The weekend I have been anticipating has finally arrived. I had received the order for the mums and I couldn't wait to show Lilly at school. They were in a black plastic bag to protect from getting damaged or ruined.
I didn't even get a chance to look at them either.
When I walked into public speaking class that morning,
Lilly had a huge sigh of relief. "Thank God you were just fucking around when you told me about the gigantic mums."
I took a seat right next to her. "You already know I like to fuck around too much." I started to untie the bag. "Besides, I value my life. If I actually showed up with something like that You would have killed me."
She started to laugh and agreed. "You know I would. I'd also make sure they couldn't find the body."
The moment of truth.
I pulled the mums out and so far they looked good. Hers had a cheerleader teddy bear and mine had a football player Teddy bear. The words "AHS homecoming 1999" were in shiny golden letters at the center.
Our names had been placed on some of the ribbons that dangled. "Alfie and ....What the hell is this? ALFIE AND LAYLA!" I quickly checked the other Mum and it was spelled the same way.
"Seriously!?" Lilly thought I was messing around with her again and grabbed one of the mums. They had completely put the wrong name. "What the hell. Today is homecoming. I can't walk around with that."
"Gah. I know, I know." I started to scratch my head in frustration and trying to figure something out. It was quite embarrassing. I didn't have time to go to the vendor to correct this.
We were both very upset by this. I was hoping everything will go smoothly as this was both of our first time going to homecoming.
The letters were only golden holographic stickers so they were easy to remove. Lilly, as much of a talented artist as she was started to rearrange the letters and put the "Y" at the end. "Ugh. This is so ghetto." She muttered lowly.
I quickly got up to borrow a pair of scissors from the teacher. Lilly was definitely on to something. She had to altered the 2 A's into the letter I and the letter L by cutting a few pieces off the A and reattaching them.
"L. I. L. L. Y. There." She shook her head and giggled. "At least you can't really see the pieces stuck together from afar."
"I'm sorry about this." I was so frustrated. I was trying to copy exactly how Lilly cut and rearranged her letters so the other mum matched.
Lilly put the mum on. "It's ok, Alfie. We'll just make the best of it"
I really wanted to just breakdown. "I know, I know. I'm probably overreacting to this situation." I slid the garter up my left arm and secured it on my sleeve with a safety pin. "At least we aren't sounding like a herd of cows like some of the others I've already seen. Someone actually has a full sized cow bell on theirs."
"Seriously?" Lilly questioned me again.
"Yeah. You'll definitely see her at the pep rally. It's the student council president."
She was visualizing who it was that I was talking about. "Oh her? Why am I not surprised."
We went on with the rest of the day, proudly wearing our corrected and professionally amateur altered mums. When it came time for the pep rally, Lilly and I were sitting with a group of her friends.
It wasn't perfect. But honestly, sitting there next to Lilly, laughing at our ghetto DIY mums… maybe perfect wasn't what I needed.
Sure enough, the student council president was the MC for the rally and you could really hear those cowbells clang whenever she walked around. We couldn't help but laugh at how ridiculous it was.
When she announced and introduced the football team, we were heckling and cracking jokes amongst the group. Our team that year were not performing the greatest and have been a running joke.
For a special presentation, the Choir did a medley of songs from the musical "Grease". I immediately spotted a familiar face among the choir crowd. "Holy shit. It's Bear!" You couldn't miss that big guy with the reddish brown hair.
"Eyy Bear! There's the Man, Go!" I stood up and started cheering out to him. You know it's bad when you'd rather cheer on the choir musical than the football team at a pep rally.
"Ugh" Lilly leaned over. "Is the Teacher seriously taking the lead role of Danny in this?" Lilly looked a bit disgusted seeing him perform with the students.
I leaned over to whisper back. "Yeah. He's probably wanting to relive his glory days and do the part he never got."
We both started to snort out into a laughing fit like a couple of idiots. Lilly was indeed right about one thing. we did make the best of it that day.