Fall was Johnny's favorite season. He loved everything about it: The crisp chill in the air, the tang of hot apple cider on a cold day, the smell of burning leaves, and especially the harvest/spooky decorations on all the houses in his neighborhood. Call him corny or whatever, but he liked scarecrows and pumpkins and stuff. Those things weren't typically among the favorite things of a twelve year old boy, but Johnny wasn't your average twelve year old boy. For one thing, he was a master mechanic, a world class chef, and one of the most eligible up and coming entrepreneur in the entire state of Michigan. There was also the matter of his wit, which was so caustic and biting that it made grown men cry and little boys exploded into confetti where they stood. Maybe, just maybe, he was being a wee bit biased when he said this, but he was something of a genius to boot. Oh, he couldn't solve complicated mathematical equations off the top of his head the way Lisa Loud could, his genius was a little more practical. Ha, where has solving math problems ever gotten anyone anyway? Into a college they couldn't afford, that's where.

No, Johnny's brilliance was a little more practical. He could fix almost anything and had the business sense of Elon Musk crossed with Jeff Besos. He was like one of those weird monster plants that guy on Gardening with Maurice used to breed before WKBBL took him off the air. In other words, he wasn't the average bear and was allowed to be a little eccentric if he wanted to be.

And boy howdy, he sure did want to be. For one thing, he sported a paper bag on his head. It was much mocked and maligned, but Johnny stuck with it, sure that it was the fashion trend of the future. It was stylish, light weight, and 100 percent environmentally friendly. You could take it off, toss it aside, and walk away guilt free, knowing that it would eventually biodegrade and go back to the earth from wence it came. Can you say the same of Louis Vitton bags? Nope, if you throw one of those on the ground, it's gonna be there forever. Someone will probably wind up tripping on it, busting their head open, and dying in the street all because you weren't wearing a paper bag. Did paper bags cause people to trip and die? No. He guessed you could slip on one if it was wet, but that was different.

For another thing, he was fascinated by obscure, out of the way things that most people didn't give two thoughts to. He clowned on his dad for liking pro wrestling, but he was kind of interested in the history of it. Oh, to be sure, it's some fake carny BS masquerading as a competitive sport, but it had a pretty cool history. Today you have wrestling companies like WWE that broadcast all over the world, but just thirty five years ago, wrestling was regional. Every part of the country had their own little hometown promotion with its own TV show, its own stars, and its own style. Most of them were part of the National Wrestling Alliance, a governing body that sanctioned events. The NWA champ would travel from territory to territory wrestling the local hero. That was a cool set up as far as Johnny was concerned, even if wrestling itself was lame. Then Vince McMahon came along in the eighties and screwed it all up by taking the WWF national. He raided everyone's talent, bought out their TV slots, and turned wrestling into another bland one size fits all corporate crap show.

Boo.

Another thing that interested Johnny was the mafia. It had an interesting history and set up as well. Everyone pretty much knows how the mob operates, right? It had a strict structure with a boss at the top, an underboss below, a number of captains, and hundreds (if not thousands) of soldiers and associates all organized into different crews headed by one of the captains. To be in the mob, you had to be Italian, but you could work with them and kinda be part of it no matter what you were. For instance, the crew from the movie GoodFellas (which was based on a true story) had a black dude. They wound up killing him, though, but they were racist as hell.

LOL, nah, they had good reason to kill him, at least in the context of being mobsters and stuff. Long story short, they pulled off a huge heist and he was supposed to get rid of the truck they used. Instead, he illegally parked it on the street, went to his girl's house, and got stoned. The cops found the truck and next thing you know, homeboy turned up dead. Johnny wasn't a killer or anything, but if he was in the mob, he probably would have taken the guy out too. Like dude, you had one job, what the frick. You just had to drive from point A to point B, why did you do this? This is terrible, you gotta go.

There were other things that interested Johnny. He liked history, especially the Colonial Period and the Civil War era. The Patriot with Mel Gibson was one of his favorite movies - something about that point in history was just cool. Sometimes he kinda wished he'd been born back then. Granted, he'd probably have been slave, but hey, some black people were free. He could be one of them. He'd have to deal with racism but he dealt with bigots who hated his paper bag, so he was used to it. "Hey, boy, what's that on yer head?"

No, it wasn't the same, but still.

Regardless, Johnny was unique, maybe even a little extra, and another facet of that was his love of fall. All the corny decorations, the pumpkin spice everything, fall was great.

