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“Do you guys ever sit back and think about just how easy it would be to start a cult?”
“Oh my God.”
“Uh, no dude. Can’t say that I have. Not recently, anyway.”
Josh let out an airy sigh, poking at what was left of the frozen yogurt in his cup with a little plastic spoon. “I do.”
“Total shocker.” Ashley leaned herself further into the sunlight. She raised one of her hands to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun, using the other to lightly fan herself. It was turning out to be one of those summer days she’d call ‘balmy,’ only to have the guys raise their eyebrows and repeat the word in increasingly higher pitches until she finally gave in and smacked one (or both) of them. “Just FYI? Please remove me from your list of potential cult members, would you? I don’t do well in big groups.”
“Hey, at least hear the guy out before you say no across the board!” Chris set his elbows onto the table, leaning in closer to the veritable cemetery of syrup-sticky napkins they’d crumpled up during their little fro-yo frenzy. “What kinda cult we talking here? Weird religious cult? Freaky sex cult? Some sort of…eldritch…Lovecraftian deal? Because I gotta level with you, I think I could probably get on board with some Cthulu raising.” As he said it, he stuck his hands into Ash’s face, wiggling his fingers like tentacles until she pushed him away.
“No cults!”
Almost mimicking her posture, Josh too leaned backwards in his chair, head lolling onto his shoulders so he could get a bead on where the trashcan was. He took aim as best he could, essentially being upside down, and with a flick of his wrist sent his empty cup flying. It tumbled through the air, and… “Boom!” He clapped his hands together once to congratulate himself before sitting upright again, the metal legs of the park chair clanging loudly against the ground. “Also, you guys aren’t thinking big enough, okay? Look, we had this whole big lesson in my abnormal psych class earlier this week about this stuff—”
Ashley’s eyebrows shot up so high that they threatened to pop clean off her face. “You talked about how to start cults. In class.”
“The professor has tenure and she literally does not care anymore. It’s absolutely beautiful. Anyway!” He slammed his hands down onto the table, making both of the other two jump. “One of the super important first steps is to have people who are in on the whole deal with you. So please rest assured, neither of you will be asked to drink the Kool-Aid, okay, because—”
“Flavor Aid.”
A lesser man could’ve let it go. A bigger man probably could’ve let it go. Josh, however, could not. He rolled his eyes in Ashley’s direction, silently watching her scroll through her phone. He met Chris’s eyes over the table for a moment before he took to drumming his fingers on the tabletop, waiting for what he was sure would be an oh-so-intriguing clarification.
But Ash just kept looking at her phone, frowning.
He cleared his throat as obnoxiously as he was able to (which, as it turned out, was pretty darn obnoxiously), flaring his fingers out when she looked his way. “Flavor Aid?”
“Oh, yeah. The whole Jonestown thing? They drank Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid. God, listen to a podcast.”
Chris let out a long, low whistle, shaking his head as though in mourning. “What a PR nightmare they avoided. ‘Oh, uh, that wasn’t us! It was, um…it was Kool-Aid!’” A grin didn’t creep so much as shoot across his face, nearly as wide as his eyes. “Oh holy crap, do you guys think after all that, Kool-Aid did commercials where the Kool-Aid man burst into people’s houses, and instead of yelling ‘OH YEAH!’ he sort of like went ‘OH NOOO!’? Because that would’ve been…so good.”
Josh turned to him only briefly, waving a decisive finger his way. “You absolutely just flunked your interview for being our cult’s PR manager.”
“You know what? That’s fair.”
He angled himself back towards Ashley, going so far as to actually knock on her third of the table when she continued to care more about her phone than his planning session. “What’s going on with you, huh? Cochise ‘n I are the only ones who text your boring ass—what’s got you all up in a tizzy?”
Her eyes slid to him with a glare that was nothing short of withering. “You’re not the only ones who text me.”
Again, Chris and Josh locked eyes across the table. Their looks of disbelief only lasted for a second before breaking into teasing snickers. “Uh huh.”
“Sure we’re not.”
“Ugh! You’re not!” She stuck her tongue out at the two of them before shaking her head, finally darkening her phone screen and setting it onto the table again. “I just got the weirdest message from my mom.”
