Last But Not Least

I stepped into my darkened apartment and sighed. I slipped off my shoes and collapsed onto the couch without bothering to turn on a light. I hadn’t had a hard day at work; not in terms of actual work, anyway. I’d been trying to ignore texts from my siblings all day, but when my younger brother turned up and started bothering my assistant with questions about my schedule and offering her coffee, I had to start paying attention.

Apparently my mother had told them that I wasn’t planning to attend the family reunion.

Logan walked into my office at set the cup of tea that my assistant had prepared on my desk. “What’s this about, Jack?” he asked.

I stared at him. Little Logan, the youngest of the seven of us, the one my mother occasionally referred to as “Last but not least” had gotten engaged to his boyfriend two weeks ago.

“You shouldn’t flirt with her,” I told him, casting a glance at my smitten assistant. “What would Doug say?”

Logan laughed. “He won’t care,” he assured me. Then he continued with the object of his visit: he perched on an expensive chair in front of my desk and began the interrogation. “Mom said you’re not coming to the reunion this weekend.”

“I’m kind of busy, here,” I protested.

“You’re not,” he scoffed.

“Well, I will be if I have to keep paying attention to all of you yelling at me!” I cried, as the text alert on my phone went off for the eightieth time that day. This time it was Amy, the oldest. I shoved my phone in one of the desk drawers in disgust.

“Jackie,” he said softly. “We’re not going to stop until one of two things happens: you tell us why, or you come to the reunion.”

I wasn’t going to do either of those things.

It didn’t have anything to do with my family, really. I loved my brothers and sisters and enjoyed it whenever I got to see them, which was pretty frequently, as my mother loved to have huge family dinners at her house several times per month. The last time I had been there was right after Logan and Doug announced their engagement, and something strange happened: my mother used her favorite saying not to describe Logan, but instead used it to refer to me.

Sure, all of my siblings were either married or in long-term relationships, and I was the only single one left. It had never bothered me before. There is nothing wrong with being single; I had a fulfilling career, wonderful friends, and a supportive family. But apparently all that my mother could see about my life was my long list of ex-boyfriends.

“Last but not least!” she had said, patting me comfortingly on the shoulder as I helped her carry scalloped potatoes into the dining room.

My brother snapped his fingers in front of my nose. “Come back, Jack,” he called, as though he had hypnotized me and was awakening me from a trance.

I rolled my eyes.

It would be easier to confess. So I gave Logan my best “don’t tell Amy” glare and my brother crossed his heart, zipped his lips, and threw away the key. Then I quickly explained that I didn’t want to be “last but not least” to my entire family: siblings, cousins, and distantly related aunts.

“Boo-freaking-hoo,” Logan sneered. “Try bearing that burden your whole life.”

“Yes,” I assented, “but you can’t help that you’re the youngest; the only reason I’m inheriting the title is because I broke up with Steven.” I paused to ready my best impression of our mother. “‘And Steven was such a nice boy!’”

Logan laughed. “Okay,” he said, and sighed. “I get it. But maybe that’s not what she means.” He gave me a serious look. “You should think about going anyway. Uncle Ralph is coming this year, and he’s bound to keep Mom distracted most of the time. She’s been after him to quit smoking.”

“I’ll think about it,” I grumbled.

So I did. I thought about it for the rest of the day, all the way home, and was sick of the subject by the time I got to my couch. My siblings could never have dogged me into giving in and going to the reunion, but apparently my conscience could.

Besides. I didn’t want to miss the yearly squirt gun battle with my nieces.

Going to the reunion turned out to be a good decision. I totally dominated the squirt gun battle, and lunch was provided by my sister’s amazing personal chef/husband. We called a truce about midday so that we could all find some shade and eat. I stood around talking to a couple of my sisters-in-law by the dessert, even though I was starving for one of Joe’s delicious burgers.

My Aunt Jacqueline was sitting near the grill.

It’s really unfortunate to be named after someone disagreeable, especially the type of person that tells an eight year old at her birthday party that she’s old enough to know that there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. Aunt Jacqueline was just such a delight.

I stood in the shade with my brother Ben’s wife and watched to see if my aunt would mosey on and find a new group of people to complain to about her useless ex-husband, but it seemed as though she had put down roots; besides, she had a good audience.

