Pride & Princesses (4 page)

   
‘...And Jet was undressing me with his eyes this morning, in the hallway before homeroom.’

    
Brooke rolled her eyes, ‘Everyone wants the pretty,’ she said smugly, ‘I bet I could even turn Peter straight.’

    
Freya looked doubtful. I turned my head to glance over at the new boys, hopefully without them realizing it. To my dismay, they were looking at the Princesses who smiled gleefully right back at them.

   
‘Wishful thinking,’ Mouche mused as she ate her sandwich.

   
‘Oh please, those girls are disgusting,’ I said, wondering if what they said was true about how much all the boys wanted them.
 

   
‘How they are so secure about their popularity with guys, I don’t know, since there were no males at all to practise on in our previous school,’ Mouche added.

   
‘Maybe they did a summer internship,’ I added.

    
Mouche laughed.
 

   
‘C’mon,’ Mouche said and we wandered off to the gym to prepare our shoes for the prospective year. We pulled our pink ballet slippers, newer than they would ever look again, out of our individual tote bags.

    
At the gym, we began rolling the moistened, darned tips of pink satin shoe in chalk in preparation for class. We smacked the ends on the gym floor to soften the toes. It was quite a long process and one we started at the beginning of the school year and repeated many times. We had to soften the soles, but not too much. There were a few other dance majors in a huddle with us. They all had good posture and acted friendlier than they really were.

    
Although Mouche and I want to go to New York one day, I’m very focused on high school life and training to become a triple threat, whilst Mouche concentrates on dance, acting and her academic majors.

Our day goes something like this:

Morning

Home room

English

Biology

History

Lunch

Dance class

Singing class

Acting class

Home room

   
As you can see, my schedule beats the usual academia from nine to three plus I managed to drop math and science, which is a good thing because I am totally driven. Even though I might seem shy, I’m never shy onstage, when I’m pretending to be someone else – living in the moment, so to speak.

   
By the time the Princesses -
Teegan, Tory, Brooke and Freya - arrived in the gym, it was pretty obvious they thought they were slumming it at Sunrise High. The girls had an air of superiority which clung to them like cheap cologne. Their dance ensembles were still colour co-ordinated, but mercifully their matching black leggings were covered by mini-skirts in various styles (bubble, pleated, ruched and vintage A-line). They were so psyched about not having to wear the HSYL uniforms, they kind of went overboard in the fashion department. The Princesses thought dance class was a beauty pageant.

   
They thought they were totally
it.

   
‘We’re going to get with so many guys this year,’ Teegan snarled as she whipped off her skirt and re-tied the satin ribbons on her ballet shoes. She stuck her foot close to the bar next to my hand.

   
‘I was warming up,’ I said.
   

   
‘Excuse me!’ Teegan snarled haughtily.

    
I inched my fingers out of the way as Tory walked over, claimed her spot on the bar and began to flex her ankles.

     
It wasn’t that Tory was a bad dancer, but she was certainly uninspiring. Although the Princesses never planned on careers in the entertainment business, it didn’t make them any less snarky about women who did.

    
Tory found her spot on the wall and began her mechanical plis. Brooke fumbled around in her tote bag searching for her hair clip. Teegan abandoned the bar and applied extra gloss to her ample mouth and Freya pulled her hair into a tight bun, keen to look the part even if she couldn’t dance it. Wow, now I’m starting to sound like a Princess.
 

    
Besides, I’m giving you the wrong impression.

    
The Princesses aren’t the main characters in this story. They are just the featured extras, the minor players. They may highlight our plot from time to time but I can’t say for sure how big a part they’ll play as the story progresses.

    
For now, this tale is really just about me and Mouche and Mark Knightly and his best friend Jet and all the teenage boys we determined to transform from geeks to our personal princes in the course of a year.

   
This story is also about the plan of action that became a guide we intended to modify as the year progressed. The plan that became the
Boy-Rating Diary.

   
‘I’d give them a 9.9,’ Teegan said as she performed a reasonable arabesque.

   
‘I’d give them a 9.8’ Mouche replied after she did a perfect pirouette. ‘There’s always room for improvement.’

