WEDNESDAY'S GOLDFISH

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PRIDE & PRINCESSES page 36

    ‘Our Game will make junior year the most memorable yet,’ Mouche declared over ice-cream, after we’d cleared away our playing cards, runes, tea leaves and crystals.

     Mouche dragged me back into the pool. We lounged under the night lights on Wednesday’s huge, plastic, floating goldfish. Mouche dragged me around with her until we were playing whirlpool and before we knew it, we were having a water fight about whose ideas ruled.

     Have you ever been swimming at night in the heat? It’s amazing, even though Mouche’s older brother, Trey (the grouch), kept yelling at us from the study window to turn it down when we started playing Muse.

    Trey was studying pre-med and was a total brainiac with no time for the absurdities of two teenage girls, even if one of them was his sister; especially if one of them was his sister. 

   ‘Hey, quiet!’ he shouted. ‘I’m trying to study and Wednesday’s supposed to be asleep.’

    Admittedly, we’d slipped one of Mrs Mouche’s cocktail mixers into our Cokes and were feeling extremely giddy; however, we realize teen drinking is not okay and so wrong (especially when near water or highways) and would never recommend it to our readers.

    We had serious hangovers the next morning. Mrs Mouche locked up the liquor cabinet when she found out and Trey promised never to leave us entirely to our own devices again.

    After dancing to retro music dressed in the 1920’s outfits we’d worn in last year’s version of Guys and Dolls, we collapsed in a corner, embraced sobriety and resumed our discussion about the perfect junior year.

    Our ideas were all pretty...ordinary: film club, blog page additions, debate club, a musical, an entire month devoted to writing up the play rehearsals, a fashion show, a themed prom (that would be left to the Princesses in the end) until Mouche and I started talking about how the mainstream boys at our school were very romantically de-motivated, and most of the artistic majors were obviously more than a little gay.

PRIDE & PRINCESSES page 35

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.

     Mouche was still dealing; she had nine cards left...

    ‘Red, red, black, red, black...and here are the answers for two Princesses: Teegan (black), Tory (black), and Phoebe...’

    ‘Don’t turn it!’ I suddenly screamed.

    ‘It’s just a game Pheebs, besides, you can never be sure of the vibes for yourself...and only God knows the future...’

     ‘Oh..okay,’ I was ready to look with one hand covering my right eye ‘...red.’

     Phoebe smiled.

     ‘Now it’s my turn... you know what? I’m not going to look!’

     ‘You promised!’ I yelled.

     ‘The future is what you make it; it can change every second...I’m going for a swim.’

     Just as Mouche stuck her card in the middle of the pack, a corner hung out. When she turned her back to dive into the water, I sneaked a peak.

     The card was red. It was the Ace of Hearts. True love.       

PRIDE & PRINCESSES (page 34)

    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?’

Page 33 (next chapter) PRIDE & PRINCESSES by Summer Day

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.

First Draft Phoebe

    This was in the first chapter of the original draft of Pride & Princesses...
      

    "Unfortunately, this is not a supernatural story, and I doubt it’s a love story but I hope it ends up being supernaturally interesting – at least to you, my fly on the wall, my reader, my friend; Mouche. Ha, gotcha. You thought it was you, didn’t you? Well unless something very strange happens, Mouche and I are the only ones who ever get to read this which makes me a little bit, shall we say, free with the prose. I might even include some truly heinous teenage boy love poetry..."

Summer Day: First chapter of Pride & Princesses by Summer Day

Summer Day: First chapter of Pride & Princesses by Summer Day