Fall was also the season for the Sadie Hawkins Memorial Dace, an event held every October at Royal Woods Elementary. If you've been to literally any school dance from first grade to twelfth, you know what time it is. If you haven't, imagine a dimly lit gym festooned with paper ribbons and strobe lights, tables full of snacks, and kids standing awkwardly against the walls while a DJ spun slow songs. It was great fun. You might not know this, but Johnny was an excellent dancer who could hold his own against anybody - except Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson would have whooped his butt in a dance off, but MJ died before he was born, so it was all good.

The dance was usually on the first Saturday of October. For the week leading up to it, everyone in school rushed to find a date. It was like last call at a honky tonk: No one wanted to go home alone, so they snapped up what they could get. Showing up alone was a good way to tell all of your classmates that you were an inept loser who couldn't get a girl to go out with you if your life depended on it. Before they became the cool guys that they were, Lincoln and Johnny showed up every year alone and got mercilessly picked on for it. "Look, Johnny brought his date, Lincoln," one kid said.

"How nice, who's the man and who's the woman?" a girl quipped.

Wow, I'm pretty sure that's some kind of phobic, but okay. Let's see if you're still laughing when we enter the workforce and I'm making more money than you because I'm a man lol. Who's the phobe now?

They were used to being made fun of so it wasn't that big a deal, but yeah, you'd totally get picked on if you rolled up to the dance alone, so there was always a mad scramble during the last few days before it. The pretty and popular people never had any trouble finding a date; the average kids didn't struggle too much either. But then you had the nerds, the geeks, and the other outcasts. Because there were more males in all of those categories than females, you wound up with a lot of dudes who couldn't find a date. Some of them stayed home, figuring there was no point in showing up, others put on a brave face and came anyway. Lincoln and Johnny were once among that latter group. They came and smiled through the pain. Now they were older and wiser, and really didn't care about having a date. They rolled up for free food and free fun. They enjoyed themselves regardless of whether or not they had dates, and if someone had a problem with that, that was on them.

If he really, really, really wanted a date, he could recruit one of the Loud girls. They all had crushes on him, which was understandable, since he was pretty great, if he did say so himself. He wasn't worried about it, though. It's not that he wasn't interested in girls or, like, too cool to date, he just didn't care. He had been an outsider for so long that he was accustomed to doing his own thing and not following the herd. "Oh, you have to have a date." Yeah? Well, just because you said so, I don't want one. How about that? You gonna do something about it? You gonna make me?

Not everyone had the same intestinal fortitude as Johnny, however. A lot of people are sheep, especially children. They worry about fitting in and being popular and stuff. Why do you think so many of them do those stupid TikTok challenges? Hey, guys, eat a spoonful of rat poison and see what happens.

OKAY!

Uh, yeah, that's a pretty garbage idea and I'm not doing it. See, I like not having my stomach pumped. You have fun, though.

One of those people who lacked the guts and confidence to be their own person was, unfortunately, Cristina. A long time ago, there was a bully named Billy Mason. To make a long story short, Johnny punked his butt and everyone in school treated him like a god for it. To use a history analogy, Billy was Nazi Germany, Johnny was America, and the school was poor, pitiful occupied France. Johnny rolled into Paris, vanquished the Nazi menace, and freed the French people from the grip of National Socialism. But then it all went to Johnny's head and he turned into a Nazi himself. He swung around school like he owned the place and treated every pretty badly. He bullied Cristina into a date by using the race card - you're a racist if you don't go out with me - but she canceled the date when he admitted that he was out of pocket. She was very relieved that she didn't have to go out with him, which hurt his feelings.

A lot.

During the run up to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, Johnny noticed Cristina going around talking to random guys. He didn't think anything of it. She was fairly cute and relatively popular, so surely she wasn't scrounging for a date. A girl like that…guys came to her, she didn't go to them. Don't get mad at that, it's just the truth.

Johnny had his own affairs to deal with so he wasn't particularly concerned with anyone else's. He recently had a little ahem accident and was suffering auditory hallucinations in the form of two different voices that plagued him day and night. He had recently opened a successful sandwich stand and had a thousand proverbial irons in a thousand different metaphorical fires. He was too busy to worry about Cristina…or even the Sadie Hawkins Dance. Everyone else was sweating bullets, but not him. He wouldn't give it a single thought until it was go time - then he'd show up, paint the town red, and then go on with his life. No big deal. After all, it was just a stupid dance. There would be, like, five more throughout the year. True, it was the oldest and most prestigious, but dances are supposed to be fun, right?

As far as he was concerned, yes, but for Cristina, it wasn't fun at all.

