Haywood's Diner

Operation Sparklers

Disclaimer: If you are critiquing my book I do not care about little grammar errors. Right now my partner and I write for fun, not because we care about commas. Feel free to point out MAJOR grammar errors but when I ask people to critique I want them to actually do so, not look in the comments and repeat the same things. I want to know if you like the characters? Is it actually funny? Did you enjoy reading? Those are the kinds of things I want answered. We're not trying to get published, we just want to entertain and lift people's moods.

Thanks,

Taylor & Andrea

Chapter 1 (Revised)

Operation Sparklers

Andrew's POV

I stood at the bottom of the stairs with a cold beer in my hand and a content smile on my face. People staggered around me sloppily drinking alcohol as they made fools of themselves on the dance floor.

From a distance I saw Zachary Ashford, my best friend since Kindergarten, heading my way with a mischievous, drunken grin on his face. That was never a good sign.

I gave him a high-five, he missed. After the fifth try, I gave up.

I greeted him happily, "The party is a success! This is awesome man!"

Zach quickly shook his head, "No it's not dude, you know what it's missing."

I rolled my eyes, "Zach, we can't do that again, we almost went to jail last time!"

He raised an eyebrow, "No one will know, just one dude? Please? We'll make sure no one can smell the smoke! We can use a whole bottle of febreeze to clean up the smell! It won't go wrong this time, I promise!" he begged.

I sighed, not even trying to put up a fight with this drunken idiot. I kinda had been itching to light some up as well anyway.

"Fine."

I shadily looked around making sure no one was following us, while Zach raced up the stairs, drunkenly, similar to a kid on Christmas morning. He also happened to be shouting, "Yes! This this is the best day of my life!"

"Zach! Shhhhhh! We don't want anyone else to ask for some! Our dealer is really expensive! And he won't sell us anymore after what happened last time!"

Zach frowned and nodded, "Poor Rebecca should have stayed away, we shouldn't have let her try, I can't believe she's gone now." Tears welled in his eyes and he looked like he was going to cry.

I patted his back, "It'll be ok buddy, lets just go get the goods. We'll have to go steal them from my parents though, they confiscated them from us after Rebecca died."

He wiped the tears away, "Okey doke man."

We approached my parents bedroom door, as I turned the knob slowly, the door opened with a click. We slowly slunk into the room.

Out of no where, Zach whipped out a flashlight, clicked it on, did some kind of ninja jump, and yelled, "OPERATION SPARKLERS COMMENCE!"

"Dude, just turn on the light. It's right there. Why do you have a flashlight?" He ignored me and tried to sneak around the room like a ninja.

He looked under my parents bed and screamed, "Found them!"

"Be quiet, we don't want anyone to hear us and try to take some, do we?"

"No," he said and zipped his lips shut like a little kid. He handed me some of the good stuff and I got the lighter ready.

Zach decided that he wanted to see how many we could do at once. "That's dangerous, dude. We wouldn't want a repeat of Rebecca. She died for our right to light," I told him but I knew he wasn't gonna listen to me.

Zach took all of the sparklers into his hands and lit them all at once. "Bro! It's burning my hand off!" the idiot yelled.

At that moment, Zach did one of the most stupid things he has ever done in his life, which is saying something because he does a lot of stupid things. He threw the sparklers onto my parents bed.

"That's better," he sighed with a look of satisfaction on his face.

"Zach?" I try my best to keep from murdering this boy who stood in front of me.

"What?" He asked, completely oblivious to what he just did.

"Do you realize tonight is our last day on Earth?" He gave me a confused look which told me that he really had no idea what I was talking about.

"You threw the sparklers on the bed! My mom is gonna kill us! We. Are. Dead."

His eyes travel to the bed that now had a growing flame on it. "What do we do? Omg, what do we do?"

As the flames grew so did my eyes, "Uhh uhh ummm I don't know!"

Out of fear I threw the rest of my beer on top of the flames hoping they would magically disappear.

As I did this Zach leaned over the flames and tried blowing them out. Effectively getting drenched in my beer as well as being set on fire.

"OH MY GOD OH MY GOD," he screeched as he dropped to the floor. "STOP, DROP, ROLL, OH MY GOD WE'RE GONNA DIE!"

Finally coming to my senses I left the room and sprinted downstairs to the pantry where we kept a fire extinguisher. I grabbed it and ran back up the stairs huffing and puffing. I really needed to workout more.

I didn't really know how to work the fire extinguisher so I just pressed a million buttons. As Zach screamed bloody murder, I finally began to spray foam all over, covering the walls, the carpet, the oak dresser my parents loved, and everything else in the room including Zach and the fire.

Then it was silent.

I looked at Zach and he looked back.

Then he yelled, "Dude! I can't believe you left me to die!"

*Facepalm*

***********************************

"Andrew Eugene Madden I can't believe you would be SO irresponsible to not only steal back those sparklers that we banned you to use after you bought some from that 10 year old next door and almost completely burned down his tree house as well as burned his sister's poor doll, Rebecca. You are so lucky they didn't press charges against you!" She raged.

"I can't believe after that incident you would light a sparkler again. Let alone in the house! But to light fifteen of them all at once? And burn the bedspread my dead grandmother knitted for me! Seriously Drew? Are you insane? Where did I go wrong when I raised you? " She said, continuously screaming at us for our idiocy.

"Yeah Andrew! Tsk! Tsk!" Zach added. I turned around and rolled my eyes at him. My mom gave him the most menacing glare ever. This caused him to whimper and try to run away but my mom grabbed him by the ear.

"I haven't even begun on you, Zachary. Don't think you're getting out of this!" She tiraded on.

While all of this was going down my dad stood behind my mom trying not to laugh at the situation around us. I knew he hated that old quilt with all his might, he probably would've given us a round of applause but my mom would've ripped his head off for that.

I was jerked out of my thoughts when my mom said, "...and you will be getting jobs to learn more responsibility! Both of you! No exceptions!"

Great. Just great.