In the interest of green slushies, our foursome stood outside the ice cream shop, pondering.
Bain Winslow was staring at a very informative sign, and it was after staring at said sign for a moment that he announced cleverly, "They're closed."
"But," said a forlorn Cheney, "I want a green slushy."
"And I want a green slushie," Christian said, as the author was undecided on the matter of spelling, and had decided to simply use both.
"Now what?" Victoria wondered.
"We could try to build a car out of nothing but bubblegum wrappers and toothpicks and change our names to Something Else!" Christian said excitedly.
"Change our names to -what-?" Cheney wondered.
"Something Else!"
"Yes, but what would we change our names to? What else?"
"SOMETHING Else!"
"Ignore him when he gets like this," Victoria said wisely.
Bain had a thoughtful look on his face. "How…would we… build the car?" he ventured slowly.
"Very carefully," Christian said solemnly.
There was silence as they considered this.
"That is the most absurd idea I have ever heard in all my life," Victoria said suddenly. "We are most certainly not doing that. We are going to go to Steak and Shake, because as everyone in the entire world knows that is what one does when one has nothing to do."
"Only," Christian challenged, "if we can do the Mad Libs on the placemat."
"Fine," she said.
So they sat, in a booth at Steak and Shake, when the reality of the situation was that our resident narrator was supposed to be writing some spectacularly clever radio commercial singing the praises of Colonial Pizza. Which meant that she was going to delegate the job to Christian, because that helped her vent in the third person and sometimes (but not usually) got her feeling rather creative.
"So," Cheney said, peering over a huge glass of Cherry Coke that cost a dollar more for the cherry, "Why do you like Colonial Pizza?"
"I don't. That is, I might. Probably. But I've never been there."
"Oh. That does tend to complicate things."
Silence.
"Colonial Pizza is like oxygen!" Christian suddenly exclaimed. "Pizza is a many-splendoured thing, pizza lifts us up where we belong, all you need is pizza!"
"Cute," Victoria remarked. "And copyrighted."
"Why are we sitting here discussing pizza when the author could be doing something of importance?" Bain demanded. Like, oh, I don't know, writing something that was actually of consequence? That needed to be done?"
It was a good question, indeed.