“Ah,” Chris nodded sagely. “We forgot her mom texts her too.”
“Shoot. Rookie mistake.”
She pretended she hadn’t heard them. It was easy enough to do—she did, after all, have years and years of practice. Instead, she leaned further back in her chair, hand shading her eyes again as she searched the sky. “She was like ‘Are you guys somewhere safe?’ and when I asked her what she meant, she was like ‘The storm!’ But…” The frown resurfaced. “IIIII sure don’t see anything, um, stormy going on here.”
All three of them tipped their faces up to the sky, which was by all accounts, perfectly lovely. Definitely nothing even storm-adjacent hiding up there. It was bright blue and clear, without a cloud to be seen, the sun beating down on them like in a kid’s drawing (all it was missing was a sweet pair of sunglasses). The park, in general, was gorgeous, and that was exactly the reason they’d ventured out in the first place; to soak up the sun and enjoy the breeze.
“I think maybe your mom needs to chill on the incense and tarot cards, Ash.”
She didn’t argue. “Just weird, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, the day your mom being overprotective qualifies as ‘weird’ is the day I know we’ve successfully raised Cthulu.”
“Cochise. My dude. Please. We’re not going the Cthulu route.”
“Why not?!”
“Because I don’t want my cult to be full of weird sci-fi nerds, okay? I’m a patient man, but Jesus Christ above, not that patient.”
“Okay, wow, weird sci-fi nerds, huh? Look who’s talking,” Ashley piped in. “I’m sorry, who do you think would join a cult that you’re the leader of?” She held her arms out to her sides, waiting for an answer she knew wouldn’t come.
And while he did dodge the question (one of his special skills), he still reeled backwards in feigned indignation, fixing her with an incredulous glare. “I will have you know, Ashley Brown, that I am incredibly charismatic—”
“Oh my God. Humble, too!”
“—and anyone would be lucky to be accepted into my prestigious cul—”
Crack!
Stunned more than anything else, the three of them went silent, looking not at each other, but the strange…thing that had plunked itself down onto the tabletop between them. They stared, and stared, and stared at the nickel-sized chunk, the mental math simply not adding up until finally Chris spoke up.
“Hey, so, uh…is it just me, or does that look like ice?”
There was a beat where Josh and Ashley seemed to take those words in, both narrowing their eyes.
“It does kinda look like ice,” Josh agreed.
“Oh crap,” Ash said immediately after, already getting to her feet.
That was the moment the sky opened up.
There was no warning, save for the bizarre, prophetic text; one second the weather was beautiful and clear, the next they were being pelted by a horrendous mix of hail and fat, sluicing raindrops. With next to no athletic ability between the three of them, their retreat was almost comical, Josh getting tangled in his chair, Chris not able to find his keys, Ashley tripping over herself while futilely trying to protect her head with the hood of her pullover.
It was only through some kind of miracle that they (1) found Chris’s car in the parking lot, (2) managed to get the doors unlocked just before they reached it, and (3) flung themselves inside without causing any sort of head trauma to each other. They piled in and slammed the sliding doors shut before collapsing in a winded heap, Ashley throwing one of her arms over her face like a Victorian lady with a case of the vapors, Chris shaking pieces of hail out of his hair, Josh pressing his face against the window to watch the storm rage on outside.
For a while there was only the sound of their breathing, occasionally giving way to nervous laughter at the sheer improbability of the sudden summer storm. But like all good things, it came to an end as Josh rapped his knuckles against the window once, the noise decisive and somehow victorious. “I take back what I said earlier. The universe has spoken. I think we gotta go Cthulu cult.”
“Yes!” Had he been sitting up, Chris would’ve punched the air; however, lying down as he was, he just sort of came very close to punching Ashley in the face.
She rolled away from him before that could happen, smoothing her hair out as she sat herself back up. “Running a Cthulu cult out of a hand-me-down minivan. Yeah. Yeah, that does seem right up your alley.”
“Right?” Josh grinned as hail continued to ping! off the roof of the car. “I think it’s perfect. So, first thing’s first…brainstorming session. Let’s get some names going, people, the catchier the better! And by ‘people,’ I do mean you, Ash. Cochise is absolutely not permitted to be part of this little exercise.”
“Again, that…that’s fair.”