Freak Week

Chapter 1

Dear Robot Diary,

First of all, I was going to try to give you some badass secret code name like "Long-winded Grocery List" or "Not A Diary" in the hopes that it would keep people from reading you, but then I realized that Robot Diary is probably enough. Anyone who would voluntarily subject themselves to the overly-emotional-vomit of a teenage girl's 'diary' is clearly on a mission to ruin their own day and who am I to stop them.

Second of all, yes, I'm a teenage female. Though recently my friend Jessica (who also recently renamed herself Banana) warned me about ageist and sexist self-identification. "Classification is something society forces on us," she said to me after homeroom on Monday. "If I have to, I choose to describe myself as an amorphous, perpetual breath machine of the multi-layered, X chromosome persuasion. Or just Banana." Then Banana whipped out an actual banana from her oversized backpack and held it in front of me. "Go ahead, just try and gender my banana."

"Why don't you try and gender my banana?" interrupted Harry, captain of the lacrosse team and resident small-minded jock. Then he grabbed Banana's banana and air humped it a couple times. "Yo Banana, you know what goes good with fruit? Nuts!" he mocked, laughing with his gaggle of athletic idiots. Banana stared at him, blank faced. "You probably don't want this banana anymore, huh?" Harry asked while struggling to open the fruit. Then we watched as the massive physical specimen in front of us wrestled with the yellow peel, flopping it against lockers and flailing it against the foreheads of his teammates but still failing to open it. "YO SCREW THIS," he shouted, and shoved the whole thing into his mouth at once.

"That's not the right-" Banana started.

"YOU'RE NOT THE RIGHT SHUT UP. LET'S GO, GUYS" Harry yelled and headed down the hallway. His pimple-faced posse followed him, some of them shoving whatever they could find in their mouth as a sign of solidarity.

Hmm...sorry I get sidetracked a lot. Why did I tell you that story, Robot Diary?

Oh, right, yes. It was a quick anecdote inspired by me being a girl.

Back to introducing myself. My name is Lace Heavensmall. I'm a senior at Greatway High School and I'm currently writing to you from the school's basement while I seek shelter from the storm outside. But, let me warn you, this is no average storm.

This is a Shih Tzu storm.

Yes, you read that correctly. Actual Shih Tzus, those adorable, floppy dogs that always look confused as to how they're alive, are currently raining from the sky. Why is this happening, you ask?

Because Freak Week has begun.

Allow me to explain. It's currently the year 2021, but it all started in 2017, well actually 2016, when warnings about climate change reached a fever pitch but we chose to ignore them. Because, let's be honest, it's hard to worry about things that might happen in the future when you have real problems right now. I, for example, was growing out bangs at the time.

I remember sitting in Freshman Biology, watching a nature documentary that was, for the most part, very boring except for a part where two praying mantises started mating and then the female ATE THE MALE'S HEAD. SHE JUST STRAIGHT UP ATE IT. Which I was NOT expecting but somehow it gave me a deeper understanding and appreciation of a lot of pop music.

Anyway, sorry, sidetracked.

AFTER the intense mantis sequence, an unexpectedly attractive old guy started to mention global warming and said if we didn't do something, bad things would happen. My friend Marmalade (we call her Marmie for short) stood up and pointed to her crotch and screamed, "Hey buddy, I got something you can do, and trust me bad things will happen." We all laughed even though we were only thirteen and didn't totally understand the joke.