Our Girl Scootaloo

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Life at school in the days after the protest was more stirred up than anything Scootaloo could remember, save only her first few days in public school when the world was still getting used to her. With the principal under arrest and the higher ups still struggling to figure out what to do, day to day life continued, but without the usual direction from above.

Having heard and seen the protest and the aftermath, Conner had gone back to school, and with help from Kevin and Jayne was catching up on his back school work, though it would take several more weeks. One teacher in particular had been refusing to accept his work, essentially dooming him to repeat the twelfth grade, and it had taken direct intervention from Ms. Chisholm to see him transferred to a different class where he would have a chance. The bullying had not stopped altogether, but with the principal's removal, the climate had improved markedly, and it was into this new school order that Scootaloo began her club.

One of the things her dads had described about college was the much more tolerant atmosphere, and the existence of clubs like 'The Gay-Straight Alliance' who's purpose was to offer help, support 'safe zone' training for faculty and provide a friendly ear to anyone who needed it. In the week following Gray's departure, Scootaloo had looked over a number of such high school and college clubs, tried to take the best elements out of each one, and written up her own founding documents.

Normally, the founding of new clubs was approved by the principal, but given the circumstances, Scootaloo decided to take the approval paperwork to the head guidance counselor, Ms. Chisholm.

"Wow, Scoot, you went out and learned about this all on your own?" she asked as she flipped through the paperwork.

"Well, not entirely on my own... Conner and my dads helped, and Josie helped me combine some of the better elements of the different charters."

She smiled. "I'm proud of you Scoot, this could save someone's life someday. It's not easy founding a club like this though. Do you have a membership roster?"

"Not yet... But I think I have enough friends that I can count on. Before I started signing people up I had to find a member of the faculty willing to sponsor the club; what do you think of Mr. Malcolm?' She asked with a slight smile.

That made her sit up in surprise. "Mr. Mallcolm the Biology teacher? He agreed to this?"

"Yeah, I asked a lot of teachers, but for some reason, they all had excuses. Everyone except him."

She seemed to think about it, and her smile gradually returned. "Well, I suppose it makes sense. It wouldn't be easy to find anyone else willing to take that first step. Tell you what, I'll approve the club here and now, and spread the word as best I can, but you'll have to get at least ten members by next Thursday."

She signed the paperwork and Scootaloo trotted out the door, now in search of the founding ten members of the club, while behind her Ms. Chisholm reclined in her chair, looking thoughtful. "Jake Malcolm…?"

Ten members in a school that size didn't seem like a big deal until she started trying to get signatures. In spite of all that had happened, or perhaps because of it, finding those willing to sign wasn't as easy as she had hoped. After getting shrugged off in class after class, Scootaloo made a determined effort, and tracked down her skater friends as school let out, practically ambushing them on their way home.

"Hmm… I've got no problem standing up for someone who needs help," Curt eventually answered, "but what's a 'straight ally'?

"It means you have friends who are gay and that you support them, that other kids can talk to you without fear that you will turn on them." Scootaloo answered with a significant look. "Conner told me what happened in the park. Not many people are brave enough to do something like that."

Curt looked a bit embarrassed. "Well I… we, couldn't just stand by and watch."

"Really? It sounds like everyone else did." Scootaloo replied seriously. "I'm guessing most of you already heard what happened with Conner?"

"We heard he tried… That he almost shot himself." Gina finished as the others nodded seriously. "Is it true?"

Scootaloo hung her head. "Yes, it is. That's was a big reason why I'm starting the Gay-Straight Alliance club. Conner had been getting abused and picked on at school for years. He couldn't come to his parents for help, and he didn't feel he could ask anyone else either. He had been all alone for so long…" Her voice cracked as she finished "He didn't think anyone would care if he never came back."

"But… he could have come to us!" Gina cried. "I would have been happy to talk… He didn't need to face this alone."

"He didn't know that. He was constantly afraid that anyone who he tried to talk to could turn around and stab him the back, tell everyone… Get him thrown out of his own home… The risk was too great for him to trust anyone. That's why we need to found this club. So people in trouble can have a safe place to go and talk things out among friends." She sighed and looked down at the very obviously blank roster. "And so far, you are the only people willing to even consider it. You don't need to attend all the meetings, or even most of them, we just need at least ten people willing to stand up and be counted."

Curt stepped forward and took the roster. "Aw, hell. It's a lot easier than swinging a skateboard."

Not all of the other skaters would sign, but she now had enough that with her own signature and Conner's she met the minimum needed to found the club. It was a start.

The day of their first meeting was set for that very Thursday. Scootaloo got up at six am, headed out early and spent almost fifteen dollars at the copy shop near her school getting the brightly-colored, cheerful posters her Papa and Conner had designed copied, and two of the copy-shop employees told her they looked awesome. That cheered her up considerably, and when she went to the copy-shop desk to buy a folder, the taller of the two copy-guys gave her a big smile.

"On the house, Miss Scott!" the handsome, muscular copy-shop worker grinned. "About time that school had a safe place for Family."

"Family? Oh, right." Scootaloo had nearly forgotten that one of the slang terms the gay community used was 'the Family.' It was actually kind of amazing, the way LGBT Americans who'd lost their original families had built a kind of new one for other kids. "Yeah, we're having our first meeting today."