    
‘I think you’re talking about the same men,’ I said under my breath as I pointed my toes and leant over the bar.

    
‘Game on,’ Mouche replied with a smile.

    
‘But we haven’t even worked out the rules,’ I whispered under my breath.

    
‘A minor detail,’ Mouche replied.

    
‘Not necessarily,’ I said.

     
Everyone stopped talking when Mrs Stefanovich, the dance teacher, arrived.

     
Mrs Stefanovich was Russian and very strict and even the Princesses were careful to tow the line with her.

     
‘Okay girls, ve are ready now...begin...’

     
But the whole class, I was thinking about how we’d devise
the plan
. And as I looked across at Mouche’s furrowed brow, I could tell, so was she.
      

Chapter 3

Girl History

    
Now before I let you in on the game plan for boy-dating and rating, I should really give you some historical information.
     

   
Mouche and I met in first grade which is why, although we don’t condone the Princesses’ prickly behaviour, we do understand the bond fused between them.

   
There was also a subtle but competitive bond between me and Mouche.

   
You can really trace the competition between us back to our first day of nursery school when Mouche turned up in the same pink-spotted smock and leggings and immediately noticed a usurper for
most fashionable
. We ended up having a painting competition that morning. Most of the paint landed on me and we spent the afternoon sitting in opposite ‘time out’ corners.

    
We bonded after the shared punishment. Then we found out we liked the same things (reading, painting and performing), until Mouche, who didn’t even want to
be
on Broadway, stole my agent. Well, I suppose you could say my agent (and his Simon Cowell accent) stole her. Anyway, it worked out for the best since Mouche and I started to attend acting auditions after Thom (pronounced Tom) saw us in a school play.

     
We rarely secured the jobs from those auditions, but travelling into Los Angeles, we still managed to share a laugh and a cab ride back home. Our mothers, Mrs Mouche and Trish, took it in turns to accompany us. They were willing moms but unwilling stage mothers. We literally had to drag them along because we were legally required to have guardians. They just didn’t get the whole acting thing and were wary of their children ‘being exploited.’ Pl-lease. We totally wanted to be exploited (because back then, we didn’t even know what the word meant).
    

    
That’s sort of how Mrs Mouche and my mom, Trish, met. After our Daddies ran off together they became
slummy mommies
and
mommies who drink
. Incidentally, the other neighbourhood mommies were probably a lot more badly behaved than our mothers. In fact, the Sunrise Golf Club was recently revealed to be a hot bed of suburban lunchtime affairs. But Mrs Mouche and Trish were under the microscope because their men had run off together. Sunrise thrives on low-level gossip and scandal but absent fathering is no reason to brand us as the underprivileged offspring of dysfunctional parenting.

    
It’s funny how you need ‘more’ community support when something goes awry in your family but people, in our case, gave us less. It takes a village... For example, each of our fathers let our mothers know that ‘
education was wasted on girls who would just grow up and get married like they did’
– well, not quite the way they did. Our Daddies might be gay but it doesn’t mean they’re not just as chauvinistic as other men. I mean, what century are we in people,
the eighteenth
? However, if both our Daddies hadn’t stopped paying our school fees by the time we turned fifteen, we would not have transferred to Sunrise and junior year may never have happened as it did.

    
Unfortunately, our plans for boy dating and rating were heading for dust once the Princesses arrived at Sunrise High. Although their mere presence inspired us to take notice of the way boys behaved around them, the truth is, even they were shocked by how much the boys seemed to ignore them after their initial surprise. They thought a co-ed school would be different and ‘the cute girls’ would be worshipped by every boy who crossed their paths. But so far, they were wrong. They were being overshadowed by the newbies.
 

   
By the third day of the new semester, Mark and Jet made a re-appearance, late, at exactly three minutes past nine in our combined home room class.

    
The Princesses were sitting in a pack towards the front and Mouche and I were sitting in the corner. I was staring through the window wondering how I’d ever get out of Sunrise when Mark brushed past me to hand a late slip to Miss Tartt who was obviously taken with him. You could tell she thought he was good-looking by the way she fluttered her eye-lashes.