PRIDE & PRINCESSES: A Pride and Prejudice (type) of teen story (Sunrise High #1)

PRIDE & PRINCESSES chapter three (Girl History)

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 neighborhood 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 d 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 s.