Our Girl Scootaloo

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Scootaloo watched in horror as the raving, furious man shouted terrible things at her. She had seen people angry with her for existing before, and she'd heard some of the threats. Religious crazies, anti-gay bigots, conspiracy theorists and just plain crazy people had sent letters or made threatening calls just about all her life, but she'd never had one this physically close to her before.

Worst of all, her friends were with her. Josie was shaking half-hysterically, Christina had burst silently into tears and Melissa, brave, fearless Melissa, had gone deathly pale.

The madman was starting to shriek abuse at them as well, in addition to gesturing wildly with what looked like the deadman-switches she'd seen on bombs in movies. Scootaloo knew that she had to do something, and do it soon.

She knew how hard she could kick with one of her hooves. She also knew from her studies of biology and the first-aid books of Conner's she was reading, just how much damage she could do to a fragile human being. Unconsciousness would be definite. Whether that meant he might drop the little switch in his left hand or not, she was less certain. But worst of all, there was also the very definite possibility of death from the kind of kick she would need to use to protect her friends.

Just before she could act a red dot appeared on the man's hand by the switch and steadily tracked its' way up his arm to his forehead, and Scootaloo decided she preferred online shopping to the mall.

One of the technology companies who used research from her medical tests had sent her a check for the additional biofeedback sessions she had given them, and while she normally deposited just about all of such funds into her college savings, this one was small enough and the work had been annoying enough that she decided to spend it on some well-deserved retail therapy with her friends. It had been a matter of sleeping with a somewhat clunkier version of her sensory apparatus on her head for two weeks, and given the itching, the interrupted sleep, and the lecture she'd caught for nodding off in English class, Scootaloo wanted something immediate and tangible for her scientific volunteerism.

She was seriously considering either a tablet computer for reading in bed, a small netbook for taking notes in class or a pair of those awesome multi-colored giant headphones that some of the kids in school were wearing between classes. They cost almost as much as an entry-level PC and her Dads had both criticized them as looking like 'fluorescent Eighties nightmares!' but it sometimes stung to not have a few of the trendy things the other kids got. Scootaloo couldn't really wear designer labels (except for the odd scarf or handbag,) and keeping up with popular sneaker brands was right out, but headphones, those were a thing that even cartoon ponies could enjoy.

That, and Josie's cool big brother had gotten her a set, and Melissa was all but certain she was getting a pair for her birthday. Christina claimed to prefer tiny noise-cancelling earphones and had a less-expensive pair, but they were still the most fashionable brand, and not, say, the $5 kind one's dad ordered from the same website that sold computer cables and squishy mouse-pads.

It was silly, Scootaloo freely conceded to herself, but she still felt her own conspicuousness keenly, and it seemed an awful shame to not participate in one of the fashions she could. Anyway, she'd already thought out how to explain her purchase to her Dads!

To Daddy, she would explain that the circumaural headphone design offered an improvement in sound quality with a better dynamic range and were very effective earmuffs in wintertime, highly efficient at muffling background noise on, say, the bus, so that she could …study or enjoy an educational work such as The Feynman Physics Lectures or a TED-talk podcast. Also, their larger size and bright color could be argued as making them less likely to be misplaced, unlike the several $5 pairs from the computer-cable website she had gone through. (The fact that she'd had to Google what 'circumaural' even meant and that she still had only the vaguest idea what 'dynamic range' implied beyond 'costs more' was fairly irrelevant.) And they did cost a lot less than aviation headphones, which was bound to be of some small comfort.

To Papa, she would point out that they coordinated easily with several of her more popularly-styled outfits, as well as the fact that the very fluorescent Eighties-nightmare-ness of them, when paired with very classic pieces such as her favorite cardigan and touches of appropriate color, such as her bright green scarf, the effect was charmingly retro and lent both practicality and a youthful flair to an ensemble that was otherwise perhaps just a little too old for her. Melissa had helped to come up with that one.

Josie also pointed out that large headphones did give one the convenient advantage of being able to pretend to not hear boys who were interested in one, especially as the relative attractiveness of the boy might affect sound quality. Alas, Scootaloo wasn't sure if the advantage of 'deters potential sons-in-law' outweighed the risk of rudeness or her Dads' assertion that if she didn't 'turn that noise down' she would be deaf before she was thirty. Christina then pointed out that parents were contractually obligated to say that regardless of anyone's musical tastes or preferred volume level, and had, in fact, witnessed her own grandma give the identical lecture to her mom.

"Something adult-contemporary that only middle-aged people like. Probably Fleetwood Mac. Grandma says Stevie Nicks sounds like a goat who went Wiccan to offend its' parents."

"…But I love Fleetwood Mac," Josie pointed out. Josie, of course, was a classic-rock fan who once charmed a teacher into giving back her confiscated mp3 player early after pointing out just which of his favorite albums were on it and letting him copy a few files.

"Well, yeah. It was weird, too, because 'In the Hall of the Crimson King' and 'Days of Future Passed' are both older than they are," Josie frowned. "And way better than the processed Nineties pop nonsense my mother likes."

"I've been reading about evolutionary theory and I think parents really might be genetically programmed to complain about our music and think our fashions are stupid," Scootaloo observed. "Apparently, in chimpanzee groups, the only way to prevent inbreeding is for the teenagers to become rebellious and somewhat annoying to the elders and for the elders to become less tolerant, which causes the teenagers to strike out on their own, find other groups of teenagers and, well…breed."

"So my mother's endless complaining about my clothes making me look like a floozy is what will actually make me more likely to become a floozy?" Melissa grinned.

"My dad said that this top made me look like a scarlet woman, couldn't you just die?" Christina laughed. "So I put a camisole underneath and now it looks like I have Ms. Chisholm's same outfit from bake-sale day. And you know she only said she was wearing a cami to keep muffin crumbs out of her sport-bra."

"I also think she was trying to rein in the perv factor from some of the divorced dads," Josie agreed, "but yeah, camisoles are totally crumb-catchers."

"I can respect the desire to keep your Victoria's Secret Compartment crumb-free, but a little bit of purely decorative cleavage does not a floozy make. Frankly, I don't think any of us but Melissa are even equipped to flooze," Christina sighed.

"These aren't floozy-ing boobies," Melissa objected. "I've told you a hundred times. These are poker-winning boobies. The very gas money for this outing was provided by a low-cut top and enough underwire to pick a lock."

"With the right skirt and heels, Scoot, you've got better legs than any of us," Melissa pointed out.

"You'd have to machine them out of solid aluminum, engineer the ergonomics for quadrupedal perambulation and you'd need at least quarter-inch-thick treaded rubber for the soles, but it could be done," Josie announced, pulling out a notebook and indicating some drawings and calculations. "See?"

"I think two-part epoxy would work just as well. Some farriers on the Internet use that now for horses whose laminitis precludes nailing. And I also designed a pair of platform sneakers capable of letting one run as fast and jump as high as a Spice Girl," Josie explained, turning a page. "See?"

"You complain about your mom's horrible processed Nineties pop music, but love the Spice Girls," Scootaloo raised an eyebrow.

"In this case? You multiply the cosine of Girl Powah times five pairs of platform shoes, solve for N when the Britishness ratio is 100%, the Spice Bus is bigger on the inside, just like a TARDIS, and Meat Loaf is their driver. Result: complete coolness." Josie grinned in a freaky, all-teeth-showing maniacal way that was strangely evocative of Rainbow Dash from the old cartoon.

"And again with your fixation on all things British," Melissa sighed. "And here comes a Doctor Who reference…"

"The Spice Girls are Time Lords, Melissa," Josie intoned in a flawless British accent. "You should accept them as your pop-singer overlords. Spice up your life, my friend. Spice up your life."

And with that, they all cracked up laughing, remembering all too well what had happened the last time a door-to-door evangelist arrived at the cheerleaders' sleepover. Josie's cheerful blending of classic-rock trivia and physics-nerd geekery, as well as a happy talent for being able to say truly ridiculous shit with a straight face had caused her to attempt to persuade two unfortunate Mormon elders into 'accepting Bonnie Tyler as their favorite female rock star of the Eighties.'

"Is it bad that I actually hope for religious nut-jobs when you're around, Josie?" Scootaloo asked.

"I don't think so. They only exist because God loves me and wants me to have nice toys," Josie grinned in her cheeky way.

"By the way, what did happen with the 'nice Baptist boy' your grandma asked you to go out with?" Christina asked.

"He's three sequins away from a Pride parade," Josie explained bluntly. Scootaloo cracked up and almost snorted lemonade through her nose. "I meant to ask, by the way, what is the correct LGBT-friendly etiquette for describing a person who trips the National Gaydar so hard that NORAD has to recalibrate every time he buys shoes?"

"I think you're okay. I told my Dads what you said about that one televangelist and I thought Papa was going to soil himself laughing."

"Well, far be it from me to not be 'protocoligorically correct' on such things," Josie looked very reassured.

