Twilight is undeniably cute. But of all her cutest traits — her full-bodied laugh, her creativity, her penchant for awful puns — the most adorable is her passionate love for stuffed animals.
By my count, Twilight owns twenty-two stuffed animals: Six bears, five dogs, four cats, three horses, two birds, one lion, and one earthworm. They all live in her bedroom, lined up on top of her dresser in tidy rows that I’ve helped reorganize at least twice. She sleeps with a different one every night, each specially picked according to a schedule she’s been updating since 2nd Grade. It’s serious stuff.
Her favorite is Owlowiscious the Owl, but the oldest is Smarty Pants the Horse, a patchworked Frankenstein of a doll with missing eyes, re-sewed limbs, and grody blue-gray fur. He’s a lil’ bit scary and kind of gross, but so am I, and Twi loves him, so I guess I should too.
He’s definitely easier to look at when Twilight holds him, squeezing him so tight against her chest that whenever she speaks, his head jostles like he’s talking too. I’ve already spent half of our current conversation staring at him instead of her — and at this point, I think I need the distraction.
“My point is,” Twilight says, adjusting her glasses, “you want to confront Wallflower again. Even if you don’t do it now, you’re bound to run into one another once the school year starts. Either way, you need a plan. And the best plan, in my eyes, is to be totally honest.”
“Honest, right.” I slump backwards on her bed, fast enough that I bounce when I land. “Tell Wallflower exactly what I think of her. That’ll go great, I’m sure.”
I don’t need to lift my head to tell that Twi’s rolling her eyes. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. The two of you just have a ton of baggage, and you shouldn’t be around each other anymore. That’s all you need to tell her, clear and simple.”
“That’s such an asshole move, though!” I say, covering my face with my hands. “Aren’t I just forcing her to deal with my baggage? It’s not her fault that I freak out whenever I see her.”
“Is it not?”
“Well — yeah, I guess it kinda is. But she’s trying to be nice now! She’s trying to change.”
“And why do you need to be around that change?”
I spread my fingers just wide enough to glare at Twi — but then I catch sight of Smarty Pants’ ugly mug again and just snicker.
Twilight sighs. “There has to be a compromise here somewhere.”
My snicker turns to a snort. “Like what? I only avoid her every other week?”
When a second passes without a response, I edge my fingers open again. She’s shooting me a manticore glare of her own, even bloodier than the one I tried to give her. And Smarty Pants doesn’t have eyes or eyebrows, but his snout is pointed at me in a scarily aggressive manner.
It’s enough to make me sit up straight. “Sorry. You know I get sarcastic when I’m nervous.”
“I do. But the point of all this is to let you live without being nervous.” She crosses her arms. “Maybe we need an outside perspective, someone with less emotional attachment to the situation. Like an arbitrator.”
“Good idea. You think Spike has an opinion?”
“He has an opinion on everything. But it might be a better idea to ask someone who’s had more than six months of sapience.”
Running a hand through my hair, I start flipping through my mental rolodex of potential advice-givers. It doesn’t take long for my fingers to catch on a knot — and as I sort out my messy curls, someone with an even wilder mane comes to mind.
“What about Pinkie?”
Twi grimaces. “I don’t know. Pinkie is great, but she’s not exactly the most logical girl I know.”
“She’s plenty logical, in her own Pinkie Pie way. And besides, she’s pretty much a friendship expert. Probably Princess-level, even.”
“I can’t deny that.” Twi floats my phone over to me and I grab it out of the air. “If you trust her advice, I’ll trust it too.”
“I’d trust Pinkie with my life,” I say. And that’s not hyperbole — aside from Twi, there’s no one whose opinion I care about more. There’s a reason I’ve got her contact photo, a shot of her drinking directly from a chocolate fountain with a comically long straw, pinned to my phone’s home screen.
I tap that photo and start a video call. We don’t even get through a single ring before Pinkie answers — at least, I think she’s answered. It says the call is connected, but her camera is totally black, and there’s no sound.
