“TOUCHDOWN!”
The umpire raised his black-and-white-striped arms3 to signal my stunning, one-handed, last minute, 62-yard, Hail Mary pass was good.
Eighty thousand spectators minus those losers supporting the other team—so say about 45,000—crammed into the Pudding Bowl, plus the two billion people watching around the planet, went totally loopy bananas bonkers. I couldn’t blame them. I had, after all, just scored the winning Super Bowl touchdown for the Hills Village Hawks in my first season as a professional football player. I had also scored the other eight touchdowns as well as six interceptions, three punt returns and rushing six hundred yards. All in all, I had definitely been busy.
I backflipped onto the balls of my feet and spun the football on the end of a finger as silver and gold fireworks exploded in the night sky.
“WHAT A CATCH BY THE KHATCHA!” yelled the commentator. “THAT’S GOT TO MAKE HIM THIS YEAR’S MOST VALUABLE PLAYER!”
Cameras flashed, people screamed, phones rang. Wait, what do you mean phones rang? I—
A ringtone snapped me—pow!—straight out of my daydream and—oof!—back into reality. For a brief second I’d known exactly what it would feel like to be the MVP in the Super Bowl (spoiler alert: it felt pretty good) before it was cruelly whipped away from me—whoosh! (Okay, enough with the sound effects.)
I rubbed my eyes and answered the phone. It was Sid. “Wassup?” My hipster phone manner was coming along nicely.
“Remember how you asked me about that radio thing?” Sid said. “Like, y’know, the competition?”
Of course I remembered! Was he kidding? But I shrugged in a real cool way, then realized Sid couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Kinda.”
“Well, I called in a few favors, kid, and the long and short of it is that you blokes are in, ya dig?”
“We am? I are?” I couldn’t believe it. Sid had pulled off the impossible. “Wow! Wow! Woo-hoo! Hubba hubba!” You’re showing way too much enthusiasm, yelled my inner hipster. Tone it down, Khatchadorian! “I mean … uh, sure, bro. That’s hefty potatoes.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head in disgust. First “hubba hubba” and now “hefty potatoes”?
Where did “hefty potatoes” even come from? Who says that? I couldn’t remember ever hearing the word “hefty” before in my entire life and here I was hooking it up to a vegetable and flinging it around to a real hipster like it actually meant something. This was it—I was going to get caught out once and for all as a failed hipster wannabe. I’d be expelled from The Grand Order of Hipsters, banned from coffee shops the world over, my clip-on man bun removed and my retro sneakers replaced with regular, ordinary-person sneakers.
“Yeah,” Sid said. “It is kinda hefty, bro. Nice wordage.”
Sid closed the call before I could say anything else dumb.
We were in! And I’d invented a hipster word! Hefty.
