Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf

That night, I was up in my room, moping about the whole Puck situation while looking on one of those websites that has a bunch of fail autocorrect stuff from iPhones. I knew the vast majority of posts were just made up to be funny, but they usually made me laugh. Of course, that wasn’t working out too well, but it was better than moping without multitasking.

I was just in the middle of rolling my eyes about a particularly bad one when Back to December by Taylor Swift started to play. Without thinking, I started to sing along, but once it hit the chorus, the wheels in my head started to turn so quickly that I could have sworn that smoke started coming out my ears.

“So this is me swallowing my pride, standing in front of you, saying I’m sorry for that night, and I go back to December all the time,” I murmured, squinting off into the distance.

A slow smile spread across my face as I quickly started scrolling though my iTunes list.

And a plan was born.

* * *

Sam stared at me like I was absolutely off my rocker. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No!” I exclaimed. “Come on, it’ll be great! How could Puck possibly reject me after that?”

“Um, easily?” He shook his head. “And it’ll be even more embarrassing for you, since he’s the one that could walk away unnoticed.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “I didn’t even think of that.”

Sam rose his eyebrows in a ‘told you’ sort of way before starting to walk down the hallway again to our first class. “It was a nice idea, though.”

“Yeah, whatever.” My mind was still revving, and I did want to go through with the plan, whether Sam thought it was the dumbest idea he’s ever heard or not.

* * *

When I got home, I had a whole bunch of plans to make my idea work to the best of its ability, but the second I stepped through the door right after school (I skipped Glee Club…I know, I’m a rebel), a force ran right into my legs so hard that I almost toppled over onto my butt.

“Ellie!” the thing screamed, and I looked down to find Grayson grinning up at me.

A smile filled my face as I lost all focus that I previously had. “Hey, baby!” I picked him up into my hands and laughed. “Whoa. You’ve gotten big, huh?”

He stared at me for a second before wriggling and looking behind me. “Joe?”

My eyebrows pulled together. “Joe…?” Who the hell was Joe, and why was Grayson looking for him?

He started running his hand across the middle of his head, and it took me a good minute to realize that he was mimicking Puck’s Mohawk. That made me laugh hysterically. “You mean Noah?”

“No. Joe.” Grayson giggled and writhed so much that I almost dropped him. “Joe, Joe, JOE.”

“Okay… Well, Joe isn’t here right now. He’s at football practice.” Lie. Of course. But whatever. It wasn’t like I had to involve Grayson with all the awfulness of my personal life. “Aileen?”

“Yeah?” she called from the other room.

“Since when are you home?”

“Piper called, desperate for a sitter, and I was due for some time off from Tuesday, when I worked late. So I told my boss, came home, and I’ve been watching Gray for a couple hours now. He’s been babbling about you the whole time.

I smiled at Grayson again, but he was no longer interested. He had seen me, just like he wanted, and now he was wandering around, looking for something else to capture his attention.

Finally, he found a basket of some sort in the bottom cupboard of the hutch. “Chocolate.” He handed the basket to me and climbed up onto a chair in the dining room, waiting.

“You can say chocolate?” I was a tad shocked. The boy says ‘mo’ instead of ‘more’, and he can say chocolate with no problems?

I sat down next to the table with him and broke little bars of chocolate in half until he was done. Once he started running around, trying to find things to play with that made annoying noises (like some light-up monkey thing that screamed when Gray pressed a button on his head), I realized that giving a two-year-old as much chocolate as he could eat was not on the top of my Smartest-Ideas-Ever list.

He found my phone after a while, which didn’t bother me but made Aileen just about have a heart attack. “You might want to take that back…” she trailed off.

“Nah. You have no idea how much that phone’s been through.” I waved her away. Plus, he was just walking around with the camera against his face, saying, “CHEESE!”, waiting for the thing to take a picture by itself.