“Just go grab a burger,” Tanya said, nudging me. “Maybe she won’t even notice you there.”

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “If only…”

Keeping my eyes down and my mouth shut, I grabbed a paper plate and waited in line for a burger behind one of my really tall second cousins. I hoped that my aunt would continue to tell the tale of how her husband never pitched in to clean up the kitchen and would take no notice of me. When my cousin wandered off with his food, I stopped paying attention to what my aunt was doing and focused on my own burger, which looked delicious. My stomach growled loudly in anticipation.

That’s when it happened.

“Jacqueline!” my aunt declared. She was the only one who called me that. Probably she was proud of the fact that I’d been named after her. The rest of the world called me Jack (or Jackie), even my work associates. “You’re dressed like a harlot! I wouldn’t be expecting to meet any men here, dear, this is a family reunion. Although I suppose you may be at the point where you’re ready to take what you can get; your mother tells me you’re the last of her brood that’s still single!”

My face immediately went as red as the raspberry Sriracha sauce that Joe had just put on my burger. I shifted my weight from one sopping flip flop to the other, and considered my waterlogged and not terribly alluring appearance. True, the cutoff jean shorts I had worn over my swimsuit weren’t all that modest, and everyone could see the green and purple stripes of my swimsuit through the old t-shirt that had been clinging to my abdomen since earlier that day when my niece had bulls-eyed me with a huge water balloon. So maybe my Aunt Jacqueline was right for once; maybe I was dressed like a harlot. But it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I was single, and not for one second while choosing what to wear that morning had it entered into my head that I would be meeting the man of my dreams that day.

I slowly put down my plate, summoned a sweet smile from an alternate universe where my aunt didn’t exist, and turned around.

“You’re right, Aunt Jacqueline,” I said loudly, interrupting the story she had begun telling to her unfortunate audience. “I honestly didn’t think about what I was putting on this morning, so I apologize if my outfit offended you. I mostly just wanted to be comfortable while I played with the kids today. I’m not husband hunting; usually I schedule that for a day I’m not going to be completely drenched. So it really doesn’t bother me what I look like right now. And don’t worry, I’ll find the right person someday, but frankly, I’d rather be single for the rest of my life than become a bitter, hateful ex-wife like you.”

I grabbed my burger and exited the pavilion, walking across the park toward a picnic table under a tree where I could see some of my nephews and nieces kicking a soccer ball around. I wasn’t quite sure what the fallout would be after my little speech, but I felt elated, angry, and horribly embarrassed. I hopped up on top of the picnic table as scenes of my mom or my older sister Amy yelling at me flashed through my head. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry or laugh. Then I looked at my burger and decided that I didn’t care.

I devoured my food in silence until the unthinkable happened: some of the raspberry Sriracha sauce escaped onto my shirt. I had just put the burger down and whipped off my shirt to rescue the sauce when I heard someone walk up behind me.

It was a guy I didn't recognize, smiling at me while I licked sauce off my shirt.

"Uh... hi?" I said.

"Hi, sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to interrupt, it's just that... you forgot your napkin." He held one out to me.

"Thanks, I'm good," I said, wiping my face with my discarded shirt.

"You like the burger?" he asked.

I nodded and went back to my devouring.

"Glad to hear it. The sauce isn't too sweet, is it?"

I gave him a questioning look as I shook my head, then swallowed and mumbled, "It's perfect, why?"

“Joe told me I wasn’t putting in enough Sriracha,” he said, then held out his hand. “I’m Wade, one of Joe’s partners at the restaurant.”

“It’s nice to meet you, but I can’t shake hands with you while I’m devouring this,” I said, and took another bite of my burger.

“I guess I should take that as a compliment,” he replied with a smile. “Mind if I sit?”

I shrugged and finished off the burger, then wiped off my fingers. “That was really good,” I said, “How did Joe rope you into helping? I hope he’s paying you, at least. There are a lot of people here.”

Wade sat down next to me and looked at the ground. “I’d rather not say, actually. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Did you lose a bet or something?”

He sighed. “No, he… lured me under false pretenses. He led me to believe that there would be tons of girls here.”

I blinked at him. “There are,” I said, gesturing toward my nieces and nephews.

“I realize that now,” he said.

“Though I’m probably the only one here over drinking age,” I said with a laugh.