Privately, Scootaloo had always thought her most hilarious friend used humor to hide the fact that she was about a quart low on self-esteem, though the fact that Melissa and Scoot both had made a habit of calling her or inviting her to dinner just because she cheered everyone up so much was really helping a lot, and Christina's parents liked Josie because of the physics prize she'd won recently and consistently 99th-percentile results in Math. The hope that she could improve Christie's knowledge of anything but Great Albums of the Early Prog-Rock Era and Classics of British Comedy was typical faulty parent logic, as Josie could only actually do mathematical calculations in her own head and couldn't explain them easily at all without her listener running the risk of weeing herself laughing, but what Christina's parents didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Josie's older brothers both had Asperger's syndrome, after all, and Scoot always wondered if her ability to palm off gigabytes of memorized facts as funny was a very clever way of making her own slightly-off-spec mind seem a bit more neuro-typical. Nobody ever sent funny people who smiled a lot to the counselor for evaluation, and if Ms. Chisholm had figured it out, she was classy enough to help Josie without letting on that she knew.

And then Melissa; she was clearly the most mature of the group when it came to boys, fashion, social nuances and, curiously enough, economics, but there were times when her cast-iron bravery and unashamed sensuality were just a bit of a cover for a seriously romantic heart and a profound capacity for love. Scootaloo had been there for her through two of the most graceful breakups she'd ever heard of, seen her keep boys and even some friends at arm's length emotionally until something went wrong for them (at which point she was mother-duck to whomever needed it,) and as strong and feministic as Melissa was, her friends could tell that when she did find the right person, she was going to fall harder and deeper than any of them. Christina compared her frequently to a character in one of the old murder mysteries she liked so much and which nobody else had managed to completely read because the author occasionally lapsed into untranslated French or Latin purely because she could. Grad-student mysteries, Scoot called them.

Christina had smiled a little when Scootaloo called them that, set them aside and then suggested another, more accessible author. She loved to read, wrote a little herself and was never happier than when some great classic of literature that she knew backwards and forwards was made into a movie, at which point her friends all went out with her to see it and then, over dinner, sat back and watched with delight as she and sometimes Josie tore it apart for getting some key aspect or highly important piece of the book completely bloody wrong, or leaving out a favorite part, or for not being the nine hours long that to adapt the book properly would have necessarily required. Only British mini-series adaptations were ever really good enough for Christina to consider them 'passable,' and when a certain popular supernatural tween romance was given a bigger budget than the latest Jane Austen adaptation and cool YA sci-fi piece combined, the cheerleaders were all a little afraid Christie might hunger-strike.

Christina was brilliant in English and the absolute darling of Mrs. Stewart's Creative Writing class, but if she couldn't get her shit together in math, Scoot was worried she might not be able to stay on the squad. And to her delight, the tutoring after school at her house was helping a lot. Papa always brought them sodas or iced tea, and Christina got all her homework done and was actually understanding the basics of trigonometry at last. Scootaloo was fairly sure that her friend would have a meltdown if someone took her TI-83 calculator away and asked her to multiply in her head, but still, progress was progress. It was nice to have friends who relied on you the way you sometimes felt you relied on them.

"Speaking of protocol, what is the proper way to tell a salesperson that you aren't interested?" Scootaloo asked the group. "If one more person comes and tries to spray perfume on us or sell us freaky bath salts, I swear I'll fake anaphylaxis and freak 'em out."

"The thing to do is put on your haughtiest expression and say 'We're just looking' in a tone that implies they should fuck right off," Melissa explained. She had a part-time job working at a local warehouse store and was thus the go-to source for information on all things retail and business. "To be fair, we are teenage girls, so a lot of them are giving us attention because the stereotypes have them thinking we're going to steal shit, when in fact, by paying attention to us, they just completely missed that minivan-mommy to our nine o'clock shoving stuff into that tasteless giant purse." Melissa smiled blithely as a salesperson, clearly about to ask them something inane, did a double-take and then reached for the phone to call Security. "And of course, you can always let Josie deal with them."

"Unless it's a bookstore, then we just deploy Christina like a tactical nuke somewhere between Classics and Mysteries."

"Why? Apart from your receipt's getting college-guy phone-number all over it, I don't see a problem with applying your lexicographical brilliance to the cause of getting uppity retail slaves out of our proverbial grille," Melissa, like all the girls, had been preparing for the pre-SAT lately and was thus enjoying the sesquipedalian loquaciousness admired wherever standardized tests with a vocabulary section are crammed for. "Though I still think that time the freaky couple in the Disney store wanted to measure you for a saddle was pretty damn funny, Scootaloo."

"That led to a very lucrative appearance at a six-year-old's birthday party, I'll have you know. Five hundred dollars for cancer research and our littlest fans still come to all our games."

"Is that where your mini-groupies came from?" Melissa asked. "I knew our Girl Scouts were showing up, but they're more like our beloved protégées, destined to carry on the pom-poms and proud traditions when we are gone. Your army of fun-size stalkers are kinda freaky."

"They're from the kindergarten! I can't help that little girls in your species have a freakish attraction to my species. Even my biology books haven't explained that one."

"I think female rugrats are just profoundly binary creatures at that age," Josie looked thoughtful. "Apart from your rare and highly likeable overalls-wearing, BB-gun owning Scout Finch rugrat, you generally get either princesses or pony-enthusiasts, and what determines which seems to be whether or not they've ever seen shit before. If a little girl has a dog and is aware of the basic biological processes, then a pony, by extension, sounds pretty frickin' rad. If, conversely, a little girl grew up in an apartment without pets and thinks of equines as something that go in a circle and have metal poles down their center, then princess-ing starts to really appeal to them as a career choice."

"Older brothers, badass dads, exposure to the concentrated awesomeness of BB guns and an allergy to pink frilly dresses, I believe. I still break out in hives at the very memory of what my Aunt wanted me to wear for Easter pictures."

"I actually went through a frilly-dress phase," Christina admitted. "But I outgrew it. Wanting to be a pop star comes after princess or pony-owner, right?"

"Yes, though wanting to be an astronaut also occurs around that same age. That's followed by…I d'know, what are we all under the impression we'd like to do?" Josie asked.

"Well, yes, duh and all that, but what kind of scientist? Bio, chemical, research, theoretical, mad?"

"Biological research, I think, with a little mad," Scoot replied with a smile. "And I'd also like to be a test pilot."

"Perfectly reasonable ambition! I want to be an engineer at the moment. Theoretical physics are all well and good, but I'd really enjoy working in something that let me apply the principles."

"What kind of engineer? Mechanical, industrial, electrical, antisocial, aerospace, civil…?" Melissa asked.

"Whatever lets me design rollercoasters, prosthetics, adorable talking robots and whatever miscellaneous stuff NASA may require," Josie grinned. "Though, in all honesty, at the moment I'm interested in applied ergonomics, robotics, artificial intelligence and possibly taking over the world, you know, as a minor."

"It was," Christina sighed with a smile. "I would like to be a librarian, and also to write novels. How about you, Melissa?"

"I would like to work my way through school, get out with minimal debt, and then get a good job as a financial planner and stockbroker. I can set up a hedge fund for all of our retirement, and with my contacts in the wide world of healthcare, aviation, popular literature and, of course, mad science," she gestured to each friend in turn, "I'll be able to develop algorithms for investment that really do take technology and culture into account. Imagine it being 1991, and being able to predict just how big this whole 'computer' and 'Internet' thing was going to go, and then to invest your money accordingly."

It was well-known that Melissa's parents had been raising her and three siblings on what had, up until recently, been retail salaries. She wasn't what she'd let anyone call poor, but her friends knew she knew a little too well what mac-and-cheese from a box tasted like and suspected her fashion sense had been partly developed through making Goodwill finds somehow work.

"No. I intend to be comfortable," Melissa explained. "Insanely rich is just as bad as being poor. For one thing, there's the tax implications, then there's how crazy much you have to spend just to manage the money, keep an eye on the money, protect the money, conspicuously consume just enough of the money that people know you have it, which means you have to work even harder to earn even more money…it's not worth it. It's stupid to try and be rich."

"Yes, but not the way you think it does. Think about it. Let's say you have a job and it pays more than enough money to cover all your food, your shelter, clothes, a car, all your basics. What do you do with the rest of it?"

"And then eventually you have all the stuff you want. Then what do you spend it on?"

"Good answer, but once you've got enough that retirement is assured, say…a million dollars in savings, then what do you spend it on?"

"But you have that job, and it only gives you fourteen days off a year. One flu, two colds and a visit to Grandma's, all of a sudden your vacation time is all gone."

"That'd work for you, Scoot, but for those of us who don't have a VFR license, a plane of their own, plus, y'know, more wings than a Kotex box, traveling anywhere worth going takes enough time, it's barely worth it to go for just the weekend. You spend more time traveling than actually spending time at wherever you're going to."

"So…fancier stuff than you had before?" The girls paused and looked in the window of a jewelry store that seemed to contain 24-karat cellphone cases. Melissa sighed and shook her head derisively.

"You can only gold-plate and diamond-encrust so many things before you're paying more in security systems, guards and insurance than the amount the things are worth to you."

