“I’ll be back at nine o’clock to pick her up,” the woman said. Marcy Plimpton nodded, smiled and began closing the door. “Is that okay?” the woman asked. “Nine o’clock? Tomorrow morning.”Marcy opened the door. “That’ll be fine,” she said. “All of the other girls’ parents are planning to pick them up around that time, too.”“Good,” the woman said. “And be sure to call me if Sophia needs anything. She’s never spent the night away from family before. She’s only been away from me one night. So if she gets scared or sad or whatever, give me a call. I texted my number to you when I RSVP’d. Do you still have it?”“I’m sure I do,” Marcy said, as she tried to shut the door again.“She’ll be fine though,” the woman said. “I’m sure she will.”“I’m sure she will, too. Goodnight.”With that, Marcy closed the door. Sophia was the ninth girl to arrive in the last fifteen minutes, and all but one of the mothers sought the requisite reassurances that their little darling would be just fine. As a mother Marcy had failed to inherit the worry gene. She always assumed everything would turn out fine unless she had reason to think otherwise. Mothers who required constant reassurance annoyed her to no end.She walked down the hallway and joined the ten girls, including her daughter, Audrey. They all stood around the kitchen counter, half of them with phones in their hand, and laughed as one girl told a story about a boy named Owen.Marcy stood in the shadows and listened for a couple of minutes as the storyteller reached the climactic point of the story in which Owen fell off his bike while trying to do a wheelie to impress her.The girls roared in laughter and nodded in approval as the storyteller described how Owen landed on his butt and held his cheeks with both hands as he limped away.“He deserves it,” one girl said. “He’s always trying to act cool.”“Yeah, he has to act cool because there’s no way he can ever be cool.”“No way,” four girls said in unison.“I hope he’s limping for the rest of the year,” Audrey said. “He’s a creep.”Marcy planned to wait for a lull in the conversation, but then she remembered that eleven-year-old girls don’t have conversation lulls, so she interrupted.“All right, who likes pizza?” she asked.The girls all raised their hands, and three girls exclaimed, “I love pizza!”“Should we order some? I’ve got snacks and drinks, but those are for later.”“Yeah, we’re going to stay up all night,” Audrey said. “My mom said there’s no bedtime for us tonight.”“Really?” a few of the girls asked.Marcy nodded. “But you all have to be ready to go when your parents pick you up in the morning.”An eruption of cheerful approval.“Now, who wants pizza?”“Pizza Please!” one girl shouted.“Yeah, can we order from Pizza Please?” another girl said.“Pizz-Za Please. Pizz-Za Please. Pizz-Za Please,” the girls chanted in unison. They banged their hands on the counter to emphasize their point, and when that wasn’t loud enough they stomped their feet.“Everyone wants Pizza Please?” Marcy asked.The girls cheered.Pizza Please opened two years before and did almost no business for the first eighteen months of their existence. Then during the previous winter a Hollywood celebrity stopped in while driving through town, mentioned it on his Twitter account, and ever since Pizza Please had been the most famous pizza joint in the country.Marcy phoned in the order—two large cheese and one large sausage—confirmed that they’d still deliver to the house despite its somewhat rural location just outside city limits, and went down to the basement where the girls had relocated and were now in the midst of dancing (more like maniacally writhing and jumping) to a song that Marcy couldn’t identify.Twenty minutes later, in the interlude between songs, Marcy heard the doorbell. “Pizza’s here!” she said.The girls again began chanting. “Pizz-Za Please! Pizz-Za Please! Pizz-Za Please!” and paraded up the steps into the dining room.“Coming!” Marcy yelled as the doorbell rang again. She wondered if the deliveryman could hear the herd of preteen footsteps stampeding through the house.She opened the door, and a gust of wind almost pulled the knob from her hand. “I didn’t realize it was raining,” she said to the deliveryman. Sheets of rain blew across the yard from the direction of the house, which provide some shelter for the poor deliveryman on the front step. Still he wore a poncho buttoned up to his neck, with a hood pulled down over his eyes. “How much do I owe you?”The deliveryman chuckled for no reason, and then said “$32.75.”Just then a shriek came from behind her as all the girls reacted to the something at once.