The Twaters are coming, the Twaters are coming!

"No way. I can't believe it. I honestly can not believe it. He does realize there are, like, black people in Africa, right?" squawked the voice of a distant friend on my cell phone's speaker phone. I looked up at my companion and she was throwing her head back in mid-cackle.

"I know, right? No, no, no, wait, you have to hear Cindy's plan for when he gets back," retorted my immediately present friend who had righted herself just before her chair's tipping point. The last two legs landed with an echo through out the lofty, sterile kitchen. She looked up at me before continuing, as if waiting for me to open my mouth and begin the story just so she could take it from me.

"She's going to throw a 'Congrats, you didn't get AIDS party!'" the echo of the chair legs still reverberating as she spewed out the punchline.

"Yeah, well, we better make sure he doesn't have AIDS before we print the banners," the phone's voice retorted with static cling. "I mean, Trey?? I can see Cindy doing something like that, but Trey Waters? The boy wears pink!" The weed we smoked earlier made my mouth sealed with resin but my mind rattled with excuses as to why it would never be me absconding to Africa for two years.

The top of the list was my love of weed. What African country contains the best climate for marijuana cultivation? Are there Peace Corps programs there or are the countries with the ideal climate too stable to require aid or undergoing a mass genocide so I have to wait until the dictator is assassinated? Images of me being planted in a remote West African village and then spawning a mass drug trafficking economy with children plucking out buds floated through my head like sugar plums and dancing bears. Site monitors would visit me and see a ten year old boy driving a BMW. When they ask me how the boy got such a luxurious car, I would use the excuse I always heard growing up, "His father is a workaholic and doesn't know how to love so he gifts things to his 27 children. His 7 year old daughter owns 3 ponies."

"Can you imagine what he's like out there?" the phone continued.

"Oh, you should read his emails," the resin sealing my lips was burning off, "his villagers are always drunk. He tried to hold a meeting at 6:00 AM so nobody would show up drunk, but someone did show up wasted, yelled for 20 minutes, and then passed out in the corner."

The story was true. I didn't include Trey's exasperation regarding his frustration with working locals. And I didn't bother mentioning the visual I had of my brother waking up drunk after a party we put together while our parents were away. One friend remained passed out on the lawn chair, the plastic, empty wine bag distorting his Marine tattoo, meanwhile another friend sprawled out on our kitchen table. Trey came down the stairs in his lacrosse shorts and glasses perched awkwardly on his nose. I stopped filling the plastic garbage bag with bottles and looked up at him in amazement. The beauty of being a pothead is that you don't wake up hungover.

"You don't have to worry about that," Trey started looking at the two garbage bags waiting by the kitchen door for the mandatory dump run, "I got it." I picked up another glass bottle and dropped it within the bag, the sound of the bottle clanking next to its brothers sent a grimace and noticeable wave of nausea through him.

"Yeah, I have to do this. Mom and Dad come home in 8 hours," I dutifully replied. After years of experience cleaning up after parties, I wasn't about to ruin my perfect streak of never getting caught. Trey shrugged, and left me with the garbage bag. In his lacrosse shorts and sweat stained pool cleaning shirt, he left through the front door, carefully shutting it.

Just before the third bag hit the point of overflowing, Trey came home through the front door, slamming it shut behind him. He dropped a bagel and coffee for me on the kitchen counter and an egg sandwich for himself. He took the egg sandwich to the kitchen table, right by his passed out friend's head and shouted, "Wake up, you fucking idiot!!" He spat at his friend with the egg and cheese caught in his mouth, and turned on the Mclaughlin Group.

Eleanor's shrill voice shouted about the woman's right to dictate laws regarding her body awoke the sleeping Marine. The Marine's scratchy, booming voice was muffled by the plastic wine bag over face, but you should still clearly hear him shout, "Turn that fucking shit off!"

Trey looked outside, and said his most commonly repeated phrase, "No," with his voice rising at the sound of the "o" which morphed into an "e" sound and abruptly stopped at the realization the vowel had magically changed. He punctuated with his "no" by taking out a new garbage bag and dropping three glass bottles right by the Marine's head.

The voice on the phone was repeating herself, and I looked at the phone searching for a recordplayer's arm to fix so needle freed itself from its infinite loop, "No way Trey is in Africa. No freakin' way."

Here is where I mention that the voice on the phone was my oldest friend, a playmate I've had since I was two and still bald. I didn't talk when I was two either, but not because my mouth was sealed shut with resin. The voice on the phone had played with me while I realized the infinite possibilities of playing with dolls, she stood by me while we danced around in tutus and black leotards, she was there for me after those tragically awkward middle school dances. The voice on the other end was also there for my first (and last) sip of Parrot Bay, she was my first passenger in my car after I got my license (the Parrot Bay and driving may or may not have happened on the same day).

Somewhere between my move out to California and my first acid trip, the voice on the phone became just a voice on the phone. She moved from my hometown in Connecticut to Maryland after her Mom lost her house after a bitter divorce. I called the voice on the phone after driving by her old house and seeing it leveled to the ground, plans for a McMansion was posted on the tree I almost hit while blindly backing out of her driveway.

However, the voice on the phone had the truest reaction to hearing about Trey's commitment to Ghana for two years. People I just meet ask if I have siblings, and I say yes, I do, a brother. When they ask the necessary follow up question of where he is, and I respond he's in the Peace Corps their face lights up in amazement. "Oh, that's so wonderful! Good for him!" at first I basked in the stranger's congratulations for having such an amazing relation, but after the voice on the phone said what I had been thinking for a year, I stopped accepting the praise.

"Yeah, well, I don't think you understand just how strange it is that he's there. I mean, the boy is an alcoholic, he buys $150 flip flops, wears pink, and even got tailor made khakis in Nepal after his last pair of Brook Brother's slacks got torn."

Now that he is coming home in two days, I can't be bothered worrying about accepting undeserved praise or correcting their built up steroetypes of Peace Corps volunteers. I just repeat to myself, he gets back in two days. He gets back in two days after two years.