Super Painful Faceplant! 💖

“... and that was when he went red as one of Principal Pid’s freshly grown tomatoes! It was so cute I could have just died! I so wanted to hold hands next to the eyewash station, and I know he did too. But then the robots I built the other night just had to go and blow up half the classroom! Figures! But I’m still hoping to get the chance to have some ~alone~ time with my love very, very soon. If all goes to plan, I’ll have just that. Hahaha! Hahahahaha! Hahaha! Hahahahaha! Oh, also, take a right three yards after the big stump covered with moss.”

“Wow. The kidnapper isn’t even pretending to be relating these entries to the directions to the hideout anymore, are they?”

“Really feels like they’re just out to embarrass you at this point, dude.”

Yeah. And it was working. After every stupid story, every insane anecdote about my mishaps with and at the hands of Snowball, the peanut gallery would explode like a piñata strapped to a firework. Or, you know, like the science lab the day Snowball’s robots blew half of it sky high. The stupid chat was going a mile a minute at that one.

XredmoonX: LOOOOOOOLOLOLOLOLOL LOSER

hunter34575: wtf he’s so gross

may89queen: Snowball is weird, but her crush is such a dork

derangeddestiny: Hahahaha this just keeps getting better

may89queen: And not in an endearing way, just to be clear

Definitelynotfenceguys: I got pinkeye from that eyewash station last october

DiscrinLL: This guy can’t stop failing lol what a tool.

hunter34575: ^true, the robots have more spine than him. At least blowing up a classroom is kinda remotely cool.

kurigohan: when’s the wedding? Lmao

If only that last poster knew…

Anyway, I think you get the picture. Please, get the picture. I don’t want to have to relate any more of what they were saying about me. And those were some of the milder ones.

In any case, the kidnapper was clearly crazy. Nuttier than a squirrel at a pecan pie convention. By this point, it was apparent that not only did they know stuff about me they shouldn’t have been able to, but also that they had some sort of intimate connection with Snowball. Some sort of grudge or vendetta, if I had to guess.

Oddly enough though, from what they had written, it seemed like they also kind of thought of themselves as Snowball. The thing with the heart underwear from a while back, for instance. The kidnapper had written that they had gifted me those heart-print tighty whities. But unless I was going completely crazy, I could have sworn it was Snowball who did that.

So then, what was up? What did it all mean? Who was this kidnaper? Were they really as deranged as they seemed? What was in store for us?

There was no use thinking about it now. Fence was already on to the next Super Secret Love Diary 💖 entry and the next cringe-fest starring yours truly. I’d have loved to zone it all out and keep pondering, but unfortunately I just couldn’t.

“I love my love,” he read. Did I mention he was also doing a stupid falsetto girl voice thing? Cause he was. It was making everything way worse than it already was. “But sometimes he just gets so under my skin. He makes me so upset I could just slap him. But then I got an even better idea. I should super slap him! I’ll remember that for the next time he gets on my nerves.”

“Huh?” For the first time in a while, I interrupted. “Did I hear what I think I just heard?”

“What do you think you just heard, dude?”

“Did you just say ‘super slap?’”

“Well, the book did. But yeah, dude. Why?”

“What’s a super slap?”

“You don’t know what a super slap is?”

I shook my head feebly. I did not, in fact, know what a super slap was.

Lucky me.

“A super slap is, like…” Fence trailed off, cupped a hand to his chin and cocked his head in thought. “It’s like… Oh, yeah! Right! It’s like a slap, but super!”

“Gee, thanks.” I rolled my eyes. “That explains it.”

“No prob, dude.” Fence’s face flashed white with a smile.

We pressed on, as did time. Past the tops of the pines above, day was already beginning to melt to dusk, oranges and purples puddling in patches of the sky. Down here on planet Earth, though, Fence was just wrapping up the story of the time Snowball shoved my brain up my [REDACTED] in her attempt to optimize the layout of the human body’s internal organs. The stream chat really liked that one, much to my dismay.

We were also still following what instructions were attached, of course, but I was beginning to get a little worried that we were just going in circles. We’d been walking for quite some time without finding the hideout. The woods weren’t that big. Where was this place anyway?

Fence was about to go on to the next entry when he was interrupted by a faint yet noticeable beeping sound.

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s coming front the Super Secret Love Diary 💖, dude.”

“Let me have a look.” He passed the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 over. It was definitely the source of the beeping noise. I turned it around, examined it front to back, but I couldn’t make out anything weird about it.

Then my eyes landed on the solar panel strip thing. The one that looked like what you might find on an old calculator. “Hey, Fance, look at this. Is it just me, or has this panel thing changed?”

