Our Girl Scootaloo

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

It had been a crisp autumn day at the skate park, and everyone was enjoying the weekend off from school. Gina had the opportunity to try out her new board, while Scootaloo finally mastered one of the intermediate tricks she had been practicing.

"And you are getting better, but until someone comes up a flying belt for the rest of us I think you will be keeping your pink bubble and your nickname. That was good though. You have a real edge thanks to all that training you got from the squad."

Scootaloo smiled back, and they shared a fist bump. They had been out practicing and fooling around for most of the afternoon and were starting to get hungry when Curt suggested they catch a bus back to his house for something to eat.

After a quick bus trip he soon led them to the basement den of the house where they laid waste to the refrigerator and sat down to some video games.

Gina took the opportunity to school them all in a first person shooter, and it was right after Scootaloo's character had been blown up by a missile that she took a moment to grab something to drink. The game would go on for another couple minutes until Gina hunted them all down, so she knew she had time, and on her way back to the couch she walked past two of the guys from their group doing something with a hypodermic needle.

She made it about three more steps before she did a double take and turned around.

"Oh, hey Scoot. I got this new stuff yesterday and I've been waiting for the best time to try it."

"Okay... What is it?" She asked with some trepidation. He repeated a slang term she didn't recognize and popped the cap off the end of the needle.

Scootaloo leapt forward and grabbed the needle out his hand. "What the hell do you think you're doing?! Heroin is a member of the opiate drug family! Way more than half the people who try this shit get hooked for life!"

"Whoa, calm down Scoot. That crap the DARE officer teaches is just a bunch of BS; remember how he taught us that pot was addicting?"

"Yeah, don't worry about it." His friend joined in. "It's all just a bunch of lies. This stuff is safe."

Scootaloo just stared at them for a moment before her she turned and walked out of the room.

There were a few startled looks, but she did get their attention. She held out the needle for everyone to see. "Does anyone know what this shit is?"

Some of them had known what was going on, and others were clueless. She proceed to read the two guys the riot act, explaining just how fucked they would be if they got hooked on heroin. Everyone got a copy of 'The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs' direct to their phone, and when she was finished, several of them were looking at her in awe.

Scootaloo crumbled the syringe in her hand and fixed Gina with a softer look. "I don't want my friends to get hurt, that's all. I care about you guys, and I don't want to watch you ruin your lives. I've only seen a little of the DARE program; I… I didn't know this was going happen.

As the fall wore on, the atmosphere at school wasn't the only thing that changed. Scootaloo had confronted Conner one evening after school, and explained that she was okay with whatever sexuality he had. It hadn't been easy for either of them, but he did come out to her, and that seemed to help, at least for a while.

Unfortunately, with things turning more hostile at school, and with his own parents to think about, Conner didn't feel he could come out to anyone else, and as the weeks went by he seemed to become more and more depressed, skipping classes, and even seeing her less often.

Scootaloo was still nominally his Girlfriend in everyone else's eyes, and late one September afternoon she stopped by his house after school.

She tried to put a smile on and nodded. "He wasn't at school today. I was worried about him and wanted to see if he was okay."

"Oh, that's so sweet of you." Nancy replied. "He has been looking a bit down lately, and he's still sore from that nasty fall he took the other day at school."

Scootaloo kept up her smile as she stepped into the house and went upstairs to Conner's room, but privately she was worried. She reached his door and knocked.

She waited and listened, wondering if he was napping; outside she could hear children laughing and playing, and downstairs someone was watching a game on TV. She tried again, louder this time. "Conner? Are you awake?"

The silence stretched on, and she was just about to go downstairs and ask when a tired voice answered.

She crossed her arms and waited, more than a little worried now, but her train of thought was interrupted by the sound of metal sliding on metal. 'Chink!'

She spun around, tucked both her hind legs in and kicked the door as hard as she could, tearing it from its hinges and throwing it across his room with a tremendous crash that echoed through the house. She lunged into the room and wrenched the handgun from him, nearly breaking his arm in the process.

They stared at each other, his startled expression looking back at her terrified, wide-eyed face as she tried to make sense of this.

As he struggled for the words, Scootaloo had time to notice the black eye, the bruises on his face and arms from the 'nasty fall' he took at school. She felt it right in her chest. Her school.

She could hear footsteps running up the stairs as his parents came to investigate the noise. The startled look faded from his face and now he just looked empty and lost, turning to stare blankly at the wall, clearly not interested anymore.

