Erin’s town was only a three-hour drive from New Orleans, so I asked my friend Jason and his girlfriend Gretchen to take the ride with me. This way, I wouldn’t feel so weird about driving all that way to see an 18-year-old girl I met on the internet.
We rolled into town at about 5:00PM that Saturday and met up with Erin at “the McDonald’s” as she called it. I laughed when I first heard her say that and immediately felt like an asshole for thinking it was funny that Erin’s town only had one McDonald’s. Our meet-and-greet started out a little awkward on account of all the stares we were getting from the rest of the restaurant. Then again, four strangers driving into town to meet a teenage girl at THE McDonald’s will do that.
Thankfully, Gretchen was there to defuse the situation with one simple question. “Did you make that?”
She was pointing at Erin’s backpack, which was actually a stuffed doll that I recognized as “Lumpy Space Princess” from the cartoon Adventure Time, only most of the stuffing had been removed and a purple pouch had been sown into it that sealed closed via a matching purple zipper. The straps were made out of old, retro-looking seatbelts.
Erin nodded and Gretchen’s jaw dropped.
“Oh my god, will you make me one? Will you make me TWO?” Gretchen asked.
“Sure, as long as you provide the supplies,” Erin said, laughing.
“Deal!” Gretchen was grinning ear-to-ear as she turned to face me. “You have to help this girl so she can make me tiny adorable backpacks.”
We all had a good laugh at this, which seemed to ease the tension. We kept on laughing too, like a bunch of idiots who had no idea just how fucked they were…
It was a little after 10PM when we neared the end of the narrow dirt road that lead to Farmer Grave’s Haunted Orchard. We parked beside a tall wooden archway that designated the orchard’s front entrance. I handed out flashlights from the small stash of them in my trunk and then we started inside.
The place looked about how I expected it to: a row of brightly-colored plywood shacks lined the vacant field beside several rows of Satsuma trees that had been covered in fake cobwebs and “scary” decorations. Each shack had a sign displaying the name of a different attraction.
There was “Horn Toss” which (judging from the illustration on its side) was a ring-toss game where you tried to throw halos onto a demon’s horns, “Werewolf Bowling,” which was anyone’s guess, and my personal favorite “The Exorcist,” which was a mounted squirt-gun game that had several wood cutouts of Linda Blair’s face as its targets. Cartoon water tanks were painted below each of the mounted squirt-guns and the tanks were labeled as holy water.
The Devil’s Toy Box was the last shack in the row. It was painted a bright fire-engine red and the door, which made up one entire wall of the small structure, was padlocked shut. Someone had stacked a dozen or so rusted folding chairs against the side of the Toy Box. Erin grabbed one of the chairs and began to unfold it as she said, “Now we wait.”