I wait a moment before trying, “Pinks? You there?”
We both jump when someone’s wet breathing comes roaring through the phone’s speakers, thunderously loud. And then, muffled and barely audible over the noise: “Pumpkin, that isn’t food!”
The breathing gets louder, and we cringe at the disgustingly drippy sucking sounds — but then the noise fades away and the darkness disappears, replaced with a blurry shot of a colorful carpet. There’s a flash of white as Pinkie wipes her phone clean on her shirt before she finally brings it to eye level.
“Hi, Sunset!” She says it with a beaming grin, but I can see the bloodshot veins in her eyes. Pumpkin Cake, one of the kids she babysits, is slung over her shoulder like a sandbag. “How’s it goin’?”
“It’s going.” I spin the phone around. “Twi’s here too.” She waves.
“Ooh! Double the cuties!” Pinkie says as she slumps down onto a couch. There’s another baby — Poke? Punch? — on the seat next to her, slamming his fists into the cushions. Pinkie leans forward and stands her phone up against something, then takes both toddlers and makes them wave at us. “Say hi to my favorite Geeky Gals!”
Twilight tilts her head at the nickname, repeating it under her breath. But I can only breathe relief — if we’d talked to her a week ago, there’s a high chance she’d jokingly call us the ‘Demon Girl Gang’ or something like that. Shame on me for doubting her.
“Sorry for the call out of nowhere,” I say, “but we need you to settle a debate.”
“It’s not really a debate,” Twi says. “We just want your thoughts on an issue we’re having.”
Pinkie nods. “I can do that. I’ve got loads of thoughts! Have I ever given you my take on slightly undercooked brownies?”
I nod back. “The salmonella risk adds to the experience.”
Twilight looks at me like I just spat in her food.
“Exactly! It’s the secret that doctors don’t want you to know!” Pinkie gazes sweetly into the distance for a sec, but then Pumpkin bites her and she slingshots back to reality. “So what’s up?”
“Do you remember what I told you about Wallflower Blush?” I ask.
“Oh, you mean the way she makes you feel like there’s a tiny gnome in your stomach jumping around and jabbing you with his pointy hat?”
Twilight looks at me, and I look at her, stammering. “That’s not how I remember describing it.”
“I saw the truth in your eyes,” Pinkie says. “Also she took all our memories. That’s pretty messed up.”
I start to chime back with an automatic, “I deserved it,” but a single glower from Twilight stops me. Instead I just shake the gloom away and explain our dilemma: I need to confront Wallflower, but don’t know how. Should I apologize and just deal with it when she makes me uncomfortable in the future? Or follow Twilight’s advice by straight up saying that I don’t want to be around her, and that she should stay away from me?
Once I’m done, Pinkie falls back into the couch cushions. Both babies are tussling for space on her lap, but she stays silent, just tapping her pursed lips. “That’s a toughie,” she says after a few moments. “If I had to pick one plan or the other, I’d probably go with Twilight’s.”
Twilight cheers, thrusting Smarty Pants into the air. I grumble.
But Pinkie doesn’t stop talking. “Honestly, though, I wouldn’t do either of those things.”
Twi brings the stuffed animal back to her lap. “Okay, what would you do?”
“You know my big sister Maud, right?” she asks, and we both nod. “Well, she’s got this really close friend named Mudbriar who — please don’t tell her this — I don’t like very much.”
Pinkie Pie not liking someone? Haven’t seen that since the sirens. This dude must be a real dick. And as if she’s reading my mind — maybe she can see the truth in my eyes — she quickly adds, “It’s not that he’s a bad person! He just sorta yucks my yum sometimes, y’know?”
“That’s a good phrase,” Twilight whispers. She levitates a pen and notebook over to herself and scribbles it down.
“At first I tried to take Sunset’s route,” Pinkie says, “and I ignored how I felt just to make Maud happy. But that got me so frustrated that I almost went the Twilight route and told him off to make myself feel better!”