She wanted to shake him, to hug him and tell him it would all be all right, but as much as it hurt to admit it, things were much worse than she had known.

"What the hell did you do to our door!?" Michael demanded from the hallway where he and Nancy stood looking over the wrecked woodwork in shock.

The plastic grip on the pistol creaked and popped as she bore down on the weapon's handle, cracking it in several places. Deliberately she turned and faced down his father's anger with an icy glare. She closed the distance between them, bits of plastic falling from the gun's ruined grip as Nancy took a step back, clearly aware that something was very wrong.

Her expression hardened and she continued forward, pushing him out of the room. "Your son very nearly took your advice to heart just now." She shoved the side of the gun into his chest hard enough to slam him back into the drywall and leave a dent. "In another second you would have heard this instead of the door."

He looked down at the handgun, and finally seemed to register what was happening. Scootaloo let the weapon fall at his feet with a hollow clatter, turned and took Conner by the hand. "Conner and I are leaving. When you get your priorities figured out, give me a call."

With that she led Conner out of the house and took him on a long walk that led home to her Dads. Jayne and Kevin were only too happy to help, giving Conner the spare bedroom and making it clear he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. The three of them worked together, and later that night seemed to finally get through. After a good cry, they coaxed what had been happening from him.

While his mother might be willing to accept him as a gay man, he couldn't imagine his father ever would. With things getting worse at school, he felt he had no-one to confide in. After the new principal had shrugged off another beating as 'boys will be boys,' he had gone to his dad's gun safe.

As he hugged them and cried, Scootaloo sobbed too, frightened at how very close she had come to losing him. As night fell, Scootaloo and Conner shared the bed in the spare room, and just cuddled together close, trying to keep back the darkness. Around two AM exhaustion finally won out, and they drifted off to sleep to the soft chimes of Scootaloo's stuffed lion playing 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow'.

As October faded into November things continued to get worse at school. By now three freshmen had 'taken a few days off' or 'gone on vacation', and while two had been back to classes within a few days, the third was now telling her friends she had decided to keep her child and become a mother at sixteen.

Pastor Gray had out-rightly canceled sex-ed, and trimmed away almost all the useful information from health class on the grounds that it was just an unnecessary distraction from standardized testing.

Some of the freshmen from his old school had also brought with them an attitude of intolerance that was beginning to find a foothold in the high school. For the first time since she had been there Scootaloo saw a group of freshmen picking on a fellow student for being gay. Fortunately their guidance counselor and cheerleading coach Ms. Chisholm was having none of it, and after an intervention that left most of the bullies crying (the details of which Scootaloo never did find out) the word went out that this sort of nonsense was not tolerated in gym class or anyplace Ms. Chisholm might be found, though the same could not be said for the rest of the school.

There were some teachers who agreed with what Josie had begun to call 'the Chisholm Doctrine,' the guidance-counselor's policy of 'civility or detention.' Mr. Malcolm the biology teacher was a firm adherent, to the point where opinions (and bets,) were divided on whether he had been bullied as a young man also or just had a raving crush on Ms. Chisholm. Scootaloo reckoned it was likely both. And Senora Cohen the Spanish teacher had caught someone calling someone else a faggot and proceeded to cuss them out in a blend of Yiddish and Spanish that took even the kids with the good smartphones over a day to completely translate. (Senora Cohen was the wife of the local Reform congregation's rabbi and had no patience whatsoever for 'Pastor' Gray.)

Sensei O'Riley the Japanese teacher and football coach knew full well that his subject, not being on the state's standardized tests, would only continue to be funded if the team won, and with a Kaizen grasp of morale, his response to bullying from his players was to implement a double-enforcement of The Chisholm Doctrine. If a player was caught bullying or speaking uncivilly to another student, he would be running twenty thirty-yard suicides and five ten-yard bear crawls on top of whatever punishment he'd already gotten or lose his place on the team. One 'golden boy' JV quarterback had successfully evaded detection with some truly cruel cracks about a ninth-grade member of the A/V club until Melissa caught him on her camera-phone and, with Byzantine cruelty, emailed the recording to Sensei O'Riley. The coach confronted his player, who, after middle school under Pastor Gray, actually had the nerve to try and justify his verbal abuse as 'trying to do that geek a favor, toughen him up so he's not such an embarrassment.' The good Sensei, who relied on the A/V kids for his manga and anime, proceeded to find the victim, informed him that if the quarterback hadn't made amends like a warrior he was off the team, and told the quarterback not to show up to practice until the A/V guy had forgiven him.