He smiled and looked down at the ground again.

“Wait,” I said, “is that why you came over here? Because I’m the only actual single female at this picnic?”

“No!” he said immediately. “Not… entirely. You did forget your napkin.”

“Great. I knew I should have gone in to work today.” I scowled, and glanced back toward the pavilion. After the burger, I was parched; I wished I had taken some time to grab something to drink before storming off.

Wade produced a bottle of water from the pocket of his big cargo shorts as though he could read my mind. He set it on the table next to me.

I gave him a wary look and accepted the peace offering.

“I have two older sisters,” he confessed. “They’re both married and have kids. But my mom is always after me to have some of my own, ragging on me that I’m going to ‘allow the family name to expire.’ She’s worse than your aunt.”

“Oh?” I said, taking up the challenge. “Your mom told you that you looked fat in your Tinkerbell Halloween costume when you were six years old?”

He choked back laugh. “Okay, you win.”

I took a drink of water. “So you’ve always been ‘last but not least.’”

“Pardon me?”

“My little brother Logan,” I explained, “our mom was always calling him that so he wouldn’t feel bad for being the youngest. ‘Last but not least.’”

Wade nodded in comprehension. “Last to be born, last to get married… if I ever manage to, that is.”

“Well, you’re definitely not ‘the least’ when it comes to making raspberry Sriracha sauce,” I said.

“That’s true,” he replied with a smile.

“I’m probably never going to wash my shirt again, just so I can go sample that sauce whenever I want to.”

He laughed. “Or I could make you dinner sometime.”

I smiled. “That’s an offer I don’t think I can refuse.”

Wade and I occasionally talked about the idea of “last but not least” over the first few months of our relationship. But it was only a year and a half later, on the night he proposed to me, that I realized what my mom really meant when she applied the phrase to me. It wasn’t that she was sighing over all of those I’d loved and lost. She was encouraging me. Because it doesn’t matter how many boyfriends or girlfriends you’ve had or how long you’re single before you find that one person who is right for you. The last one will never be the least.

Dreaming in Screenplays

Have you ever paused while in the middle of a REM cycle and thought, “Man, if I could get this down on paper, Hollywood could stop doing reboots of 1980s cartoons”? I have. Quite a few times recently, actually. But of course, once I wake up and try to remember them, my dreams slip away from me.

Saturday morning’s subconscious entertainment began with the murder of a chemistry professor by two of his students. They panicked and couldn’t think of a smart way to get rid of the body, so they dumped it, stupidly hoping that it just wouldn’t be found. Then they went about their business. One of them met the girl of his dreams and fell in love, completely forgetting all about the terrible crime he had committed. When he was finally caught, his greatest regret was not the death of his professor, but the fact that he had betrayed the trust of the woman he loved.

This morning I was treated to another hopeless love story, though this time it was narrated by the main character, a prisoner of war incarcerated in a detention camp. Not only did she fall in love with one of the guards, but she discovered a way for her side to win, which would end the terrible war. She told the secret of victory to several people she trusted: a few other prisoners and of course, the man she loved. Instead of helping her, all three chose to betray her, and she was killed. The creepy part is that she continued to narrate the story even after her death, including interesting tidbits about how uncomfortable it was to be buried near tree roots.

My dreams might be crazy and a little ghoulish, but I’m sure movie-going audiences would shell out money to see them on the big screen.

Anything to prevent Super Friends: The Movie.

Tiny Owlssembly Line

My daughter said to me this morning, "Mommy, when will you be done with these owls? We want to play with them!" Hey, kid, you can have them when I'm done playing with them.
I like to amuse myself by picking out and matching the yarn for the tiny owls, and today I set out a bunch of different kinds and did a tiny owl assembly line. By the time I was finished, I had four brand new tiny owls!
Now I just have to find some motivation for the tiny eye assembly line, so my tiny owls will be able to see.

Thursday in History: Terrified of the Future

It’s impossible for an inventor to know how future generations will use an invention: how it will be improved, if it will be overshadowed by something new, or whether it will be completely ignored. All one can do is hope that their invention improves the state of the world and makes life better or more convenient for those who come after.

