Rice Dinner

“Hello?” Pat answered after answering his phone. Garrett, who was sitting on the other end of the couch with an Xbox controller in hand, wondered who could possibly be calling.

“Um, right now? You wanna have a band meeting right now?”

Garrett figured it was John or Tim calling, if a band meeting was the subject of the conversation.

“Dinner? Um, alright. We can try…”

He paused the game and turned sideways to face his best friend. What could he be talking about?

“Alright, see you in an hour. Okay, bye.”

Pat turned to face his best friend as well. “John wants to have a band meeting. And apparently all the guys want us to make dinner for them.”

“Why us?” Garrett asked curiously.

“Probably cause they’re too lazy. But they should know that we’ll fuck it up one way or another…” Pat answered.

Garrett turned off the Xbox and they headed to Pat’s kitchen.

“What are we gonna make?” Garrett wondered aloud.

“Rice…?”

“Rice? Of all things, you want to make rice?” Garrett chuckled at Pat’s answer.

“Well, we have rice left over from when Tim tried to make sushi for that one girl he was trying to impress, remember?”

“Well we need something to make with the rice. We can’t have just rice,” Garrett observed.

“Okay, mister smarty pants,” Pat retorted, “Let’s make…um…chicken.”

“Chicken it is, then!”

After a few minutes, Garrett and Pat looked at each other with wide eyes.

“Garrett, I don’t know how to make rice…or chicken, for that matter. Can’t we just have grilled cheese?”

“We can’t have grilled cheese,” Garrett told the long haired drummer, “because we had grilled cheese yesterday.”

“Then let’s have soup or something. I have a couple cans of Campbell’s in the pantry!”

“We had soup on Tuesday, Pat.”

“Oh…”

Suddenly, Garrett pulled out his phone. He texted a message to Twitter, simply typing the words, “rice dinner.” Then he opened Safari and Googled the words, “how to make white rice.”

He opted for the first result on the page and began to read. “Hey Pat, this is actually pretty easy! How about you make the rice and I make the chicken?”

When he didn’t hear an answer, he looked up from his iPhone screen and searched for his best friend. “Pat? Pat, where are you!?” Garrett ran a hand through his hair. He hoped that Pat wasn’t off doing something stupid. He could get distracted so easily, he often got into extremely dumb situations when no one looked after him. Garrett just hoped that Pat wasn’t in the middle of one of his Michael episodes. He hated those when it was just them two. When they were with other people, it was okay, because then he wouldn’t have to be the only one to deal with it. But when it was just him and Pat, anything could go wrong.

Pat came scampering back into the kitchen, wearing a pink apron, and held an identical one in his hand. Garrett burst into laughter. The apron that Pat wore was a light shade of pink, and was decorated with small white hearts and lace. Lace! Pat posed like a supermodel and put on the most seductive expression he could muster. “Do you like my apron?”

Garrett’s laughter just got louder and louder. “I love it, Pat. It looks great on you,” he answered, trying to quiet his laughter.

“Good, cause you have one to wear too!”

The dark haired bassist’s blue eyes widened and he started to protest. “There is absolutely no way I’m putting that thing on. It looks way better on you than it will on me, I can promise you that.”

“No, Gary! You’ll look awesome! Only real men wear pink aprons.”

Garrett grumbled something that sounded like, “Well, then I’m not a real man.”

“What was that, Garrett?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly.

Pat smiled and shook his head. “I guess that means you’re wearing it!” He shoved the apron at Garrett, who took it and reluctantly put it on.

“If anyone sees me in this, I swear to God, Pat, I’ll stick your hair in the fireplace.”

Pat ignored Garrett’s lame threat and nodded to the phone that was still in his hand. “So how do we make rice?”

“Well,” Garrett started, “First, you measure out the rice. Do you have any cups we can measure the rice in?”

Pat nodded and looked around in a cupboard until he found what he was looking for. He came back with a plastic cup used for drinking. Garrett chuckled. “No, Pat. I meant a measuring cup.”

“Oh…” Pat walked back towards the cupboards and drawers and searched for what Garrett had asked for. He came back with a clear plastic cup that had measurements and numbers in it. Pat had never liked math. He never knew that he would have to use the subject just to make rice…

Garrett nodded. “Okay, let’s make, um…nine cups of rice. Just take that cup and scoop up the rice and put it in the rice cooker.”

Pat did as told. He didn’t really know where the rice cooker was, but he tried his best to figure it out. He didn’t want to annoy Garrett, he would’ve felt bad. He carefully scooped out exactly nine cups of rice and put each cup in what he figured was the rice cooker. When he was done, he turned back around and asked, “What do we do next?”

Garrett walked over to where he was standing and examined his work. Then he started to laugh again. “What’s so funny?”

“Pat, that’s not the rice cooker.”

Pat’s eyes widened. “It’s not?”

“No,” Garrett informed him gently, “That’s the blender.”

Pat joined in with Garrett’s laughter. “Imagine if you had turned it on, oh my god. Then we’d have rice smoothies!”

He wrinkled his nose and laughed even harder at the thought of having to drink a rice smoothie.

Garrett shook his head and helped Pat transfer the uncooked rice into the actual rice cooker. How was Pat supposed to know what the rice cooker looked like? He had never really eaten rice, except at restaurants where it was already made for him. Garrett found the whole fiasco quite amusing. Of course Pat would mess up such a simple thing as rice.