That ended very strangely. The A/V guy challenged the quarter-back to a first-person shooter game so they might settle the matter like men. A whole Saturday of frantic sniping and fragging later, the two became fast friends and within the month, the football team boasted a new 'manager' in jersey but no pads, whose job was both to film the games for analysis and advise on strategy. And the quarterback broke a finger punching a rival team's linebacker who dared make a crack about his new friend. Above this, the Sensei beamed, and when Pastor Gray asked how the boys were doing, O'Riley replied in Japanese with a serene look and a prayerful gesture. Gray took it to be some positive quote from some Eastern philosopher, nodded, and wandered off, but the two cheerleaders taking Advanced Japanese knew the phrase to be, essentially, "Up yours, motherfucker."

Other teachers, however, were not so kind. Mr. Frink the history teacher actually made a crack to a student's face in Mr. Malcolm's hearing and got a veiled threat about the union being informed of 'his little problem.' Nobody was ever sure what that meant, but Frink avoided Malcolm, and speaking directly to anyone about anything not class-related, for weeks afterward. Some of the less-talented teachers were content to let class clowns and kiss-asses waste time and even abuse others provided it meant they were called 'the best teacher' and not given any lip. Others skirted the issue by not allowing any talking in class at all, and for a lot of bullied kids, even an icy silence and dull PowerPoint lectures were better than the hallways, so they excelled in those subjects. The bullies and lazy ones who got their grades on personality, however, got a nap. But mostly, teachers took either the 'I didn't see it so it didn't happen' attitude or 'oh, they're just having fun, don't be so sensitive' one that people only have when they have forgotten absolutely everything prior to their twenty-first birthday. Some even thought the bullying was funny.

That lasted until Josie found Mrs. Gryle giggling as a popular girl speculated that a geekier-looking one was 'probably a dyke.' At that point, the cheerful coloring-book fan lost her temper completely. She proceeded to speculate herself, at length and in cheerleading-trained ultra-loud tones to rival the Royal Canterlot Voice about what the popular girls must have called Mrs. Gryle when she was young. The hypocrisy of a frumpy middle-aged woman tolerating abuse in order to have stupid bimbos who did little but waste class time like her was quickly revealed when Gryle first asked, then shouted, then screamed and cried for Josie to stop talking, shut up and finally 'shut the fuck up, you little bitch!'

The teacher went home with a sick headache and Josie got detention with Ms. Chisholm, (plus a three-pack of Pop Rocks from said coach to feast upon, unofficially for a well-made point.) The first day was for insubordination and the second day for her flat refusal to apologize, plus The Gryle refused to allow Josie back in her class and she wound up testing into AP English instead. Scootaloo realized that tensions were getting a little out of control, especially given that Josie hated English and had probably beaten the AP test out of sheer spite. (That, or Josie was actually a lot better at English than she let on and had just hated Gryle and sentence-diagramming in general. It was always hard to tell with her.)

Pastor Gray called Josie's parents in for a conference about the matter and whatever he heard, he came out looking vaguely disturbed and treated Josie from then on as if she couldn't be expected to know better, coming from such a house. Josie's parents came out with stern expressions, got their daughter to the car and then promptly took her out for actual coffee, because "after putting up with that man, you deserve it." That was also the day Josie started carrying a notebook.

Things were still tense that crisp fall day when one of the staff pulled Scootaloo aside in the hallway to ask a favor.

"Of course I can talk with one of your students, but what's going on? I know you teach special-ed, and I try to stay friendly with everyone, but it can be... uncomfortable to hang out with kids who keep trying to ride on my back or braid my mane."

The teacher looked a bit embarrassed but continued. "No, it's nothing like that. You need to have a talk with Amelia Findlay."

"Um..." She looked very uncomfortable, but still didn't answer. "Just ask her what she's been up to lately." And with no more than that she looked around as though she was being watched and darted off down the hall.

When lunch came two hours later, Scootaloo suggested that her friends invite Amelia over to sit with them. There were more than a few raised eyebrows, but she insisted, and with their teachers permission, brought a very pleased looking Amelia over to sit with the cheerleaders.