“It’s so crazy in here. My daughter’s having a sleepover for her birthday,” Marcy said. “I don’t have a headache yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.”The deliveryman chuckled and gave Marcy the pizzas. “Oh, new boxes?” she asked.“It’s been a busy night,” the man said. “We ran out of our normal boxes a little while ago, so it’s the plain boxes for tonight. The pizza’s the same though.” He chuckled again.Marcy gave him a twenty, a ten and a five and told him to the keep the change. The man nodded, chuckled, and walked away.The girls accosted Marcy as she made her way into the room with the pizza, and she had to use a stern voice to tell them to be patient. They’d always thought of her as the Cool Mom, so hearing her yell brought a hush over the room.She passed out the pizza, and the girls ate in silence for a few minutes, until Marcy mentioned a teenage singer, and the girls realized her sternness had been temporary.After everyone ate they returned to the basement and danced, although somewhat less enthusiastically, heeding Marcy’s warning about the danger of mixing stomachs full of pizza with intense physical activity. No one wanted to be forever known as the Girl Who Threw Up At The Party.When they had their fill of dancing, Marcy bounded up the stairs to get makeup and nail polish to begin the salon portion of the evening. As she reached the top step she heard the doorbell. All the girls showed up on time, and they weren’t expecting anyone else, so Marcy immediately thought a worried mother had returned.She opened the door and saw a teenage boy standing in front of her, pizza delivery bag in hand, and a cap with the familiar Pizza Please logo on it.“Can I help you?” Marcy asked.“I have a delivery for Marcy,” the boy said. “I’m sorry it took so long. We’re super busy and I’m the only driver tonight.”“Uh, I already got my pizzas,” Marcy said.“You already got your pizzas?” The boy pulled a receipt out of the delivery bag. “It says right here two large cheese and a large sausage. Is this the right address?” He took a step back, looked at the address on the house, and said, “Yeah, that’s it.”“But a man already delivered our pizzas. About half an hour ago. Two cheese and a sausage.”“I’m the only driver tonight,” the boy said. “The other two guys called off.”“No, we already ate our pizzas. Another man brought them. He had on a poncho. He told me about how you guys ran out of boxes so they had to use the plain boxes.”“Ran out of boxes? That’s crazy. We’ve never run out of boxes. They have stacks of those things up to the ceiling. What kind of pizza place runs out of boxes?” He pulled the boxes from the delivery bag, and sure enough, they were the usual boxes, with the Pizza Please logo right on top.“But we already have our pizza. The man…” Marcy looked behind the teenager, as if she expected to see the first deliveryman standing there. “And we ate…” she said, as she turned around and looked at the kitchen.“Hey, don’t worry about it,” the teenager said. “My boss said these are free anyway. Everyone’s waiting so long we can’t possibly charge them for the pizza.” Marcy said nothing. She just stood there looking at the teenager, trying to figure out what was going on. The boy handed the pizzas to her, and she took them without thinking about it. “No charge for the pizza,” he said. “We’re happy to bring it out to you. All the way out here. On such a busy night.”Marcy understood the man’s disguised tip request. “Oh, sure. Absolutely.” She put the pizzas down, grabbed two dollar bills and gave them to the teenager. He thanked her, walked away, and left her standing in the doorway.The thump of the car door as the teenager closed it startled Marcy and cleared her head. She raced to the kitchen and picked up the phone to dial the police. After she dialed the 9, she thought better of it, and instead decided to dial Pizza Please. Surely they’d have some rational explanation.She put down the phone and went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and saw one plain brown pizza box, the remnants of the first pizza. She wasn’t going crazy.Pizza Please’s phone number was right at the top of the receipt she’d been given by the teenager, and now that she thought of it, the first driver hadn’t given her a receipt. He hadn’t worn a Pizza Please hat. And what about those plain brown boxes?Marcy’s heart raced as she picked up the phone, hit the talk button, and held it to her ear to check for a dial tone before calling the restaurant.Instead she heard a familiar chuckle.
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