To Brian and Rachel’s surprise the little kid act worked like a charm. Megan’s mom just couldn’t say no to the eager little girl. So they swallowed their pride and repeated the act for their moms. Brian had the toughest job because they’d decided his place would be the best location to go to as he was an only-child. He had to convince his mom to have them all back. In the end though it turned out to be a piece of cake. All the moms were eager for their children to make friends, or maybe just for the chance to socialise with other moms. Either way the trio was soon gathered at Brian’s house.
The moms placed the ‘kids’ in the back yard to play while they had tea in the kitchen. Of course that allowed them to watch the children closely through a sliding glass door, just in case they got into any trouble. The backyard was no exception to the transformations the world had gone through. A plastic play place with a little ladder and yellow slide sat in the middle of the lawn. Along the side was a swing-set with an attached slide of its own. Just beside that was a small sand box shaped like a turtle. The lawn showed all the signs of belonging to a family with a growing little boy. The newish swing-set had replaced the plastic play place as the boy reached ‘big boy’ kindergarten age.
The three friends headed as far away from their moms as they could, settling on their bottoms in the grass along the far fence. Brian and Rachel hadn’t even bothered to remove their backpacks and now dropped the bright cartoon bags beside them.
“So, what’s the plan?” Megan asked Rachel as soon as they’d sat.
“What plan? Why are you asking me?” she retorted.
“Well I dunno Rach, maybe because you’re always the one with a plan,” Megan huffed.
“Well I’m sorry if having my whole reality change overnight has thrown me off my game a bit! I mean, I can’t even read. No, worse, I can’t even recognise the alphabet! How do you expect me to come up with a plan to fix that?”
“Okay, okay, we need to stay calm,” Brian reminded them. “Now I don’t know how this happened, but the only thing we can do right now is accept it and try to go with the flow.”
“You go with the flow, I’ve had it with being treated like a kid,” Rachel snapped. “I’m tired, I’m dressed like an idiot and I’m hungry. But if I go in there and ask for something to eat all I’ll get is fussed over and fed like a baby.”
“Well maybe there’s something in here we can eat,” Brian suggested, opening the zipper of his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack.
Brian rummaged through the pack, finding only crayons, a colouring book and… a leather-bound copy of Catcher in the Rye. All three gasped as the book fell onto the grass. Brian picked it up tentatively, as though it might burn him. He felt the leather in his hands, looked over the worn book. It was completely unchanged.
“What is that doing here?” Rachel demanded.
“I didn’t put it in there. I swear I haven’t seen this since last night,” he insisted.
“So it just packed itself in your backpack all on its own then?” Rachel scoffed.
“Maybe it did,” Megan interrupted ominously.