Happy Thanksgiving all! I hope everyone is having a wonderful day, and I'm taking advantage of my time off to post a couple new updates. I'm so sorry I can't update as often as I would like to, and around Christmas, I won't be able to update then as I will have other things going on, but I will do my best to get what I can in beforehand.
But for now, enjoy these six idiots, and the introduction of a new character who might return later. Thanks again to symplymystery for a little thing in here.
Chapter 11: We Blew Up A Turkey
3 days before Thanksgiving
"We ought to have Thanksgiving."
The six friends were all sitting in the common room of the girls' dorm when Tori shut her magazine and announced this. John and Melinda stopped their thumb war, Felix lowered Hounds of Baskerville, Linda put down her pencil by the letter she was writing to her boyfriend, and Phil closed the World War II history book he'd been reading. They all stared at her until Felix spoke up. "Why?"
Linda shrugged. "Why not? We get the day off, and it's not like we can really get home and back in that time. Thanksgiving is a time for family, but it's just the same with friends too."
Felix nodded, but there was a more excited gleam in his eyes now. "Not too bad."
"How are we going to do this then?" Phil piped up. "I mean, are we all going to cook together, or divide and conquer?"
"I say divide and conquer," Melinda said as she pinned John's thumb down. "We can get more done in less time."
'We'll need a turkey," grinned John. "I'm calling that."
"Mashed potatoes!" Tori stuck up her hand. "And I can grab a can of cranberry sauce too."
"I can do squash or something," volunteered Felix.
"PIE!" Phil and Melinda called out at the same time before looking at each other.
"You can take it," they said while Tori started snickering.
"What if you two do a pie together, and then maybe find some rolls?" she suggested.
"But what about me?"
"Don't whine, Linda," John said. "You can work with me."
"Excellent!" Tori rubbed her hands together eagerly. "Anyone got something they can't eat or whatever?"
"I'm allergic to pecans," Linda told them.
"So no pecan pie then." Felix looked a bit disappointed.
"Nobody really has pecan pie," Tori muttered as she cracked open her magazine.
Felix glowered at her. "I have."
"Well, big whoop," mumbled the brunette.
"What happens if someone screws up?" asked Linda, working to drive the subject away from pies to prevent a fight. "Not that I'm saying we will. I just want to be prepared."
"Ah, we'll figure it out when we come to it," John answered before turning back to Melinda. "Alright, rematch, and I'm not going down easy this time."
Thanksgiving Day
"So how are we going to cook this thing?" Linda asked as she held the door for John, who was carrying the turkey. "It's not like we can really do it in the kitchens. Tori and Felix have taken over the one in your dorm, and Philind-Phil and Melinda are in the girls'."
John almost dropped the turkey. "What did you say?"
"Phil and Melinda are in the girls'," she repeated, hoping he would ignore her slip-up.
He shook his head. "No, not that. You said something else. Called them something."
"Oh," Linda mentally slapped herself. Tori's bad girl shenanigans were really affecting her. "Philinda. It's just a stupid little nickname that Tori made up for them a few weeks ago when she locked them in the gym."
"That was you two!" John smirked. "Phil thought it was Orson being a total d-"
"It was Tori's idea, not mine. And we're getting off-topic," Linda looked down at the bird. "Seriously, how the hell are we cooking this?"
John shrugged. "I know a guy."
"Whoa, wait up there." Linda grabbed his jacket to stop him. "What guy?"
"Some kid from Sci-Tech," John explained. "I heard that he's made a machine that can cook a turkey, so I called him up to see if he could cook ours. He said sure, no charge. Just wants to see it in action."
"Please tell me he isn't a senior." Linda really hoped it wasn't one of the two guys she had helped Melinda and Tori prank last month.
"Nah, he's a newbie like us." John started forward again. "Now come on. We've got to go to Sci-Tech."
'Please let this go well.' Linda prayed as she followed after him. She was already worried about leaving John in charge of their main dish. Hopefully, nothing could go wrong.
"Soooo what kind of pie are we going to make?" Phil asked Melinda as they entered the grocery store.
"Pumpkin," Melinda told him with a smile. She wouldn't admit it to anyone, but she was elated that she and Phil were going to be working together on the pie. Even though he had no interest in her like she did in him, Phil was still a good partner anywhere. Hopefully, the kitchen was going to fall into that range of anywhere. "It's simple, traditional, and basic. I do good basic."
Phil gave her a tiny smile that made her heart flutter. "Usually I was in charge of helping with the turkey," he revealed as they wandered down the aisles. "My aunt made the pie."
"Have you ever made a pie before," Melinda teased as she put a can of pumpkin into the basket.
Phil blushed. "Once," he admitted shyly. "Okay, it was more like I tried to in Home Ec. Did not go well. I had to stay after class and clean out the oven because the pie blew up."
