Oops! My Croissant Started a Coup! | Complete (ONC 2021 Longlister)

10. Treehouses are for Adults

The winding roads of the city were filled with people dancing and washing their cars. Totally normal. So, naturally, I asked Winnifred about it. "What is going on with all the dancing and car washing?"

Everyone in the van went silent and looked at me as though I were an alien with three heads with spinach stuck in the front teeth of all of my mouths. "What?"

"You are joking, right?"

Oh, shit! I'm supposed to be from here. What am I supposed to do without a phone to search for the answers to these questions?

"Oh, yeah, I guess I just live in the country where it isn't quite as exciting. It's cool to see all the action in person, though."

No one's going to buy that, you dolt.

"Tell me about it," said one of the girls in the back as she filed her purple fingernails into pointier points. "We used to have to wash the tractors with our brothers. Not sexy."

And then the car exploded into seventy stories at once about what they used to do on this holiday apparently dedicated to cleanliness. I struggled to keep up with all the stories but this holiday about organizing and cleaning was apparently the clue to unlocking why my croissant tweet was important.

Hopefully my brain would stop being swiss cheese long enough for me to write that down so I could share it with the police (or spies or whatever they were) when they finally found me.

I talked also so they wouldn't think I had never celebrated this very important and stoic national holiday. "Yeah, my sister and I dumped a bucket of old dish water on my dad's head once and he really wasn't impressed. Then he got us back later that day with water balloons and green beans for dinner."

I laughed to fill the slight emptiness of the other stories in the van and then when they picked up I added, "And I think I'm going to go completely crazy before anyone ever finds me here!"

And while a person would think that the carwash dancing holiday would be the strangest thing I'd see in town, I was even more surprised when we didn't stop anywhere in town. Instead, we drove right through it and followed a trail of colourfully decorated vehicles straight out the other side and into a deep, dense forest.

This is where I go to die, I thought to myself. This is the part of the horror movie when I find out I've agreed to get in a van with a secret cult of serial killers or something.

So, as the obviously eerie music played in my mind, and the calypso beats played from the speakers of every car on the road, we wound through forests so strewn with confetti and streamers and other biodegradables that it was almost impossible to tell there were trees underneath.

"This doesn't really seem like a good place to plan a coup!" I had to shout so Winnifred could hear me above all the music and her own off-key singing.

"We aren't planning anything!" she shouted back, handing me a can of something alcoholic that had been passed to her by someone standing along the side of the road. It reminded me of those bike races or marathons where someone stands along the roadway with food bursting out of a bag so they can provide necessary sustenance to the athletes.

Except in this case it wasn't nutrients, it was beer.

And I definitely wouldn't call any of us athletes as our cars continued the festive funeral procession through the darkening forest.

Despite this, I did survive the journey by pouring bits of my mysterious drink out the window every time I could see that Winnifred wasn't looking. By the time the van stopped in the middle of a small clearing, I was almost certainly the only person who was not completely wasted.

What was in that beer?

Before I had the chance to think, I was being dragged out of the van by no less than three women who did not put me down once they extracted me from the vehicle, instead choosing to hoist me above their heads and carry me away.

So I did what any rational person would do and shouted at the one person whose name I knew. "Winnifred! What exactly are we doing here?"

"We're celebrating, of course!"

"Yes, but what are we celebrating? I don't remember this part of the holiday!"

"We are celebrating you, silly! And our success." She held up another beverage she must have magically conjured from inside her prison uniform, which we were all still wearing. "To Harper!" she shouted, hoisting her glass in the air. The girls carrying me threw me up slightly and miraculously didn't drop me as I came crashing toward the ground. My stomach fell right out of me, though, and I felt so scared I could have puked all over them.

Not that they would have noticed.

"To Harper!" the whole crowd shouted. Next thing I knew I was staring up at a very tall tree with a tree house decorated entirely in printouts of my breakfast tweets. Someone slipped a crown onto my head that seemed very much like it was made from bread.

Well there it is, Ladies and Gentleman, I am the Queen of Bread. All hail!

And then, as though a robust cheerleading squad had just appeared in front of me, people began climbing on top of each other to create some kind of human structure. They are pretty good though, and I'm pretty hungry. Do you think I could eat this bread crown or would they sacrifice me for that?

And just as I had decided it might be worth the risk to eat my sacred bread, with absolutely no warning to me, I was thrown extremely high into the air by the women who had thus far been carrying me barely above their shoulders.

Okay, seriously, what is in that beer?

I flew through the air with all the poise of a pig on stilts until finally being caught, completely upside down, by a small group standing in the deck area of the tree house. Presumably, they climbed all the rest of the people who now formed human stairs.

How are the rest of them going to get up? More human cannon balls?

I had no time to think about that, because the crowd screamed something that was either "Carpet Raining Dance Hose" or possibly something in a language I was not familiar with. And then, the group that had caught me stood me upright and each took hold of a rope ladder affixed to the deck and flipped it over the edge so the human staircase could start climbing themselves up.

You know, I think I would have preferred to use the ladder. But only slightly.