"So…quit your job. Live off your savings and enjoy all the free time you want, if you have that much."

"Josie got it," Melissa smiled. "Free time is the only tangible luxury. Fancy car, giant house, expensive clothes…what does any of that matter if you have to work so hard to get them that you never get to enjoy them? I'd rather have a cheaper car and a house that's just big enough and…well…some of my clothes can be expensive but not my everyday ones, and get to enjoy things like travel and hobbies and friends."

"Yes, but depending on where you get hired, teachers still struggle to make ends meet, and that three months is all the time you get to plan nine months of lessons, take your continuing-education classes and do any projects around the house you didn't have time for during the year. No, what I'm hoping for is the kind of job that I'd do even if it wasn't my job. You know, something that's pretty much a game."

"Professional StarCraft player? I think you need to be South Korean for that," Josie smirked.

"No, really. Managing money, moving investments around and such…that's like a game to me. I enjoy it. Even if I have to work sixty-hour weeks until I'm in my mid-thirties or early forties to be successful, I'd still do it even if they weren't paying me. But that's the other thing. Change what it means to be successful, and you don't have to work quite so hard."

"…I don't get it. Successful means you have a job and money and…I don't know…"

"Exactly. People hear 'successful' and start looking for fancy cars and gold cufflinks and golf and a snooty-butt attitude. Most successful guy I've ever met? He wears scruffier shoes than Josie, drives an old truck and spends most of his time building playgrounds for poor children or flying that ridiculous hairdryer-chair thingy."

"Mr. Stewart from the warehouse store?" Scootaloo asked. "He flies ultralights at my airport. I know him."

"Did you know he only works two days a week, or whenever a cashier gets sick?" Melissa took out her phone and used the calculator. "He's built his chain of stores up to the point where he hardly needs to work at all anymore, but he still does to make sure the chain is doing well, and now that he's getting 90K a year for a 20-hour work-week, he can spend most of his time doing whatever he likes."

"Uh…90K a year is not that much at all, especially not for a CEO. My Dad makes almost 70K now," Scootaloo looked confused.

"Yeah, but your Dad has a family, a house, two older but not ancient cars and a Cozy Mark Whatsit plane, plus he's saving up a lot for retirement, I'd assume. Mr. Stewart's house is half the size, he paid it off years ago, his truck's older than God, his only family is that dog of his and his employees, and he spends a lot less on things like clothes and food and cars, because to him, those things don't matter as much as free time, flying his hairdryers and building playgrounds. That, and 90K a year is shockingly low for a CEO, given the size of his company, but that's another thing."

"Exactly. Take whatever amount of money you need to be comfortable, meaning all your needs met, most of your wants met and a little left over, and then find the job that lets you make that much with the minimum amount of time…unless you really enjoy your work like Mr. S. does, and then work isn't work at all, it's just what you do."

"You really take your boss seriously," Josie looked thoughtful. "He seriously only comes in two days a week?"

"On average," Melissa explained. "And you know what else? He pays us fairly. I'm making ten-fifty an hour part-time, if I needed benefits I could get them, and I already have a little 401K."

"Yes, I am. And I already have a little starter fund for my retirement. If I stay with the store during college, there's tuition-reimbursement for part of my education, Mr. S. gives out a scholarship every year, and if I do well and learn new skills, he's more likely to promote me or another cashier who gets her degree into corporate than to hire some new person, because he likes his management to understand the place and how it works. Our biggest competitor? They pay minimum-wage starting, no bonuses, no benefits, they work like hell to keep everybody part-time, the 401K matches half what ours does, the products they sell are cheap junk because they're using sweatshop labor…they're just not nice people. But you bet your ass the uppermost management's got brand-new cars every year, fancy mansions, send their kids to private schools…Mr. S. was fixing his own truck himself in the parking lot the other day, because making sure we're all okay is more important to him."

"So it's not just about being comfortable," Scootaloo smiled, "but about being ethical."

"Yes! I'd rather be a financial-planner here in town or maybe the Chief Financial Officer for Mr. S and make 75K a year than go to Wall Street and make billions and billions just to cheat on taxes and starve the poor."

"…You must be the only member of the Future Entrepreneurs Club at school who's not a Republican," Josie observed, admiringly.

"Well, I'm sure as shit not a Democrat," Melissa growled. "I'm a progressive. There's a big difference."

"S'wrong with Democrats?" Josie feigned offense with a smile. "I mean, apart from being really whiny."

"Neither Democrats nor Republicans are really any good," Christina sighed. "If you look at their history, they're all, for the most part, upper-class white men with a very small amount of token women and minorities. They're all crazy rich. They're all older than 35. And once they've been elected for more than a single term, they've typically got investments tied up in matters that are affected by the laws they make."

"It's the most elaborate kind of insider trading," Melissa agreed. "Congressmen on the Energy committee agree to vote a certain way so the Congressmen on the Education committee will vote the way they agree with, meanwhile Energy's got money in a textbook company and Education is in bed with coal. What's best for the country, be it environment, education, medicine, science, even social policy…none of it matters as much as keeping the people in power not only in power, but richer than any of us could ever dream of. It's really unfair."

"Well, even the richest person isn't that much richer," Josie finished her lemonade with a slurp and threw the cup away in a recycling bin. "The richest people on the Forbes 400 make, what, a hundred times more than the entry-level employees of the companies that made them the money, right? Sure, it's a little unfair, but they do run the place…"

"Try many, many thousands," Melissa smirked wryly. "Here. I have the math in my paper for Economics." She took out a notebook and passed it to Josie. At the top of the open page was written

"The net worth of the richest heir to a certain storei is the top number –that's 27.9 billion, with a B, and below it is the average annual salary of a cashier at said Now given the way that net worth is invested…it works out to approximately…" Melissa turned a page of calculations. "About every fifty-seven minutes."

"How long it takes the person with the 27.9 billion dollars to earn the average annual salary of one of their cashiers."

"So what you or I would make in a year working for them, they make in about an hour," Scootaloo nodded. "That was about what I thought it was. Still, they pay a lot more in taxes, proportionally speaking, right?"

Melissa could be really insufferably smug sometimes. She shook her head with a shit-eating grin that had previously reduced an ardent trickle-down economist on another school's debate team to not merely incoherent, but incontinent rage as well.

"Proportionally speaking, as in 'what percentage of actual income goes to taxes?' Your dads pay more, And so do the middle-managers of the company in question. The cashiers make so little that they get almost all of their tax burden back, what with the Earned Income Tax Credit and the federal poverty line being where it is, though that's still money that comes out of their pay and which they don't see again until two weeks after they file a tax return, and the soonest you can do that is the beginning of February, with when most W2s come out."

"That's…that's ludicrous. That's what, the richest person in the country?" Josie took Melissa's notebook, rifled through it and found the Forbes 400 print-out. "Aw, hell no."

"This fellow, though, he gives a mess-ton of money to charity," Christina pointed out. "Most of these people give a lot to charity, though, right, so it's like paying taxes, sort of. Deductions and all, right?"

"Sort of," Melissa inclined her head a little to the side, with a 'kinda' hand gesture. "Paying to vaccinate sick kids in Africa, sure, I'm all for deducting that, and a lot of these people do genuine good with their money. But there's also a list of what these people contribute to Senate and House re-election funds, various think-tanks, propaganda groups, PACs…"

"What's a …oh, a Political Action Committee, I remember from Civics," Josie was still frowning over the notes.

"That's buying seats in the government," Josie absolutely growled. "Oh, for fuck's sake."

"And bear in mind, a lot of their investments are corporate stock, meaning that they're helping big corporations like the ones where they made their money to grow larger. It's not so much the municipal bonds, the school bonds, the small-business bundled securities, the angel investments…"

"It's Wall Street, not Main Street. Makes the rich richer, doesn't do shit for the poor besides, just possibly, creating a few more jobs...but not very well-paying ones."

"Is this more of that freaky Bible-verse economics thingy you were on about at practice?"

"The Matthew Effect, yes. 'For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.'"

"Yes, yes, your cutie mark is a book,iv have a pretzel," Josie handed Christina a $10 bill and gestured vaguely at the Auntie Anne's, as they had come to the mall food court. "And get me a cinnamon one?"

"Explain this again, and use simple words," Josie demanded of Melissa, sitting down at a food-court table.

"It's like that song 'God Bless the Child,' that we did in Chorus, but it really applies economically. Rich people get richer and the poor get poorer. This happens no matter what. You can say 'oh, let's do trickle-down economics, and the job-creators will create jobs,' but in practice, you get the Matthew Effect. Then you can say 'let's be progressive, ask the rich to pay their fair proportional share of things in taxes, less what they can deduct for legitimate charity, institute a living wage for the statutory minimum,' and you know what happens then?"

"Pretzels for everyone?" Christina asked, bringing over an armful. "They had a special on! Two-for-one!"

The great discussion of economy and statecraft paused for a hearty laugh and a much-needed intake of delicious carbs.

