(June 8, 2026)
The Adventures of the Little Lovelies - Backyard Edition
Mt. Cheeks
It lasted exactly four days.
Four days of Bitty and Dassah having a secret Stargate under Ervin’s old fort and not telling anyone. Four days of coming home with chocolate on their shoes, glowing rocks in their pockets, and stories about a bouncing Moink.
On day five, Ocean cornered them by the chicken coop with his notebook.
“You’ve been going to the fort after dark,” he said. “With Go-Diddy. Without me. That violates the Scientific Method.”
Harbor was right behind him, still in pajama pants at 3 p.m., controller in hand. “Yeah. And you’ve been hogging Dad. He’s supposed to help me beat level 9.”
Nation just leaned on the fence. He didn’t say anything at first. Then he tripped over a root, caught himself, and muttered under his breath, “Big Daddy.”
“What?” Ocean asked.
Nation went red. “I said… pignaddy. It’s a word I made up.”
No one was fooled. Everyone knows Nation misses Big Daddy — his friend from youth group he used to play G-Soccer with every night before Big Daddy moved to Anchorage. Nation says it at the dinner table. He says it when he drops his fork. He said it last Tuesday when he missed a goal in the yard and everyone pretended not to hear. Mom found him crying about it once in the motorhome, and just sat with him.
Bitty looked at Dassah. Dassah looked at Bitty.
“We have to tell them,” Bitty whispered. “Lovely Law #1.”
That night, Go-Diddy met all five of them at the fort. Ocean with a headlamp and a clipboard. Harbor with a bag of chips. Nation with his G-Soccer hoodie on inside-out. Bitty and Dassah holding hands.
Dad uncovered the Stargate.
Ocean’s jaw dropped. “You built a functional Einstein-Rosen bridge in the woods.”
Harbor’s jaw dropped. “You built a video game portal and didn’t tell me?”
Nation just whispered, “Big Daddy would love this.”
Go-Diddy powered up the old naquadah generator. The ring lit up. “This stays between us. Your mom knows, obviously — she’s Mom — but we don’t tell Psalm yet, she’ll make us fill out permission slips.”
He pulled out the old planet list. At the very bottom, in messy green marker, someone had written:
P9X-BUTT – “Mt. Cheeks. Jeffrey lives there. Bring snacks.” – Yoseph
“Yoseph found this one when he was 11,” Go-Diddy said. “Said the mountain looks like… well, you’ll see.”
He dialed. Seven chevrons locked. The wormhole opened with a foomp that smelled faintly like laundry.
“Thirty minutes,” Dad said. “Stay together. And whatever you do, don’t eat the brown fruit unless Jeffrey says it’s okay.”
They all held hands — Bitty, Dassah, Ocean, Harbor, Nation, Go-Diddy — and stepped through.
Planet P9X-BUTT
The sky was pale blue. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass and pancakes.
In front of them rose a mountain. Or rather, two mountains. Perfectly round, side by side, with a deep crack down the middle.
Ocean immediately started sketching. “Geological formation consistent with… no, that’s just… that’s just butt cheeks.”
Harbor fell over laughing. “It’s Mt. Cheeks! Yoseph wasn’t kidding!”
Right in the center — right in the middle of the crack, where you’d expect — was a perfect circle of brown grass. Brown, soft, like a welcome mat. And in the middle of that circle was a tiny house, with a tiny door, tiny windows, and smoke coming out of a tiny chimney.
The door opened.
Out stepped Jeffrey.
Jeffrey was three feet tall, exactly. He wore overalls, no shoes, and a hat that looked like an upside-down acorn. He had a big smile and eyebrows that moved when he talked.
“Well howdy!” he called up. “Y’all must be Ervin’s people! You got his nose!”
Harbor knelt down so he was eye-level. “I’m Harbor. I’m ten. I like video games and snacks.”
Jeffrey stuck out his hand. “I’m Jeffrey. I’m… well, I’m Jeffrey. I’m three foot. I like snacks and naps. Wanna be best friends?”
Harbor, who had spent the last three months becoming a professional Couch Growth, felt something he hadn’t felt in a while. Seen.
“Yeah,” Harbor said. “Best friends.”
Jeffrey took them inside. His house was one room, with a little stove, a little table, and shelves and shelves of baby dolls. Porcelain ones, cloth ones, plastic ones.
Bitty stopped cold at the shelf. She picked up a tiny cloth doll with yarn hair.
Her breath caught.
It reminded her of Baby Judah. Her baby girl they’d lost years ago. She still missed her sometimes, on birthdays, on quiet nights. She held the doll to her chest for just a second, then smiled, soft.
“She’s in a good place,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “And she’d have loved this little house.”
She put the doll back gently.
Jeffrey, meanwhile, was giving a tour of his backyard, which was just piles and piles of little brown fruit.
