Delta Alpha Delta
This is a sequel to the Apron Costume Shop story.
By the time Connor found the aprons again, he’d already forgotten ever seeing them before. Well, some version of Connor had seen them before…even if not this one.
They were in the back seat of Mason’s car in a crinkled costume-shop bag, wedged between a half-empty case of hard seltzer and a book bag. Connor dragged the bag out by one handle while they were parked in front of the Delta-Alpha-Delta house, both of them half-dressed and already late for the brothers annual costume bash.
“Dude, you promised to get us real costumes!” Mason huffed. “Tell me these aprons aren’t our costumes!”
Connor reached into the bag and pulled out the red one first. It unfolded in a bright square of cotton and cheap black lettering:
KING OF THE GRILL
He laughed immediately. “Oh, absolutely these are our costumes.”
Mason took the second apron and held it up by the neck loop. Dark blue denim, big stitched pocket, silver letters across the chest:
ASK ME ABOUT MY MARINADE
Mason stared at it, then at Connor, and started laughing too. “This is so bad.”
“Exactly! It’s perfect.” Connor draped the red apron over his bare chest. “We go as two dads!”
Mason slipped the blue one over his head and started creating a back-story to help his general disappointment in his friend’s decision in costumes subside. “Two divorced dads, specifically.”
“Two hot divorced dads” Connor retorted before Mason could even finish.
“From a cul-de-sac in Ohio!”
Both men laughed for a few seconds - proud of their addenda to the underwhelming presentation of the aprons. Connor adjusted the neck strap and frowned for a second. “Do these feel… weird to you?”
“Weird how?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know.” He tugged at the apron front. “Familiar? Maybe?”
Mason looked down at his own apron and shrugged. “Probably because they’re the most spiritually correct costumes we’ve ever had.”
That felt like enough of an answer. Connor snorted, grabbed a backwards baseball cap from the dash, and slapped it onto Mason’s head. Mason retaliated by swiping Connor’s plastic sunglasses from the cupholder and shoving them at him.
Two minutes later, they walked into the ΔΑΔ house with a swagger and the undeserved confidence of two young men who had planned their costumes well in advance.
The party was already in full swing. Music thumped through the floorboards. The downstairs smelled like beer, sweat, and whatever someone had burned in the kitchen an hour ago. Brothers were everywhere - Roman togas, cowboy hats, football pads, fake mustaches, jerseys, nothing coherent or cerebral. A few shouted as soon as Connor and Mason came through the front room.
“Holy hell,” someone yelled from the couch. “It’s the grill masters!”
“Delta Alpha Delta!” another brother shouted. “More like DAD!” That got a bigger cheer than it deserved.
Connor spread his arms theatrically, red apron on full display. “Gentlemen, I’m here to discuss propane and propane accessories!”
Mason patted the pocket on his blue apron and said, dead seriously, “Don’t ask me what’s in the marinade if you’re not prepared for the answer!”
Someone, probably already wasted, nearly fell off a barstool laughing. For the first half hour, that was all it was: a dumb bit, a good bit, the kind of costume that got funnier the drunker everyone got - and you can be sure people were plenty drunk. Connor and Mason played into it shamelessly. Connor stood in the kitchen with one hand on his hip telling a pledge made up stories about the tragedy of overdone burgers. Mason accepted a beer and immediately started lecturing nobody about optimal meat refrigeration times.
Every now and then, though, one of them would glance down at the apron he was wearing and feel a tiny useless twinge, like when you heard part of a song you almost knew. Something about the fabric. Something about the cut. Something hovering just out of reach.
Then Tyler and Eli cornered them by the stairs. Tyler was in a pale blue polo and backward white cap, already flushed from drinking, carrying a giant foam cup like it was part of his costume - which otherwise seemed non-existant. Eli stood next to him in jeans and an old fraternity T-shirt, glasses slipping down his nose.
“You guys have to let us try those on,” Tyler said, pointing between them. “Just for a minute.”
“For what?” Mason asked.
Tyler grinned. “Because I want to see if we can pull off "Father of the Year" energy! I have dad jokes for days!”