Twi clicks her pen shut and frowns. “That’s not quite how I’d describe my ‘route.’”
“So eventually, I took a middle route: I just stopped going places that I knew Mudbriar would be!”
We share a glance. Twilight’s the one who finally asks, “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said! If I know he’s gonna be someplace, and I don’t super duper have to be there, I don’t go there.” She winks. “That way we don’t see each other, but I don’t have to hurt his feelings, either!”
I stick a fingertip in my mouth to gnaw on a nail while I mull over Pinkie’s plan. Getting to avoid Wallflower and a painfully awkward conversation? Those are two absolute wins in my book. “Yeah. That might work.”
“Whoa, whoa!” Twilight says, waving her arms out wide. “I don’t know if I like this idea. Why should Sunset have to restrict herself like that? And isn’t this sort of lying?”
“I’m not lying. I’m just not telling Wallflower what I really think!”
“It’s a lie of omission.”
“C’mon, that’s not how it works. Like, I think Mrs. Harshwhinny is a rancid bitch” — Pinkie gasps and covers the babies’ ears; I offer a speedy apology — “but I wouldn’t ever tell her that. It’d be rude as hell.”
Twilight lids her eyes. “Also, you’d get detention for a month.”
“Sure, that too, but mostly because it’s rude. And am I really ‘restricting’ myself if it’s to avoid someone who makes me feel horrible? It’s not like Wallflower and I share that many spaces anyway.”
“Yearbook.”
I wave her away. “Aside from that.”
“It’s pretty big.”
Wave harder. “Aside from that.”
Pinkie shrugs. “You do you, girl. It’s just my two dollars.”
“Two cents,” Twi corrects.
“No way,” Pinkie says, blowing a raspberry. “You can’t buy anything with only two cents. But two dollars gets you four gumballs from the machine in the back of the mall!”
“I’ve always heard it as two bits,” I say, mostly to annoy Twilight. Which I succeed at, based on her frown.
“What do you think, Pound?” Pinkie asks, lifting the brown-haired baby towards the camera. He opens his mouth, and a torrent of puke comes out. “Oh my god” is all we hear before the video call cuts.
“I still don’t like Pinkie’s plan,” Twilight says as I stuff my phone into my pocket. “I mean, having to plan your life around avoiding her? Is that healthy? It feels like you’d be substituting one problem for another.”
“I don’t think there’s any perfect way to handle this,” I say, “but this seems the least painful. And you were looking for a compromise — this is one, even if it sucks.”
“And it does.” Twi bows her head, touching her nose to Smarty Pants’ ragged scalp, and takes some long breaths. After a few quiet moments of thinking, she looks up again and says, “But I guess it’s not the worst plan of all time. So if this is how you want to handle things, I’ll support you.”
“Thanks.” I offer my fist for a fist bump. She returns it, then raises one of Smarty Pants’ hooves so he can join in too.
“But seriously,” she says, “how are you going to handle yearbook? You’re the president.”
“I’ll quit,” I say. It takes more strength to say that I expected. “And I’ll hand the reins over to Wallflower.”
“But you love yearbook!”
“Yeah, but it’s me or her, and she’s way better with the layout program than I am.”
Twilight pouts. “I’ll quit too, then.”
I touch her knee. “You don’t have to do that.”
“90% of the reason I joined yearbook was to hang out with you. If we both quit, it just gives us more time to do that.”
That brings a grin to my lips. Yearbook be damned, I’d never turn down more time with Twi. But then another worry appears: “What about the rest of the girls? I don’t want to leave Wallflower as the only member.”
“Fluttershy is friends with her, so she’ll probably stay.” Twilight starts counting on her fingers. “You know Rarity loved designing the cover, so she’s not going anywhere.”
“And if Rarity stays, AJ stays,” I say with a snicker.