"Really?" Scootaloo asked, wishing Josie would get to lunch on time for once. "What did he pick you for?"

Amelia was nominally in the tenth grade, but due to her handicap, had the mind of a third grader. She looked at Scootaloo as though she had just been given a case full of the best candy she could imagine. "He picked me to carry the baby Jesus!"

Like most of the girls at the table, Scootaloo's first thought was of a church play for Christmas, but just as she was starting to feel relieved, she looked to the other girls and saw them staring at Amelia in horror. She was calmly rubbing her stomach with both hands.

"Um... Sweetie? Could you tell me a little more about your Christmas play?" Scootaloo asked as she tried to keep up a smile, hoping she was wrong.

"Our Christmas play? Are we having a play? Do I get to be in it?" She asked with enthusiasm.

"Um, I think what she means," Melissa interjected, "is that she wants to hear more about how you were chosen to carry Jesus."

Her face brightened immediately. "Oh! My Deacon at Pastor Gray's church said it was imacu... Imacumate... Immaculate conception." She finished proudly. "He said that the reason I'm feeling sick when I wake up is because of Jesus!"

"Okay, sweetie, did you and the Deacon do anything... different... recently?" Melissa asked with the beginnings of a cringe.

"Yeah! After our special time last week I asked him why God wanted me to throw up in the mornings and he had me go potty on a plastic thingy. He told me I was very special and that it was because I get to carry Jesus!"

The stony silence stretched for some time as the girls looked to each other for help.

"Hey guys! Sorry I'm late." Josie paused as she saw her cousin. "Hey, Amelia! What have you been up to?"

Josie dropped her cousin off when lunch was over, and, smiling all the while, thanked her for an enjoyable meal and promised to meet her for lunch again very soon.

"Scoot, I need to see you in the rest room." Josie added cheerfully as they walked away.

Scootaloo couldn't decide if she should say something about the callous way she was taking all this, and was just about to speak up when she noticed the blood dripping from Josie's clenched fist.

This time, the edge of pain and rage in her voice was impossible to miss even under the cheery facade. "You carry bandages with you from your summer job... right?" She asked, her voice cracking at the end.

"Here, let me see that." She ordered in the no-nonsense EMT voice Linda had taught her. Josie presented her right hand, and Scootaloo winced as the fingers of Josie's hand opened, revealing bloody punctures where her nails had been driven into her flesh. She looked up to see tears running down her friend's cheek.

"Hey, this is going to hurt for a while, but I've got all supplies I need right here. Just bear with me and I'll get you patched up in no time."

She led Josie to the sink, thankful for the hundredth time for prosthetic hands that didn't need gloves, and scrubbed out the wounds with soap and water. After drying her hand, she padded the area with gauze and wrapped the palm of her hand with tape to hold the bandage in place. Unfortunately, that meant the easy part was over.

That was all it took to push her over the edge, and Josie fell to her knees on the hard tile and hugged Scootaloo as she cried.

It was some time before she regained her composure, but at length she managed to explain.

"I... I never told you how I knew Amelia did I?" She sniffed and wiped her nose. "She's only a year and change younger than me. We used to play when we were kids. Softball, basketball... Riding our bikes together." She finished as she broke down sobbing again.

"It was very nice of you to look out for her all those years." Scootaloo consoled. "It couldn't have been easy to have her tagging along with all your other friends."

"We used to ride out bikes together when we were nine and ten. We lived on the same street, we were best friends! But...but her parents weren't well off, and she didn't have a bike helmet."

"We were racing on the street and a car pulled out in front of us. She was winning, she was out in front, she didn't have time to dodge!"

Josie was actually shaking in her arms as she continued. "I ran and got help... I prayed... I prayed so hard for her not to die..."

For a few moments, the little tiled bathroom was silent but for her sniffles and the drip of water falling from a leaky tap. She seemed to be putting herself back together though, and when she spoke again the hard edge had returned to her voice.

"But she did. The friend I knew died in that ambulance, leaving only a broken, crippled child behind with no memory of us or anyone else. I could have been the one who died that day, and if nothing else I have to believe I'm still here to help her when I can."

"And now after everything else that's happened, that chauvinist Pastor Gray and his anti-woman policies are going to put her through all this?! No. This has gone on long enough."

Josie stood up, dried her eyes and brushed herself off. "Scootaloo, I need you get everyone on the squad together after school tonight – we are going to need all of their help for this. We're also going to need your Papa's help to make this work; do you think he'll be willing?"