“And I want to see if this one,” Eli said, flicking the blue apron, “can make me look like I refinance boats for a living. And besides - our non-existent costumes are lame and you guys have had enough attention already! Spread the love!”
Connor looked at Mason. Mason looked at Connor. Both shrugged.
“Fine,” Connor said. “But if you spill anything on King of the Grill, I swear to God…”
Tyler saluted and snatched the red apron. Eli took the blue one more carefully.
“There’s a mirror upstairs, let's use it to take some selfies” Tyler said. “We’ll be back in two minutes.”
Connor watched them head up the stairs shoulder to shoulder, aprons hanging from their hands. He felt that odd twinge again, stronger this time, and rubbed the back of his neck.
“What?” Mason asked.
“Nothing,” Connor said. “I just had the strangest feeling.”
“About?”
He watched Tyler and Eli disappear down the upstairs hall. “No clue.”
⸻
The upstairs half-bathroom at the ΔΑΔ house was barely big enough for two men to stand in shoulder to shoulder without elbowing each other, which made it exactly the kind of place Tyler and Eli would choose for a joke selfie.
Tyler put the red apron on first, still laughing. “Tell me honestly,” he said, turning toward the mirror. “Am I giving neighborhood cookout dad?”
Eli, already looping the denim apron over his head, smirked. “You’re giving ‘asks if the beer in the fridge is for everybody.’”
Tyler barked a laugh. “That’s the same thing!”
Then he stopped. His smile lingered a second too long on his face before slipping. He tugged at the neck strap. “Dude.”
Eli was staring at himself now too. “Why does this suddenly feel tight?”
The room seemed to shrink around them. Tyler’s shoulders jerked first, broadening under the red apron not with youthful gym definition but with the heavier, denser width of an older man. His chest thickened. His waist pushed outward, not soft exactly, but settling into a substantial, middle-aged solidity. The pale blue polo beneath the apron tightened, then changed with him, seams stretching and reshaping into an older cut that fit a thicker torso.
“Connor got the wrong size or something,” Tyler started to joke, but his voice snagged halfway down into something deeper, rougher. He grabbed the sink.
In the mirror, a dark blur spread over his jaw. Beard stubble pushed through smooth skin all at once, not in patches but in a fast, bristling wave, thickening up his cheeks, darkening his chin, filling into a full beard that framed a face broadening by the second. His cheeks got heavier. The easy, loose planes of a college kid’s face settled into the lined, lived-in structure of a man around fifty. His nose looked more pronounced. Crow’s feet pinched into the corners of his eyes. Beneath the backward cap, the front of his hairline crept backward, temples clearing, then the crown thinning until the cap sat oddly over less hair than it had a second ago.
“Eli!” Tyler said, and the name came out in the voice and tone of his father.
Eli lurched back against the towel rack. “No, no, no.”
His own change was racing him. The glasses on his face shifted as his features thickened underneath them. His jaw got broader. His cheeks filled. The bridge of his nose hardened into a stronger line. Beneath the blue apron, his slim torso filled out, shoulders becoming denser, chest fuller, stomach firmer and thicker. Dark chest hair pushed up under the collar of his T-shirt and spilled higher as if it had always been there. His hairline retreated in a smooth, merciless line at the temples, leaving the front slightly higher, more mature, more undeniably his father’s.
Across his upper lip, a thick dark mustache grew in dense and fast, heavy enough to change his whole expression. His forearms roughened. Hair spread darker over them. Even his posture changed, settling lower and sturdier.
Tyler stared at him in horror. “You look like—”
“Don’t say it,” Eli snapped, except it didn’t come out like Eli anymore. It came out like a man in his early forties who had spent years answering work calls on speakerphone. He clutched the sink next to Tyler, the mustache on his face making the motion look absurdly natural. “You look like your—”
Tyler’s cap no longer fit right. He pulled it off and stared at the thinning hair beneath it, then at the beard shadow swallowing the lower half of his face. Hair had started creeping out at the open neck of his shirt. His arms were thicker, dusted with more hair. His stomach pressed solidly against the apron front.