"You blew up a pie!" She couldn't contain her laughter, and neither could he. "How did you manage that?"
"I don't know. It just went…" he gestured with his hands. "Boom."
"Well, don't worry about blowing up another pie," Melinda assured her friend, resting a hand on his shoulder. "I can teach you how to make an easy pie that will taste fantastic and not blow up."
He smiled at her again. "Really?"
She nodded. "Really."
"Do you think we can actually do it?"
Tori looked up from the potatoes she was trying to cook to where Felix was leaning against the counter. He'd just put his squash in the oven to cook, and she could see him itching to run off to his room and grab a book.
"Want to give me some more details?" she asked, turning down the stove.
"This." Felix gestured to the space around them. "The six of us making Thanksgiving dinner."
Tori didn't reply. She allowed herself to think back on the conversation they'd had a few days back when they were planning all this out. Maybe she had been a bit hasty in throwing this idea out there. Her culinary skills were more survivable rather than stellar, and she didn't even know about the rest of her friends. Still, she had enough hope to hold onto the possibility of having a Thanksgiving dinner between the six of them that would go successfully.
"Tori?"
She realized that she still hadn't answered Felix, and shrugged.
"I'm sure it'll all turn out fine," she reassured him casually as she reached for the salt.
She would find out later that it wasn't salt.
"How much longer?" John groaned as he flopped on the ground.
Linda rolled her eyes. "That is the twelfth time you've asked that in the fifteen minutes. Give it a break, John."
"These things take time," Peter said. He was the one who had made the supposed turkey cooking machine. Earlier, he'd tried to explain to them how it worked, but Linda had been left clueless. Still, Peter Vaughn was a very nice boy, who was intelligent and kind and witty. Also, he detested Eddy and Willis with a passion.
"They're the worst," he complained to her when she asked him about them a few minutes after John asked how much longer it was going to take for the thirteenth time. "Willis is the main jerk. Eddy, he's okay on his own, but Willis brings out the worst in him. It's kind of sad I think."
Linda murmured in agreement as he fiddled with some knobs on a gray metal box the size of a tissue box. "Well, maybe one day it'll come to bite them back in the butt."
"It already has," Peter told her, grinning ear to ear.
Linda frowned at him. "What do you mean?"
Peter set down the controller. "Last month, a couple of seniors, including those two bozos, were making some really nasty comments about Operations. One of the Ops students was nearby and overheard them. She ended up telling them off with some pretty terrible insults. I think 'Oompa-Loompas' got dropped in the insults. Well, Willis was pissed and decided that revenge was the only way to get even. So he and Eddy snuck out at night to go deface something at your guys' Academy. I think it was a mural or something. That's what I heard through the grapevine."
"But nothing was destroyed." John was now sitting up, listening intently.
Peter nodded. "The next morning, Eddy was babbling to anyone who would listen that the Ops Academy was-get this- haunted by the ghost of Bucky Barnes. Willis was saying the same thing, but everyone knew that they had been pranked. As if there's even such a thing as ghosts. And I highly doubt that Bucky Barnes would come back from the other side just to put some firecrackers in a couple of idiots' trousers."
The three of them all chuckled at this, but Linda was laughing more at the memory of the night and the two Sci-tech fools screaming with their bums looking like the Fourth of July.
"I think I remember that," John remarked after they had calmed down. "Everyone in my room woke up after we heard some popping noises. Then one of my roommates woke up and started shouting down at some people down below who were laughing. I told him to stop being an old man and go back to sleep."
Peter snickered and picked up the gray box again. "Man I would have paid to see-OH SHIT!"
The controller-that's what Linda was going to start calling the gray box- had lights flashing and a buzzing siren going off. Her head whipped over to the cooker. It was shaking violently and hissing out smoke.
"Something's gone wrong!" Peter cried out. "No, no, no! This shouldn't be happening!"
A series of loud bangs echoed in the clearing they were in. All of them stood up and began to back toward the woods.
"Get down behind the tree," Linda ordered, pointing to a fallen log at the edge of the forest clearing.
She managed to dive over it with the boys just before a loud BOOM ruptured the air. Linda gazed back at where they had been, and saw a cloud of smoke erupt from the cooker. Looking to the sky, she could have sworn she saw a drumstick flying through the air. Every one of them watched the spectacle unfold before them with open mouths.
Once the smoke had cleared, John stepped out from behind the log and ran out to the spot where the cooker had been. Linda and Peter followed close behind him. Peter looked disappointed, and she was in a similar mood. They stopped beside John, who was staring at the ground. Bending down, he picked up the carcass of the turkey. Half of the rib cage was exposed, and the little meat that was on it hung in limp strands. One wing dangled precariously by a strip of meat. The remaining drumstick just fell off.
"That," John sighed mournfully. "Was our turkey."
