I sat down with my third serving of dinner salad and cake and began to dig in.
Maggie raised an eyebrow at me. "Rough day?"
My bite of salad went down my throat whole as if I were a snake. Having to wait for my breathing passage to clear gave me time to think of an appropriate answer. I didn't want to lie to Maggie, but there were things I couldn't talk about. I couldn't mention anything about Dreamwarden related issues, especially since my Dreamwarden issues were now tied in with Sunflower's, so they weren't just my secrets; they were hers too, and I couldn't reveal she was a candidate to anyone. It also would probably be bad to say I had a conversation with the infamous Sunset Blessing—who had briefly turned me into a human.
I looked away. "I can't talk about it. There are things involving other people's secrets, and I can't betray that trust. I'm sorry."
When I looked back at Maggie, I saw her frowning at me. "It seems you have lots of secrets I didn't know about, like that magic from the other day. It makes me wonder how much I really know you. I thought we were best friends," Maggie muttered. She then shook her head. "Forget I said that. If it is other people putting trust in you, then you are in the right not to tell me. I just can't help feeling like you don't trust me after seeing what you kept from me."
Okay, now I felt worse. Maggie was my best friend, and at the same time, she knew very little about what went on with me.
I made a decision, right then and there, possibly a bad decision, but one I felt was worth the risk. I wanted Maggie to feel I trusted her absolutely.
"There is one thing that's at my discretion to share or not. It's a big deal, even bigger than that other secret I shared with you. If I share with you, you can't say anything to anybody. You can't even act like you know. If it ever comes out, you need to act shocked."
"Did you murder someone?" Maggie asked.
"No. I'm being serious here," I whined.
"Did you have a secret love child that your parents keep locked in the attic?"
"What?! You know I'm a virgin!"
"I don't know that for sure. You've been keeping big secrets to this point," Maggie countered. I couldn't tell if she was being serious or not.
"Urgh! I'm a virgin," I said with emphasis.
"I'm just picking at you, Bec; lighten up," Maggie replied. "You normally don't get upset at some mild teasing, which makes me concerned about you. What's going on?"
I didn't answer and took time to think about how to approach this while scarfing down the remainder of my food. Maggie let me chew, perhaps worried I would choke on my food if I tried to talk.
"We need somewhere private to talk, like super-duper private," I finally said.
Maggie scratched her head. "Well, my room is pretty private. I don't have a roommate, and the girls that share a bathroom with me keep their door shut—if they are even there."
"Sounds good," I replied. "Let me get one more serving—"
"No."
I stared up at her with my ears laid back. "But I'm hungry!"
She shook her head. "You're stress-eating, and you are supposed to be on a diet. You need to lose weight, not gain more. I swear, if you go for another serving, I'll call your parents and tell them you are gorging yourself."
I let my ears sag and gave her my best puppy dog eyes.
She shook her head again. "Not going to work, Bec. Come on; I'm trying to look out for you."
I stuck my tongue out at her, then fluttered my lips. "Fine. Let me waste away till I'm skin and bones."
"That might take a while," Maggie chuckled. She then grabbed my tray in one hand and hers in the other. "I'll put these up, and we can walk back to the dorms."
It didn't take long to leave the cafeteria and be on our way back to the dorms.
"Oh, I did have something else interesting happen today," Maggie said as we walked. "Jordan's mother emailed me. Apparently, she caught that filly reading my fan fiction."
"Oh, dear," I moaned. "Are you now in trouble for corrupting innocent youth?"
She rubbed her arm, absently. "No, not really. It was weird. Her mom gave a full review of the story I sent—it was one of the shorter ones. She reviewed the grammar, punctuation, and word choices. It was like I turned in a paper to my English teacher."
"Jordan said she wanted to be a teacher. Maybe she wants to be a teacher because her mom is one," I mused.
"Wouldn't surprise me after reading that email," Maggie replied. "She then wrote out a long section stating she isn't going to stop her daughter from trying to obtain mature reading content since she'd rather know about it and be able to discuss it instead of having Jordan attempting to hide it from her. She then gave me a list of things she doesn't want Jordan exposed to—and let me tell you, that mare has to have experience reading some serious smut to come up with some of the things she listed."
"We like to think our parents never do anything shocking, and they just stop having lives other than us after we're born," I observed sagely. "Non-Equestrian ponies tend to be a little more open on average about sex. Miss Seapony said it's because the spell that made us ponies had instructions in it to gently encourage us to breed. Sunset Shimmer wanted us to go out and multiply. Her goals were always more ponies."
