Synonyms For Better

Chapter 3 - The Great Ice Cream Caper

   I WALKED THROUGH the town with my hot chocolate (whipped cream included) cup in hand, it being long-empty.

After my baffling encounter at Delight Pops, I thought I should probably just go visit the areas of the town that were completely isolated, like a flooded swamp or a roadside ditch, and then tell Aunt Cheryl that I had thoroughly explored every nook and cranny of this exotic town.

But alas, I ended up near a patio diner, where there were some people just bumbling about, some sitting in groups while eating delicious food and catching up with their friends. Families of three and four and five were busy making sure that everyone was accounted for and that no one was crying over ketchup mixing with the mayo.

But I, of course, ended up getting stuck with a family of seven.

How? Because after I threw my cup away in a garbage can near the patio, I turned around just to trip over a small pebble in my way. I pitched forward and stumbled right into a table with seven people, where the parents seemed hassled by the five children in which: two of them were squirting packeted ketchup at each other, another two were trying to see how many baby carrot sticks they could fit into their nostrils, and the last child was sitting there with spoonfuls of relish dumped over his head.

I had smiled at the parents politely, wondering how they were going to solve this major complication, when they suddenly looked at me like I was the Pope before asking for my help.

And so, this is how I ended up holding two staggering ice cream cones while the dad led the other three children to the taco truck nearby. Meanwhile, the mom was trying to clean-up the other two children.

So I stood there with the two tall ice cream cones in my hand, getting kind of restless and staring at the sky, the ground, the trees and even a squirrel staring at me suspiciously; I looked at everything but the actual children.

They were making silly faces at me, trying to get me to play along with them. And for a while I did, after that squirrel staring at me finally scurried up a tree after I blinked at it. And making silly faces with little kids was actually kind of therapeutic, especially since I had the piled ice cream cones in hand to block my face in case anyone was wondering if I was a certified lunatic. Other than that it was quite nice, surprisingly.

But then it happened.

"Do you know how to cross your eyes?" one of the kids asked.

"Of course," I shrugged, and the kids exchanged excited looks, turning back to me in awe. 

"Will you please do it?" the other kid asked hopefully.

I laughed and crossed my eyes, staring into the middle of my vision. The mom just chuckled as she continued with her work, and when I uncrossed my eyes, she mouthed thank you to me. I smiled at her, laughing when the kids tried to cross their eyes as well.

"It's like this, kiddos," I started, crossing my eyes again. "It's really easy..."

My peripheral vision was obviously not at its best when I was crossing my eyes. And perhaps I was heavily, um, involved in this salient endeavour that I wasn't even paying attention to the outside world.

It was at the last millisecond— no, jiffy— that I heard a loud and panicked, "Please move!" along with a quieter and horrified, "Oh no."

First, I heard the startling noise of wheels rolling over gravel, like from a skateboard or something similar. I uncrossed my eyes and turned curiously, only to see a quite familiar person on roller blades zigzagging towards me like a caffeinated mouse in a maze.