For one brief, impossible instant, both men understood exactly what was happening. Tyler saw his own father in the mirror wearing his expression and Eli saw his father’s mustache settle onto his own face.
Then the understanding loosened. The panic didn’t vanish so much as slide sideways, becoming confusion with nowhere to land.
Tyler blinked at the mirror. “Why am I…” He frowned. “Whose house is this?”
Eli touched his mustache, puzzled but no longer terrified. “I was looking for a bathroom, I think?”
Tyler peeled the red apron off automatically, as if it were the least important part of the situation, and dropped it on the sink. Eli unlooped the blue one and hung it on a hook near the sink. Then they looked at each other.
“Do I know you?” Tyler asked.
Eli squinted. “Maybe? Why are we in the bathroom together?”
After a few seconds the two middle-aged men walked back into the party like they had taken a wrong turn at a neighborhood cookout.
⸻
Connor noticed Tyler first. Or the man who had been Tyler first anyway. There was a thick-built, bearded man standing by the chips in a better-fitting version of Tyler’s polo, turning slowly in place like he had entered the wrong address. He looked about fifty, broad through the chest and waist, hairline receded, beard neat but full. He had Tyler’s eyes.
Connor laughed out loud before he could stop himself. “Okay, who invited somebody’s dad?”
Mason, coming out of the kitchen, followed his gaze - and then froze. At the far end of the room, another older man had just emerged from the hall. Early forties maybe. Glasses. Receding brown hair. Thick mustache. Sturdier build than Eli had had by a wide margin. He looked around with calm, low-grade confusion and accepted a beer from a passing brother without asking questions.
“That’s not funny,” Mason said quietly.
Connor turned. “What?”
Mason looked from one man to the other. “Where are Tyler and Eli?” Connor’s grin faltered.
The red apron was back downstairs twenty minutes later, crumpled on the arm of a couch. Nobody knew how it got there. The blue one turned up in the upstairs hall, then vanished again.
At first, Connor and Mason tried to find some rational explanation, mostly because the irrational one would have required saying sentences neither of them wanted to say out loud.
Maybe Tyler and Eli had gone home and someone’s actual dads had shown up. Maybe alumni were invited. Maybe the whole house had gotten more drunk than either of them realized.
Then Brandon disappeared into the downstairs laundry room with the red apron over one shoulder, shouting to somebody that he was going to “see if the dad energy hits different.”
He had already been one of the hairier brothers in the house - shirtless under an open flannel, dark chest hair, thick legs, built like he spent more time squatting than he did studying - which he did by a wide margin. Connor almost called after him. Mason actually started to. But by the time they got to the laundry room door, it was shut.
From inside came a muffled curse, then a heavy thump.
Connor knocked once. “Brandon?”
A long pause. Then a gruff: “One second.”
The voice that answered was not Brandon’s voice. Connor and Mason looked at each other. The door opened a crack first, then wider.
Then out popped a man with Brandon’s dark eyes and hairy torso but absolutely nothing else in common. He was broader, thicker, built like the older version of Brandon had been buried inside him all along and had finally gotten his turn to break free. Hair covered his chest in a dense dark spread that disappeared down over a full, powerful belly - more muscle than softness beneath it, but unmistakably a dad gut now. His scalp was mostly bald, the top cleared out and shiny under the overhead light, with only heavier hair around the sides. A thick mustache dominated his face, dark and blunt over his mouth. His forearms were huge and shaggy. He held the red apron in one hand like he had forgotten why.
He blinked at them. “You boys in line for the washer?”
Connor’s mouth fell open. The man frowned, looked at the apron, shrugged, and draped it over a chair before lumbering past them into the party.
Mason grabbed Connor’s forearm. “It’s the aprons!”
Connor shook him off automatically, still staring after Brandon’s father. “No shit, Sherlock!"
By then the party had started to tilt. Not all at once, not with a scream or a flash of lightning. It tilted the way a room tilts in a dream - so gradually that you only noticed once your drink slid off the table.
A skinny sophomore Connor barely knew went upstairs in the blue apron and came back as a narrow, graying man in the frat t-shirt, patting his pockets for car keys and asking if anyone had seen a Honda double-parked on their way in.