On this day in history in 1888, one of the first audio recordings in the world was played at a press conference in London on Thomas Edison’s phonograph. Listeners were treated to a piece by one of the foremost English composers of the day: “The Lost Chord” by Arthur Sullivan.

At one of the parties held shortly after the debut, Sullivan himself was treated to a demonstration. He thought the invention and the accomplishment Edison had achieved was wonderful, but had he had some reservations. “I can only say that I am… terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever…”

If Sullivan and Edison could listen to some Top 40 Hits today, I wonder what they would say.

Writing Prompt: Keys to Heart and Home

She was seven and I was eleven. At the annual neighborhood Fourth of July picnic, she pressed a key ring with two keys on it into my hand and leaned toward my ear. “These are the keys to my heart,” she whispered in one of those annoying girl whispers that any nearby listeners can’t help but hear. “Keep them safe!” She gave me a grin that was slightly diminished by her lack of front teeth and scampered off.

I sighed and put them in my pocket. Mattie Jenkins had given the “keys to her heart” to every fifth grade boy that summer. Last week she had been clinging to my best friend, and he hadn’t been very nice to her about it. My mother assured me that Mattie just admired our maturity, and that sometimes older men were very attractive. I had rolled my eyes at her. I didn’t roll my eyes at Mattie at the Fourth of July picnic, because I knew there were plenty of boys left in my class who didn’t possess a set of keys and that she was bound to forget me soon and go chasing after one of them.

Sitting on my front porch that evening while my sister and dad set off fireworks in the end of our driveway, I pulled the key ring out of my pocket to inspect it. One of the keys was meant to fit into a lock, but Mattie must have taken the other from her father’s hardware store, because it was a blank. I shook my head and shoved the keys back in my pocket. I was sure Mattie would get over me soon.

And she did. Before school started, three more boys from my class had received the means to unlock Mattie Jenkins’ heart. I overheard some of them talking about it once; they were swapping stories of what they had done when the gift had been bestowed and what they’d done with it afterward. “I threw them away,” said one. “Who needs junk like that laying around?”

Privately, I agreed, but for some reason, I didn’t feel like throwing them away. I guess maybe I was flattered that Mattie’s wandering fancy had fixed on me, for however short a period of time, and didn’t want to hurt her romantic feelings by tossing them away like that.

In fact, they were one of the only personal items I had left when the war was over. I had the watch I’d been given for my high school graduation, a wallet sized photo of my family from when I had a stupid haircut in eighth grade, and the keys to Mattie Jenkins’ heart.

The state of my neighborhood when I returned to it would have shocked me if I had seen it with eleven-year old eyes. As it was, my war-exposed twenty-six year old eyes didn’t see anything they didn’t expect to see. I’d seen worse. My mother and sisters, safe as I could make them on an island in the Caribbean, had begged me not to go home. I had promised my mother that I would join them after I took a look at the place I had risked my life defending for eight years.

I picked my way down the cracked streets, whistling the Star Spangled Banner while dodging yawning holes and the occasional festoon of razor wire. Not many buildings were left standing. I could see part of one wall left over from the workshop our next door neighbor had been so proud of, and a few overgrown bushes here and there, but nothing was left of my own house except the foundation.

Post-apocalyptic suburbs are pretty eerie, but it wasn’t the familiarity of the place or the solitude that bothered me, it was that soon it would be dark and I’d be stuck sleeping all alone, possibly without any cover. I shuffled down the sidewalk that used to lead from our front porch to the street and nudged some fallen bricks aside. I smiled at a sudden memory of my father, who had died four years before: his red face, yelling at my sisters to get outside to help him while he mixed concrete. It had been a family project to protect our mailbox from onslaughts by teenage hooligans, and it had worked; nobody had ever bothered our sturdy brick mailbox. Well, no one with a baseball bat, anyway.

I decided to head toward the elementary school to see if there were still any trees out by the soccer field that I could use for cover for the night.

I was stepping under some razor wire when something caught my eye: a key ring hanging from one of the barbs with two keys on it, one of them a blank. I stopped and stared at it, and rummaged around in my pockets until I found my own set. They weren’t exactly the same, but it was impossible not to see that these keys had once belonged to Mattie Jenkins. I turned and looked into the middle of the street. I had been standing on that spot so many Julys ago, next to a table full of chips and potato salad, when an innocent girl had confessed her love for me.

