• Published 15th May 2012
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Be Human: the All-American Girl Sidestories - Shinzakura



Sidestories for the All-American Girl series

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The Stallion and the Girl, Part Three

“Que sem ela não pode ser”
- João Gilberto




“Are you sure?” Mike said, completely surprised. He looked at both Carlos and Erica, scanning for some indicator, some sign that this was all a joke at his expense, that what he heard couldn’t be true and he’d just embarrassed himself in the hugest way possible. The three were in Isaac’s Caribbean Café – The Best Little Jamaican Coffee Shop in Winchester! –sans DJ. She was up in Baltimore for the day; the Johns Hopkins Biomedical Research Center wanted to harvest stem cells from her to create replacement organ tissue and bone should she ever be in a position to require them.

Both of his friends sat there, drinking their coffee, not saying a thing.

“Guys, this isn’t funny,” he warned. “If you’re just fucking with me, come clean now.”

“We’re not,” Erica said, finally. “DJ feels about you the same way as you do about her.”

Mike looked at them like they were crazy. “She does?”

Carlos looked at Erica. “Should we tell him?” When she nodded, Carlos said, “You know that Nestle stuff you’ve been sniffing the last couple of days?”

“Yeah. Smells great, though last time it made me want to….”

The Hispanic teen grinned. “Yeah, thought so, boy. The thing is, you were feelin’ it because she was pumpin’ it – those were pheromones you were feeling. Apparently she produces a pheromone, PEA – it’s a natural chemical in cocoa – and it’s tailored to work on people she’s attracted to.”

Mike suddenly felt downcast. “So all I’m feeling is just the need to breed? That’s it? Just because of chemicals?”

Erica shook her head. “How do you feel about her now?”

“I’m still attracted to her because of her smile, her personality, her brains. And though it might be silly to say, I’m not attracted to her because of her looks; she could be human and I’d still feel the same way.”

“And when was the last time you talked to her?”

“That’d be Friday evening, on the phone, when I had to tell her about the stuff I got set for the party. Not since.”

Erica smiled. “And there you go – pheromones only last for a few minutes. You haven’t seen her in three days, so the pheromones have long since worn off. Furthermore, and be honest with yourself: the pheromones make you want to get physical with her…but you’re not attracted to her for her looks.” She reached over and patted his hand. “Face it, tiger: you just hit the jackpot.”

A smile seemed to come onto his face as majestically as a sun rose over the horizon. “So I’m in love with a girl like no other.”

Carlos grinned. “Yeah. Of course it goes without saying that if you hurt her, we’ll beat the motherlovin’ crap outta you.” Erica joined in on that smirk, and for a second, Mike felt as though he were under a microscope.

“Well, that settles it, then. If she’s feeling the same way about me that I am about her, I probably should say something, you know?”

“Why not wait until the night of the party?” Erica suggested. “It’s a casual place, no one’s on the spot and it’ll give you a couple of weeks to think about what you’ll say and give me a couple of weeks to prepare her.”

“Why do you need to prepare her?” both boys asked.

“Guys, it’s a girl thing,” Erica replied. “Falling in love is a special moment for girls, and it’s really going to be a special moment for her. Who knows, might even be special for the both of you, a first step in a life together forever.”

Mike chuckled. “You make it sound as if I’m going to marry her.”

“Well, who knows?” she said. “My aunt Kerri met my uncle while they were in high school, so I can’t see why you can’t have a lifetime of love.”

“Too far into the future to even see,” Mike answered. “Heck, I’ve just barely thought that I have to think about in the relative near future where I’m going for college.”


“Hello, Marcy,” Serena said to the girl as she ran into her at the Apple Blossom Mall.

“Oh…he-hello, Serena,” Marcy said nervously. Of all the people to run into, she had to run into the brains of the Valerie Squad. Valerie’s reputation could get someone in trouble with just a say-so, but it was really bad if you ran afoul of Serena. There was already a rumor that Serena had cooked up something while in Eighth Grade to get a rival girl arrested for shoplifting; whether or not it was true, it had added to her fearsome reputation.

“Easy, I don’t bite,” she said. “In fact, I was going to get a bite for dinner; my parents are out of town and I’ve been dying to try the boulangerie on the other side of the mall. Would you like to join me? My treat.”

“Sure!” Marcy said, enjoying a chance to eat out. Things were tight at home right now and Marcy had to give up her piano lessons because the family couldn’t afford them, instead having to learn the way the first piano players did: by ear.