“Pinkie had a blast picking all the superlatives last year. And chances are that Rainbow will stay, if only to make sure there’s enough pictures of her in the book.”
I nod, then fall backwards, letting my head slam into Twi’s frilly pillows. “Only problem now,” I say through a sigh, “is that someone has to tell Wallflower I’m resigning.”
Twilight crawls over and lays next to me, still holding her doll. “One of us can do it. Heck, even me, since I’m quitting too.”
Avoiding a confrontation with Wallflower would be ideal — but I shake my head. “No, it has to be me. It’s only fair.”
Twi rests her hand on my arm. “Are you sure?”
“I still need to apologize for attacking her at Summer Sunfest. Besides, it’d be a total coward move to do this via proxy. Even Flash Sentry broke up with me face-to-face, and I was two weeks away from becoming a literal demon at that point.”
“Fine. But can I help you write a script to practice with, like we did for the girls?”
“Absolutely. I’m gonna need all the help I can get.”
Twilight spends only a second smiling before she turns over onto her back, takes off her glasses, and closes her eyes. “Just give me a few minutes to think of the right angle to take.”
I chuckle. “The angle?”
“What you should focus on in your conversation with her.” She places her glasses neatly on her chest, just above Smarty Pants. “I’m tapping into my mom’s journalism genes.”
“How come you can have journalism genes, but Rarity can’t have keysmashing genes?”
For a good five seconds, Twilight opens her eyes and stares at the ceiling. “No comment,” she finally says, shutting them again.
Giggling, I turn over onto my side to watch her think. The furrowed brows, the slightly parted lips, the chest that rises and falls in sync with mine. She’s wearing her Lazy Sunday outfit, an old t-shirt and a pair of snug boxer shorts, and I can trace the outline of her slender torso and thighs. And her shirt is riding up just enough to give me a peek at her tummy — again, undeniably cute.
I use the word ‘cute’ a lot. Pinkie is cute when she’s laughing or baking. Twilight is cute when she’s brainstorming, or reading, or playing games with me. Fluttershy is cute when she’s infodumping about the vital need to maintain local beaver habitats. They’re cute when they’re excited, and when they let me share in that excitement. Passion, mixed with kindness.
And taken far enough, it’s not just cute — it’s sexy. I mentioned Flash Sentry a minute ago, and he’s still hanging out in my mind. Sure, I mostly dated him to secure my spot as CHS’ Queen Bee. But even at my worst, I couldn’t deny his charm. From the outside, he might look like some aloof, impossibly cool, hunky rockstar. But spend even a day with him, and you’ll uncover what he really is: Goofy and trusting and passionate and kind. He’s sexy, and back then, I was ugly. He deserved (deserves) so much better.
By the time our relationship ended, it’d become sickeningly toxic: Daily fights, insults, and lies. But I still remember those humid Friday nights when he’d scramble up the five flights of stairs to my apartment, guitar case slung over his back, and serenade me with every cheesy ballad he knew. He’d close his eyes, lift his head, and croon the night away. More beautiful than any misty Canterlot waterfall or scarlet sunrise. I could stare for hours.
I feel the same way about Twi when she leans to the side to magically make herself turn faster in a racing game, or when she laughs and her whole body shakes. When she runs with Spike and pants just as hard as he does, or when her eyes light up as she flips the switch on some new invention for the first time. When she stops to welcome Fluttershy or Trixie or Derpy or anyone into a conversation so no one gets left out. When she asks someone how they’re doing, and actually wants a real answer. When she sings with so much emotion that spit flies out of her mouth. When she holds my hand and her love pulses through me, a second heartbeat, hot and tingling.
I loved Flash. But I love Twilight more.
The thought echoes.
I look at Twilight. Her eyes are still closed. Her shirt is still riding up.
Again. Again.
My vision blurs as a chill creeps down my chest and into my gut.
Do I like Twilight?
I mean, of course I like her. But — at risk of sounding like a middle schooler — do I like like her?