"Hormones weren't enough; they needed mind control too?" Maggie asked.
I shrugged. "Well, it is just a gentle nudge; you don't see me racing out to have foals. I have been a pony almost my entire life, and in a few years, there will be adult ponies that were never human at all—like Jordan. Can you call us mind-controlled if that is how we always were?"
"I suppose not," Maggie muttered, then sighed. "Sorry, Bec. My dad has always gone on about that stuff. He isn't the worst, but he is definitely a speciest in private. You can't grow up in a speciest household and not have it influence you, even if you try not to let it. I apologize for saying insensitive things."
I was taken aback by her confession of having speciest thoughts. "I… I don't know what to say. I never thought of you as being a speciest."
"I try not to be," she replied quietly. "I grew up hearing those things all the time at home. I knew they were wrong, but at the same time, it was inescapable since it came from the people that loved me, raised me, and taught me right from wrong. I have talked to counselors about it."
"I never knew that," I replied as I looked at my best friend in a new light, trying to reconcile this newly uncovered layer with what I had known.
"Didn't want to talk about it or confess to it," she muttered again, her voice dropping to a whisper. "I guess I'm only talking about it now because I got on you about keeping secrets from me—I don't know, it's confusing. How am I supposed to talk to my best friend about the fact I secretly look down on ponies when she's a pony? I try not to look down on ponies, but it's like something I can't shake. I can understand if you're mad or feel betrayed."
Did I feel angry or hurt? Maybe a little hurt. It was hard to hear that my best friend harbored anti-pony thoughts. However, she was also open and honest with me, and she had always been a good friend.
"Do you look down on me?" I asked, afraid of the answer.
She hung her head. "Most of the time, no, but on rare occasions, I'll think something I shouldn't about you. I get angry at myself when I do and tell myself that I shouldn't think like that. That it is wrong."
That felt like a knife going into me. I reminded myself that she was being honest, and she could have just kept it to herself and lied.
"I believe you," I replied. "You said you went to counselors about this? What did they say?"
She took a deep breath. "They said that the prejudice we learn growing up is a hard thing to overcome, even when we know it isn't right. I need to never excuse myself as just being raised that way, and that overcoming prejudice is a process that takes work, and it can take generations. It's my job just to keep catching myself when I find myself thinking like my dad, to remember how much I care about my pony friends, and to make sure that I teach my future children to be better, so they never grow up absorbing that prejudice from me. That's how you end the cycle."
"I would never have known if you didn't say anything," I said as we reached the dorm building. "It hurts to hear, but you are brave to be honest with me, knowing how badly I could take it."
"And how bad is this going to go?" Maggie asked stiffly. "I don't want to mess up my friendship with you."
I thought about Lântiān and how she knew in her head that I wasn't to blame for what happened between her and her mother, but couldn't seem to let it go in her heart. Maggie knew things in her head that her feelings fought her on, and she struggled with them. Right now, she was scared because she had exposed those things to me, and she was afraid she'd lose my friendship over it. That was an important detail—Maggie desired to keep my friendship. I was more important to her than the prejudice she learned growing up.
Emotions and thoughts could get so complicated and could be our worst enemies. Maggie was my best friend, and I was hers, and we wanted to maintain that friendship. That was what was important to focus on.
"I forgive you for not always thinking the right thing," I answered as we reached the elevator for the human side of the dorms. "I'm your best friend, and you're still mine. Your counselors were right. When does prejudice end if we don't make an effort? I think that goes two ways. It doesn't do it any good if I reject you; maybe it makes it worse. Nothing has changed between us."
We boarded the elevator by ourselves. Maggie pressed the button for the correct floor. "Thanks, Bec."
"You haven't heard my secret, so don't thank me yet," I replied. Should I still tell her? It seemed I was committed at this point. She'd also been very open with me. I owed it to her.
We got off the elevator and silently walked down the hall to her room. We passed a few more humans, but they didn't seem to care about there being a pony in their territory. Still, after hearing what Maggie said, I wondered how many also felt the same way and didn't show it to the world. How many speciest feelings were hidden under the surface in the people I saw every day? It wasn't just humans that could have those feelings either. Everyone knew about overtly speciest groups like the Shimmerists, but what about others that silently felt the same? Meadow's parents had been Shimmerists before being Blessingists. Did they still have those feelings towards humans? Did Meadow have them too, and just didn't let anyone see it? I hated knowing that there was a hidden world of prejudice that I had barely been aware of but now couldn't help wondering about.