“Huh? Oh yeah. I think you might be right, dude.”

When we had first picked up the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 this afternoon, the solar panel had looked like this:

⬛⬛⬛⬛

Four large black squares.

But now, it looked more like this:

⬛⬛

“Two of the squares are dulled out. There are only two left.”

“What do you think it means, dude?”

“Beats me. But it has to mean something, right?” I tapped at the solar panel. “What if this thing isn’t really a solar panel after all?” It wouldn’t have surprised me given how crazy all of Snowball’s gadgets were. In fact, now that I thought about it, the chances that she had attached just a normal solar cell to the front of her diary was way too tame an idea by her standards to be true.

But in the end, whatever secrets the fading readout held, we weren’t able to figure them out. By then the beeping sound had already stopped too, and, goldfish-brained idiots that we were, me and Fence had both already forgotten about it. So we just kept moving on.

The real gut punch was what we moved on to.

“And then there was that time when we were alone together,” Fence read aloud with an incredible nonchalance, as if he wasn’t casually doing intense damage to my social standing (which was already pretty low to begin with) with every word. Hey, at least the chat was eating it up, right? Ugh.

Fence continued. “The time was right, and romance was just filling the moment. I could tell. I could feel it all around us, like an electrical charge in the air giving me the courage to do what I did next.” I knew what was coming next. This was the story of the time Snowball leaned in and gave me a big, fat ki… ki… ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-! Err. Well. Whatever. Details aside, the kidnapper was writing from the perspective of Snowball again for some reason. It was becoming increasingly frequent in their entries, and increasingly weird.

Fence continued continuing. “So I leaned in. My love’s eyes went wide as love and affection for me filled his heart.” Yeah, no. They were wide with fear and shock, thanks very much. “And that was when I let all the emotion in me, everything that had been building up over the time I’d spent with my love, out all at once, with one big, fat ki… ki… ki… ki… ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-! No, I can’t write it! But I must! But I can’t! But I must! … No… No, I can’t after all.”

Phew, I thought. Good call for once, crazy kidnapper. Fence and the stream viewers didn’t know it yet — and hopefully they would never find out — but this was actually the most embarrassing moment I ever shared with Snowball. I probably would have died of cringe on the spot if it had been told for all to hear.

“Actually, just kidding! I must!”

NO!

“There’s no sense in holding back. Not in life. Not in love. <3”

Yes, there is! There’s all the sense in the world in holding back! For the love of god, hold back!

“And there’s certainly no sense in holding back in this Super Secret Love Diary 💖 either!”

Oh, Jesus Christ, no! My teeth were clenched like a vice. My nails dug shallow little troughs of pain in my palms. I was sweating enough bullets to supply a small army.

“No!” I interjected, desperately trying to stop what I knew no longer could be stopped. “You can’t read that!”

But he could. Fence could read the finale to the story, the epic punchline primed to put the ribbon on top of my social downfall for good. And everyone knew it. Including me.

“Here goes! That was when I leaned in and gave my love a big, fat ki—”

“Holy SHI—!”

That was when I ate dirt. No, not metaphorically — physically, actually. Racing upwards to meet my freaked-out face, the soft, wet earth slapped me clean across the cheek as clods of it clumped up into my mouth.

“Ughhhh… oww…”

“Whoa! Are you ok, dude? That was a gnarly fall.”

“Did… did…” I could hardly get the words straight. My head was spinning. I shook it back and forth like a wet dog. Flecks of dark loam went flying and I think I felt my brain settle back into place a little. “Did you finish reading that entry you were reading?”

“No, dude. Course not. I got interrupted when you faceplanted, hard!”

“Then… I’m ok.” I flashed Fence a thumbs up as I flopped back onto the ground face down.

“What did you even trip on anyway, dude?”

It was a good question.

“Probably nothing, just like usual.” Hate to admit it, but I kind of have a habit of eating it out of nowhere.

“No, dude. Look at this. Whatever this is, it’s definitely what you just took a spill over. Is this a… lab coat?”

That got my attention. I scrambled to my feet in half a second, whipping around to get a look at what exactly it was I had stumbled over.

At first, it didn’t look like much of anything at all. A weird, lumpy ball of white, with some legs sticking out of the bottom, cause why not I guess. But a second later, when my brain registered what it was looking at, my eyes globed the size of golf balls.

“Those legs are attached to… feet!” Maybe I was still a little out of it. Why was that such a revelation? “And the feet are wearing… pink bunny slippers!”

Yes, that’s right. There, sprawled on the muddy, leafy forest floor, passed out in the muck and the dirt but nonetheless clad in her signature lab coat and bunny slippers, was Snowball.

To be continued!