So far, Rainbow’s move to Canterlot for university has been cool. After having put up with years and years of dickheads in Cloudsdale schools (her parents insisted on enrolling her in those prissy private institutions where everyone seemed to only like talking about their new phones and new cars and new boyfriends or how ugly the girl sitting over there was), Rainbow had fully planned to spend her three years in uni putting on her surly face and avoiding everyone just so she wouldn’t have to go through the same thing again.
Instead, now she had friends. You heard that right: plural. At first, the only person she had known in Canterlot had been Fluttershy, who was from Cloudsdale but not a dickhead; they had gone to the same kindergarten together and occasionally hung out. Despite Rainbow having been an absolute asshole of a kid and the fact that she had lobbed a ball of playdough in Fluttershy’s face the first time she approached her, Fluttershy had still, incredibly, continued to talk to her. Anyway, Rainbow had only ever been good at making enemies, but Fluttershy was good at making friends, and that was how Rainbow got to meet Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, and Pinkie Pie.
Now, Rainbow doesn’t want to seem… ungrateful. Fluttershy, Rarity, Pinkie and Twilight are all wonderful people in their own right. They get along well, Rainbow cares about them like they her, and they’ve helped each other out countless times. But when it comes down to certain things that Rainbow likes, none of the four of them are really… up to it. You see, Rainbow is a, well, YOLO kind of gal. She likes getting up to hijinks, y’know, doing challenges and other stupid shit for fun. But Fluttershy, Rares and Twi get embarrassed easily or care about things like personal safety, and refuse to join Rainbow in racing to the train station. Pinkie’s great for pranks, but she’s not exactly as athletic as Rainbow is, and it’s no fun armwrestling someone you can beat in ten seconds flat.
So there’s that. But Rainbow’s happy enough with where she’s at.
That is, until the Apple Shake Girl comes along.
There’s a juice bar in one of the quieter malls in Canterlot’s main shopping district. Sweet Apple Shakes is a hidden gem: small, locally-owned, and produces the greatest fruit shakes you will ever taste ever—or so Pinkie Pie claims. Because Pinkie won’t stop raving about it, Rainbow Dash allows herself to be dragged along with the others to the store one cloudy Tuesday afternoon, even though fruit shakes aren’t really her thing.
It’s quiet for sure: they’re the only ones there when they stroll up to the store. It has a bright and colourful shopfront, fruity pinks and oranges and greens. The counter has the pattern of pink shapes on a yellow backdrop while the signboard above has a simple illustration of a cup of fruit shake and an apple symbol in the centre. The menu boards behind show there are more than just apple shakes sold here; there’s a range of different fruits and vegetables, and a choice of juices, smoothies, milkshakes, et cetera. An interesting choice of music pumps from the speakers: country music, instead of the typical pop one would expect to be playing at a mall juice bar.
Behind the counter in the kitchen, a girl in a similarly gaudy uniform—neon green polo and orange apron—methodically chops the skin off a watermelon. Her blonde hair is wrapped back in a hair net.
“Jackieee!” Pinkie squeals her way over to the counter. “So good to see you again! I’ve brought some friends along this time.”
The blonde girl looks up, setting the knife down. The four others stand around awkwardly as her green eyes travel over each of them.
Finally she nods. “Howdy. What can I get y’all?”
They each order something. Fluttershy gets a strawberry milkshake, Rarity gets the tropical fruit blend, Twilight gets grapefruit juice, while Pinkie’s order is some abomination like a banana peach smoothie with… chocolate milk and raspberry ice cream? Rainbow can’t even remember what she said. But the blonde girl, ‘Jackie’, carries out each of these orders swiftly, weaving her way around the juicing machines and blenders with mesmerising ease. She gets even Pinkie’s nightmare of an order perfectly.
Which is why it’s so strange when it reaches Rainbow’s turn.
Rainbow doesn’t think her order was that complicated. Apple smoothie. Yet the girl seems to take… longer to put together her drink. She lingers over the box of apples before choosing them, cuts up the fruit in slow movements, and drops it into the blender slice by slice instead of dropping in the whole handful.
And also—Rainbow might just be imagining it, but—the girl keeps looking at her. It’s like she feels the need to glance over at Rainbow Dash every few seconds, as if Rainbow’s going to steal a pear or something while she’s not looking, which is frankly insulting because Rainbow doesn’t even like pears. When the girl finally passes Rainbow her smoothie, her intense green gaze doesn’t let up one bit.
Understandably, Rainbow is super weirded out. She takes the smoothie and hightails it out of there. She tells Pinkie and the others about it, but Rarity says,
“Well, rainbow hair isn’t exactly common, dear, of course people are going to stare.”
