Pride & Princesses (6 page)

     
‘Shouldn’t hold that against them, we got thrown out of Loratio Academy, remember?’
 
‘Yeah, but those women are vicious, man. If you’re considering introducing them to Petra, I’d think again. The Queen Bee...’

    
‘Which one’s that?’ Mark was yet to learn girl-speak and found the language faintly irritating.

    
‘I think her name’s Teegan.’

    
‘Oh,’ Mark said contemplatively.

    
‘Like I said, I’d think again...’

     
Peter continued, ‘then the newbies went back to the basketball court; more physicality, less conversation. Guys are comfortable relating via sporting analogies. Jet was probably shocked that Mark had even mentioned his sister. Men don’t reveal their emotions easily...’ Peter told us dramatically, I’d joined them both outside and listened intently.

     
Mouche was taking it all in.

    
‘Thanks Peter. Your take on the situation has been enlightening...’ Mouche said as she jotted down a few notes to expand her love theories later.
 

     
I looked around at a bunch of students weaving through the courtyard.

    
‘Are all of these students going to grow up to become adults and what will they take with them into the big wide world?’ I mused quietly.

    
‘The same bigoted, self-centered personalities they’ve displayed here,’ Peter said.

     
Mouche smiled. I laughed in agreement. It seemed most of the sixteen year olds I knew had personalities designed to last a lifetime. They certainly hadn’t changed in the twelve months I’d known them - some of them hadn’t changed since first grade.

      
Last year we’d heard snippets of love conversation flying past us in the halls. That was when we were the semi-anonymous newbies and nobody seemed to care if we heard their scurrilous talk.

   
Boy talk.

   
‘Didn’t those two hook up?’

   
‘Yeah, that’s what I heard’

   
‘So, did he get some?’

   
‘Yeah, I think so.’

   
‘The new student teacher is totally hot...’

    
Ah, hello, the new student teacher is male but drama boys can always be relied upon to be somewhat artistic in their choices.

   
‘Did he get some? The new student teacher?
Are they dreaming? I mean, there’s romance combined with delusion for you there, right there.’ Mouche said.

   
‘Obviously, we are focused on our career plans with good reason.’ I replied.

   
There’s also another reason. When we first arrived for sophomore year, our cousins, Ella and Katie (who are slightly younger than us) had been here since freshman year. They’re not our besties but we are still blood relations and that means something. Our cousins were actually asked out on a sort-of double date with Alex Miller and one of his friends, Tom Allen.

   
Prior to last year, we’d never really spent much time with our cousins. Ella and Katie (who’d started to call themselves Elle and Kate) preferred to hang out with each other which suited Mouche and me because they were super-giggly and boy-crazy. Not so boy-crazy that they’d do anything illegal in the back of the Sunrise bowling alley, though.

   
The day after their ‘big date’ my cousin Ella and Mouche’s cousin Katie told us that Alex and Tom spent most of the evening trying to outdo each other and Tom even ‘forgot’ his wallet and made them pay for everything.

    
Ella continued, ‘then, after ignoring us for an hour and conversing with each other, they tried to
get on us
in their car so Katie and I mutually decided to end the ‘date.’ The girls had been learning karate and had apparently had to get tough with those badly behaved boastful pre-men.

    
‘So I guess you could say we
double dated at the bowling alley.
It was kind of fun, but not as much fun as Alex Miller and Tom Allen
say
they’d had.’ Katie added.

     
We were surprised to learn via the
Alex-Allen
web site that ‘hanging out’ with Ella and Katie had evolved into a full on scandal the following week. Even the Princesses got to add their ten cents worth. Ella and Katie had morphed from nice to seriously heinous and slutty. Then, because the words of males seemed to hold more value than the words of females, the students in general believed the boy’s version of the story.

   
‘People need to learn a lesson,’ Mouche mused, ‘a lesson in social etiquette.’

   
‘And we are just the ones to teach them,’ I realized. We wanted to challenge ourselves to motivate these pre-men and women; to interest them in the romantic trysts of another era; without them realizing they were part of our game - a game we could turn into fun with quotes and helpful hints and even a treasure hunt.

    
That’s how the plan for the
Boy-Rating Diaries
came into existence and was ultimately turned into a dare.
 

   
Mouche once said, ‘sometimes I think we belong in a Jane Austen film or a Bronte novel.
    
When I was little, like twelve, I thought my first great love affair would be exactly like
Wuthering Heights.’

   
‘Except you don’t need to die at the end,’ I replied.
 

   
‘Of course not,’ Mouche said, ‘but not all the best stories have happy endings.’

Chapter 4

Gossip and Rules

    
That evening, I was finishing my homework in my room when Mouche came over to invite me for a swim. After school I just liked to relax and hang out with Mouche and her baby sister, Wednesday, but I usually had to finish my homework first. Since my mom was at work, I grabbed my suit.

    
‘Don’t bother with the towel,’ Mouche said, and off we went to climb the fence between our houses, like we’d done for the past decade.

     
As we lay on our lounges, we considered the merits of our Sunrise News Blog – something we’d been updating for the past year - the live feed anti-snark version of the Princess blog. You could visit the Sunrise News Blog anytime of the day to hear about the daily life of Sunrise High in cyberspace. Princessesbf.com was nastier and more exclusive; fashion tips for the desperate and dateless, unfortunate Sunrise High teachers, that sort of thing. The Princesses always wanted to control the legitimate ‘school blog’,
Sunrise News
, but Mouche and I (token editors), had other ideas.

   
‘Always have the end in sight at the beginning,’ Mouche began. ‘Planning is the basis of every successful enterprise...’ You could just tell Mouche is going to be a sensational lawyer someday, though I’m not entirely sure what she has in mind.

   
We’d been planning for a while.

   
The last weekend of vacation was spent watching hundreds of old high school and romantic movies for ideas. It had been a truly amazing summer holiday filled with evenings of swimming, feasting, DVD watching and looking over all our old photographs and letters to each other, written in baby-handwriting in those early years before we gained access to texting and the web.

   
Antique memories made us sentimental.

   
By third grade, we used to drop off notes before school for the other to read when they got home and thus began our pink leather bound, feather-writing hobby; a rehearsal for the Boy-Rating Diary we would one day co-author.

    
We had a secret hole in the brick wall between our fences where we kept my grandmother’s cake tin lined in plastic to protect the letters from the rain. And every afternoon I would sit on my grandmother’s porch (she only lived one street away) and read or write to Mouche – depending on whose turn it was to do either.

   
We shared a lot of secrets over those years, stuff that doesn’t seem important now but really seemed to matter when we were eight, and ten and twelve.

   
It was our discussion on the third night of junior year
that led to the drafting of
The Boy Rating Rules -
that and our supernatural instincts.

   
Sometimes Mouche and I don’t even have to talk to know what the other is thinking and
 
Mouche can occasionally predict events that haven’t yet happened,
 
but never for herself, only for others and only if they are good.
 

   
That night, Mouche had her Tiffany playing cards spread before her. She had made up a different meaning for each card and had amusing ways of applying different people to each of the playing cards which ‘inspired’ her vibes about the future.
 
For example, the Queen of Hearts was red (light in colour) and represented her and her desire to fall in love. I was the Queen of clubs (dark hair, pale skin) Teegan (Diamonds, light hair (red) but ‘money-orientated’ and Freya the Queen of Spades (a dark haired untrustworthy female - at least, that was the meaning for the cards tonight). Then Phoebe would put all the face cards representing the girls she knew and cut cards (red meaning ‘yes’ and black meaning ‘no’) until she had dealt the final card to answer her question.

    
Tonight’s question was, ‘will Mouche meet the love of her life this year?’

   
If the cards were dealt until the end and either me or Mouche or both of us ended up with a red card, we would meet ‘the one’.

    
‘Of course, a real teen psychic wouldn’t need cards but sometimes our intuition about ourselves requires a little push along. Besides, I’d never claim to be totally psychic, just kind of telepathic. I can feel when the Princesses are using their negative energy against us,’ Mouche said, spraying essential oils to deflect bad energy.

     
‘Oh, me too. I’m not
actually
psychic, but I totally read people. I sense it when they like me or when they give me their nasty, jealous vibes...’ I added.

     
We’d both been victims of the jealous vibe at HSYL. In any case, our card games were just for fun. We had a rule – never to ask a bad question that we didn’t want to know the answer to and never to dwell on anything negative or mean.