Goddess, it’s Twi. We’re best friends. What a weird thing to think.
But we are weirdos, both of us. And that’s not even counting the magic powers.
We’ve danced around half-naked together. Melded memories and probed each other’s minds. She’s cried in my arms, and I’ve collapsed into hers. She’s rubbed ointment on my bare, sweaty back. Pretty intimate for just friends.
What would it be like to date Twi? Incredibly fun, I imagine — even if it just meant spending, like, 50% more time with her and nothing else. And we’ve got so much in common, so there’s loads of stuff we could do together. Movies, day trips to the beach, walks in the woods. Rock concerts are probably out of the picture, a bit too loud for her, but we would listen to music together. She would probably even make museums interesting.
Help her in the lab. Write songs with her. Cheer her up when she’s depressed. Hold hands and share thoughts. Hug her the way she likes to be hugged, our bodies pressed so tight together that our atoms could merge.
I’d treat her better than Timber, that’s for sure.
I haven’t dated anyone since Flash, and that was a lifetime ago. Do I still know how?
Her parents like me, I think.
What if I bought her a new stuffed animal?
I wonder what it’d be like to kiss her.
“Sunset?”
I jerk awake, moving my hands so fast that I accidentally slap myself in the nose. “Ow!”
Twilight cringes. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I check my nose for blood — nope, just boogers — and nod. “Yeah, I’m… yeah.”
“Are you sure? Because you’ve been staring off into space for almost a minute now, pursing your lips like you do when you’re anxious.” She sits up and motions to her own face. “And you’re very flushed.”
I touch my cheek, and find it phoenix hot. When did Twi’s room get so stuffy? And my clothes, so tight? Or, a better question: What the hell am I doing, thinking about my best friend like that? The last minute of fantasies flicker through my mind again, and I can feel my internal thermometer rising to a feverish peak.
“I’m sure,” I eventually say. Excuse. I need an excuse. “Just remembering an embarrassing moment I had with Flash Sentry, back when we were dating.”
“Oooh,” Twi intones, leaning in so close that I can smell her kiwi shampoo. “Storytime?”
Damn it, Sunset, you stupid lying clown.
“Maybe later.” I jump to my feet. “Gotta pee.”
I use that excuse a lot, huh? And to think I used to be the best liar at CHS. Aren’t clowns supposed to be good at improv?
She pouts, but lays back down. “I’m holding you to that. Smarty Pants is too.”
With an affirmative grunt, I rush out of the room.
The worn wooden floors turn my footsteps into gunshots as I scurry downstairs, past framed photos of Twi and her family, all the way to the bathroom. The walls are a burning pink, the same color as the streak in her hair.
I hang over the ornate sink, turn on the cold water, and once it’s frostbitingly painful, start splashing it into my face. I’m shocked that it doesn’t sizzle.
Okay, okay, no need to exaggerate. My imagination got the best of me — not exactly a rare occurrence — and I got flustered — just as common.
But I do have to scold myself, self-love exercises be damned. I shouldn’t be ogling Twi like that, no matter how ‘cute’ she is. She’s not a random chick on the beach, some faceless hottie to play with in my fantasies. And I’m not some horny teenager looking for my next fling. She deserves more respect than that. I’m a clown, frizzy red hair and all, but I’m not a creep.
She and I, dating… It’s a fun idea, maybe. The kind of thing that Rainbow Dash would tease me about. And yes, we’re probably closer than most people are — but we’ve experienced things together that no one in this world has. We’re best friends in a different way than everyone else.
Besides, even if I did like her (Goddess, I sound like a stupid kid) there’s no way in hell I’d risk our friendship like that. No way. I’d rather toss myself out her bedroom window.
It takes embarrassingly long for my heart to slow and my blood to settle, even as I do my best to think about anything other than Twi. I shoot myself one last glare in the mirror — I even add a growl for good measure — then snatch a hand towel off the wall and rub my face clean. It smells like kiwi.