“Floop!” he announced proudly. “I harvest every Saturday afternoon. Eat some, sell some at the market in town. It’s my main food.”
There were literally piles of floop everywhere you looked. Little brown, plum-sized fruits, smelling sweet like brown sugar.
Dassah, who is brave about food, picked one off the nearest pile and bit it before anyone could say the thing Dad said about not eating.
It was delicious. Warm, juicy, tasted like a cinnamon roll.
Three seconds later, she farted.
It was loud. It was also… incredible. It smelled exactly like fresh baked cinnamon rolls. Not just okay — actually delicious. Like you wanted to stand downwind.
Ocean sniffed the air and wrote in his notebook: “Hypothesis: floop fruit farts are nutritious.”
Dassah giggled. “Again!”
Everyone was hungry from the walk, so Jeffrey just shrugged and said, “Help yourselves, just don’t eat the green ones, those make you hiccup in French.”
They all ate. Bitty. Ocean. Nation. Even Harbor, who was too busy showing Jeffrey his handheld game to chew properly.
Within two minutes, the circular brown field in the middle of Mt. Cheeks sounded like a whoopee cushion convention, and smelled like a bakery.
Go-Diddy walked by a particularly enormous pile, hands in his pockets, and said exactly what he was supposed to say:
“Woah… that’s a big pile of floop!”
Everyone lost it. Jeffrey laughed so hard his hat fell off.
While they were eating, Nation tried to climb up the left cheek of Mt. Cheeks to get better signal for his phone — he was hoping maybe, somehow, he could message Big Daddy about G-Soccer. He slipped on floop skins, landed on his butt, and the wind got knocked out of him.
He sat there, in the brown grass, and without thinking, cried out, “Big Daddy!”
It wasn’t loud. It was under his breath, the way he always does it. At the dinner table. When he falls down. When he’s just thinking.
Ocean looked over. “What did you say?”
Nation went bright red. “Pignaddy! I said pignaddy!”
Harbor, mouth full of floop, said, “Bro, we all know you miss Big Daddy. It’s okay.”
Nation’s eyes got wet. He tried to play it off, but Go-Diddy just sat down next to him in the grass and put an arm around him.
“I miss playing with my friends too, buddy,” Dad said quietly. “Wanna play G-Soccer with me when we get home?”
Nation nodded and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Yeah.”
The Song
After lunch, Jeffrey showed Harbor his most prized possession: a little wooden guitar with three strings.
“I wrote a song for when I miss people,” Jeffrey said. “Because sometimes I get lonely up here on Mt. Cheeks.”
Harbor, who knew a lot about being lonely on a couch, sat cross-legged next to him.
Jeffrey taught it to him, line by line, and they sang it together, their voices echoing a little in the crack of the mountain:
“Come on Jeffrey, you can do it, pave the way, put your back into it, tell us why, show us how, look at where you’ve come from, look at you now.”
They promised — pinky swear, which for Jeffrey was basically a whole-hand swear — that whenever they weren’t around each other and they started to miss each other too bad, they’d sing it.
Bitty recorded it on Go-Diddy’s phone for proof.
When the watch beeped, they all groaned. Jeffrey packed them each a pocketful of floop. He gave Mom Brandy the little doll “for Baby Judah’s memory.” He gave Nation a smooth rock “to hold when you miss Big Daddy.” He gave Harbor the three-string guitar.
They hugged — which meant Harbor had to practically lie down — and stepped through the gate back to Wasilla.
Home
It was past bedtime when they got back. Mom made them all take showers because they smelled like a bakery that had exploded.
At the dinner table the next night — spaghetti again — Harbor got quiet in the middle of eating. He pushed his noodles around.
Then he looked up at the ceiling and said, soft, “I miss my best friend, Jeffrey.”
No one teased him.
He cleared his throat and started to sing, just loud enough for the kitchen to hear:
“Come on Jeffrey, you can do it, pave the way, put your back into it, tell us why, show us how, look at where you’ve come from, look at you now.”
Bitty joined on the second line. Then Dassah. Then Ocean, who harmonized. Then Nation, who was still a little hoarse from earlier, sang “pignaddy” under his breath and then laughed at himself.
Go-Diddy recorded it and texted it to a number he still had saved from Yoseph’s old notes — supposedly Jeffrey’s cousin on another planet with a radio.
Later, Nation was on the couch playing G-Soccer with Dad. He missed a goal, fell sideways, and muttered, “Big Daddy.”
Dad just paused the game. “Wanna call him? We can see if he’s up.”
Nation’s face lit up. “Really?”
“Really,” Go-Diddy said. “Lovely Law #1. We don’t let our people stay lonely.”
And upstairs, Bitty and Dassah were already making a new list on a napkin:
Planets to visit with Jeffrey next time.
Underneath, in crayon, Dassah had drawn two round hills with a little house in the middle.
She labeled it: MT. CHEEKS.
The End... for now.