and rising. The humidity made the air feel like a sauna in hell. My freshly waxed armpits dripped sweat like a faucet.

You’re probably wondering about that plan I mentioned. The plan, simply, was to hook Janet up. I’ll leave the specifics of the hooking and the upping to your imagination.

“We’ll just go around it,” I said. I refused to be deterred.

To our left was a ditch filled with stale, murky water. Likely chock full of snakes and alligators. It’s a well-known fact that any standing water in the state of Florida contains at least one creature or thing you don’t want biting you, slithering on you, or swimming up your nose.

On the right, barbed wire lined an overgrown pasture. Cows were grazing. And mooing. Possibly laughing. The smell of fresh manure wafted in on the breeze. A hand painted sign warned, “Trespassers Will Be Shot!”

Getting shot seemed like it would be less painful than getting eaten by an alligator, so we crept along the fence to the right, giving the ass a wide berth. It still hadn’t moved, other than the chewing, and some occasional pooping.

“Is that foam on its mouth?” Ralph pointed at the ass.

“That’s not foam, it’s drool.” Truthfully, from a distance, I couldn’t tell.

Now, some might say hooking up at a high school reunion is a bad idea. In fact, Ralph said that exactly. So did my hairdresser and the cashier at Publix. I, however, thought it was a good idea. A great idea. So that’s what we were there to do.

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