Teenagers attending a football game unknowingly create a cycle of cause and effect. |
Josephine Jelly had roller-coaster braces that gripped her teeth and roared when she cheered for the football players who plowed the field with losing linemen, crumpling their gumball helmets. To Josie's left sat Melanie Moodie, homecoming queen and unwilling sister who absolutely hated that she was related to her little brother Sam, who refused to be human and came and went through the doggie door any chance he could. Animal Sam, as he liked to be called, sat quietly next to his glittery sister, thoughtfully sniffing the baby-sitter popcorn-buttery wind trying to remember where he'd buried each half of one particular pair of pink plastic buckle-up shoe-shaped bones that he knew she would soon be missing. Under his nose, completely undetected, crept Donovan Dunfee, dressed in the darkness like a starless night beneath the bleachers, pondering cell phones, space ships, and ipods between the slats of the battery-powered bleacher antenna from which he had signaled his alien rescue. Kathy Cramer, the Cougar mascot, spotted his beacon from a cheerleader's shoulders. Raising her furry arms, she waved in a spirited fury of orange and blue, with a whip of her paws and a twirl of the tail, which caught the attention of Animal Sam, who barked and stood to leave the bleachers to get the field to chase her down. Melanie Moodie instinctively grabbed her no-good brother, or so she called him, brimming with anger and partly possessed, as she anchored her fists on her homecoming hips and yelled as loud as her lungs would take her, inspiring an entire football team to get back there, or else. They wrinkled the defense, crushing their helmets, planting the linemen with a touchdown tackle, sending Josephine screaming, her braces emitting high-frequency waves that shook the bleachers to the cosmic core and echoed a message on Donovan Dunfee's detector: Have fun tonight. Don't wait on us. We've decided to catch the game. - The Aliens p.s. Who's that in the mascot suit? to which Donovan Dunfee sent another signal, catching Kathy's eye which made her wave, bringing Sam to bark which angered his sister, fueling the players who flattened the linemen, sending Josie screaming, her braces making ripples which Donovan read with his bleacher detector in the form of another alien message. And so the game went on and on for Josephine Jelly, Melanie Moodie, Animal Sam, Kathy Cramer, Donovan Dunfee, and The Aliens, who all attended the football game on that fateful Friday night. |