Writing Prompt #120

With Mattie Jenkins’ keys clasped tightly in my fist, I walked away from my childhood home.

At the top of the hill, I spotted what I was looking for: there were still trees near the old elementary school, and parts of the building were even still standing. But what I didn’t expect to see was a much nearer building, fortified with sand bags and a wall made of concrete blocks. It was in the same place as the hardware store had been, and a light shone through the sliver of a window in the thick front door. The silent streets let me hear the rumble of a generator. Someone was inside.

I made my way carefully to the gate in the wall, but it was locked with an old fashioned pre-war tumble lock. I glanced up at the building and then down at the keys in my hand. It couldn’t hurt to try.

The keys to Mattie Jenkins’ heart opened the gate in the wall.

I stepped up to the door and banged on it, then tried the knob. To my surprise, it opened, and I stepped inside to find a shotgun pointed at my head.

“Hands up,” a voice ordered. “How did you get in here?”

I complied without argument, Mattie Jenkins’ keys dangling from my index finger.

The shotgun lowered a bit, and the voice wavered when it asked, “Where did you get those?”

“Someone gave them to me,” I replied, “when I was eleven. I didn’t expect them to open the gate; I’m sorry for scaring you.”

She set aside the shotgun and let me see her face. It was white, as though she had seen a ghost. And maybe that’s what I was.

“Stephen?” she breathed. “Stephen Webster?”

I nodded.

With a cry, she darted across the room and threw her arms around my neck.

“It’s nice to see you too, Mattie.”

It had been a while since I’d had a real grilled cheese sandwich. Mattie made me one on her gas stove while we caught up. She told me about her base of operations, how she provided food and supplies to people who still lived in the surrounding area, and I talked a little about being on the front. When I was finished enjoying the ambrosia of warm, real food, she offered to put me up for the night.

“Thanks,” I said with a smile. “I was planning to set camp in the timber behind the school, but sleeping indoors sounds much nicer.”

“Oh, God,” Mattie replied with a grimace. “I’m glad you didn’t; the whole thing is mined. We used the school as a shelter for the first couple of years, before it got really bad. Then the State Militia used it as an armory for a while. They were the ones who felt the need to protect it that way.” She munched on the crust of her sandwich. “Didn’t help much.”

I pulled the keys she had given me out of my pocket again and looked at them. “Are you saying that I’d be dead right now if I hadn’t kept these?” I asked.

She blushed and smiled. “It was sweet of you not to throw them away,” she said. “But that lock is universal; pretty much any key will open it.”

I shook my head. “Nobody carries stuff like this around anymore,” I told her.

“Except my customers and suppliers,” she corrected me.

“Even so…” I said. “Mattie Jenkins, I’m pretty sure the keys to your heart just saved my life.”

No Love Lost

It’s an “I’ve got nothin’” Tuesday, so here’s my first cliché story.

Wendy Andrews and Drew Hopkins were made for each other. Their parents were best friends who swore that having kids would not keep them from seeing each other, and planned from the start that their children would be best friends, too.

And they were. For the first five years of their lives, Wendy and Drew were inseparable. They played together, they fought over toys together, they learned together, and they grew together.

On the first day of kindergarten, they were escorted, hand in hand, to school by their parents. And while standing in line to go inside, Drew was jostled by someone and accidentally let go of Wendy’s hand. Unfortunately the ill-timed bump also caused Drew to bang into Wendy, and she fell to the ground. If it were not for a brand new group of peers surrounding them, Drew would have tenderly helped Wendy up and kissed her skinned knee. But instead, he looked around uncertainly and did what everyone else was doing: he laughed.

Wendy stomped into their new classroom with tears stinging her eyes. Everything would have been fine by lunch time if they had not been seated on opposite sides of the room, but from where she was, Wendy couldn’t see Drew’s contrite face. He spent the morning wondering if she was okay and hoping he would have a chance to apologize, but by the time he was able to, he didn’t want to. Wendy had told her new best friend Natalie Bell about an unfortunate accident Drew had had at their fourth birthday party, and now everyone in class was laughing at him.