Once he was no longer interested in the phone, he ran laps in the circle that the living room, hallway, kitchen, and dining room made. Every time he made it to the end of the hallway, he stood up on the heater and looked out the window, saying, “Mommy?” Even though that window looked out to the backyard…

“Mommy’s not here yet,” I sighed before he took off again, running as quickly as his short legs would take him.

“Hey, Gray!” I finally called, just about pooped out. How little kids had so much energy, I didn’t know. Oh, right…chocolate. Why didn’t chocolate give me that much energy?!

Grayson looked over at me, appearing annoyed that I had interrupted whatever the hell he was doing. “You want to go outside and play with the bubbles?”

This, clearly, was exactly what he wanted to do. He put on his big grin and ran for the door, turning the doorknob himself and rushing out into the doorway. My heart skipped a beat when he almost tripped over the front stairs and fell on his face, but he recovered in no time.

As I got the bubbles, my brain was finally able to catch up with me, and my stomach panged as I remembered Puck watching Grayson. How he sat with Gray on the floor and watched Toy Story, pointing out characters through the whole thing, asking who they were to try to get Gray to talk.

My eyes watered for a second, but I stopped them in their tracks, blinking rapidly and sniffling once. The last thing I wanted was for Grayson to see me crying after not seeing me for a good six months.

“Alright!” I greeted when I joined Grayson in the driveway. He was running in circles, occasionally throwing himself against the pavement and laughing. Frankly, if I were to throw myself onto the pavement with as much force as he was, I would probably feel like crying, but it didn’t even faze him.

After pouring some of the soapy liquid into the little bubble pan thing, I took out a wand and submerged it. “Now, Gray, I’m going to put this near your mouth. All you have to do is blow as hard as you can. Ready?”

I did as I instructed, but Grayson took it upon himself to put his lips right up to the wand and do a raspberry. Then, he inhaled and tried again when only a couple, small bubbles emerged.

“No, Gray.” I laughed and tried again. “Like this.” Holding the wand a good few inches away from my face, I blew a couple bubbles. Of course, this whole lesson meant nothing to him, and he was much more content getting the soap all over his lips. It mustn’t have tasted very good, but whatever floated his boat, I guess.

After about ten minutes, Grayson got bored and went into the garage to find a basketball. A couple of times, he shot it, but since the hoop was about eight feet in the air, he got nowhere near it. I still clapped and cheered for him anyway, pretending like he was the next Michael Jordan.

He must have realized that he wasn’t any good, though, and threw the basketball into the woods next to our house. “I’ll get it,” I joked, running after it. I was only gone for ten seconds. What slipped my mind was that toddlers didn’t even need that much to disappear. Completely.

“GRAYSON?” I yelled, running all over the place looking for him. I even got down on my hands and knees and examined under Aileen’s car.

“Ellie!” Aileen called to me out an open window. “He’s out back.”

“Oh, thank God.” I ran beside the house and found him hiking through the trees. My mind ran through all the possibilities that could happen, all resulting in Aunt Piper hating me: poison ivy, biting spiders, bears.

Scooping him up into my arms, I carried him back to the driveway. “Do not go into the trees. You hear me?”

He started to run away, but I grabbed his arm lightly. “I said, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Ellie,” he sighed. Who knew a two-year-old knew sarcasm? Then, his eyes lit up and he pointed at the street. “JOE!” he yelled, jumping up and down. “JOE!”

My head snapped up, and surely enough, Puck’s truck was driving by. I stared at it, and he must have realized that I saw him because the car suddenly picked up speed, disappearing just as quickly as it appeared.

Grayson looked offended, but I was just surprised that he somehow remembered Puck’s car from so long ago. “Joe no like me?”

That was all it took for the waterworks to take over. “No, he does,” I reassured him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “He loves you. He’s just…busy.”

That sentence was all it took to refuel the fire I felt to put my plan into action. Whether Sam said it was crazy or not…

It was going to happen.