Missing Person Report #452966

He's gone. Abe's gone.



On Saturday night while I was desperately trying to place the face of the man who was sitting across from me and yelling about his pregnant wife and New Kids on the Block, a man who turned out to be my next-door neighbor from college and, coincidentally, the brother of my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, that's when Ex-Keith was hatching his plan to abduct Amy's creepy bust of Abe Lincoln.

It strikes me as odd that Keith was able to hatch and execute this plan without getting caught. I am especially impressed by this because Keith was quite drunk on Saturday night—drunk enough to yell, "TAKE OFF YOUR PANTIES!" to me while sitting no less than four inches from his girlfriend. The fact that he was, after the panties debacle, able to go on and have tact and sleuth is admirable.

Keith has hatched many a plan in his life, and many of those plans have gone horribly, horribly wrong. For instance, there was the time Keith's mother went out of town and I came over to spend the night. He'd planned the whole thing. I was to arrive after she left. We would order pizza and watch movies. I would lie to my parents and tell them I was at Amy's when I was really spending one of my first nights with a boy in a place where there was no parental supervision.

When I got to his house, we rolled a mattress into the middle of the living room and slept right there, five feet from the front door. In his planning, Keith never stopped to consider that his mother would change her mind about how long she was going to be away that next day. He never stopped to consider she would pass over a meat raffle in favor of heading home to spend an afternoon reading magazines and watching Walker, Texas Ranger. We woke in the morning to the sound of her rattling her keys against the front door.

Keith said, "Oh my God—my mother's home! Run!"

And I, fearing that his mother would think I was some sort of loose girl with sketchy morals, launched out of bed and dashed into his bedroom, where I pretended to have been sleeping all night, very far away from her son.

She must've thought we were morons.

But the plan Keith hatched on Saturday night was far more intricate than the mattress in the living room plan.

For most of the night, Abe—whose bust was ready for Halloween and wearing a purple feathered Mardis Gras mask—sat next to me at the table. He sat through round after roud after round of Asshole. He watched my lips turn redder and redder from the Hurricanes. He survived several almost-drops from my old college neighbor. At one point, Keith stripped him of his mask and started wearing it on his own face, but Abe sat by like the mild and compassionate soul he is.

We never even noticed when Keith stuffed him into the empty beer case and escorted him out to the car. We didn't notice this because, well, we were doing the Electric Slide in the living room. We were also wearing boas. We are not to blame.

Anyway, the next morning my phone rang, and it was Keith.

"Missing anything?" he asked.

I was wasting a considerable amount of time ridding my mouth of the red Hurricane stains, but I couldn't so much identify that I was missing anything, so I said so. "No," I said. "WHAT DID YOU DO?"

"Where's Abe?" he asked.

It turns out that Abe, after being shoved into the empty beer box and run down to the car, found a new home atop Ex-Keith and Big Head's mantel.

"He looks pretty good there," Keith said. "Pretty comfortable."

Well played, Ex-Keith. Well played. And to think, there used to be a time when you loved and worshipped me instead of stole creepy busts of ex-presidents that belong to my best friend. That time looked like this:



We want our Lincoln back, you crazy New Englander.