Niles Reddick is author of the novel Pulitzer nominated Drifting too far from the Shore, a collection Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies/collections and in over a hundred and fifty literary magazines all over the world including PIF, Drunk Monkeys, Spelk, Cheap Pop, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Slice of Life, Faircloth Review, With Painted Words, among many others. His new collection Reading the Coffee Grounds was just released. His website is www.nilesreddick.com
Silent Crushes
The teenage girls decided to end their semester at school with a spend-the-night party. They ordered pizza, made sugar cookies, drank hot chocolate, and decided to watch Hallmark movies. Mostly, they talked about boys who they thought the teachers liked better and who mostly ignored them and preferred sports, hunting, or video games.
The parents who allowed them to flop at their house in pajamas too short for anyone never heard the kitchen door shut or the teens pile in two cars parked by the street and leave the subdivision to head directly into another subdivision. The parents had nodded in recliners, exasperated from repetitive, negative news. The girls parked by the curb of a house whose owners they didn’t know, made sure the lights were out at Nicholas’ family’s house next door, grabbed rolls of toilet paper, and draped the pin oaks in front, the holly that flanked the corner of the house, and the azaleas in the landscaping. Some of them giggled while others shushed them.
Like adult burglars, they piled into the same vehicles and drove to the next house of a boy they all liked, but who also ignored them, and repeated the toilet paper escapade. They papered a third yard before calling it a night. The three targets–Nicholas, Martin, and Clay—never had a clue anything was happening outside their windows. They wore headphones and were yelling at their friends who were all played a game on the X-box.
It wasn’t until dawn that any of the boys’ parents realized their yards were draped in toilet paper. The drizzle started about three in the morning and made for quite a mess when neighbors, out for an early stroll with dogs, saw, shook their heads, and were thankful it wasn’t them who had to clean it up.
Annoyed more than angry, the parents woke and told their boys what their friends had done, but they had no idea it was sweet girls from their class who had silent crushes on the boys. Some of the mothers, though, knew what their daughters had done. They had the Life 360 app on their phones and tracked the whereabouts of their daughters. Two of the mothers noted where they had been at ten at night and confronted them.
“We were watching Hallmark movies, drinking hot chocolate, and eating sugar cookies,” one daughter lied to her parents. She lost her phone and car keys for a week. The other daughter confessed what the friends had done, but the parents told her to avoid that sort of thing in the future, that it was illegal, that if they were caught, it could affect their college admissions. Plus, the parents had done it themselves in a time when the only app was nosey neighbors who called parents to tell.