"Ac'fuwwy," Melissa explained, enjoying a cinnamon pretzel, "it'ff the Maffhew Effect again. The riff get riffer, becauff even when *gulp* the poor get paid better and have more social infrastructure, like roads and schools and an army and police and shit, poor people still spend the majority of their income. It's only once you reach 'comfortable' when you really start to save or invest the stuff. And when poor people spend money, guess who they give the money to in exchange for" - she took another bite - "goodff and serviffefs?"

"The pretzel lady!" Christina grinned. Scootaloo and Josie just looked at her, and she seemed to cringe a little at the joke-fallen-flat.

"Yes, and to many like her. The pretzel lady probably makes somewhere between minimum wage and $15 per hour, maybe more if she owns the franchise. But the pretzel company, which is almost certainly a subsidiary of some giant PretzelCorp..."

"The poor spend their money on things that make the rich richer," Scootaloo sighed, excitedly understanding it at last.

"Precisely. So the choice between letting the rich loophole and tax-break their way out of supporting society, keeping the minimum wage low, all of that neo-conservative stuff, and the more progressive proportional-tax-rate and standard-of-living stuff…either way, the rich are going to get richer and the poor will stay poor. Maybe the rich people have a slightly smaller yacht the first year in the second scenario, but on a long enough timeline, yeah. Matthew Effect kicks in."

"…But that's so sad," Christina looked down at her pretzel. "The poor people can't win either way?"

"No, some poor people can," Scootaloo remarked. "In any group of poor people, you'll get some who work their way out, just as in every group of rich or middle-class people you'll get some going up and some coming down, right?"

They crumpled their pretzel wrappers into balls for the trash can and returned the tray neatly to the lid, talking as they went. Having finished their lemonades by the time they got back to the little stand mid-mall, Scoot briefly asked if anyone wanted refills, then stepped a few yards over to get a complete second round. Seventy-five-cent refills and real lemons definitely made the Real Lemonade and Hot Cookies stand the best value in the mall. The all-natural, made-fresh-today-ness of it was a treat compared to the endless bottles of Gatorade or Snapple cheerleaders normally guzzled and the stand even had a zero-calorie diet option made with stevia for people like Melissa, who worried about her weight, and people like Josie, who insisted the cane-sugar kind was just too effing sugary. And if you came in through the middle doors and got one immediately, then did a loop of the east wing and food court, upstairs and down, you'd be ready for a refill right as you came back to the stand, and then after the west wing you could get a last refill for the drive home.v

A really nice and very big Greek-American family owned the lemonade stand (and a few other restaurants in the food court, for that matter,) and Scootaloo had discovered as a tiny pony that people of that particular heritage and profession were startlingly open-minded about pegasi. It was as if they'd always assumed that there must be a few around somewhere, nice to finally meet one, would that be cash or card? Mr. Kanakaredes Senior's sole observation on the fact that Scootaloo was four-legged was to remark that "I have something you kind of girl will like!" and offer some of the red-and-white peppermints they gave folks with every meal…and it was true. Scootaloo, like virtually all equines, loved peppermints.

To this day, every member of that family would put two instead of the usual one on top of the lid as they gave her an order of lemonade and ask "how you daddies doing?" or "you and you friends working hard in school?" She knew most of their names (they did not wear tags,) and enough about them to ask after the correct relatives and keep up a friendly acquaintanceship, as did Melissa, who simply seemed to have spent a lot of time at malls when she was a kid. It was funny, but when she and the girls were first old enough to be left unsupervised at the mall in middle school, the fact that Scoots and Mel would converse quite naturally with these and other clerks had seemed to really startle Christina and some of the other friends who sometimes came along.

Apparently some parents taught their kids never to talk to strangers ever and others taught them to always be friendly and polite to people who worked in shops, as it was Somebody With a Name Tag whom one was supposed to look for in the event that one ever got lost. Privately, Scootaloo sometimes wondered if a hell of a lot of shyness issues stemmed from being so petrified of being kidnapped that all strangers seemed scary. Her dads' attitude of teaching her the difference between a 'nice' stranger one could and should be friendly with and the sort who, well, not so much, seemed like the better choice, and sure made it easier to make friends.

Weird, really, how a look at some other folks' parents could make your own seem at least marginally less uncool.

"It's 'how poor are the poor people?' actually. You had Madame Trudeaux for French class last year, right?"

"I saw the movie. You couldn't pay me to read a book that long. He kinda lost me at the Battle of Waterloo," Josie sighed.

"I've read it nine times," Christina smiled, "but I'd have a book on my butt if we were all ponies, I know..."

"Compare what happens to Fantine in the 1800s to what happens to a girl in a similar situation now. How would Jean Valjean's life have gone differently?"

"Well, if he stole a loaf of bread, he might've gotten community-service and probation instead of nineteen years in jail," Scootaloo observed.

"Jean Valjean stole the bread for his sister's six children," Christina, who recalled such details, explained, "and while the window does count as destruction of property…wait."

"Yeah. With no dad, and household income below the poverty line," Melissa confirmed.

"Can we say 'food stamps,' ladies and gentlemen?" Josie shook her head as if to say 'you magnificent bastard,' to Melissa. "And birth control and WIC and TANF, then school lunch, Head Start, the church food bank…poor guy never has to steal the bread at all. The whole book doesn't happen."

"Yep. Fantine either gets her shit to Planned Parenthood before schtupping what's-his-name-"

"Or, well, after, or else she has the option of open adoption, or WIC, TANF, EBT, job training, free community-college tuition and a stipend in most municipalities, plus she'd have a high-school diploma if she weren't a complete fuckup…the Thenardiers never enter the picture except maybe as slum landlords…"

"Also, she can't get fired for having a kid, and if she does, she can sue the shit out of the company," Josie piped up happily.

"Basically, the whole book goes from 'The Miserable Ones' to 'The Really Broke and Somewhat Inconvenienced but Otherwise Okay Ones,'" Scootaloo chirped.

"And that's what the progressive movement has done for us all," Melissa finished, triumphantly savoring a bit of pretzel. "We can all send Zombie Teddy Roosevelt and his homegirls a nice thank-you note. There are always going to be poor people, sure, just as there will always be rich people. The only difference between neo-conservativism and progressivism is 'how poor is the poorest person' and 'what is the baseline for a standard of living that we, as a moral society, are willing to tolerate?'"

"Neoconservatives would be perfectly fine with more Fantines nowadays if it meant their taxes were lower," Josie frowned. "But how is this not socialism?"

"Socialism and progressivism have sort of the same goals, but they are different. Socialism says 'everybody gets something, no matter what, even if you have to rob the rich to feed the poor.' Progressivism says 'everybody gets something according to how hard they work, where they started from and how well they do, but nobody will be left with nothing and nobody is allowed to get everything.' It's the difference between what neoconservatives think people on welfare are like now, buying big-screen TVs and such while refusing to work, and them actually standing real odds of being that way. Under progressivism, you still have an incentive to work and do well, because not only is the baseline standard of living, while better than what we have now, still not that great, but you remove some of the essential hopelessness from the poor. A living wage for the minimum gives you a shorter distance between 'starting out from nothing' and 'comfortable.'"

"But if almost everyone can be comfortable with less effort, why would they work harder?" Scootaloo asked.

"How does Mr. S. spend his money, now that he's comfortable?" Melissa asked with a grin. "Scholarships. Investments. Starting small businesses. Inventing stuff. Developing stuff. Charity. Hiring more people and paying them even better. Progressives want the poor to not only have the chance to get out of poverty, but the chance to do good for themselves and society."

"No, we need some socialism, just as we need some free-market capitalism within a progressive political economy. You need opposition parties to prevent ideological tyranny, the onset of fascism and single-party atrocities such as genocide," Christina explained. Melissa and the others stared at her. "What? They make books on political theory now."

"Well, we started talking about this in Hot Topic, and we're at the food court now," Scootaloo observed.

"Yeah, pretty much. It's kind of hard to get a basic explanation of economic reality, theory and socio-political implications into a thirty-second TV spot that the average voter can understand," Melissa popped a candy into her mouth and took a long sip of her lemonade.

"Yeah. And if you try and give people free books door-to-door, they assume you're crazy," Christina sighed. "Just ask the Communists. Or the Mormons."

"What do you think of this t-shirt?" Melissa interjected gently. Scootaloo liked it, Christina agreed and Josie nodded agreeably. The conversation continued as Melissa checked the stacks for one in her size.

"I like the Mormons," Josie smiled. "We had two elders, you know, the missionaries they send, come over one time when I was little. Mom had already read their book, so she asked them in to discuss it, except she was busy painting and couldn't step away from it or it would show. So they offered to help while we all talked, and darned if they didn't help Mom get three rooms done. We had them stay to dinner and it was really nice. They visit whenever they're in town, and just lately I've persuaded them to get mp3 players."

"Not so much, actually, I think they primarily like to see people discussing and thinking about faith in general. They were kind of like the Hare Krishnas in that respect."

