I glanced around, making sure no one else could hear us.
“But, I’ll tell ya a secret.”
“What’s that?” Joe asked.
“It looks like a jellyfish, but it’s not.” I looked at him and nodded seriously. I had the feeling my eyebrows were trying to escape into my hair. Actually, my whole face kind of felt like it was crawling around.
Joe’s bulging eyes suddenly crinkled as he started laughing again along with almost everyone else in the vicinity. I wondered if they had heard the secret, too. Joe raised his cup, and I looked down at my hand, pleasantly surprised to see my own red plastic cup was still there. I brought mine up, too. We tapped the plastic cups together and drained them.
Samantha took them both from us, refilled them, and handed them back.
“Now dance!” she said with a laugh.
“Dance?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” she said. “You’re on a table. You must be doing a table dance. You definitely need your shirt off for that.”
“I do?”
“Yep.” Samantha nodded seriously.
I looked over at Joe.
“I think she’s gotcha there, dude,” Joe said, nodding in agreement.
“Are you going to take your shirt off?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said. He placed his cup down on the table between his feet and yanked his shirt off over his head. Then he swung it around in the air before hooting and throwing it off into the shrubs by the beach.
Well, hell. I guess I was going to have to do it, too.
I had a little trouble—both with putting the cup down and with getting my shirt off, but Samantha was quite helpful with both. I stood up with my cup in one hand and my shirt in the other. I looked at them both and then threw them behind me with a shout. Punch went everywhere. Joe held his stomach as he laughed, and I joined him.
Then I noticed just how high up I was on the table.
“Damn,” I mumbled as I looked around. The bonfire was a lot lower now, but I saw a couple of guys hauling more wood from the nearby forest to rebuild it. There were kids everywhere, and from where I was, I could see the tops of all their heads. When I looked past them, I could see two feminine figures walking up the beach, arm in arm.
“Mayra!” I called out, waving my hands frantically. “I’m over heeeeere!”
Mayra approached with a tear-stained Aimee on her arm. She looked up at me with her forehead all furrowed into a bunch of cute little tiny lines as she handed Aimee over to Scott, and they hugged.
I wanted to poke at the little forehead lines, so I headed over in her direction.
I kind of forgot I was on top of the table though.
I landed face first in the sand but didn’t have any trouble rolling myself over and staring into the night sky. Nothing hurt, either, which was kind of odd. I could see Joe high above me, still laughing his ass off.
“What the hell is going on here?” Mayra said as she stood over me.
I turned my head toward her, and the expression on her face was just incredibly funny. I couldn’t stop laughing, and the stars above her head starting spinning around her hair, which was also pretty funny.
“Matthew, where’s your shirt?”
“I dunno.” I raised my arms over my head to shrug but then realized they weren’t really up in the air since I was on my back on the ground. I flailed my arms around in the air a bit, but I didn’t think it had the same effect.
“Matthew!” Mayra gasped. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing, nothing wrong here.” Joe hopped off the table much more skillfully than I had managed. “Nothing at all wrong with my main man, Mister M, here. No, ma’am.”