Rainbow Dash already knew that, but this was different.
Pinkie grins, “As for the longer wait time, well, the apple smoothie’s their specialty! The owners of Sweet Apple Shakes are really serious about their apple drinks, so they pay a little extra attention while making them.”
“Besides, I reckon that she’s just tired,” Fluttershy adds. “She just prepared all of our orders in one shot, after all, and she had to work alone.”
She hadn’t looked tired at all to Rainbow, though.
“Especially after preparing Pinkie’s smoothie, too,” Twilight adds thoughtfully.
Okay, fair. Rainbow looks over to where Pinkie Pie is sipping on her chocolatey-brown monster concoction, humming in blissful enjoyment. The others are wearing similar expressions as they sip on their drinks. Well, good for them, but no matter how amazing these fruit shakes are, there is no way in hell that Rainbow Dash is going back to Sweet Apple Shakes again.
“Go on then, try yours!” Pinkie pauses to gesture at her.
Rainbow Dash looks down at her own drink: a rich, creamy cinnamon colour. Lifting the cup to her lips, she braves a sip.
What the fuck.
~~~
Rainbow tries visiting the shake store at different times other than Tuesday so she can avoid the blonde girl. There’s just a problem that she realises once she’s visited the store on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday (they close on Sundays) — Jackie seems to work an incredible number of shifts. Some days a tall ginger-haired man takes over, but there’s no reliable pattern to their shifts. It seems completely random. Or maybe it isn’t random and it’s just Rainbow who can’t figure it out, but Twilight refuses to pause doing her maths tutorial to help her chart out their shift patterns (“you could just not go to the store” yeah, and with apple smoothies like that? Ridiculous.).
So Rainbow Dash sucks it up and continues to visit Sweet Apple Shakes every Monday morning, because that’s when she really needs the energy boost before her 8 AM class. That’s a shift that Jackie works consistently, but Rainbow is prepared to do anything for that heavenly, ice-cold, sweet-spiced apple smoothie. And if that means waking up earlier so she can endure Jackie’s tortuously slow smoothie-making process and her long green gazes, Rainbow’s fine. More than fine.
Until one day, Rainbow’s alarm doesn’t go off.
“Shitshitshitshitshit,” Rainbow swears as she rushes down the street, dashing across traffic lights and ignoring all the loud honks that blare her way. She’d be able to run much faster if it weren’t for the peak hour crowds in Canterlot, but instead once she’s in the city centre, she’s forced to trundle at a snail’s pace behind douchebags looking at their phones and impenetrable gaggles of gossiping youngsters.
By the time she reaches the mall and tears through the atrium to reach Sweet Apple Shakes, it’s 7.50 AM instead of 7.15 AM like she intended. Really though, 7.50 shouldn’t be an issue with her uni being 5 minutes’ walk from this place, but Jackie, sweet Jackie insists on taking up to half a goddamn hour making her smoothie. Rainbow timed her.
“What can I get for you?” Jackie asks her. Rainbow fights the eye-roll. She sees the corner of Jackie’s normally stoic lips twitch and wonders if the girl discreetly enjoys this. She absolutely does, the bastard. It’s all a game to the sadist Apple Shake Girl.
Rainbow watches as Jackie turns away and begins to roll apples around in her freckled hands. Having selected her apples, she lays them out on the counter individually. She looks them over again, before finally grasping one and setting it on the chopping board, all of this at an agonising pace.
Rainbow coughs.
And then Jackie gives her this look. Rainbow Dash becomes acutely aware of the huge knife in her hand and wisely keeps quiet.
And also, it’s like. Look, Rainbow doesn’t want to be a Karen. She’s had more than enough time spent with her mother whenever she kicks up a huge fuss over anything imperfect given to Rainbow. One time Rainbow had gotten a kiddy meal that came with a Lego Robin figurine even though she had originally wanted Batman; Rainbow had been like “eh, whatever”, but her mom had yelled at the staff to get it replaced and threatened to call the cops if they refused, and Rainbow had to stand there the entire time bearing all the pointed stares and generally looking like the world’s most entitled brat. Hence Rainbow Dash makes it a point to be extra nice to service workers, if only to make up for a fraction of the suffering her mom extols upon the minimum wage worker population. She gets out her phone and starts to scroll through memes in an attempt to distract herself.
But then the time in the corner of her screen blips from 7.52 to 7.53, and her professor’s face flashes in her mind. She has Dr Svengallop this semester, a small and grouchy man who Rainbow is solidly convinced has never felt love in his life for anything or anyone. He’s basically Severus Snape IRL, and Rainbow’s no Hermione Granger, alright, she’s already struggling in assignments and really doesn’t need more points taken off her course evaluation for being late.