"Tiling the kitchen," Josie explained artlessly. Her folks had a habit of buying older houses, moving into them, fixing them up, and then renting them out when they bought the next. It made for a very paint-spattered, if happy childhood, and luckily they had done well enough with real estate to keep Josie in the same school district. "Turned out they were pretty darn good at grouting and the mosaic backsplash came out gorgeous. But they mainly cared about how open people were to new religious ideas, though the one fellow was pretty serious about vegetarianism."

Melissa had purchased her t-shirt by then, and the girls, not seeing anything else they wanted, continued on. The next store was, of course, a Christian bookstore.

"I'm still amazed that the mall put a Hot Topic next to this," Christina remarked.

"Store franchises tend to take whatever vacancy is available," Melissa explained. She knew a lot about malls. "Want to take a look inside?"

"Depends on who's working," Josie shrugged, plunging right in as if there was nothing eerie or strange at all about a store where crucifixes had their own inventory. "OH, SNAP!"

"Oh, no, she found something," Melissa sighed. They followed their friend into the store.

"They have VeggieTales coloring books on sale! Heck, yeah!" Josie pumped her fist in the air from behind a huge bin of marked-down children's literature. "And here's one on Joseph and his brothers, I can color his coat again…" The geeky cheerleader began eagerly gathering up a stack of coloring books, occasionally rejecting or exclaiming excitedly over various titles, almost as if she had forgotten the other three girls were there.

"I think she's serious," Melissa whispered out the corner of her mouth to the other two.

"These are awesome!" Josie came back around the bin with a nearly ten-inch-thick stack of coloring books. "Look, Christina, Naomi n' Ruth are in this one. I bet they draw them like…yep, they always make Ruth look like Ashley Judd in this series. And Queen Esther…wow. Scoot, look."

"No, that's Queen Esther. That, or there's a stable time loop we really did not need to know about," Josie turned some pages excitedly. "The artist of this series is almost certainly a huge Trekker, he seems to use people on reruns for models when he draws coloring books. Like this, here."

"Yep. Riker and Troi with the baby Jesus. And Balthazar is Captain Sisko, Melchior looks like Picard and if you adjust for the lack of Vulcan ears, Gaspar is totally Tuvok from 'Voyager.'" Josie's grin was less maniacal and actually kind of affectionate. "I really like this one."

"Well, I thought another one for me, one for my Sunday School and then I thought you might like one because of the 'Star Trek'-ness…"

"Another one?" Melissa asked. "So you've colored this coloring book before and now that it's on sale, you want another one."

"Oh, maybe third grade," Josie shrugged. "This VeggieTales one has pirates in it for you, Mel. And Christina, look, Bible-verse acrostics."

"Oooh!" Christina took the book from her friend and began reading excitedly. "Crosswords, too!"

"So…we're getting Bible coloring books today?" Scootaloo asked, in the tone one might use when asking just where the aliens probed a friend who is acting a little off.

"Waaait, wait wait," Melissa held up her hands, noticeably not putting down the coloring book which contained pirates. "Your Sunday School?"

"I didn't know you were religious, Josie," Christina observed. She went to church with her parents, but didn't really take it seriously.

"Well…yeah. After confirmation, just about anyone can teach if they have the time and know how to make lesson plans. I teach the third-graders now." Josie seemed a little surprised that they were surprised.

"Yeah. It's really great, actually. We were reading the story of Noah's Ark last week, so I looked up the various measurements of a cubit and we learned how to calculate interior volume of a three-dimensional container. Then we used that to make a scientific guess at how many jelly beans were in the jar for the fundraiser and if we're right, we get to eat them all. And then we colored a bunch of pictures of animals."

"So…is this some kind of freaky hipster thing where you teach them ironically?" Melissa asked.

"I don't think so," Josie certainly looked perfectly sincere, but with her, that didn't necessarily mean she was. "I've been a member of a church pretty much since I was born. I know Christina goes to church and that you and Scootaloo don't, and I figured you'd either ask if it were ever important or it'd come up in conversation somehow. So…up it comes, I guess." For the first time, she looked a little uncomfortable.

"Yeah, just about always have been. Don't worry, though, it's not the freaky fundamentalist-whackjob kind or the lobbyists-with-Bibles kind. We're more the 'keep your fork, there's pie after,' kind, if that makes any sense."

"Well, duh. So's the Bible if you actually read the thing. Jesus does a long-range Heal Major Wounds on a Roman centurion's 'servant?'" She mimed the air-quotes. "Either the fundie crowd is incredibly gullible or never saw 'Spartacus' in their lives. And don't even get me started on David and Jonathan."

"I know, it must be weird to have me turn out to be a thing you've only ever encountered the worst kind of," Josie explained. "But for reals, Christianity's not quite what the fundies and judgmental types make it out to be. My second-graders and I built a catapult over Vacation Bible School last summer break."

"You know how in the book of Joshua the priests march the Ark of the Covenant around the Walls of Jericho and then blow their ram's horn and it's like pow! Controlled demolition up in the place, total religious pwn? So we built some walls out of empty Aldi boxes out in the parking lot around a Jericho made from MegaBlox, made a little Ark of the Covenant out of Legos for the kids to carry around it in some white t-shirts and we were going to use the amplifier and subwoofers from the church P.A. system and a ram's horn I got off the Internet to replicate the experiment, but then Pastor Josh was like 'no, you cannot have a bass cannon' because hearing protection and OSHA and 'is that a Barbie doll dressed like Rahab the Harlot on top of that MegaBlox Jericho, what the hell, Josie?' and just totally harshing my game with the little kids." She was talking very animatedly, with expressive gestures. "So he said we could make a catapult like the ones in Second Chronicles instead if we did the math and were careful not to dent any cars, so we did that instead."

"Pretty much, yeah," Josie nodded. "Provided I keep it relevant to Scripture and don't start any fires I can't put out, that is pretty much how we roll."

"I find the 'can't put out' part of that sentence to be a little alarming, don't you?" Christina asked Scootaloo in a stage whisper.

"Of course…well, I mean, within reason. We did have to ask an old man who was really racist to leave and Pastor Josh did tell this one couple that if they didn't accept God's gay children, they were welcome to choose another church, so they did, but yeah, anybody who's not a complete ass-pocket can come to services. And there's really good coffee there, even if I'm still only allowed to have the decaf when everyone else who's gotten confirmed can have regular."

"I have a deep respect for this man's commitment to public safety," Melissa snarked.

"Naturally!" Josie really perked up at this. "I've been kind of wanting to invite you for years, but I was afraid you'd think I was trying to be all 'you should convert' or 'come get saved' at you like one of the freaky Christians. I mean, I really enjoy having a church family and a place where I can talk to God, but not everybody does, and it's like the comic-book store. If you ask the sort of person who likes comic books or has met nice comic-book-fans before, they're like 'oh, cool, I'd be happy to come see your favorite store,' but if they don't like comic books or have only met really ass-pocket comic-book-fans, then they're like 'eff you, nerd,' and I can't really blame them."

"Well, yeah," Josie collected the coloring books from them and gestured toward the cash register at the back of the store. "Pastor Josh's boyfriend is working today. If I cuss in here, I'll get a lecture and a half come Sunday."

"I told you your Dads would be welcome, Scoot!" Josie grinned. "It does occur to me to ask, though…does your family have a Bible?"

"Well, because I've just about made enough purchases on my frequent-shopper card to get one for free and these coloring books should put me over." She stepped over to another shelf and pointed out a medium-sized dark blue book. "This is my favorite translation, and it's got the most footnotes and annotations and stuff. Or there's also this one, it's the kids' version, but the illustrations are great."

"What, like scalped tickets? No, I just …figured it might be a nice thing to have so you could look up the context for whatever the service happened to be about that day, plus it comes in really handy to be able to tell judgmental ass-pocket Pharisees exactly why they suck. And there are even some half-decent smutty bits in the Song of Songs." This was a valid selling point to people their age. "I know Mel's got one because she quotes from it whenever she needs to tell an ass-pocket off and I'm pretty sure Christie's got sections committed to memory, but...you didn't know who Joseph was when the drama club announced they were doing 'Technicolor Dreamcoat' for our school play. And with all the stuff I buy for my class, I keep getting frequent-shopper perks here, so it wouldn't cost anything to get you one….thought I'd ask."

For the first time ever, Josie, the aspiring mad-scientist, math prodigy and manic Mythbuster-For-Jesus actually looked shy.

"I'd love one, Josie," Scootaloo nodded. "Can't promise I'll wind up a Christian myself, but you've always said the first step to understanding anything is 'RTFM.'"

"Read the –effing manual," Josie agreed, looking pleased with herself. "Which one do you want?"

"Don't get King James," Melissa remarked. "I don't like how they put 'woman' for 'servant' and the Elizabethan grammar just makes it harder than it needs to be, for all the quotations sound fancier. Besides, that one's free online, so why spend the money for the tree-meat copy?"

"My folks' church thinks the King James Version is the only true word of God," Christina explained with a sigh. "Never mind that it's possibly one of the least accurate, from a historical or linguistic perspective."

"I've said it before, Chris; your folks' church has an unnecessarily high proportion of ass-pocket Pharisees."