“Next, you wash it. Take the bowl outta the cooker and stick it under the faucet. Let the water fill it up until it’s about 3/4 full.”

Pat did as told, but this time, Garrett watched him carefully to make sure he was doing it right. “Good. Now, you kinda have to stick your hands in there and mush it around. That’s how you clean it.”

Garrett smiled as Pat cleaned the rice as instructed. “The rice feels funny…it’s all hard and stuff.”

After a few minutes of Pat just squishing the rice around, Garrett helped him pour the water out of the bowl, making sure none of the rice escaped.

“Alright, now fill the cup with water and pour it in the bowl. Do that nine and a half times. After that, just stick the bowl back into the cooker and push down the switch.”

Garrett figured that Pat was alright, so he went searching in the fridge for the chicken breasts that Pat had told him he could cook. After setting out the pack of chicken, he referred back to his iPhone and found a simple chicken recipe on eHow.

He needed a broiling pan, salt, pepper, a lemon, and of course, the chicken. He turned on the oven and put it on bake, preheating it for 375 degrees. When he was done with that, he carefully cut a hole in the lemon. He found this harder then it sounded. His tongue stuck out of his mouth due to how concentrated he was on poking the right sized hole in the lemon.

“You alright there, Gare?” Pat asked, “You look pretty focused.”

Garrett nodded and finally finished cutting a hole out of the lemon, then proceeded to squeeze it on the chicken. Just as he was about to finish, he accidentally squeezed some in his eye. “Fuck! Ouch! Shit! Cock! Ow!”

Pat was absolutely no help. He just stood there and laughed at Garrett’s pain. Garrett’s middle finger somehow managed to stick out and Pat just kept on laughing. After Garrett had calmed down, he asked Pat to help him season the chicken with salt and pepper evenly.

They basically covered all ten pieces of chicken with salt and pepper, assuming that what they had used was enough. Then, they lay the pieces of chicken down evenly on the broiling pan and stuck them in the oven, and Garrett set the timer on his phone for 25 minutes.

Suddenly, the door opened and in walked John, Kennedy, Tim, Jared, Moose, Vito, Matt, and Gary. “Band meeting time!”

“What’d you make us?” asked Tim.

“Rice and chicken!” said Garrett and Pat proudly.

Then the room grew silent and all eyes were on the two boys.

“What are you staring at us for?” Garrett asked, slightly annoyed.

John snickered. “Your, uh, aprons are quite stunning.”

Garrett’s eyes grew wide and he looked at Pat. “I told you that no one was supposed to see us in these!”

“Aw, they match!” exclaimed Jared.

“Pat,” Garrett said through gritted teeth.

“I think you look fine,” said Kennedy, “Don’t hurt Pat.”

He just narrowed his eyes and untied the apron, taking it off and folding it up, putting it on the counter.

“Alright, while we wait for the food to finish, let’s start our band meeting,” said Pat. All the guys nodded and they sat down on the couches and recliners in the living room.

The band meeting immediately turned into a Halo match. It wasn’t exactly what they had in mind, but it was better than talking about boring band stuff. They would talk about that at dinner, Pat thought.

Round after round of Halo went on, and the competitive yelling got louder and louder. There were boys trying to lean over each other to block each other’s eyesight, and insults were being thrown back and forth.

Garrett successfully finished another round, Matt throwing his controller down in defeat. Suddenly, John spoke up. “Um, Gare, your phone’s been beeping nonstop, but no one’s calling or texting.”

“That’s weird,” he mumbled, taking his phone from John. Then, he realized it was the timer.

“Fuck! The chicken!”

He had overcooked the chicken.

Of all the things that had to go wrong, he just had to overcook the chicken.

He and Pat ran into the kitchen and the oven door flew open. Garrett shoved an oven mitt onto his hand and pulled out the broiling pan. The pieces of chicken looked like burnt rocks. They had been in the oven for almost 45 minutes.

He set the pan down and frowned. He couldn’t believe that he had fucked up. Now they had nothing to eat but rice.

“I know what to do!” Pat said.

Garrett looked at him with hopeful eyes.

“I’ll just run down to El Pollo Loco and get some chicken. Don’t worry, Gare. It’s okay.”

“Thanks, Pat.”

Pat ran out of the house and into his car and drove to the nearest El Pollo Loco. The drive thru line was long. So he jumped out of the car and walked into the restaurant itself. He stood behind the only person in line and while waiting, made a new tweet.

“Me and @garrettmaine did a big goof with dinner tonight. Sorry.”

When it came time for him to order, the cashier stared at him. He figured it was because she knew him from The Maine or something. “Can I have one order of the ten piece, please?”

She nodded slowly and told him his total. He handed her a twenty dollar bill and once he collected his change, he stepped aside, waiting for his order. He looked up at the television attached to the ceiling. It turned out to be one of the televisions that was actually a security camera.

Pat finally realized why the cashier was looking at him so oddly.

It wasn’t because he was in a band, it was because he was still wearing his apron. In his rush to get out of the house, he hadn’t taken it off. His cheeks turned red in color as he thought about how he must’ve looked to everyone in the restaurant. He sheepishly untied it and took it off. Then the lady called his order number and he grabbed the bag of chicken and sped home.

“Thank you for dinner, you guys,” Tim said once everyone was settled on the dining table. “Even though you messed up, we still appreciate what you did. So thanks.”

They made a “toast” of beer and soda to Garrett and Pat, and the two boys high fived. “Let’s eat!” exclaimed Kennedy.