Wendy and Drew’s parents were puzzled by their behavior when they picked them up from school, and even though they got the whole story from the teacher, nothing they could say or do could convince their children to reconcile. It didn’t stop them from trying, not that week or that month or that year, or for the rest of the years they were in school. Wendy and Drew refused to be friendly again. They sat silent through dinner parties, glared at one another over cake at birthday parties, and looked in two different directions during Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations.

Instead, they acknowledged each other through the determination to be the best. Wendy had never been good at spelling, so every gold star Drew got in elementary school was a win for him. Her science skills bested his at every middle school Science Fair, no matter how interesting his erupting volcano was that year. Their high school tennis teams always held boys vs girls scrimmages at the beginning of the year, and there was always quite a bit of unauthorized betting between their teammates as to who would be the winner of the Wendy vs Drew match.

Nothing could stop their parents from launching various attempts to restore their friendship. But it seemed that nothing they tried could repair Wendy and Drew’s broken relationship. No secret presents or forged apology letters supposedly written by their children could bring about a reconciliation. “Drew and I are not friends,” Wendy told her mother. “Stop trying!” Drew, on the other hand, disclosed to his mother that “we may have been friends when we were little, but that’s over now. It’s nice of you to hope, but this is starting to get ridiculous.”

The last straw came when their parents began to pass out graduation party invitations. Drew hadn’t wanted to have a graduation party, and Wendy had been enthusiastically planning to have a joint party with several of her friends at Natalie’s house. But their parents had other ideas; their children were born three weeks apart and had shared every birthday party, so why shouldn’t they share a graduation party? Their families would expect it, they told their annoyed children. Drew agreed to show up and cut a piece of cake for his grandma while wearing his cap and gown, but Wendy told her parents that she was having her party at Natalie’s, her name was going to be on the cake, and she had already helped pay for decorations. “I’m not having the same graduation party as Drew,” she told her father angrily. They grudgingly compromised: Wendy would show up for her grandparents’ sake and then she would be allowed to go to whatever party she wished. She gave way when her parents promised not to take any pictures of the two of them together, though they knew that it would be impossible to make the same promise for their guests (and planning all the while to ask for copies of any shots featuring both Drew and Wendy).

Prom was another obstacle: their parents wanted pictures of them together, standing in front of Drew’s house, just like they had taken on their first day of kindergarten. Drew said he couldn’t because he and his friends were picking up their tuxes right before dinner and going straight to prom afterward. Wendy absolutely refused; she had plans to ride in a gigantic limo with all of her friends and then to meet her boyfriend outside the school right before the dance began. Neither of them would tolerate any attempts to rearrange schedules. “At least we have the graduation party,” Drew’s mom told Wendy’s dad sadly.

That evening Drew’s dad got a text with a picture Drew had taken of himself and one of his friends at dinner. Their bow ties were hidden by plastic bibs meant to keep bits of delicious crab meat from ruining their rented suits. Wendy sent a picture to her mom that Natalie’s mom had snapped: Wendy and six of her friends standing in their formal wear in front of their impressive transportation. “Maybe they’ll see each other at prom and make up,” said Wendy’s dad, not really believing it himself.

Drew and his Crew rolled in to prom amid the cheers of many female underclassmen. Drew enjoyed the adulation, but had never really been interested in dating any of the girls that were supposedly “in love” with him. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in girls, it was just that none of those girls were interesting. He spotted Wendy’s group of friends gossiping at a table near the refreshments. They were hard to miss, since they were all dressed in different colors of the same dress: a gauzy, Disney fairy-like affair. The girl in the pink dress was missing, though. He wandered over to get some punch.

“She should just come inside,” Natalie was saying. “It’s not like she isn’t going to have a good time, just because stupid Luke decided not to show up.”

Drew found Wendy trying not to cry on her phone or her dress. She was sitting on the step outside the door she had stomped through on their first day of school. He sat down next to her.

She gasped and glared at him. “What do you want?” she asked scornfully.

“I…” he began. “It was the first day of school and I was nervous and I wanted people to like me. I’m sorry.”

Wendy’s eyes went to the spot on the sidewalk where she had lain in humiliation years ago. “It’s a little late for that now,” she said, carefully wiping tears from her face in an attempt to avoid ruining her makeup.

She flinched when Drew kissed her knee. More tears found their way down her cheeks when he said, “Are you okay, Wendy?”