"I think the footnote-y one would be my choice," Scootaloo picked it off the shelf with her arm, only to notice from the pressure sensors at the hand that it was shockingly heavy before handing it to Josie. "Wow! It's huge. Way heavier than it looks."

"It has the maximum density of content within its' pretty blue cover, yes. Like a TARDIS Bible." Josie remarked appreciatively, patting the Bible on its' spine like it was a page-filled kitten. "And it's red-lettered."

"That's…convenient, I suppose. Does that symbolize the blood he shed for our sins?" Scootaloo inquired.

"Um…ew, no! It's so you can read the most important parts easier, I was told. Though I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising publisher in the sixteen-hundreds thought that would be fabulous marketing." Josie looked over the bin of coloring books one last time. "Does anybody want anything else from here?"

"These angel magnets are pretty," Christina observed, looking at a display of delicate gold-and-crystal angels that sparkled in the fluorescent light, "and I did need to get something for my grandma's birthday."

"They're cheaper with my frequent-shopper card. I can get it with my debit card and you can just get the pretzels next time."

"Do not. You gave me lunch money and lady-supplies the day of the history test when I was up late cramming and forgot my backpack."

"The day you had your denim jacket buttoned all day long?" Scootaloo recalled. "Josie, did you forget your shirt again?"

"Hey, I got an A on the test, didn't I? And that time I noticed it at the bus stop, so there was time to muffle the underwires before anyone but the squirrels saw me."

"And this is a conversation you will have in the Christian bookstore," Melissa raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, they're well aware that sometimes I'll forget some critical piece of an outfit or pick up the wrong garment for the occasion. Acolyte robes cover a multitude of sins, including my 'Bat out of Hell' t-shirt."

"I'm really looking forward to Sunday now," Scootaloo remarked as Josie went up to the register with enough coloring books to calm a preschool zombie apocalypse, the 'TARDIS Bible' and Christina's grandma's angel magnet.

"I think I might go myself," Melissa agreed. "Not even for religion's sake, but because Josie in a church…"

"Why don't you ask your folks if you can go with us all to Josie's? Maybe imply that we might start rotating and it'll mean we might someday come to yours, plus it'd be no big deal for me to pick you up on the way," Melissa grinned. Her 'new' car was only new in the sense that she had owned it for a month, two weeks of that actually running once the repairs were done, but she never missed an opportunity to offer people rides in

"Free TARDIS Bible!" Josie handed Scootaloo a bag, then handed out the rest of the items. "Coloring book what has pirates in, crosswords and special angel magnet. I got a box for it and some bubble wrap, so it gets to your Gran safely." Christina gave Josie a hug. "We should get a big ninety-six-crayons box someplace and do coloring at our next sleepover."

"I think the teacher-supply store by the sneaker place has crayons," Melissa said. "And Scootaloo, didn't you want to try Radio Shack for a better selection of those fancy headphones?"

"A tablet is really different from a pair of headphones," Josie looked contemplative. "Weird how they cost about the same…well, not all headphones, just the fancy kind."

"I got mine for Christmas and they're nice, but I wouldn't say they're any better than my old pair except for the not-being-broken part," Christina explained.

"Mine are awesome, but…it's not the actual headphoney-ness of them that makes them awesome. They are awesome because Demi got them for me and they have the soft n' padded kind of ear-cups. But they do make cheaper ones with padded ear-cups that are just as nice, plus the hobby store has fancy spray-paint that works really well on plastic, and then you could have any color you wanted."

"Wow, Josie. Normally I'm the royal princess of being a cheapskate," Melissa smiled.

"Well, after Demi bought the headphones, Laurie wanted to get me something that matched, so he got me this wicked-sweet gaming mouse, disassembled it, and spray-painted the shell and buttons separately before he put it back together and wrapped it. It matched the headphones, so you probably could do the same thing with a less-expensive pair and get much the same effect."

"Pretty much," Josie smiled. "They're good brothers. Weird as a marmoset in math class, but good brothers."

"If I got some of these headphones," Scootaloo pointed to a pair marked $24.99, "do you think you could help me take them apart to paint them?" Josie and Melissa both looked critically at the style.

"This pair, though, these have visible tri-wing screws," Josie pointed. They were $34.99. "And Laurie will lend me his tri-wing screwdriver and Ex-Acto knives if we bring him tribute."

"Scoot, he's a guy. If we bring him brownies, he'll probably do the teardown, paint job and rebuild for you, then offer to upgrade your RAM if you so much as hint that you might make more."

"Why are brownies more valuable than Mountain Dew? They cost less to make," Melissa looked puzzled.

"But Laurie is a guy. Guys do not know that a box of mix, some eggs, oil n' water are as easy to put together as Shrinky Dinks and about as expensive."

"The world of baking is as a walled city to them, where only the pure of heart and chic of shoes may enter and return with riches," Christina added.

"Verily, no man may slay the wild and fierce Brownie Mix Package upon the earth," Scootaloo chimed in. "Seriously, they can't. Even Papa makes his from scratch."

"Really?" Melissa asked, with a momentary faraway look in her eyes. "And how much is the special plastic paint?"

"From the hobby store, if you get the kind for models? Six to eight bucks a can. From the hardware store if you just get the kind marked 'For Plastic'? About three bucks, but there aren't as many metallic and sparkly options. They make a nice iridescent paint, too, but that's like twenty-five bucks a can and you can only put it on over black." Scootaloo tried on the demo pair of the $34.99 headphones and found that they fit her, and very comfortably.

"For high-school classes, yeah. Daddy says that in college, laptops and netbooks are A-okay."

"Oh, the why-do-we-get-old one? Lobbying on the part of the buffet restaurant industry," Melissa chirped.

"And old people only die to keep movie theaters from going bankrupt with senior discounts and politics from staying really ancient and racist way longer than the public wants," Josie giggled. "Unless it's, like, for evolution or because the souls need to be recharged by communion with the deity every hundred-some years or after serious trauma, that's what I'd guess."

"Why not? If the flashlight gets broken, you take the batteries out and recharge them, then put them into another one. Same thing if it wears out. If human souls are like batteries, why wouldn't we need to die, spend time with God until we were ready to go again, and then get put into a new flashlight? The Hindus believe in reincarnation, and church always seems to make my folks feel like they've been on the cell-phone charger overnight, ready for another week of calls, texts and cat pictures. So it's as credible a theory as anything else, really."

During this conversation, Scootaloo purchased the pair of headphones. A nice netbook for class notes could be ordered from online later.

"This is why church with you is going to be worth the price of admission," Melissa sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose as if Josie-logic was making her head hurt.

"They kinda pass the hat during communion, s'called 'offering,' but you don't have to chip in unless you want to. And even then, it doesn't have to be a lot. Like the Gatorade-pool at practice, that's way more than you'd need for church."

"I'm pretty sure you can't just pick and choose religious ideas from wherever you like and bolt them on, like…like a bad Honda kit."

"Why not? If a Hindu person follows the path of the Bodhisattva Yeshua bar Joseph of Nazareth and trusts that his Way will lead them to inner peace, that makes them just as Christian as I am, just in a different way. And who am I to say my Bodhisattva is best pony? The Muslims and Jews believe in a lot of the same morals and values, and even atheists just have one less God than the monotheists."

Scootaloo and Christina were trying very hard not to giggle, but Melissa just rolled her eyes.

"When Pastor Josh decided to trust you with Sunday School, were there…problematic children in the age group he chose? Maybe some complete write-offs in there that the faith could afford to lose?"

"It's like you read some Spinoza and decided 'yay! Faith is like Legos!'" Melissa finished with a jazz-hands gesture and an imitation of Josie's mildly-manic tone.

"…I can't even deal with you. This is hilarious and I can't even laugh because it's your religion."

"Well, who the fuck said you can't?" Josie slurped her lemonade and smiled. "Religion can be funny."

"I've been trying not to pee myself since 'Bodhisattva is best pony,'" Christina admitted.

"I don't even know what a Bodhisattva is and I think it's hilarious," Scootaloo agreed.

"A Bodhisattva is a being which, having attained enlightenment, returns to help others," Christina explained.

"Which one of several freaky songs Josie likes?" Scootaloo added with just a touch of snark.

"The one about the drug addict pawning a gold ring and dying of an overdose with freakin' Christmas bells in the background."

"Yeah, that's Steely Dan. 'Charlie Freak,' it's on their 'Pretzel Logic' album. Why, what made you think of that?"

"That is a fucked-up song, Josie, and convincing that stupid policeman from the middle-school that it was appropriate for your sixth-grade D.A.R.E. graduation skit was also fucked up."

That was one of the irritating things about Josie's taste in music. It was at once deeply weird, completely unpopular to anyone else their age and freakishly catchy. Melissa suffered from Josie-songs caught in her head constantly, especially as some of her whimsical friend's favorites featured heavily on the in-store music playlists where she worked. Of course, she also tended to collect Josie-songs herself and even had entire mix CDs from her friend in her car, but complaining hilariously about Josie to her face was just a thing more or less everybody did. It was never mean-spirited, just the kind of 'what're we going to do with you?' that every token eccentric in a group of friends would get.