She looks up from her phone to see where Jackie is at in the smoothie-making. Only to realise that there is no smoothie, and there is no blonde-headed girl. Jackie is gone and there’s no one else behind the counter.
What. The.
Shoving her phone in her pocket, Rainbow whips her head this way and that to try and find her, but the door to the storeroom in the back is ajar and Jackie’s not in there either. Rainbow eventually figures out that Jackie must have gone to the toilet.
Fucking insane! Rainbow thinks to herself as she glances furiously at the half-cut apples on the chopping board, only one red glistening apple left uncut. Couldn’t Blondie have just held her piss in until she finished making the smoothie for her only customer? If she doesn’t finish chopping those apples, it’ll be Rainbow’s head that’s gonna go on the block!
This would probably be where a reasonable person would give up on the smoothie and just head to class. But Rainbow Dash is tired and annoyed and hungry, and also, she’s a YOLO kind of gal. She’s a YOLO gal who needs an apple smoothie, pronto. She looks at the empty storefront, looks at the half-chopped apples just sitting there, and thinks to herself: why the hell not?
Twilight Sparkle would have been able to answer that question, but Rainbow’s not Twilight.
Before she can deliberate it too much, Rainbow clambers over the little door and enters the mini-kitchen of Sweet Apple Shakes. Now it’s important to note here that Rainbow Dash has never done anything remotely resembling cooking. Yes, she’s 21 years old and yes, she lives alone in her dorm now, but her parents hardly cooked, and when she moved to her current residence in Canterlot there was only a shared kitchen that was so grimy she didn’t want to use it, and eating out was cheap enough that it wasn’t necessary for her to learn to.
But hey, it’s only making a smoothie. There isn’t even a stove to burn down. Can’t be that bad, right?
Rainbow picks up the last apple that lay on the chopping board. Moving aside the other apple slices, she holds the apple flat on the board and gets the knife. She aims it at the stem and sinks the knife into its soft flesh. Alright…
But then her knife hits something hard. Rainbow frowns and presses harder, but the knife only digs in a little more before stopping again. Rainbow clenches all the muscles in her hands and forgoes stabilising the apple for leaning her whole weight on the flat of the knife.
“Raaaaaarghhhhhhh!” she cries out with the effort. She struggles and heaves and pants, only managing to get the knife to squeak down a little fraction before the base of the apple slips away, and Rainbow’s weight and the knife goes crashing down onto the board, scattering the cut apple slices while some drop to the ground. Meanwhile, the whole apple has gone Superman. It flies into the air, ricochets off the fridge door and goes rocketing for the row of glass blenders.
Rainbow, with a sudden surge of inhuman reflexes, dives desperately in the way of the rogue apple. She nearly topples over the blender behind her, but turns around rapidly to steady it. The apple pinballs off her shoulders and falls to the ground. It goes rolling until it bumps into the corner of the walls, coming to rest in a position that clearly displays Rainbow’s failed knife-cut. Only then does it occur to Rainbow that she shouldn’t have tried to cut straight through the core of an apple.
Well. That could have gone worse. And it’s only 7.56.
Quickly, she salvages the apple slices on the floor, rinsing them in water before gathering all the fruit in her palms. She runs towards what she hopes is a blender and not a juicer. Surely, (hopefully,) conventional wisdom would not fail her at this point. She dumps the lot in, and then tries her hardest to recall what else went in the smoothie. Now she wishes she paid attention to what Jackie was doing instead of pointedly averting her gaze every time while she waited.
Trial and error it is. She speeds towards the fridge, finds an open carton of milk inside, and pours some into the blender. Okay… she looks around until she glimpses something that looks like a spice cabinet. She had always tasted a touch of cinnamon in the smoothie, so there should be cinnamon in it. Opening the cabinet, she gets on her tiptoes and grabs the shaker that says CINNAMON. She shakes a generous amount over the blender. Rainbow is a genius. Because she’s feeling smart, she also grabs shakers for ginger and nutmeg—even she knows those are apple-y spices. Ha! Who said Rainbow couldn’t cook?
She stares into the mixture of apple slices, cold milk and brown dusting between the blades of the blender. It’s lacking something… Rainbow remembers that in the smoothie, there was a crunch to it. Not like the blended apples, but like that of crushed ice. She stomps for the fridge once more, flings open the freezer door, and sticks her hand in the ice tray. A lot of cubes had stuck together, but she managed to pry out a few good blocks. She plonks them into the blender and checks her watch. 7.58. Oh fuck, she’s going to have to run like mad later. She punches the big red power-on button on the machine.