Maggie's room wasn't a whole lot different than mine. Instead of a set of bunks, there were two regular beds. The furniture was larger to accommodate humans but was in the same bare wood utilitarian style. She had the same type of closet area and also had a balcony. The door to her bathroom was shut, and the second bed didn't seem to be in use. A bunch of books and parts of her luggage were scattered across two different desks.
I jumped and flapped my wings a few times to land on the bed that no one was using and took a seat. Maggie ignored her bed and came and sat beside me, probably so I didn't have to speak up for her to hear me.
"You're free to talk," Maggie announced. "No one over here has pony hearing, and these walls insulate sound reasonably well."
How would I start this?
"Um, Dreamwarden Psychic Calm is retiring soon—like, within a few months soon," I said slowly and nervously.
Maggie frowned. "Okay, I'm guessing that is a pretty big secret. That's like a government secret, something that would be classified information. You never mentioned meeting him. You talk about the sex seahorse—" she winced. "Forget I worded it that way."
I couldn't help myself; I giggled. "You should be pun-ished for that one."
She groaned. "You talk about Yinyu and seem to know her well, but you've never talked about any of the others much. Are you and Psychic Calm friends too?"
I shook my head. "I've never met him. I've met some of the others a time or two, but not him."
"So, how did you find out he was retiring?" Maggie asked.
I fidgeted with my forehooves. "I might be in the running to replace him."
She went wide-eyed for a second then arched a brow at me. "Might? They consider hundreds, maybe thousands, of candidates, from what I heard. How big a might is this?"
I licked my lips. "They do consider lots of candidates, but each Dreamwarden has their own ranking system for who they favor, and out of this combined rankings, they narrow hundreds of thousands down to a top few candidates. The rankings change all the time, so it is still not decided who will be his heir."
"You didn't answer the question," she said flatly.
I winced. "I'm… I'm number one in rankings with four different Dreamwardens and ranked high with the remaining two. At least, that was where they said they had me ranked yesterday—I think it was just yesterday; it could have changed. I don't know."
Maggie shook her head in disbelief. "You're trying to play a joke on me. What is your real secret?"
I blinked. "It's true. That is my secret."
"It can't be," she said as she stood up and started pacing. "You can't be in line to be a Dreamwarden. No offense, but you're nobody."
"Dreamwardens are just regular people," I explained. "Miss Seapony was a prostitute living off the street. I heard Phobia Remedy used to be an overnight stocker at a grocery store. Psychic Calm has always been a psychiatrist. They weren't worth talking about."
"But what would they want with you?" Maggie asked in a flustered voice. "You're an obese pegasus that can't even stick to a diet for a day. They've got Lust, Fear, Anger, Song, Order, and previously had Death and Silence. What are you going to be, the Warden of Gluttony? You're training to be an architect. What do the Dreamwardens need with an architect—one that isn't even trained yet?"
I flinched a little. "I was thinking about taking Creativity if I get chosen. It's something important to me that I'd like to inspire. As for why they want me… I think it's partly my powers and partly because there's nothing scary about me—unless you make cakes and cookies for a living."
"Stop it!" Maggie yelled. "Why are you doing this? Is this your way of getting back at me for what I said while we were walking here?"
My ears flattened to my side, and I cringed further. "I'm telling the truth. Why would I make this up?"
Maggie threw her hands up above her head. "I don't know! You tell me. Do you want to make yourself seem important? Do you want to get back at me for saying I sometimes let myself think of you as some stupid brainwashed pony? Maybe now that you have new friends, you don't feel like you need me anymore, and you're trying to drive me away."
My eyes were tearing up, and my body was shaking. "Maggie… what can I do to prove to you that I'm telling the truth?"
She laughed. "Maybe if you were telling the truth, you would already know. Dreamwardens are supposed to be smarter than the rest of us dumb mortals, right?"
I was openly sobbing now and couldn't bring myself to respond.
Maggie stared at me and seemed like she wanted to say something.
"Bec, I—"
I looked up at her. I could barely see her through my tears.
"Bec…" I could hear the tears in her voice as she tried to continue. "Just say you didn't know what you were thinking and that you're sorry for lying like that, and we can forget this even happened."
It felt hard to breathe. "I'm not lying," I said in a whisper.
There was an extended silence. I cried, and I could hear her crying. Then I heard the door opening.
"Get out," Maggie ordered.
Still crying, I left without another word. Maggie slammed the door shut behind me.