(And, for her part, Josie always seemed to bask in the attention like a kitten in the sun. Attention is not a thing teenage girls with two special-needs older brothers tend to get a lot of.)

"I can play you another one of theirs. It's about telling members of a cult to STFU and DIAF, but in a really polite way and with a tambourine in the background. Would that help?"

"I want to hear the song about telling a cult to fuck off!" Scootaloo announced.

So they found a bench, Josie's beat-up old mp3 player was fished out from her jacket pocket, the headphone-splitter she somehow always had was produced (but no headphones, their backpacks being sensibly locked in the trunk of Melissa's car,) and Scootaloo tried her new headphones as she and Christina listened to the song in question. (You could rotate the ear-cups to face outward and just put your left and your friend's right ear into a cup each if you were sitting down. Nice headphones.) It really was quite catchy and cheerful, and Josie beamed even as Melissa shook her head and playfully feigned complete exasperation.

"Where do you even find these songs, Josie? Do you have Pandora set to the depraved people's mid-life-crisis channel or something?"

"Actually, I've mostly been ripping CDs from the library. Every time some grownup gets an iPod and donates their stash, I can help myself to all manner of delights."

"That's…actually a really good idea," Scoot agreed. "Doesn't cost anything, and if it's crummy, just don't rip it or delete the mp3s."

"I'm going to have to do that now, and feel really silly for making fun of your favorite band, aren't I?" Melissa sighed.

"Pretty much. You can't always be the alicorn princess of being a cheapskate, Mel."

"Twenty percent cooler," Christina agreed, and the four girls shared a group hug.

"Fuck you, buddy!" Melissa retorted, glaring daggers at the scruffy, flannel-shirt-covered man who had yelled at them. She and Josie were already on their feet and spun to a fight-or-flight position.

"Like you don't have porn of cheerleaders doing loads worse at home!" Josie added. The other girls gave her a shocked look and she shrugged. "Bet you ten bucks he does."

Scootaloo stood up from the bench where she and Christina had been listening with one ear each to the new headphones.

"We've got your back, Scoot," Melissa confirmed, stepping to her friend's side like there was no question.

"I've got something you'll enjoy, bitch!" the man said, ripping his shirt open. Christina squealed and covered her eyes, Melissa rolled hers and Josie actually cracked up into pre-emptive laughter and pointed, the technique her brothers had taught her for flashers on the bus. Scootaloo just stared in horror even as Josie's giggling went higher, faster and vaguely hysterical, seeing what the man actually had revealed.

Under the shirt wasn't…well…rednecky-looking pervert bits, but a vest packed with what looked like plastic explosives, wires and some ominous blinky lights…a suicide bomb.

And then he started to yell horrific abuse at them all, incoherent spitting raged words of pure hatred. Scootaloo recognized the deadman switch in his hand as just like the ones in movies, just as Josie's giggling died down to a dull mumble of what could be prayers and Melissa went absolutely white. Christina was crying, the bewildered mall patrons were running away and shrieking…it was pandemonium around the frozen bubble of Them and The Crazy Guy.

She could kick him. She could kill him. Break his neck with one hoof and stop his heart through chest-impact shock with the other. If she did it quickly, she could still stand a chance of getting the switch with her prosthetic before he let go. She tensed her muscles, original and robotic, and took a breath to do what she had to do to protect her friends.

The Crazy Guy stared at his hand as the dot scurried up his arm and onto his face, then back down to his heart. He panicked, first batting at the dot like a crazed kitty-cat (which wrenched a hysterical squeak from Josie,) and then whipping his head around wildly to the upper story, looking for whomever was aiming a gun at him.

But there was, however, one of those obvious old 1980s-style round mirrors, of the sort cashiers used to spot shoplifters in corners. It was high up in a corner formed by a column and the wall, overlooked the little alcove with water fountains just a few yards from their bench and Scootaloo realized the laser wasn't coming from the second floor at all, but from-

The gunshot made all of the girls and The Crazy Guy scream and cower, but the Crazy Guy, weirdly enough, kept screaming. He writhed on the floor for a second or two more, then collapsed, limp, the switch still in his hand and two long, curly wires protruding from two Taser barbs in his back.

They connected to a device in the left hand of a very serious-looking woman with dark sunglasses, a dark suit so plain it could have come from a box marked 'Suit, Black,' and a tiny but visible transceiver in her ear. In her right hand was a black automatic handgun with a laser sight, which she had clearly used from behind the Crazy Guy purely to freak him out before firing the warning shot and her Taser, one in each hand.

"We're clear. Alpha team, move in," the woman in the dark suit and glasses spoke into her transceiver.

If she had been one-sixth scale, she could have been either FBI Agent or CIA Spook Barbie, the dark-haired kind that Josie had because it was Important To Have Dolls That Looked Like You.

She holstered the gun and detached the Taser leads before pulling out a pair of handcuffs and very efficiently cuffing the unconscious Crazy Guy. As she did this, the deadman switch fell from his hand and the girls collectively gasped again.

"Oh. That. No need to panic, there," FBI Barbie announced, picking it up and flicking open a battery door on the tiny device with her thumbnail before knocking two 9-volts out onto the floor. "We've been watching this one. His vest was bought from an undercover agent and contains less explosive or flammable chemicals than your common bottle of nail polish."

She had a steady, calm, and, under the circumstances, completely un-reassuring smile. "That, and those batteries were wired wrong."

The agent –for she could really be nothing else, lowered her sunglasses just enough to look over them at Scootaloo and her friends. "Josephine Findlay, Christina Harcourt and Melissa Adams, I presume. Miss Scootaloo Scott and I have already met." She pulled a small ID wallet from her pocket and flashed a photo-ID cardvii with a badge the diameter of a Coke can, not including the eagle on top. "I'm Agent C.A. Tyler," the dark-bespectacled agent introduced herself to the other girls, putting out a hand. Scootaloo hesitated, realized the other girls weren't going to move, then extended her prosthetic. The sensors reported a firm handshake that was so evenly applied, it clearly wasn't meant to impress anyone. "Sorry about this little incident. I suggest we get some coffee."

"What are you talking about?" Scootaloo almost shrieked. "He could have blown us up! Murdered us and I don't know how many other people here!"

"No, I don't think so," Agent Tyler replied airily. She had a low, not quite monotone voice, but still deep and vaguely stern enough in pitch to be a little unsettling coming from a woman, especially one who was so average-looking apart from her work attire. "That isn't a functional bomb, nor was the switch capable of anything but some very realistic blinky lights." Contempt for the bomb-maker made the corners of that un-reassuring smile twitch. "Our undercover agent sold him such a good dummy kit, too, but the poor bastard even managed to wire it wrong."

Just as Crazy Guy woke from his Tased slumber and began to wriggle, another few agents in dark suits and several uniformed officers appeared. He was bundled off as unceremoniously as a dirty catbox and the other mall patrons who had fled were gathered up and checked on. Scootaloo could even see paramedics, though not from her EMT squad, coming.

"How do you know Scootaloo?" Melissa asked, suddenly, moving and speaking for the first time.

"Protection detail when she was a little filly," Agent Tyler explained. "I don't suppose you remember some Cowardly Lion dolls, or a ride in a private jet?"

"Yes. I've just been reassigned to your case. About time, too, from the look of things," the agent remarked, perhaps a little smugly, even as she shook hands with the other girls and helped still-shaking Christina up off the bench. "Let's get that coffee, then."

"No. I learned to fire a simultaneous distraction shot while incapacitating the threat when I was assigned to the Senator." The agent opened the door and ushered the girls, who did not complain, into a waiting black livery minivan, done up inside like a kind of tall limousine. "Keeping a blank cartridge at the top of my magazine, now, that I learned from my last assignment." The girls continued to stare and it took the Agent a second to realize that they expected some sort of follow-up. "Oh. The First Lady throws up at the sight of blood, incidentally."

"Honestly? At the moment you only have the four serious threats. This was actually one of the minor ones. And considering the primary threats are either under surveillance, in other countries or both, I don't expect we'll be dealing with this sort of thing that often," Agent Tyler knocked on the privacy glass and another agent passed warm, lidded paper cups through to them. They had the girls' names on them in Sharpie and even little thermal sleeves. "So I wouldn't say so much that threats to your life, independence, liberty or well-being are back so much as that the situation so happened that you had cause to become aware of one for the first time in several years."

"I thought you'd always had people who didn't like you or your dads for dumb reasons, Scoot."

Agent Tyler did a different knock on the privacy glass and a soft cloth handkerchief was passed through for Scootaloo.

"Did your …coworkers make us a Starbucks run?" Melissa asked, looking at the un-branded cup.

"No. But this is one of the better-equipped vehicles in the fleet. How's your coffee?"

The other girls looked at her for a second, a little shocked that she could rebound so quickly.

