The Worst Photos Yet!

"Man… I just don't know. Fence?"

Fence shrugged. "I got nothing."

Figured.

Me and Fence were hanging out on a stretch of beach by the water's edge. We had come over to a more populated part of the beach, which, in hindsight, was a bad idea since it made it even harder for me to focus on what I was trying to focus on. As for Fence, he had already given up on helping me, it looked like. He was letting the shallow waves lap at his ankles and staring out idly at the huge expanse of blue.

Meanwhile, I was still lost in the thoughts tumbling around inside my head. It was like my skull had turned into a laundromat, and my brain was a pesky pair of stained shorts that just wouldn't seem to get clean.

I fanned the instant photos out in my hands and stared at them hard. Turned them upside down. I even tried turning them backwards. But in the end, I had as much as Fence did: nothing. Even less than nothing, actually.

I mean, I hadn't even taken these things. Snowball had. So how was I supposed to know what to name a bunch of photos?

I had tried my best on the first three. But the fourth one was still a total blank, both in my head and literally on the little white strip at the bottom of the picture that you could write on. I had no idea what to name it.

"I'm back!" Breaking my trance, Snowball appeared out of nowhere — about half a centimeter behind me.

Me? Scream like a little girl and jump two feet straight up over a little surprise like that? Never.

"Eeeeeek!"

Ok, fine. Maybe not never. Maybe, like, just sometimes. Like, just this one time.

"Jesus, Snowball. You almost scared me out of my own skin."

She cocked her head cutely. I m-mean annoyingly. "Like a snake?"

"No."

Even more surprising than her little sneakup, though, was the fact that she'd actually brought what she'd promised to bring.

"Anyway" — she beamed — "soft serve vanilla for Fence… A mint chocolate chip sandwich for you… and for me, a rainbow popsicle!"

Maybe most surprising of all, she actually distributed the ice cream without anything blowing up in our faces, figuratively or literally. Way to go for once, Snowball.

Still though. There was a problem here.

A toothpaste-flavored one.

"Trade?"

Fence just sighed. "Ask me how I knew you were gonna ask, Dude," he said, but swapped me anyway.

"Huh? Huh?! HUH?! What's this about?"

"He doesn't like mint ice cream," Fence explained to Snowball as he unwrapped his — formerly my — ice cream and dug in.

I did the same with the cone of vanilla he'd handed me, starting, of course, from the side. Wouldn't want to ruin that perfectly shaped swirl right off the bat. "Why would anyone like something that tastes like toothpaste?"

"I see, I see…" Snowball whipped out one of her trusty mini notebooks and started scribbling furiously. Great. That thing probably had more intel on me in it than I even knew about myself. "But that's not why you're really upset, is it?"

"Upset?" Damn. That obvious? I always was pretty lousy at hiding how I felt. "I'm not upset. I'm fine. Totally. fine. Right as, uh…" What was the saying again? "Right as rayon."

"You're wearing a pretty complicated face for someone supposedly right as rain," Snowball said, smirking. Super annoying, even though I knew she was just trying to help. "Let me see."

She snatched the pictures out of my hand before I could stop her. Not that I wanted to stop her. She could have them for all I cared.

I never needed to see them again.

"Oh! Nice job!" she said, flopping down to sit criss cross on the sand. Her rainbow popsicle — which was her favorite food, by the way — dangled lazily from the corner of her mouth like she was the cigar-smoking lead of an old western. She was certainly taking the lead here, much to my embarrassment.

She started reading the names of the photos.

"Oooh, I like what you named the one I took when we all went blasting off! Heheheh."

"What is it, dude?" Fence asked.

"It says," she read off the photo, "'Lightning Doesn't Strike Twice, but Disaster Does.'"

"Whoa, dude. Deep. Is that in reference to how, like, we paradoxically saved ourselves by punching ourselves really hard, dude?"

Instead of answering, I just went red in the face. Great. What the heck was Snowball laughing at anyway? She was the one who asked me to name the pictures she took of us as she punched us out of the crumbling castle and halfway across the beach. With her modded Super Punch 💖 camera wired up the way it was, all it took was pressing the shutter button at the same time as she pressed the boxing glove trigger.

It hadn't been the safest of exits, but blasting off like that famous cartoon villain trio — y'know, the red-haired woman, blue-haired guy, and the talking cat? — was better than getting crushed to death by a landslide of sand as far as I was concerned. As for the witch, Sandy, and her pet giant venus flytrap, Aphy? They very well might've been buried in the collapse. But if I had to bet, I'd put it all on them being perfectly fine somehow. In my observation and experience, people as nutso as them somehow always make it out of even the most impossible situations alright.

Wait. What did that say about us?

"Ooooh, here's the selfie I took as we sailed across the sky!" Snowball held the picture up. It was a freeze-frame of the three of us in free fall above the beach. Snowball was doing the peace sign, Fence was sniffing his armpit, and I was screaming my head off. "And you can see the whole horizon in the background. There's the beach. The people look like little ants!"

"What did he name that one, dude?"

"'Hopefully the Sky's the Limit of Stupidity, or Else We're Dying of Asphyxiation in Low Earth Orbit.'"

"Hey, wow, dude! That's not bad. Why are you going all red over these? They're actually pretty great."

I didn't really have an answer to that, so I just said nothing as my face continued to burn. I didn't know why I was so embarrassed. I just was, even if they didn't think my naming sense was as bad as I thought they'd think it was.

"Oh, this one's my favorite." Snowball held up the third of the three pictures she'd taken. It was of me, passed out in the sand, face half buried, shorts around my ankles and butt sticking out comically, mooning the entire beach. There were a bunch of people in the background of the shot with their phones out, taking pictures of their own and videos as they laughed at, not with, me. I actually ended up going viral later that week and becoming a meme and online laughingstock, but that's a story for another time or, better yet, never. "This one's called 'The Consequences of Being Me.' Heheheh."

"Hahahaha. Nice, dude."

Yeah, alright, sure. Laugh it up. Easy to do when you're not the humiliating subject of the up-close snapshot of your own literal downfall.

Ugh.

With that dealt with, we'd at least gone through all three pictures Snowball took as we made our great escape from the worst sand castle yet.

But for me, the worst was still yet to come. There was still a problem here. A big one, captured perfectly on a teeny, tiny, paper-thin, rectangle of shame.

THE FOURTH PICTURE.

The one I couldn't think of a name for for the life of me.

And the absolute most embarrassing one yet.

It was a picture of…

To be continued!