Page 109 of Badd B*tch

"Oh yes. They're just dreadfully boring and tend to run screaming from the likes of us."

"Dreadfully, is it?"

She snorted, grinning at me. "Oh, shut up. Hawk and I are watching a British murder mystery show on BritBox right now. You're lucky I'm not on any substances, or I'd be doing the full accent. Which is a terrible, terrible thing to hear."

"Hawk?"

"My husband. Hunter Hawkins."

"When we discussed his improbable number of famous family members, he neglected to mention that you're married to, and pardon me for saying this this way, the Hunter Hawkins."

She snickered. "The Hunter Hawkins. Gonna have to use that on him sometime. He'll hate it." She sashayed off. "Go watch Jax play Goldeneye. You'll get a kick out of it, I promise."

This is just ridiculous. From where I was sitting, I could see Harlow Grace, Xavier Badd, Myles North, both members of Canary…and there was Hunter Hawkins, scooping up his daughter and rescuing the universe from impending doom via the removal of sugar and caffeine from her little hands.

I remembered the interaction between mother and daughter, then, regarding rules, and how one of them involved only drinking from her cup. Meaning, approved liquids only. Clearly, she had a taste for soda.

I watched Delia slide up to her husband and daughter, leaning in to kiss him while Harry gleefully bludgeoned her mother on the head with a piece of bread.

I cackled involuntarily because Delia totally ignored the bread-bludgeoning, which only made Harry irate and her husband laugh—if the shaking shoulders as they kissed was laughter.

I felt a squeeze of something bizarre in the region of my torso. No, I did not, as Harry had asked, have to do a tootie. It was a metaphorical sensation, thank you very much. A flip-flop of the stomach, a squeeze of the heart. Squishy feelings.

Meaning what, however? I examined myself as I left the bench swing and crossed the yard, dodging a horde of screeching preteen girls chasing each other with handfuls of…cake? A gobbet of baby blue frosting whipped past my nose, and I was nearly bowled over by preteen girl horde number two, and one of the girls was deadass carrying a whole cake as she ran.

I stopped and watched as the two hordes collided like the battle lines in Vikings, and then white cake and blue frosting flew fast and furious.

I looked around—several of the older Badds were watching in bemusement but made no effort whatsoever to stop the cake fight. In fact, Baxter used a cake knife to cut a piece off yet another giant store-bought sheet cake, and then scooped one excavator-sized hand into the slice and launched it in a high parabola into the horde of girls.

Within seconds, every other uncle was launching handfuls of cake at the girls, who…didn't even notice. They just assumed it was coming from the other girls, which only served to make the cake-tossing uncles laugh so hard they fell into a dogpile heap on the grass, smearing each other’s faces with cake-covered hands.

The women, in turn, watched the whole series of shenanigans with a lot of sighing and headshaking and eyerolling, but no one seemed to be anything other than amused.

That had to have been at least fifty bucks worth of cake. But then, as I scanned the three—yes, three—folding tables groaning under the weight of food, I didn’t think anyone would miss it.

I passed the tables, taking a quick inventory, out of curiosity: six whole roasted chickens carved into slices and wings and thighs and legs, a dozen catering trays with lit Sterno under them—and in them, I saw mac 'n cheese, plain wings, chicken tenders, beef sliders, pulled pork sliders, fettucine alfredo, spaghetti and red sauce, and something like goulash, among other options; there were platters of chocolate, blueberry, and lemon-poppyseed muffins the size of my head, trays of croissants and pain au chocolate and trays of cupcakes in assorted flavors; there were three apple pies, two lemon meringue pies, four pumpkin pies—in the middle of summer?—and two chocolate cream pies; there was a giant chest freezer with an extension cord running up to the side of the house, on it taped a piece of printer paper with the words "ICE CREAM" scrawled in Sharpie; there were four open Yeti coolers full of melting ice and cans of soda of every possible variety and brand and of cans of beer and bottles of white wine and champagne, and a nearby card table was laden with bottles of mid-shelf whiskey, vodka, and gin; there was another card table with the relevant two liters of mixer sodas, and a third with the red Solo cups and a fourth cooler just for ice.

Just to be clear: this was not a celebration or a party. This was just a random, informal, summer get-together. "Just for funsies," Jax had told me this morning, when he mentioned it was happening.

I was told it was unplanned as of yesterday. As in, they just "threw this together last minute." In my world, a party this big would be planned weeks in advance and would be a once-every-few-years kind of thing, and even if we invited every living family member from mom’s and dad’s side and all their friends, you still wouldn’t get two-thirds of the head count.

There was a professional-quality sound system, too, by the way, pumping out high-octane pop and hip-hop—and whoever picked the playlist knew their shit, because, in my personal opinion, it was a no-skip playlist.

My head was spinning.

Honestly, part of me wanted to find a closet somewhere and hide behind the coats.

Instead, I grabbed a can of local IPA, piled a plate full of pastries and cheeseburger sliders, and headed for the basement with a pile of food that would normally equal my caloric intake for a week.

The Goldeneye "Tourney", it turns out, was easy to find. First clue was the noise blasting from the open sliding glass door of the walkout basement—I've been less deafened on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier without ear protection. The second clue was the signs taped above the door, handmade in a hurry from cut-apart cardboard boxes.

One read: "GOLDENEYE TOURNEY" and the other read "PLAYERS ONLY!"

I leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, beer can on the floor at my feet, as I ate and tried to make sense of what I was witnessing:

Dave and Buster’s had gotten pregnant by a March Madness watch party.

There were four TVs and four N64 consoles with four controllers each, the TVs and consoles resting on yet more card tables spaced around a massive open room. A pool table had been moved aside to make room, and a piece of plywood had been placed over the table; the plywood was the home of the bracket, which was drawn on a giant dry-erase board, because this was a very serious, very legit tournament. It looked like two younger boys were in charge of the bracket, since they kept sprinting from TV to TV and taking notes of who was winning and who was out—the brackets seemed to change round by round according to a set of rules I'd never hope to understand.