A pretty brunette with big eyes and freckles. Cristina was, by all accounts, a normal girl. She liked doing her make up, playing with small animals, and the color pink. Like any human being, she didn't fit 100 percent into a single category: She had interests outside of what you might classify as "girly." She liked electronics and video games, especially open world ones where you got to pretty much do whatever you wanted in a huge, interactive environment. Unbeknownst to her classmates, she played GTA Online every night when she got home from school. Sometimes she went on psychotic rampages that claimed dozens of lives and caused millions in property damage, but she mainly liked driving around and experiencing Los Santos and the desert around it.

Open world games were great.

Something else that was great? Not being made fun of because she didn't have a date to the Sadie Hawkins Dance. Cristina had always been somewhere in the middle of the schoolyard hierarchy and as such, was used to being somewhat well treated. Unlike Johnny and Lincoln, she had never been picked on before and couldn't stand up to the pressure. If everyone was eating cinnamon for a TikTok challenge, she would do it as a matter of course to fit in.

Normally, she never had trouble getting a date for school functions, but this time around was different. She didn't know why, but so far, no one had asked her out yet. No one worth going out with, that is. A few of the geekiest, dorkiest nerd bois had approached her, but while you had to have a date for the Sadie Hawkins Dance, you couldn't go with just anybody. You had to have some dignity about it.

Normally, Cristina was content to wait until the right boy asked her out, but it was getting really late in the week and so far, no suitable male had come forth. She began to sweat on Tuesday (perhaps a little prematurely), and on Wednesday, she was biting her nails. On Thursday, she was actively looking for someone to take her to the dance. She kind of felt like it was beneath her to be the one asking but desperate times call for desperate measures. Every half way decent boy she went to, however, already had a date. Even the lower tier decent ones. Cristina had never seen anything like it before.

That left her in a bad spot. She simply had to have a date to the Sadie Hawkins Dance. If she showed up alone, her standing on the playground would take a nosedive and she would never live it down. She could always say she was sick and just not go, but that might backfire on her. No, if she wanted to protect her reputation, she had to go and she had to go with someone who wasn't completely terrible.

Who, though?

The only options left to her were Johnny and Lincoln. They were a couple screwballs with delusions of grandeur. They thought more highly of themselves than they had any right to, and had both done and said super cringy things in the past, but they weren't so terrible. If she had to ask one of them, it would be Lincoln. She approached him Thursday afternoon after lunch, but much to her amazement, he was already taken. She paid little attention to him and had no idea that he was going out with Maggie now. That was a mind blowing shocker.

But okay.

I mean, there's no accounting for taste, right? Like they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Striking out with Lincoln left her only one semi-viable option.

Johnny.

She couldn't say that she ever looked at Johnny and thought "Oh, lawd, he is fine," but she once held a slightly higher opinion of him than she did now. The last time she ever really interacted with him, he bullied her into going on a date with him. She wouldn't have minded a date with him so much if he wasn't such a huge jerk, but he was. That, however, was, admittedly, a long time ago and he seemed to have come down from his ego trip since then.

That day, Thursday, she caught up with him as he was rummaging through his locker in the period between the second to last class and the last. "Hey, Johnny," she said.

He jumped in surprise and whipped around to face her, almost falling over. When he saw it was her, he put on a polite smile. "Oh, hey, Cristina, how's it going?"

"It's going good. How about you?"

He shrugged one shoulder. "I can't complain."

"Good," she said. She looked down at her feet. "I was wondering if you wanted to go to the dance with me this Saturday."

Johnny missed a beat. "Uh, sure, yeah, I guess. I mean, yeah, that'd be cool."

"Great," she said.

"Great," he echoed.

They stood there awkwardly for a moment. "Okay, uh, bye then," she said. She turned around and hurried away.

Later on, at home, she sank onto her bed with a deep sigh. Johnny wasn't so bad, she told herself, and she'd get a lot less flak for going with him than she would for going alone. Just then, her older sister Quinlan came in. A thicc girl in a dress and jacket, Quinlan wore a pair of sunglasses on the top of her head. They had five younger siblings as well, Pam, Stevie, and three other boys. They had a full house and full hands.

"What's eating you?" she asked.

Cristina sighed and told her.

"Well, he sounds like kind of a dork," Quinlan said, "but a fun dork. You just need to chill out a little bit and stop worrying so much about what other people think of you."

"But I don't want to get made fun of," Cristina moaned.

Quinlan rolled her eyes. "So you want to live your life in the middle and never do anything or take any risks. Got it." She stifled a yawn. "Your life is boring."

"Is not!' Cristina interjected,

Was it?

She thought about that for the rest of the night and into the next day. Maybe Quinlan was right. Maybe her life was super boring. And maybe she was a little uptight.

On Saturday evening, well before the dance, Quinlan took Cristina into her bedroom and gave her a makeover. She straightened and then curled her hair, applied the perfect amount of make up, and gave her a pep talk. "You're a very beautiful and intelligent girl. You don't need to follow the pack. If anything, the pack should follow you."