Then a sudden thought came upon her: why was Serena being nice to her?

As if somehow reading her mind Serena gave her a smile and said, “I must confess, I have a problem as of late and I don’t know how to solve it. I can’t go to Valerie, you see, because…well, she’s my friend and I wouldn’t want to be at odds over this. So I thought I’d just go with a neutral party, someone known around school for being fair. That’d be you, Marcy.”

“I…see.” Marcy was confused, to say the least: she had that kind of reputation around school? It was a first to her.

“I was talking to Jenna Barnaby,” Serena said breezily, “and she told me that the reason she and Doug Summers patched things up over the summer is because you talked to both and helped them get through their problems. Plus, I have to admire your determination: your family life being the way it is, and despite all the stuff you have to do for school and band and keep up those grades.

“How’d you…?”

Serena laughed. “Jenna told me everything; in fact, she couldn’t stop gushing about how much you did to save their relationship. Ah, here we are.” They were now at the front of the Palais du Rose, a Franco-Vietnamese restaurant that had just opened up a few months ago and was already the talk of the small town. The maître d’ showed them to a table and the two continued to talk.

“Oh, okay. Well, I was glad to help Jenna. She and Doug are perfect for each other, and it’d be a shame to see them break up because he went to Winchester City High instead of our private school.” As the waiter brought menus, she asked, “So what can I do for you?”

Serena blushed. “I…well, okay, I’ll be forthright: I’m kinda smitten on Michael Hengst. You know the new kid you and your group hang out with?”

There was a slightly crestfallen look. “I...uh, well, he hangs around the…the Alien Club now more than us, but I know him. Why?”

Serena smiled inwardly. I knew it. There had been a rumor going around that Valerie had threatened Marcy and her group to stop talking to Mike lest something bad happened; in truth, Valerie just didn’t care, since she had her eye on Mike regardless. However, the truth apparently was that Marcy stopped speaking to him because she liked him; she was the kind of girl who pushed away those she liked. She thought about her next words carefully and said, “I’d like to tell him how I feel, but…like I said, Valerie’s a friend and I don’t want to step on her toes. So if I got a go-between, well you know, right?”

There was a look in Marcy’s eyes just for a second, a flicker of an idea. “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” The waiter picked that moment to show up and take their orders; to Serena, it was perfect, because it gave Marcy a couple of extra moments to soak on that idea.

“You might not believe this, but when it comes to guys, I’m rather shy. So I could genuinely use the help.” In truth, Serena wasn’t much for the opposite sex, but that had more to do with the fact that no guy had yet to match her exacting standards. “And I really could use your help.”

“Well….”

“Please?” Serena went into full manipulative mode, laying one thickly on the other girl. “I’d really be in your debt if you did.”

That clinched the deal. “Okay, if you want me to, I’ll do it.”

“Perfect. You don’t know how much this means to me.” At that point, Serena knew she had Marcy hook, line and sinker. As the other girl had more exposure to Mike while “trying to work for Serena’s sake”, natural emotions would take over and Marcy would push for her own feelings. Mike would naturally respond and per the plan, Marcy would have a couple of months with Mike before Serena moved to break them up, setting the stage for Valerie to swoop in and get her man.

After all, Serena thought to herself, that’s what I’m really learning in school, after all – that people are idiots and all it takes is the right nudge to get them to do what you want.


Sam sat next to his sister in the car as they sped down the westbound Interstate 70 on the way back home from Baltimore, their parents talking about business related to their company; DJ wasn’t really interested, so she let her brother command her time.

“DJ, are you gonna help me with my costume this year?” he asked.

“Well, what did you have in mind?” she asked.

“I was thinking about…maybe….” he trailed off.

“Maybe what?” The silence was deafening. “Okay, out with it before you deal with the noogies.”

“Well…I was thinking I could make…um…a….”

DJ crossed her arms, a faux-stern look on her features. “I’m waiting.” By now the conversation had caught the attention of Matt and Anna, and while neither said anything, they were both peeking through the rear-view mirror.

“Iwaswantingtomakeaponycostumesoyouwouldn’tbealone!” he blurted out.

“You wanted to what?”

“I was hoping…you’d help me make a, uh, ‘pony’ costume so you wouldn’t be the only one!” he said, knowing his sister really didn’t like the word and he was probably going to get in trouble for it.