The blender doesn’t move at first. Rainbow moves to punch the button again, maybe check the main power switch, but it’s at that moment the blender lets out a terrible groan. It’s like something out of a horror movie soundtrack. And then, the blender starts to shake all over. Rainbow gets the feeling that something has gone horribly, awfully wrong, but is too horrified to move, and so she just stands there like an idiot, watching as the blender jar rattles in its housing like it’s experiencing a seizure, its contents sloshing about inside dangerously. The groaning doesn’t stop either, but only keeps growing louder and louder. On top of the groaning, a high-pitched buzzing noise starts.
Then suddenly, a hand grabs the back of her shirt and hauls her away seconds before the blender shatters.
~~~
So, things are looking ugly.
Very ugly indeed.
For one thing, the time is 8.05 AM, and there is still no apple smoothie.
For another, Rainbow Dash is currently standing in the middle of Sweet Apple Shakes’ kitchen, drenched in sour-smelling liquid, brown cinnamon and nutmeg smeared like soil across her face. There’s apple slices, ice cubes, and shards of glass all over the floor. Several of the blender machines lie tipped over, smashed on the ground, their different contents pooling together with the spilt milk to form a large, chunky puddle swimming in fruity colours. Someone walks past the store and their footsteps slow as they pause to stare in amazement at the carnage.
In front of Rainbow Dash, there is also a very angry blonde-haired girl. She’s splattered in the milk-cinnamon-apple debacle; less than Rainbow, who had taken the brunt of it, but still a sorry sight. The girl doesn’t even say anything to her, just vaguely waves her dripping palms about the wrecked store and then gestures at her in a silent question:
How?
Rainbow can only shrug. Rainbow fucks up a lot, but this is a new level, even for her.
Jackie actually looks murderous. Rainbow is unpleasantly reminded of the fact that Jackie is standing within reach of the big knife on the chopping board. Rainbow decides to open her mouth to salvage the situation, which is only the second-dumbest thing she’s done all morning.
“Hey now, Jackie, I know this looks bad-”
“Do not call me Jackie!” the girl roars. Rainbow clamps her mouth shut, quivering in her sopping-wet sneakers. The girl looks ready to continue on her tirade, but then she pauses to stare at Rainbow some more, and Rainbow guesses that this is the point where she takes in the shell-shocked, absolutely misery-soaked state that Rainbow is in and takes pity on her.
The girl takes a deep, deep breath and runs a hand over her frazzled blonde hair. Then she retreats to the storeroom, emerges with a broom, and with the other hand tosses a roll of paper towel and a bundle of clothes at Rainbow.
“Go to the toilet and get cleaned up,” she says gruffly. “Don’t go runnin’ off, now—I want ya back here lickety split. You and me, we’re going to talk.” Her piercing green eyes stare daggers into Rainbow. Welp. She hopes Dr Svengallop won’t miss her too much today.
Rainbow squelches her way to the nearest toilet, cleans up as best she can, and changes into the clothes the girl gave her—the same bright green polo shirt and knee-length blue skirt that the girl is always wearing. By the time she gets back to the shop, the girl has swept up the shards and fruit and has gotten started on mopping up the smoothie swimming pool.
When she sees her, the girl cocks her head and asks, “Why aren’t you wearing the apron?”
“Uhhh,” Rainbow says, her hand still holding the neon orange apron that was wrapped into the bundle. “Look, I’m grateful for the change of clothes, but I don’t need the apron.”
“The apron’s part of the uniform.”
“Thanks, but I’m not really looking for employment right now-”
“It’s not a request.” A hard look, and the reality of Rainbow’s situation begins to sink in. “In return for the property and equipment damage that you have caused, and the amount of loss that we’re going to make while waiting for new sets to come in, you will work here for the next year.”
What? She can’t do that! Rainbow’s a full-time uni student, for goddess’ sake, with assignments and exams she can barely keep up with; a permanent job on top of that would most certainly kill her.
Rainbow considers offering to compensate monetarily instead—her parents are rich, they could afford whatever sum this damage costed—but then there’s the nightmare of actually asking them for the money. Not that they wouldn't pay up, but Rainbow also knows that they would force her to pack up her bags and return to Cloudsdale at once, deeming her too irresponsible to handle things on her own. It had already been so difficult convincing her parents to let her move here.
There are fates worse than death, Rainbow thinks grimly. She puts on the apron. Smiling cruelly at her, Apple Shake Girl reaches out and hands her the dribbling mop.