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“Soph’s right,” my dad said.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Before we invite him over for the first time, we have to come up with the most epic prank. Have you kids ever seen the Joe Dickson wedding footage?”

Who the hell was Joe Dickson? “No?”

“Oh, right. Because of all the sex.”

Well now I was curious.

“Scratch that. I have a better idea. Here’s what I’m thinking. We take out the real ceiling your mom made me put in and replace it with a false ceiling like I’ve always wanted. And then we hide a bunch of pudding in the rafters. Buckets and buckets of pudding. Then we need to build a staircase...”

“We don’t have a second story,” I said.

“Shh,” RJ said. “I want to hear his vision for this.”

My dad slapped his back. “Yeah, give me a second to explain, Soph. The staircase doesn’t lead to another story. It leads to a door onto the top of the false ceiling. We tell Adonis that the bathroom is upstairs. He goes up. Opens up the door, and it’ll be like not a real doorway. Because the rafters aren’t that tall. But it’s his first time here. He’ll be too polite to yell down the stairs asking what’s up with the weird half door. So he’ll crouch down and crawl...”

“Will he though?” I said.

“Yes,” my dad said. “Because we’ll give him laxatives at dinner so it’s a bathroom emergency. So on top of the laxatives and politeness, he’ll have no choice. He’ll crouch down in front of the weird little door and crawl in, looking for the bathroom. But he’ll be crawling right onto the false ceiling. I’m thinking a very pliable material here. Tarp like. So he crawls in and it immediately starts to fold up. He’ll fall, taking the whole ceiling with him and the tarp will hit the buckets, knocking them over. So he’ll land all tangled up in the tarp drenched in pudding. I think I’m feeling vanilla for this one.”

“Epic,” RJ said.

“Right?” my dad said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But... “I think you went way too big with this one. I was thinking something smaller.”

“This is small,” my dad said. “Trust me, it’ll be hilarious.”

My dad either went way too big or way too small. And he never seemed to be able to tell the difference.

Maybe I did like Adonis more than I was admitting. Because I didn’t actually want this to happen to him. As much as I hated it, he was the star of our basketball team now. “But he might break a leg falling through the ceiling.”

“Huh,” RJ said. “That won’t work. We kinda need him on the team, Dad.”

“We’ll put a couch cushion underneath where he’s going to fall,” my dad said.

RJ pressed his lips together.

Yeah, he was worried too.

“Um...” I said. “Dad, Mom will get really mad at you if you destroy the house again.”

My dad laughed. “That’s what the tarp ceiling is for, baby girl. It’ll kind of fold up on itself, taking all the buckets of pudding with it. All going toward one direction. Adonis. It’ll be contained on him.”

Now I was kinda worried he’d get a concussion from the force of all those buckets. “Plastic buckets?”

“No, metal. We need quality material here.”

Of course.

“And the tarp will help with easy cleanup.” My dad rubbed his hands together. “I’ll start setting everything up.”

I glanced at RJ.

RJ shrugged, like he wasn’t that worried about it after all.