"I am so, so sorry," apologized Peter. "It worked earlier. Something must have gone wrong and it…it blew up your turkey."
"We blew up our turkey," Linda repeated. Now what were they going to do?
John looked over at her. There was a twinkle in his eyes. "We blew up a turkey," he snorted, failing spectacularly at not smiling.
Linda let out a giggle. It seemed so comical all of the sudden. Here they were, standing with a Sci-Tech kid in the middle of a field while John was holding the carcass of their turkey. "We blew up a turkey."
John started to chuckle, and Peter joined in, no longer nervously wringing his hands. Soon, they were all in fits of laughter, unable to stop as someone would always say 'We blew up a turkey' when the laughter died down.
"We…blew up…a turkey," wheezed John. "Oh God, we are so screws."
"Who cares!" Linda laughed, waving the fallen drumstick over her head. "We blew up a turkey."
"I thought that you guys were going to be making mashed potatoes and squash?" Phil asked as he set down the pumpkin pie down on the table they'd set up on the roof of the girl's building. Melinda had been an excellent teacher. Turned out he could do good at basic. It was something he was going to definitely do more often.
Felix groaned and buried his face in his hands. "I burned the squash. There is a pan's worth of burnt cubes in the trash can if you're curious to see how bad it was."
"Thanks, but no thanks," Melinda sighed. "What about you, Tori?"
The brunette grimaced. "I messed up my recipe."
"She put in sugar instead of salt," Felix clarified, earning a smack on the arm and a dark look from Tori. "What, you did!"
"Well, you didn't need to tell them that."
"They would have asked anyway."
"Enough!" Phil and Melinda shouted together. Felix and Tori stopped bickering and looked over at them.
"So we've messed almost everything-"
"We forgot the rolls," Melinda interrupted. "How did we forget those?"
"Crap," Phil said as he remembered. "Okay, anyway, we've messed up almost everything, but there's no need to fight over it all. And besides, we still might have a turkey."
"Yeah," Linda's voice sounded weary. "About that…"
The four spun around to see John, Linda, and another boy their age come up through the door to the rooftop holding an aluminum serving dish. Inside was a turkey carcass.
"What is that?!" Felix sounded almost disgusted.
"That, my dear friend, is your turkey," John told him proudly.
Everyone stared at them. Phil took a deep breath. "What?"
"Okay, you just had to cook the stupid thing!" exclaimed Tori. "Not…whatever the hell you did to it!"
Linda giggled. "We blew it up."
Melinda looked at her, stunned. "You WHAT?!"
"Actually, it's more of my fault." The new boy stepped forward.
Felix frowned. "Who are you?"
The guy smiled. "Peter Vaughn. I'm a freshman at Sci-Tech. Anyway…"
Phil listened intently to the story as Peter explained it. As soon as he hit the part about John holding the dangling turkey when the drumstick fell off, he began to laugh along with everyone else. Before they knew it, they were all on the floor of the roof, chuckling and guffawing like a pack of hyenas. Phil ended up sort of supporting Melinda to keep her on her knees, and she was doing the same for him. "They blew up the turkey," he sniggered to her.
Melinda threw her head back and laughed harder. Phil didn't know if he'd ever heard a more beautiful laugh. He wanted to tell her that, but he felt too shy too. Anyway, it would probably end with admitting his feelings to someone whose heart belonged to another.
"Okay, okay," Tori panted, climbing back up to her feet. "So we have only pie. Now what do we do."
Peter cleared his throat. "I think I might have an idea."
Half an hour later, the seven students were sitting at their table on the room, laughing and joking and swapping stories over their dinners. Peter had seen a special advertised by a diner for Thanksgiving dinners for one person that included all the things they had attempted to make. He had been planning to do that for his meal, but the rest of the cadets told him that he would be eating with them. Seven meals had been ordered and picked up by Phil and Melinda, and now they were being enjoyed along with the pie that the two had made. Everyone agreed that their pie was better than the diner's.
"Hey, John," Peter nudged him and pointed to where Phil and Melinda were sitting beside each other, teasing each other about something. "Those two, Phil and Melinda. Are they a thing?"
John shook his head and smiled. "You're not the first person to have asked that."
"Huh," Peter remarked as he swallowed a mouthful of mashed potatoes. "The way they talk, finishing each other's sentences or even speaking in unison, I would think they were. Anyone would. I don't think I've ever seen two people who were so perfect for each other, and I don't think I ever would be able to again. They would make a fantastic couple."
Tori heard this and turned to him. "We're working on it with them," she confessed. "Maybe one day, they will."
Happy Thanksgiving again! I hope you have enjoyed this. Next chapter might be a little more hair-raising, and I'm going to get it written out the best I can before life gets in the way!
Please a leave a review to tell me what you liked, or if you have any ideas for Christmas.