Jenna found a magic flute in the woods while walking home alone from marching band practice. She took it home and played it in her bedroom, and discovered it played a song unlike any she’d ever heard before. After playing for a few minutes, she looked out her window and saw all the boyfriends from her school standing on her lawn, their eyes rolled back in their heads, swaying to the music, waiting for more, waiting forever if they had to.
There was Kevin, Lisa’s boyfriend of six months who held Lisa’s hand on the way to school every day.
There was Max, Pamela’s boyfriend of two years. They were doing it. Everyone knew.
There was Terance, Reena’s boyfriend who had a car.
Jenna never had a boyfriend, so she was pretty stoked to have all of them at once all of a sudden. She played louder, called more boyfriends to her house, until they spilled off of her lawn and onto the street.
That first night, Jenna played her flute until well after midnight. The boyfriends had been standing for hours, growing tired but unable to leave. They started falling into standing clumps together, sleeping against each other’s weight, trying to continue to sway while nodding off. Jenna eventually lay down for bed, but she left her flute on the windowsill to let the breeze carry a steady, quiet note out onto the lawn for the boyfriends to cling to.
Jenna woke up the next morning to a crash of breaking glass, a rock through her window. She dove to the floor, worried the boyfriends had grown violent. When she peered out over her windowsill, she discovered it wasn’t the boyfriends who were turning hostile.
The girlfriends were outside.
They were tugging on their boyfriends’ arms, trying to drag them away, but the boyfriends wouldn’t budge. The girlfriends were crying, pleading with their boyfriends to take them to the movies or out behind some bleachers, but it’s like the boyfriends couldn’t even hear them. All they could hear was the sound of Jenna’s flute, still carrying a fragile tune on the early morning wind.
“Give us back our boyfriends you bitch!” one of the girlfriends shouted. It was Kara, who used to be friends with Jenna back in middle school. Kara was Oliver’s girlfriend, and Oliver was hugging one of the trees on Jenna’s lawn, licking its bark.
“Go get your own boyfriend!” screamed Nandanee, another girlfriend who had come to retrieve her boyfriend, Josh, who had stripped down to his underwear and was grabbing at the sky above his head, trying to reach out and grasp the notes from the flute.
“I didn’t tell them to come here!” Jenna shouted back. “They came on their own! If something as simple as a flute song can come between you and your boyfriends, maybe that calls into question the depth of your relationships with them!”
That set the girlfriends off. They were stirred into a rage, tying rags around sticks to light on fire, getting ready to storm Jenna’s house and burn it down.
Jenna grabbed her flute and blew hard and steady, the most beautiful tune she’d played yet. It stirred the boyfriends to vivid life. They threw out their arms, knocking their girlfriends to the ground. They pressed in against the house, creating a boyfriend moat. The girlfriends climbed up onto the mass of boyfriends, trying to crawl across their shoulders and heads to set fire to Jenna’s house. They might have made it, too, if Jenna’s Dad hadn’t been home.
“Hey, you girls!” Jenna’s Dad yelled from the front porch in his bathrobe. “If your boyfriends like my daughter more than you, you just have to accept that. You’re going through puberty now, a confusing time. You’re all experiencing new emotions and they change every day. One minute you think you’re in love to the end and the next your boyfriend is camped out on a lawn listening to some other girl play a flute.”
The girlfriends were sprawled about the lawn listening to Jenna’s dad, letting the flames on their rags burn out.
“Hormones,” Jenna’s Dad said. “Go on home now. It’s just hormones.”
The girlfriends reluctantly got up from the grass and started home, leaving their boyfriends behind, crying as they made their way down the block. They were ex-girlfriends now.
Excited to have all the boyfriends to herself, Jenna went outside to be their girlfriend. She cozied up to them, one after the other, bending their arms around her shoulder and pulling their faces to hers for kisses. But the boyfriends all seemed uninterested in their new girlfriend. They didn’t want to cuddle or kiss. They couldn’t even whisper sweet things in her ear since they’d been rendered preverbal, only able to make grunts and groans. They only seemed to notice her when she was playing the flute. When she put the flute down, even though all the boyfriends in town were on her lawn, it was like she didn’t have a boyfriend at all.
“You deserve better,” Jenna’s dad shouted from the porch. He’d been watching Jenna, still in his robe, sipping his coffee from his ‘#1 Grill-Master’ mug.
“What if I never find better?” Jenna asked.
“You will,” Jenna’s dad said. “There are a million guys out there who’ll love my Jenna for who she is, not for how mentally debilitating a song she plays on the magic flute she found in the woods.”
Jenna knew her dad was right. She crawled out from underneath the boyfriends she’d piled on top of her and stood with her flute in hand.
“Thanks Daddy!” she said. Then Jenna did what she had to do. She put her flute to her lips and started to lead the boyfriends down the block.
The next day at school, Jenna walked into the cafeteria and you could have heard a pin drop. All the ex-girlfriends were glaring at her. Before they could start cursing at her or throwing food, Jenna said, “Follow me.”
She led them out of the school, through the park, all the way to the cliff’s edge. The girlfriends peered over the edge to find their boyfriends in a pile on the rocks far below, the place where Jenna led them with her magical flute song.
“Why did you do this?” Lisa asked Jenna.
“It was nice having all the boyfriends in town, but I was never their girlfriend,” Jenna said. “I decided it’s probably better for all of us to wait until we find a boyfriend who’s attracted to more than just a pretty song.”
“No but, why didn’t you just destroy the flute and give us back our boyfriends?” Lisa asked. “Instead of leading them all over a cliff to their death?”
Jenna thought about this.
“That was one option I guess,” she said.
Jenna and the girls moved away from the cliff’s edge to get away from the corpse smell rising up from below. They weren’t ex-girlfriends anymore. They were just girls again, all of them hoping to meet a nice boy one day down the line.
Happy The Boyfriend Flute Day!