"As you can see, you've been under the Department's protection and surveillance long enough to find out how you take your coffee…or not, as the case may be." As blank as the dark glasses left Agent Tyler's expression, Scootaloo had the feeling they'd just experienced her first Josie-snark. "Incidentally, what is the attraction of lemonade?"

"We only get it at the mall, and it's the really good made-from-real-lemons kind," Josie explained. Her slight case of what might be ADD seemed to be helping her recover unnaturally well, and Scootaloo thought of Pinkie Pie.

"Also, Miss Adams, I've taken the liberty of having your car delivered to your home. It should arrive there approximately when you do, and I've also had your schoolbags removed from the trunk just in case there is some delay. Under the seats is where Agent Stevens usually puts them, though you may need to swap."

Sure enough, their backpacks were under their seats, though, as predicted, Josie and Christina had theirs under each other's.

"Honestly? This is classified, of course, but the agents following him gave us notice as of one Interstate highway exit from the mall. We had about eight minutes. Luckily, just before he made it inside the mall, I was able to send Delta team to handle your possessions, arrange for the tow and, of course, make the coffee. There is a protocol in place for this kind of event, after all."

"See if I ever bitch about where our taxes go again," Christina, still a little shaky, remarked. Melissa thought of something and frowned.

"No, we copied the keys when you bought it, though we also watched you when you added an emergency key you didn't think anybody else knew about." Agent Tyler sipped her coffee. She wasn't smug. It would have been easier if she was smug, but she was actually just…so, well, matter-of-fact.
"Good move, incidentally, putting it where you did. We wound up using our backup so as not to waste time getting yours out from there…and yes, we did have a standing warrant. I thought you'd ask."

The agent pulled a blue-backed legal paper from her jacket, but Melissa was too startled to read it. "I'll send a copy to your email if you promise not to write a paper about it for Mrs. Ellsworth's class...or any of them, really. I trust that the need for the majority of Miss Scott's protective detail's activities to remain highly confidential does not, after today's events, need to be explained?"

"No, Miss Findlay. I will, in the next few forty-eight hours, arrange for some sort of suitably impressive de-briefing with each of your families, in which they are reassured of your safety, reminded of how very valuable classmate connections with someone like Miss Scott can be to various later career paths and if necessary, I will imply that scholarships and other advantages may be yours if they manage not to be complete twits about the whole inconvenient affair. And, since you asked so nicely, Miss Findlay, I shall allow your older brothers to notice my sidearm and, if you like, inform them that up until the fake bomb appeared you were…what is the word? Badass? Would that be good enough?"

"That would be nice, thank you." That was it. Josie was Agent Tyler's ardent admirer now.

"At any rate, we should be arriving at Ms. Adams' residence shortly, and," She pulled out her phone and seemed to be checking something "Your vehicle is already on-site and waiting. Incidentally, Agent Stevens advises that you need to have the passengers side drive shaft replaced as the CV joint is worn out and has begun clicking."

"It has been a pleasure meeting you all face to face, and you should be hearing from me again in the next two days. After that... I sincerely hope we next see each other under happier circumstances."

She shook each of their hands as they got out onto the sidewalk, keeping hold of Scootaloo's a moment longer then the others. "You, Ms. Scott, have an appointment with me next week. There are certain skills a person in your position should have, and once this has blown over we can discuss them in detail."

Scootaloo had begun shaking again as the adrenaline wore off. "I'm... I'm so sorry! I had no idea I was putting you all at risk by-"

"Stop. None of this." Josie cut her off. "Scoot, you are not responsible for what crazy people choose to do. I'll admit, this was not quite the day we were all expecting, but... We're your friends. We're here for you and we're not going anywhere."

The moment lasted only a short while before Joise's ADD acted up again and she blurted out.; "I can't wait for Agent Tyler to tell my brothers how badass we were!"

i Web address: /forbes-400/list/
Just type the http, slashies and three W's into your browser, then copy-paste any footnoted address, the bit after 'Web address' and the colon, after the dot in triple-W dot. Or just highlight them, right-click, and 'open in new tab' or 'Search Google for' option may work, on some newer browsers. And yes, feel free to steal Melissa's research for your own homework. Never let it be said that fanfiction isn't a perfectly valid use of study-hall time.

ii Web address: /Hourly-Pay/Walmart-Stores-Wal-Mart-Cashier-Hourly -Pay-E715_D_KO15,

iv Being not only Scootaloo's friends but teenage girls, they were all very well aware of 'My Little Pony' and its' related tropes. Speculation on what their cutie marks would be, were they also equine, was a standard topic of discussion even for girls their age who did not have the privilege of an actual cartoon pony on their cheerleading squad. Scootaloo found it highly amusing and occasionally offered extremely witty suggestions as to what various teachers and public figures would have on their proverbial flank, which generally cracked everyone up laughing.

v Plus, if you used a dollar bill to get each refill, you could use the quarter you got back for some fruit candies from the big Gumball Machine Mountain near the toy and weird-gadget stores. This mall had the unspeakable elegance to offer Runts, Red Hots and other choice little-kid delicacies sorted separately by flavor in the machines, and dropping a handful into one's lemonade had the lovely effect of turning it into a strawberry, a banana or even a sour-apple lemonade just as one was getting bored of plain lemon taste.

Scootaloo, of course, had been going halvsies on a handful of strawberry and banana Runts with Christina since seventh grade, because Strawberry Banana Lemonade, especially done with Runts, was to them an improbably splendid beverage and one of the great Epicurean pleasures of mall-going. Scoot's Daddy had seen them do it once and thought it was the most horrible diabetes-inducing thing he had ever seen since That Time With the Giant Pixy Stix At the Fair, but Papa actually took watermelon Runts in his lemonade and gave his husband a cheeky smile every time he did it. So at least atavism could then be blamed by the Philistines, like Daddy and Christina's Mom, who did not appreciate Runts at all.

Melissa did not approve of such indecorous behavior as dissolving Wonka products in a citrus solution and always ate her Runts separately, savoring first the candy itself and then sipping the lemonade to enjoy the subtleties of their contrast; exactly how her much-admired and wonderful grandmamma enjoyed peanuts with her Saturday evening Scotch, the one indulgence of a lady who had worked hard for fifty years and didn't intend to let a thing like being sixty-three stop her. It was not uncommon for Melissa to make up a pitcher of lemonade at home and open a box of Runts, then watch murder mysteries with Grandmamma until it was time for bed, and on weekdays they would share the pitcher and the box. After Melissa broke up with her first boyfriend and been brave and nonchalant about it all week (despite actually really feeling horrible and needing to cry several times in her room,) Grandmamma had said nothing, but quietly poured a half-size portion of Scotch into a second glass and placed the peanuts between them, tacitly acknowledging that Melissa had handled the matter like a grownup and a lady. Grandmamma understood everything.

Josie, however, liked to spend a second quarter at the candy store across from the cell-phone-case kiosk on a packet of red Pop Rocks to put in hers, which made it luxuriously fizzy and gave off a lovely strawberry-smelling cloudlet of CO2, which she always inhaled with the air of a gourmet and a contented smile. The first time she had performed this unnecessarily decadent ritual, the girls had given her deeply puzzled looks, to which Josie indignantly and haughtily replied that "my big brothers put Pop Rocks in drinks all the time," and that was the end of that. Josie's big brothers might be a little odd, with Demijohn the kind of brother who wasn't really a social asset in school despite being a senior, and it was kind of unusual that Lawrence still lived at home despite being twenty, but big brothers were big brothers and Josie was the only person on Earth allowed to say a word against them. It would be safer to visit Thailand and insult the King than to even imply that Laurie and Demi weren't the heroes Josie considered them, and of course the punishment for anyone who did anything to Josie that Laurie and Demi ever found out about was rumored to be something so awful that barbaric third-world despots from the Amnesty International shit list would need their blankies and night-lights just to hear described. Chrissie and Scoots were pretty sure Josie was only such a ninja at their ninth-grade Model UN because she'd grown up with big brothers and therefore was already used to realpolitik.

And yes, there are social mores and cultural implications in how one takes one's candy-and-lemonade. Examined closely enough, American high schools actually make the Court of Versailles under Louis XIV look like a damn fraternity house.

vi It took a 'tardy' slip at school to persuade Melissa that collecting random strangers from a bus stop and dropping them at their places of employment on her way to her destination so they could get there faster and skip a fare, while awesome and very kind, was not always the best idea. Still, the fellow whose Jaguar was in the shop had given her a fifty for gas money and several stock tips that turned out to be really good, and more importantly, the waitress on her way to a job interview at a better restaurant always comped Mel a Cherry Coke after she got the job.

vii In time, Scootaloo would begin to remember small details about that day, such as the fact that Agent Tyler's rank at the time was Lt. Cmdr, the organization for which she worked was not nearly so legible, and that, incredibly, she had dark glasses on in her ID picture as well. It was the sort of badge that could have seemed fake if anyone else had been carrying it, and some years later, Scootaloo was to find out why.

Our girl Scootaloo 1 of 3

by Cozy Mark IV

Ch 11: Red Dots and Coffee