After staring at one another for a moment, Wendy could no longer hold back her sobbing, and threw her arms around Drew’s shoulders, pouring out all her woes of a cheating boyfriend who had just informed her he couldn’t come to prom because he was going out on a date with someone else.

When Wendy calmed down a bit, Drew helped her up. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll dance with you.”

Twenty minutes later the pair were spotted by the math teacher. “Is that Drew Hopkins slow dancing with Wendy Andrews?” he asked the girls’ tennis coach. “I thought they hated each other!”

“There was definitely no love lost between them,” the coach agreed. “I wonder what happened.”

Review: Lost in Austen

So Amazon Instant Video’s got this new thing: a long list of shows that you can watch through their service, but only the first episode is free.

There are tons of titles available through Amazon Prime, but if you’re not up for anything on that list, you can always pay for your movies and TV... or torture yourself by trying to watch only the first episode of something. I mean, there’s no way you’re going to watch the second episode if it isn’t free, right? Surely you can resist watching the rest of the show in our current binge-television-watching world, right?

Long ago, Lost in Austen was on Netflix and available to watch on Prime, but I was hesitant. The synopsis painted a picture of a modern London girl inserted into Austen’s world, so the literary purist in me shouted, “but that would make everything all wrong!” But then of course the day I decided I finally wanted to try it was the day that I found out it was no longer available (for free) anywhere. Last night, though, I saw that it was on the dangerous list of Amazon’s “only the first one’s free.” I said to my husband, “It might be terrible; I may as well watch the first episode and find out.”

Well, it turns out I was right. About everything.

Not about it being terrible, but I guess that depends on your definition of "terrible." Inserting a modern person in the Regency period was disruptive and it did mess everything up. And watching only the first episode of a television show is like trying to eat only one potato chip: IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. So my advice for trying out Amazon’s drug dealer style “first episode free with ads” service?

(So far this has been more a review of Amazon Instant Video’s new attempt to get you hooked and give them your money. We now return you to your regularly scheduled review of fan fiction on film.)

Here’s the question that sets the whole thing up: what would any loyal Austen fan do if they were inserted into one of the books? The answer is: try to make sure everything happens the way it’s supposed to. And what would happen instead? Of course everything would go wrong.

No Austen fan, no matter how devoted, would be able to switch over in to the speech patterns of the early 1800s immediately. There would be at least one moment when they would be yelling, “WHERE ARE THE HIDDEN CAMERAS??” And no one would be able to resist predicting things or trying to influence the characters. Nobody who is a true Austen fan would be able to just sit back and watch things happen when they have a chance to interact with the characters they love.

And that’s what Lost in Austen is about. Amanda Price is a Londoner whose favorite night in consists of curling up alone on the couch with Pride and Prejudice, even though she could probably recite the greater part of the book without opening it. She’s understandably shocked when she finds that Lizzy Bennet has entered her bathroom through a secret door, and even more shocked when she goes through the door and finds out it won’t open after Lizzy closes it behind her.

Amanda is rude and sometimes vulgar and gets drunk at pretty much any opportunity (which may put you off watching it if you can’t tolerate that kind of thing). But she tries her best to get things done the way they should be in Lizzy’s absence while trying to hang on to her sanity. “I may be losing my grip on reality, but at least I’m still in control of my hair.”

The greatest part about this romp through Austen’s world is how well the writers grasp the characters (although I suppose it isn’t hard when you’ve had two hundred years to study them). Bingley just wants to fall in love with someone beautiful, Darcy wants someone who doesn’t fall all over themselves trying to make a good impression on him, Mr. Collins is susceptible to any kind of praise (especially of Lady Catherine), Caroline Bingley is a snob, Mr. Bennet loves his daughters despite the fact that they drive him crazy, Mrs. Bennet is determined to have all her daughters marry well, and Mr. Wickham is an unscrupulous liar.

It’s hard to find good fan fiction. And it’s even harder for Austen fans, a fact that is unfair, since our beloved author only wrote six books to begin with! Pretty much any re-imaginings of Austen are the raindrops that quench Austen lovers’ souls.

Is Lost in Austen ridiculous? Yes. Is it fun? Absolutely. Is everything wrong? Pretty much, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. It’s Austeny. And if that’s what you want, Lost in Austen is what you need.

Just know that you’ll only be able to watch the first episode for free.