Neither of her parents said anything, so DJ just assumed the ball was in her court. Thus she responded by giving her younger brother a hug, feeling really touched that he cared enough to do so. “You know, normally I really hate that word, Sam, but I know what you mean.”

“So you’ll help me?”

She grinned, giving him a noogie anyway. “Yeah. I can’t promise it’ll look exactly like me, but we’ll see what we can do, okay?” She noticed the brief glances of approval given to her by her parents via the rear-view mirror and she flashed a silent smile in return.

Matt finally spoke. “So, you think you’ll be okay running the church Safe Halloween Party on your own? I know you’ll have some of your fellow students there, but do they have plans in case you get overwhelmed?”

“Oh, yeah. Apparently Father Wakka’ll be there. He told Carlos that he’s making a Maori warrior costume for himself. Also Pastor Bixby from Mt. Carmel Baptist and Rabbi Horowitz from Beth El will be there as well as someone from the local Islamic Society. We should be covered.”

“Do you have other big plans we should be aware of?” Anna asked.

“Um, no, why?”

“I just thought you might want to take the time to talk to your friend Mike about…well, you know.”

She leaned against the back seat, feeling her tail pressed against the cloth and wishing that someone at one of the car companies would somehow get the idea to make seats that took her tail into account; on long enough drives, she ended up fidgeting from the pressure. “I really don’t know. I’m still concerned that I might screw things up, you know?”

“Screw what up, DJ?” Sam asked.

“You’ll find out when you’re older,” she told him. Turning back to her parents, she asked, “Well, do you have any suggestions for a costume? Erica’s trying to get me to join her in her latest costume stunt, but frankly I really don’t want to.”

“Why, something wrong with it?” Anna asked.

“Oh, not at all: I just don’t exactly have the talent for electronics and all that fine-tune precision stuff she needs for her costume. We’re talking LEDs and circuits sort of stuff, the kind of thing that even your fingers couldn’t really deal with. I swear, with those fingers of hers, she’s going to be a surgeon one day.”

“Well, I have an idea, if you want to hear it, furball,” her father commented. “There was a costume party that your mom and I went to in Santa Monica before we got married and I still have some of the stuff for it, if you’re interested.”

“Sure, Dad, I’m so out of ideas right now that I’m willing to do it,” DJ replied.


“Marcy, so what are you going to do?” Beverly asked. “I mean, if you step on her toes like that, Serena’s going to make your life a living hell, the kind of hell that simply getting your parents to send you to another school isn’t going to help – and bear in mind there are only two high schools in the area that you can go to.”

“I know!” she commented. “Don’t you think I know that?” She sat on Beverly’s bed, hugging a plushie close to her; the other girl well knew what Marcy was imagining holding close to herself. “I don’t think she knows how I feel about him?”

“But I thought you were avoiding him now that he hangs with the Alien Club!”

“It’s because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of him,” she murmured. “But I don’t think I can hide how I feel about him much longer.”

“Then why don’t you tell him at the Safe Halloween Party?” Denise, who was also present, asked. “I mean, he’s helping out at the party and it’d be the perfect place to confess to him, with no stress whatsoever.”

“I didn’t know that,” Marcy told her. “But that’s a great idea!”

“So you’re saying you’re going to this party on behalf of Serena, and you’re going to steal him for yourself? That’s just stone, girl, just stone.”

“Hey, if it’ll get me the guy of my dreams, it’ll be worth it.”

“Icarus, Marcy, Icarus,” Beverly warned her. “You better be careful of what you’re going for, because if you piss off Serena, she’s the worst of the Valerie Squad, and you know Valerie’s going to step in to help her best friend. You’re walking into a minefield, I’m telling you.”

“Plus, if you want to know,” Denise continued, “there’s a rumor – it’s just a rumor, mind you – that Mike’s interested in DJ. Probably someone misunderstood something somebody else said, or whatevs, but that’s the rumor.”

Marcy laughed. “Oh, please – we go to a Christian school! I think Mike knows better than to commit bestiality by dating her!”

“Um…she’s legally a person. If he dated her, it wouldn’t b—”

“It’s not going to happen,” Marcy said, more forcefully. “I’m going to confess to him, he’s going to be mine, and then let Serena come after me, because I’ll have the best guy in school as my boyfriend and she can just suck it!”