Cristina took a deep breath.

"Just unclench your butt cheeks and have fun, that's all a dance is supposed to be, fun."

Okay.

Let's do this.

The door bell rang.

That would be Johnny.

Johnny arrived at seven dressed in a suave suit and holding a corsage. His white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and when Cristina and her older sister answered the door, he gave each one of them a kiss on the hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he said to Quinlan. "I assure you, I will have her home early and in one piece."

"Oh, he's charming," Quinlan giggled.

Johnny looped his arm through Cristina's and they made their way to the dance, chit chatting as they went. When they arrived, they handed their tickets over and went inside. The lights were low and upbeat music played. Boys and girls danced in the middle of the room and everything was picture perfect. He and Cristina took a charming and smiling photo together, then he went and got her some punch. At first, she was tense and he could sense that she wasn't quite sure of him, but he was the perfect gentleman, and over time she relaxed. It was his main goal to put her at ease and to provide the most enjoyable experience of her life. "Care to dance?" he asked.

"Sure," she said with a girlish blush.

He took her onto the dance floor and they shook a leg to all the upbeat pop tunes of the day. Eventually, the lights got even lower and a slow song began to play. They awkwardly faced each other and blushed. "Do you wanna…?" he let that thought trail off.

"Sure," she said.

He put his hands clumsily on her hips and she rested her arms on his shoulders. They began to move and sway with the music. "I'm really sorry about how I acted before," Johnny said. "I was a jerk."

"We can all be jerks sometimes," Cristina said. "I'm sorry for hurting your feelings."

"I think after such a beautiful evening, we're eve," he smiled.

"Yes we are," Cristina said.

Mission accomplished, Johnny thought, their date was a success.

Their date stared as a disaster.

Johnny showed up to the door in a grease stained paper bag and a ratty jacket, his one weird eye twitching uncontrollably. He said that he downed a whole 12 pack of chocolate cherry cola and was "Buzzin." He grabbed Quinlan's hand and slobbered all over it. Quinlan looked at Cristina from the corner of her eye. "Wow, he's charming," she said sarcastically and laughed.

He dragged Cristina down the street, muttering to himself all the way. It sounded like he was saying "I won't poop on myself, I won't poop on myself," but she was sure that it wasn't. It couldn't be.

As soon as they got to the dance, they took a photo, Johnny rolling up his sleeves to strike a decidedly unmuscular pose. Next, he brought over a glass of punch for himself but not for her, then spilled it all over the front of her dress. "Whoops," he said. He took off his paper bag and tried to use it as napkin to clean her up. He then put it back on. "Right as rain," he said.

He then proceeded to run around the dance floor like a lunatic. He bumped into people, took a plate ful of snacks from someone's hands, and pumped his fist in the air. "Let's party!" He started to do the robot, and Cristina couldn't help but laugh. He dragged her onto the dancefloor and started busting a move. "Do it like this," he said.

She tried to copy him. "Like that?"

"No, your rhythm's all off." He put his hand behind his head, grabbed his ankle, and jerked like he was having a seizure.

Cristina was reluctant to follow his lead since everyone was staring, but Quinlan's words came back to her, and she forced herself to do it.

And you know?

It was fun.

"DO THE SPONGE, EVERYBODY!" he cried. He flopped to the floor and started to convulse. He flopped around and knocked a few kids over. He got back up and spun around, bouncing off of unsuspecting dancers and crashing into the snack table. The punch bowl flew through the air and landed on Principal Huggins, who ran around screaming and waving his arms. "STICKY! I'M STICKY!"

Cristina laughed until she cried.

Soon, the dance floor was in ruins and paramedics were carrying injured kids out on stretchers. Lincoln showed up with Maggie, took one look around, and sighed long sufferingly. "Is he always this wild?" Cristina asked, impressed.

"Only when he drinks too much soda."

By the time Johnny walked her home, he was coming down from his high. He was sluggish, bleary-eyed, and dragging. "My head hurts," he said. At her front door, he rubbed his head. "I hope you, uh, had fun."

Cristina surprised him by hugging him tightly. "I did," she said. "You really know how to show a girl a good time. I haven't seen that much chaos since the last time I played GTA online." She laughed.

"Good," he said. "Well…good night."

He turned away and shambled off into the night. Cristina watched him until he was gone, then went inside. "How was it?" Quinlan asked.

"I took your advice," Cristina said, "I unclenched and had fun."

"That's good. You think you'll ever go out with him again."

Cristina thought for a moment. "Maybe," she said.

"Just maybe."