Memorial Day

I did something today that was potentially really, really dumb.

Every year, my family has a get together on Memorial Day weekend, always Sunday.  I decided to show up for a while.  I got there kinda late, so everyone of age was a bit tipsy and all the kids were getting tired.  Well, except my cousin Dylan, but he's always bouncing off the wall.  He was running around yelling about Mother Russia and terrorists and all sorts of strange things.  In fact, he immediately decided that I was a "unique red-headed Nazi" and tried to shoot me with a baby.  So I yelled at him in German and he ran off.  After that, I only talked to him in my German accent that he couldn't tell was awful.

My cousin was there with his electric guitar and amp, and my uncle had his bass and amp, and they sat on their amps and we all sat around them and they played and we all sang.  It was a beautiful drunken scene.  Everything from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to "Hey Jude" to "Puff the Magic Dragon" to every AC/DC song ever got played, and only half of the people knew the words or chords to a song at any given time.  I had to remind my aunt - who was a bona fide hippie back in the day - of the words to "Hey Jude".  Another one of my cousins took over for a while, he played mostly Metallica and 90s stuff, though.  He knew some Green Day, and only I knew the words.  Naturally, they made me sing them.  Talk about awkward.

I talked to my parents.  They were a little tipsy, and with some arm twisting and coercing, they agreed to let me go on a road trip.  Mum also gave me some money in case I needed it.  They both had that sad our-little-girl's-growing-up face that every kid learns to recognize.  I didn't tell them about my current situation.  I knew they wouldn't believe me.  Hell, I barely believe me.

I wasn't at the party very long.  Liz and Amy had gone to grab some more supplies from their places, and a few minutes after they showed up I noticed a masked man standing almost out of sight talking on the phone.  We left in a hurry.  I hated to rush goodbyes, but we had to get out.  One of my cousins, the one playing guitar earlier, hugged me out of the blue.  It caught me off guard since he isn't normally a very huggy person.  At all.  We are pretty close, though - people joke that we're siblings sometimes, and we formed a team because we're usually the only one to get the others' various quotes and references.

"Stay safe," he said.  "I can't have a Tag Team Awesome without you."

I came closer to crying right then than I've been in years, and I'm not a very emotional person.  The fact that he was clearly plastered didn't seem to take anything away from it.

We stopped at my place to grab a few more things and left town.  It's just us now.  The three of us against a group of ruthless super powered people bent on catching me working for an unknowable Eldritch monstrosity.

I hope I just found myself in a fictional tale, because that's probably the only way we're getting out of this at all, let alone victorious or unscathed.