{"id":794,"date":"2019-01-27T01:28:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-27T01:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=794"},"modified":"2019-01-25T01:32:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T01:32:00","slug":"silent-crushes-by-nils-reddick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/01\/27\/silent-crushes-by-nils-reddick\/","title":{"rendered":"Silent Crushes by Nils Reddick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 <\/em>www.nilesreddick.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silent Crushes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nteenage girls decided to end their semester at school with a spend-the-night\nparty. They ordered pizza, made sugar cookies, drank hot chocolate, and decided\nto watch Hallmark movies. Mostly, they talked about boys who they thought the\nteachers liked better and who mostly ignored them and preferred sports,\nhunting, or video games. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The parents who allowed them to flop at\ntheir house in pajamas too short for anyone never heard the kitchen door shut\nor the teens pile in two cars parked by the street and leave the subdivision to\nhead directly into another subdivision. The parents had nodded in recliners,\nexasperated from repetitive, negative news. The girls parked by the curb of a\nhouse whose owners they didn\u2019t know, made sure the lights were out at Nicholas\u2019\nfamily\u2019s house next door, grabbed rolls of toilet paper, and draped the pin\noaks in front, the holly that flanked the corner of the house, and the azaleas\nin the landscaping. Some of them giggled while others shushed them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Like adult burglars, they piled into\nthe same vehicles and drove to the next house of a boy they all liked, but who also\nignored them, and repeated the toilet paper escapade. They papered a third yard\nbefore calling it a night.  The three\ntargets–Nicholas, Martin, and Clay\u2014never had a clue anything was happening\noutside their windows. They wore headphones and were yelling at their friends\nwho were all played a game on the X-box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            It wasn\u2019t until dawn that any of the\nboys\u2019 parents realized their yards were draped in toilet paper. The drizzle\nstarted about three in the morning and made for quite a mess when neighbors,\nout for an early stroll with dogs, saw, shook their heads, and were thankful it\nwasn\u2019t them who had to clean it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Annoyed more than angry, the parents\nwoke and told their boys what their friends had done, but they had no idea it\nwas sweet girls from their class who had silent crushes on the boys.  Some of the mothers, though, knew what their\ndaughters had done. They had the Life 360 app on their phones and tracked the\nwhereabouts of their daughters. Two of the mothers noted where they had been at\nten at night and confronted them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cWe were watching Hallmark movies,\ndrinking hot chocolate, and eating sugar cookies,\u201d one daughter lied to her\nparents. She lost her phone and car keys for a week. The other daughter\nconfessed what the friends had done, but the parents told her to avoid that\nsort of thing in the future, that it was illegal, that if they were caught, it\ncould affect their college admissions. \nPlus, the parents had done it themselves in a time when the only app was\nnosey neighbors who called parents to tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-cO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":795,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions\/795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}