Luna was mystified.
She had searched through several of the houses and every one of them seemed completely deserted. It was as if there was no one anywhere around the commune, even though it had been bustling just a few hours earlier.
When she finally got to the main dining area, the room erupted. People leapt out from the corners, from under the table, and from behind the chairs. Suddenly the place was filled with commune members and more.
“Surprise!” someone yelled.
The crowd broke into three different birthday songs before they settled on the somewhat traditional (and, as of March 14th, in the public domain) “Happy Birthday to You”.
Luna looked around the room. Everyone from the commune was there, along with Peter and George and Fred, and Ed and Ralph, and the entire Trollwork team, and Amanda and Steve, and Edgar, and even Stan! Standing next to Sal!
And then she spotted her mother and (and Luna had trouble believing her eyes) her father.
“How does it feel to hit the big Two-O?” Chuck asked.
“I can’t believe that the coolest commune in the north was created by a teenager,” Marge said.
“Wow,” Patsy said. “What will you do now that you’re an adult?”
Luna just stood there stunned. She kept looking around the room with her mouth open and not saying a word.
Finally, she broke into tears.
“I love you all,” she said.
*
Eventually Luna made the rounds of the room, taking good wishes and congratulations from everyone and trying very hard not to be too embarrassed.
“I blame you,” she said to Ralph. “If you hadn’t run off with Ed, I probably wouldn’t have been mad enough to start this commune.”
“Mad as in angry or mad as in crazy?” Ralph asked.
“Both. I think.” Luna slowly scrunched up her face into a somewhat puzzled looking expression before breaking out into a grin.
“So was that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Oh, it’s very a good thing,” Luna said. “But I blame you anyway.”
Edgar told Luna that the Reagons were sitting in jail cells in the state capital and facing twenty to thirty year sentences.
“What does that mean?” Luna asked.
“That means you shouldn’t need to think about them again until at least you turn forty,” Edgar said. He stared at his shiny black shoes.
“Great,” Luna said. “Now I know they’re gonna screw up my middle age years. Something to look forward to.”
Luna made it around to her parents last.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” she said to her father.
“Your mother made me come,” he said.
“What do you think of the farm?” she asked.
“I try not to,” he said.
“He’s not going to say anything nice about this place,” her mother said. “It would spoil his reputation.”
“You’re both crazy,” her father said.
“Oh, by the way,” her mother said, “your grandma Lagoon says to say hi. She would have liked to come down here but she says she doesn’t travel well these days.”
“Tell her I miss her and I’ll come up and visit soon,” Luna said.
“I’ll let her know that. Oh, and she also says to watch out for this guy she says that she knows. Bill Schmitt. She thought he might come here. She says that he’s real trouble.”
No comments:
Post a Comment