Two weeks passed, and Halloween came. The school was filled with costumes both original – someone had spent some serious money and made their own Star Wars stormtrooper costume – and ridiculous, such as the usual bedsheet togas and store-bought outfits. Even a few of the teachers got involved, the principal even going so far as to dress like Frankenstein – the eponymous Victor, not the misnamed monster. The school had a half-day schedule as to allow the community to have fun at Halloween and all the various events of the evening.

“So, are you nervous about tonight?” Erica asked Mike. She was dressed up as Ambika from Claude & Monet; a costume she’d said took forever to make.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Mike replied. His costume was a copy of Rudolf Valentino’s famous Sheik character from a hundred years back. Mike had actually wanted to wear something else, but Shelby had flown in the weekend before just to get him to wear this, saying that it was far more romantic.

“Dude, you’ll be fine, trust us.” Carlos, to the surprise of absolutely no one, dressed as a Venetian jester, with an expensive costume that he’d had Erica help him with. “She was telling me just last night that she was trying to come up with a costume that would impress you. I mean, hell, she’s even trying to get your attention with costumes, dude!”

“I hope not,” he commented. “I love her for who she is, not because she’s flashing skin.”

“You know,” Carlos said, “I have no idea if she can ‘flash skin’, per se. She’s fuzzy, but even we don’t know about the girl parts.”

Erica, with a wicked smile on her face, went up to Mike and whispered something in his ear. The look on his face was stunned. “She does?”

The girl nodded. “Yup. What, you thought she had horse udders? Why do you think she wears a bra?”

“I…never really thought about that,” Mike blushed. “It’s not like I’ve known her for years, you know?”

“Trust me: whatever she is, she’s the human being equivalent of whatever she is, including the anatomical parts,” Erica assured her. “So if you two ever want t—”


“Hey, sorry I’m late!” DJ came running up to them and unlike the three of them it could be said she had the oddest costume. Weird shirt with some sort of psychedelic teardrop designs on it, slacks, beads, and round sunglasses with rose-colored lenses. She even styled her hair into light waves. “Okay, what’d I miss?”

The three of them stared at her. Mike was the first to speak. “Okay, what are you supposed to be?”

“John Lennon, during the Magical Mystery Tour years.” When the inevitable blank stares came, she drolled, “John Lennon, one of the Fab Four? The Beatles? Hello?

“The Beatles – I think the music teacher mentioned them back when we took Music in Eighth Grade,” Erica commented, still not comprehending.

“Isn’t that the band Bono was in?” Carlos asked, completely lost.

“Yeah, that was music before rock n’ roll was invented, wasn’t it?” Mike said, equally as clueless as the other two.

DJ shook her head sadly. “You poor, poor deluded fools. How could you not know that they wrote songs like ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’!”

“Wait – I thought that was Led Zeppelin,” Mike said. Once he decided that he was going to ask DJ out, he took the effort to try to learn all the past music that DJ listened to, with a little help from Shelby, who was studying to be a teacher. But apparently even his older sister was stunned by the sheer amount of old stuff that DJ listened to.

The humanized alien sighed dramatically. “All the philistines in the world I had to talk to today and it just had to be my best friend and my boyfr—” She stopped suddenly, catching her Freudian slip.

Unfortunately for her, so did everyone else. “What was that, DJ?”

DJ was turning twenty shades of red. “N-nothing.”

“Are you sure?” Mike asked, somewhat surprised to have heard it from her own mouth.

In turn, she turned and ran as fast and far as she could without going into four-wheel drive. Granted, her speed was no faster than the average person jogging, but she was pushing herself as fast as she could.

As she rounded the corner, Erica told him. “Tonight. For both your sakes.”


Mike was remembering all of what everyone told him as he went to go get the brooms, watching as the kids were being ushered out for the evening, the party over. It had been moderately successful, enough so that the rep from the Islamic Society offered to hold it at their building next year. He also admitted he’d had more fun than he’d expected.

But the best part of it all was the way DJ carried herself. At a couple of points, several people smelled chocolate in the air, and she tried to hide her embarrassment. Her tail also rose dramatically for some reason at one point and she almost had to step on it to get it to go back to normal. It was almost as if it had a mind of its own, something she joked about on occasion – but not today. And for most of today, she seemed to be walking on eggshells, enough so that at one point someone asked if she was feeling okay.

He now knew: she felt about him the same way he felt about her. And he couldn’t deny it any longer. Yes, his father told him that there was a certain melodrama to teen love; his parents had finally figured out that he was mooning over someone but fortunately neither of them put two and two together and Shelby had said nothing about what she knew. However, she did tell him to follow his heart.

