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

GOSSIP & RULES (chapter four)

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 color) 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.