They had to be sure of their suspicions before they got too far, and with Scootaloo's help Josie soon had proof that Amelia was indeed pregnant. After school they rode the bus home with her to break the news to her parents.

At first her father flatly denied it, saying her weight only made her look that way, however the positive pregnancy test brought them up cold, and Scootaloo repeated back everything Amelia had said at lunch while the girl played with Legos in the next room.

"We have to call the police, and you're going to need to contact an adoption agency too. I know this isn't going to be easy, but we have to put him away for this so he doesn't hurt any more kids."

Her father's response was not what she was expecting. "Well... Are you sure it was really the Deacon?"

Scootaloo stared at him in confusion. "You heard what she told us. Who else could it be?"

"The paternity test will soon settle that." Josie replied levelly. "And an amniocentesis would show the results even sooner. As soon as Amelia makes an appearance in a hospital the staff will make some inquiries, and then when they hear what happened they'll take samples and involve the social workers and the police."

This seemed to worry them even more, and after a few strained glances Amelia's parents thanked them for their help and sent them both on their way.

As they stood on the porch, Scootaloo looked at Josie in confusion. "What was that about?"

"You don't know them very well, so I'll explain." Josie replied in strained tones as she stepped off the porch. "They've just been told that their daughter is pregnant with a child she is in no way fit to care for. Not the neighbor's daughter, not a friend's daughter, their daughter. They've been campaigning to make abortion illegal for years, and now they suddenly find themselves badly in need of it."

"Yes." Josie continued in tones of anger and bitterness. "But that was before they had to deal with it themselves. Do you know what difference religion makes in likelihood of choosing abortion? None." She practically spat the word. "Because it's easy to tell others what to do, it's easy to hand out 'abstinence rings' but when you have failed as a parent, when it's your child, and you're looking at the next eighteen years of your life, suddenly it's not so easy anymore. After they figure out how far along she is they'll realize just how far they have to travel to find a state where late-term abortion is still legal. I'd expect them to come to you for a quiet airplane ride sometime in the next few days Scoot."

"You should probably offer first." She continued in tired tones. "Regardless of what else is going on, can you honestly say it's fair to force a third grader to give vaginal birth to an eight pound child?"

Josie wheeled about on Scootaloo, her anger peaked. "Well, we kind of lost our chance for what was fair and right when she got pregnant!" She yelled. "Whose fault is it that she didn't know any better? Who pulled the sex-ed classes that would have given her a fighting chance? Who hired that pedo without bothering to run a background check?" Josie's eyes were wide and her expression had gone beyond anger, leaving a face that didn't look particularly sane.

Scootaloo took a step back. She had never seen her friend like this, and didn't know what to do.

"Okay, okay! I'll help however I can, just please calm down." She reached out and held her hand. "Didn't you say you needed my Papa's help for this plan of yours? Why don't we go to my house and talk to him. Goodness knows Conner would welcome the friendly company."

Josie used the walk back to calm down, and by the time they stepped into the kitchen, she was functional again. Kevin and Jayne listened while she explained what had happened, and what she wanted to do about it. Scootaloo had kept her dads up to date on some of this, and Conner's arrival and informal adoption had certainly raised concerns about her school, but neither knew exactly how bad it had gotten. By the time she finished, Kevin was nodding agreement, and had pulled out a tablet to order fabric, patterns and supplies.

"Okay, for a protest like this we'll need as many people as you can get. How many do you think you can convince?"

"I'm guessing we can probably get about a quarter to half of the high school girls to participate. The other girls who've been hurt haven't just been numbers and they're not just fellow students. I know several of them personally, and that doesn't count all the brothers and sisters, cousins and friends who have watched their lives fall apart around them.

"If school had always been fucked up it would be harder to sell this, but our school used to be one of the best. We aren't idiots; we can see the damage being done. Scoot and I need to talk with the squad and get them to help with the recurring. Its only Monday today... Do you think we can have the sewing done in time for next Monday?"

Kevin grinned. "If you get me some slave labor to run the sewing machines it could. Does anyone else on the squad know how to sew?"

"At least one hundred. They're not too hard to make, but they won't be cheap either. Can you guys afford this?"

Our girl Scootaloo 1 of 3

by Cozy Mark IV

Ch. 14 Family Values