Looking for an Explanation

Ernest was certainly perplexed, but he was also starting to get wet. Quickly, he moved onto the dry front porch. His mother and sisters were almost certainly all asleep, so he'd have to let himself back in. He fumbled in his pocket, and withdrew his keys. There was the house key, next to the key to the mailbox, the key to his bike lock... and a fob that he didn't recognize.

A Chevrolet key fob.

Heart in his throat, Ernest pressed the 'unlock' button. And sure enough, the headlights on the Corvette in the driveway flashed, and he heard the tell-tale thunk of the doors unlocking.

He turned away, shoving the house key into the lock and opening the door. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and slumped to a seat on the bench that rested just inside the entrance.

After the initial shock, Jessica realized that there wasn't any point looking for Ernest anymore. Not here, anyway. Samantha said he'd left, and Tiff had left too, so Jess was going to have to think of another option. Maybe she could text him, or call him? She was pretty sure she still had his number in her phone, an artifact of their class project last year.

Her phone was still upstairs in her room. Jess dashed up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

At this point, Ernest was having a difficult time explaining what was happening to him. Tiffany picking him up could be dismissed as a weird coincidence. The Corvette could have been a prank -- though who would have both the motive and the means to pull a stunt involving an expensive car was a complete mystery. But getting the fob to the car onto his key ring? That was some next level shit, something that would have been both extraordinarily difficult to do -- after all, his keys had been in his pocket for the whole time he was at the party, and there certainly hadn't been a fob for a Corvette on them before he'd left his house -- and utterly random, since there was no obvious joke or payoff.

Ernest replayed the entire evening in his mind. Nothing had happened that was out of the ordinary until he'd found that ring. After that, he'd started to walk home, the storm had threatened, he'd wished he had a ride... and Tiffany had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, hell-bent on giving him a ride home. Then they'd talked about Tiffany's Corvette, Ernest had wished he had one of his own... and the car had somehow showed up in his driveway, with Tiff insisting that it had been there all along.

"When you have eliminated the impossible," Sherlock Holmes says in The Sign of the Four, "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

It seemed completely ludicrous that the ring was granting Ernest's wishes, but he couldn't think of another explanation that made even the slightest bit of sense. It was ridiculous, absurd -- but it had the advantage of being a hypothesis he could actually test.

Ernest stared at the ring, which still perched on his index finger, and said, "I wish someone was here to explain to me where that car came from..."

And then, in some combination of exasperation, flippancy, and disbelief, he added, "...and that it was the girl of my dreams. Pretty sure that isn't gonna happen."

KNOCK KNOCK

Ernest slowly raised his head. Though he couldn't see who it was, someone was here, knocking on the door of his house at one in the morning, less than a second after he'd finished uttering the words. Was this the proof he'd been waiting for (albeit without really expecting)? There was only one way to find out.

He stood, and opened the door.