A broad-shouldered lacrosse bro vanished into the bathroom with the red apron and emerged later as a ruddy, barrel-chested father with a salt-and-pepper goatee, immediately complaining that the music was too loud.
Another brother came out of the downstairs bathroom older, balder, and deeply offended by the quality of the paper towels.
Some of the transformed men clustered automatically in the kitchen. One found the thermostat and turned it down. Another stood by the snack table talking to no one in particular about propane tanks. A third ended up out back examining the house grill with the solemn concentration of a monk.
Every so often one of them would stop, look around, and ask a question in complete sincerity.
“Is this a fundraiser?”
“Whose basement is this?”
“Why is everybody wearing costumes?”
“What's the password for my phone, my son always tells me...”
They were confused, yes - but not enough to panic. Their minds kept smoothing over the inconsistencies in their existence. A fraternity house party became, in their heads, some hazy event they had probably meant to attend at their son's request. Something odd, but survivable.
Connor and Mason tried to keep track of who was still themselves and failed almost immediately. Faces got slippery. Names blurred. Someone Connor swore had been on the couch earlier was now a bald man in orthopedic sneakers talking about mulch. Mason started a list in his phone, but the names stopped meaning anything halfway down.
Around one in the morning they finally found both aprons together again, abandoned in the upstairs bathroom where Tyler and Eli had changed. Connor picked up the red one. Mason took the blue. The mirror above the sink showed two flushed young men in a tiny fraternity bathroom, scared enough now to be quiet.
“Do it,” Mason said.
Connor nodded. They pulled the aprons back on. Nothing happened. They waited. Still nothing - but they somehow knew nothing would happen and not just because they wore the aprons to the party.
The silence in the room deepened. Mason stared at himself in the mirror, blue apron against his chest. “Why doesn’t it work on us?”
Connor gave the kind of laugh people used when they wanted it to cover everything else. “Maybe we’re just imagining everything and we attended a party that was always full of middle-aged dads?”
Mason turned and looked at him. “Connor.”
There was something in his face then that made Connor look back at the mirror. For one impossible second, the reflection changed. Not fully. Not like the others. Just a flicker.
The young blond guy in the red apron was gone, and in his place stood a middle-aged man with a thicker chest, stronger hands, rougher face - someone older, heavier, deeply familiar. Beside him, Mason flickered too: not brown-haired and twenty, but older, broader, with a more mature face and a darker apron stretched over a much larger body. A costume shop mirror. Narrow changing rooms. Fluorescent light.
A shopping bag. Laughter in voices that were not these voices. Driving home with the aprons. Connor jerked backward so hard he hit the toilet. The image vanished.
Mason grabbed the sink with both hands, breathing hard. “You saw that.”
Connor swallowed. “Yeah.”
Neither of them said what it meant. They didn’t need to.
⸻
By the time dawn started whitening the windows, the ΔΑΔ house no longer felt like a fraternity house. It felt like the after-hours lounge of a suburban rec center that had somehow swallowed a keg party.
Middle-aged men sat on couches rubbing their temples. One of them had started wiping down the kitchen counters. Two others were on the back deck beside the grill, speaking to each other with intense concern about whether the propane line was secure. Somewhere upstairs, a man with a thick mustache was asking if anyone had aspirin and why his son wasn't at the party.
Connor and Mason slipped outside with the aprons folded between them. They sat side by side on the curb in front of the house, the sky just beginning to brighten over the roofs. Empty cups littered the lawn. From inside came the muffled sound of dads talking over one another in confused, practical tones. For a while, neither of them spoke.
Then Mason looked down at the blue apron beside him.
“If it turned all of them into their dads…” he said slowly, “why didn’t it turn us into ours?”
Connor stared at the red apron. The flash from the bathroom had already started to fade, slipping away like a dream right after waking. But the feeling of it remained - older hands, a different body, the terrible certainty that the aprons had recognized them once already. He rubbed his thumb over the word GRILL.
“Maybe,” he said, and had to clear his throat before trying again, “maybe it did...and we have to tell our dads!”
