“I’ll show you how to meditate!” the second shouted, grabbing his sibling around the waist and then slinging him to ground in a squirming mass of knobby elbows and knees.
“Fight, fight,” taunted the first, taking a flying leap to join the heap of twisting bodies and hurled insults.
Monica rolled her eyes heavenward. “As I was saying….”
Seth raised a finger. “A moment, please.” Although he had no idea what a Skyrim or a Rammstein was, he closed his eyes, raised his air guitar, and belted out a rousing rendition of “Back in Black.” He hit the ground a moment later, a tiny mouth with pointy teeth trying to sing “Ba-a-ah-ack!”
“Hey! You did it!” Monica exclaimed before she turned her attention to the boys, wrestling them apart.
“I am the possum!” Seth crowed, struggling to extricate himself from his jeans. “I changed at will!” He rewarded himself by wading into a patch of azalea bushes in search of prey, and was crunching his third cricket when his ears perked up to the sound of tires on the driveway. He froze momentarily, then waddled out from under the shrubs, rolling his view up, way up, to Dustin’s truck.
“Dustin!” he squeaked, waddling as fast as his nonaerodynamic body allowed.
Andy opened the driver’s door and stepped out. Seth stopped in his tracks, smile falling, until….
“Seth?” Dustin rounded the hood from the passenger side.
“Okay, boys, time to go home,” Seth heard Monica say from a million miles away. Seth sat back on his haunches, imagining AC/DC in concert and him with front-row seats. The next minute, he was wiping assorted cricket parts from his lips as he closed the distance between himself and the man he’d worried he’d never see again.
Dustin met Seth halfway, attacking Seth’s mouth with his own. “Mmmmm…,” he exclaimed as he came for air. “Cricket!”
Epilogue
Eighteen Months Later
“DON’Tmake me come over there!” Seth aimed his best “the Jack”
scowl at the trio of teens vamping it up on the football field—with blatant disregard for the rest of the team.
“He started it!” Eddy yelled, reaching around Teddy to smack the back of Freddy’s head with a football helmet.
“Did not!” Freddy shot back.
“Did too!” chorused Eddy and Teddy.
“I don’t care who started it—I’m ending it!” Seth backed away from his tripod, hands on his hips. To the other students in the group Fighting Possums photo, he probably appeared to glower. However, goose bumps rose on the arms of the Johnson boys and a few other players, a strong enough warning to back down.
“Oh! I’m just in time, I see,” the nearly deaf widow Pickens shouted, beaming up at Seth from her vantage point more than a foot and a half below him. She placed a hand on his arm, a beatific smile adding more wrinkles to her dried apple of a face.
Seth huffed. The last thing he needed was his own personal ninety-year-old fangirl. “Now, now, Ms. Pickens,” he said in his most placating tone, wresting her hand from his arm, “not in front of the kiddies. What brings you here, anyway?”
“How many times must I tell you to call me Estelle?” She batted her lashes. “My granddaughter is one of the seniors you’re taking pictures of today. She spilled spaghetti sauce on her blouse at lunch and asked me to bring her another.” Estelle held up a folded garment for Seth’s inspection. “But please, continue, I wouldn’t want to hold you up.” She nodded toward the football team, gathered for their yearbook photo.
“Thank you.” Seth bent to peer into his camera. A hand swatted his ass.
“Oops, must’ve slipped.” The old lady cackled her way across the field.
The Johnson boys, amply chastened by their leader’s power play, resumed their positions within the lineup, allowing Seth to finish the photo shoot.
The coach approached after Seth snapped the last shot. “Okay, seniors. Now go get prettied up for your pictures.”
Seth packed up his equipment, lugging several heavy cases to the Thurman County High auditorium to render yearbook likenesses. Easy money, and not a bad job—until….
“I can’t believe my grandmother brought this old thing! I look fat.”
Thoughts of the family waiting for him at home allowed Seth to survive the next few hours. The Johnson boys loaded his SUV and he set off, pleased with the fruits of his labor.
He stopped by his studio next to the public library/post office to drop off his equipment. Before powering down his computer for the day, he took a tiny little peek at his profile on “All About Me.” Oh my! More than one hundred comments on his latest uploaded pic. Unsurprising—everyone loved baby pictures, it seemed. But… he nearly choked when he noticed a familiar icon and a message stating:
