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-bitch version of www.princessesbf.com. 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 bitchier 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; starting with Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and Some Kind of Wonderful – then ending up with Buffy and The Notebook, Clueless and Veronica Mars. 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.