Tonight would be that night.

“Um…Mike?” A voice sounded next to him and he looked to his right, seeing Marcy there. She’d come at the last minute, having escorted a few of the kids in the neighborhood that she usually babysat. “Do…do you have a minute?”

“Um, sure,” he said absently, watching as someone brought a ladder out so they could start taking down the streamers and bunting. DJ offered to go up; he wasn’t sure that was a good idea as despite her hoofspace, ladders weren’t exactly designed with ponies in mind and this what he could see from this distance, it was the kind that had round rungs instead of the flat step ones. “What’s up?”

“I…uh, can we go somewhere private to talk about all this?” she asked, noticing everyone in the area and suddenly wondering if confessing her feelings at the party was such a hot idea.

“Um, sure,” he said, worried about DJ. Now that he looked at it a little better, it did have round rungs, and those were a problem even for human feet, much less hers. Well, if someone was there by the ladder to make sure she was safe, he could afford to step out for a second or two.

Impulsively, she grabbed his hand, giddy as she could be; once they rounded the corner and she was able to confess in private, it’d be wonderful. Sure, her mind pictured something out of an anime, but real life in this case probably wasn’t going to be much more different. Besides, there was always a grain of truth in fiction, right?


“DJ! Look out!”


Time froze for Mike as he heard those words. He whipped his head around to find the latter on the ground, broken in two – damn wooden ladders! – with DJ seeming to hang on to the lighting fixtures in the room, something that was obviously not meant to handle the load bearing of anyone hanging on to it.

From that point, everything was instinctual: he ripped himself out of Marcy’s grasp, bolting as fast as he could toward where DJ was barely holding on. “DJ, let go, I’ll catch you!” he shouted the moment he got within reasonable distance. Calculations raced through his head: if he made it to where she was and caught her, from the height and the speed he might just break both his arms, but it was much better than letting her break her head or worse!

At last, he got under her just as her grip gave out and she fell the ten feet from the air to the ground. He caught her somehow and his arms hurt like hell; the force of her fall brought him to his knees and he collapsed, dragged down – and yet he put everything into it that she didn’t hit the ground.

“What were you thinking?” he gasped, wincing from the pain as he held her.

“I know, it was stupid,” she said, followed by an admission he hadn’t expected – or that she hadn’t intended to make. “I just wanted to show you I can do the same things others can.”

“DJ, I don’t care about that!” he said, ignoring the screaming pain in his arms; this wasn’t how he wanted to tell her, but something told him it was now or never. “I care about you. I don’t care what you look like – I don’t see you as whatever you are. All I see is a wonderful girl, one that I want to be with – one that has my heart.”

“What are you trying to say to me?” she whispered, her eyes widening as wide as plates.




“DJ…I love you.”




Instinctively, their lips met, brushed together, then fully connected, sending both into paradise. The room exploded into the full-out scent of dark chocolate, so much so that there was no one who couldn’t smell it now. The two continued kissing until the adults present, confused at two teens of different species making out but realizing that it wouldn’t be a great example, broke them up.


Watching the new lovers from a distance, Carlos and Erica looked at each other, and the two old friends hugged. “Mission accomplished!” Carlos laughed, happy for DJ and her new beau.

Erica smelled the rich scent of dark chocolate in the air; DJ’s hormones had definitely just gone into overdrive. “Good job, girl,” she whispered, watching as the pair dizzily clambering back to their feet.


“So what now?” Mike asked, looking at his girlfriend; it felt so right saying that.

She gave him the sunniest smile in the world; one he knew was meant for him and him only. Holding him close and ignoring the rest of the universe, she wrapped her tail around the two of them as far as it could go – which admittedly, wasn’t much – and then leaned against him, sighing. “It’s a whole new world for us, sweetie,” she breathed, happy as a lark. They looked at each other again, and then this time, mindful of everyone present, kissed more chastely, thrilled to be together as all present saw a new chapter in humanity’s history made.


One girl, watching from afar, didn’t see that in the least. No, instead she was suddenly consumed with a huge hatred. As Marcy Balis watched the guy who was supposed to be her boyfriend making out with the alien, she felt a spike of hate burning within her, mindless rage growing like a tumor within.

At the beginning of the year, DJ had been a friend. And now?

DJ had earned herself a new enemy.

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