"Well…so far I have ten people, myself included, and I think my friends Josie, Mel and Chris might show up…"

"Hence the posters. Could I see?" The copy-guy, whose nametag read 'Brian,' took one of Scootaloo's proof copies. "Give me a minute."

He turned around to one of the machines and the other copy-center worker appeared with plastic bags for Scoot's posters –far too many for the thirty copies she had already made.

"I…that's all the money I brought with me," Scoot explained, especially as Brian was laying her poster onto the glass plate of one of the big machines behind the counter.

"High-school clubs get sponsors every day, don't they?" Brian asked. He took a business card from the counter, dropped it into a downward-loading printer-fax-copier and punched some buttons. Seconds later, a copy of the business card, just 120% larger, appeared on a sheet of 8 ½ by 11 paper. Brian swiftly trimmed off the excess with a huge chop-style paper cutter, then took a Sharpie and added 'Sponsored By' above the business card in handwriting so perfect it looked like a font. Then he pulled up the corner of the poster from the glass plate of the machine and added the 'sponsor' tag between poster and glass, so it'd copy into a bit of void space on the design. With a flourish, he punched buttons on the machine then thumped the big green one like he was firing a weapon.

His enthusiasm was infectious, and Scootaloo realized the other copy-shop guy was handling the other customers so she and Brian could talk business.

"I tell you what, Miss Scott," the handsome copy-guy grinned. "We'll give you all the signs you need, on the house, plus pizza for all your meetings. And not Little Caesar's, either, the good kind with any toppings you want. If the bastards tear your posters down, we'll print more. If you need them bigger, we'll print them bigger. And if any adult complains, well, we're the only copy shop within 20 minutes of downtown with email-in and rapid-fax capabilities, plus we're the cheapest. Something tells me that only parents with absolutely no rapid document production needs will ever tangle with you guys."

"Really? But…but…we only have ten members, and the meetings are supposed to be every week! That'd cost a fortune!"

"Yeah, and as soon as the other students realize you have the best posters and where they come from, we'll make the pizza budget and then some back in additional business. I've wanted the sports teams to come to us for years; we're closer than FedEx Kinko's and we do better work. Good for us, good for you. That's what sponsorship is supposed to mean."

"But all that printing…and replacing any destroyed posters? That might mean a lot of printing, way more than we could ever afford to repay."

"It's the Broken Windows theory," Brian explained. "They tear down one poster and it stays down, they get the message that the Gay-Straight Alliance can't even protect their signs. They tear down a poster and three more pop up, with new designs every week, posters for events…the difference between 'new' and 'normal' is only twenty-one advertising exposures on average, you know."

"Yeah. If you advertise enough, people start to think of your brand as familiar. Three exposures is enough to make them remember it and take action if they were going to. Twenty-one exposures, especially of different content with different messages, that's enough to make them think of your club as a familiar part of the school, something they don't want to see gone or changed, even if they aren't members. Human brains are fairly easy to hack like that."

"Imagine Christmastime with no Coca-Cola polar bears or Santa Claus on the box."

"…Well, but those are a tradition. I start looking forward to those around Halloween."

"And they run the first one during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, knowing you've been looking forward to it for almost three weeks. You, me, and a million other kids look forward to those cute little polar bears, because when you're a kid, they're cute and funny, and by the time you're ten or so, assuming you see the ad only twice or three times, it's a tradition and you love it. One year, they decided not to do polar bears or Santa Claus and people actually revolted. They wrote to Coke and demanded the polar bears back. Even people who don't even drink the stuff, they love those stupid bears, and it's all because they've been conditioned to consider them normal."

"So you're going to make gay students and straight ones being friends normal…with posters? You can do that?"

Brian, whom Scootaloo suspected by now was 'Family,' snapped a Z with a flourish and grinned broader.

"Honey, I'm going to make your school prouder of the Gay-Straight Alliance than they are of that miserable excuse for a soccer team. Your teachers all keep calendars in their rooms, right?"

"Plain black and white, maybe a couple of old engraving-type pictures of the school a hundred years ago? Tiny little things?"

"Well, not to be rude, but those shitty little calendars can fuck right off. I'm going to order a set of full-color calendars, big enough for a kid with glasses to read from the third row of desks, with more school-spirit, bright colors and seasonal nostalgia than you'd get from grinding up yearbooks and snorting them. I'm also going to order new gradebooks, and all of that we'll be bringing to your teachers as a free gift for the end of the next nine weeks. That's Tuesday, right?"

"Perfect. See, teachers don't always get the budgets they need to do their jobs very well, so free shit gets used. I'll also order up a big box of deluxe custom coffee-mugs, the good kind where the handle fits all four of your fingers, with the Safe Zone logo."

"Sister suffragette, look at this," Brian pulled up his sleeve and showed her a Safe Zone tattoo, among other excellent body art. "I was an RA in college. We bleed Safe Zone."

Scootaloo beamed, amazed and surprised to find someone who understood. "So whenever a teacher attends a meeting or gets the training from your faculty adviser, in addition to the beautiful Safe Zone signs they'll get for the classroom door, the complimentary packet of dry-erase markers in the cool colors the office supply store doesn't always have and a super-giant whiteboard eraser, guaranteed to blow away five lines of equations in one simple swoop…they'll also get a sweet-ass ergonomic sixteen-ounce coffee cup with their name on it."

"Miss Scott, I once had a teacher, seventy-one years old, sweet little old lady who taught English and the Knitting Club, and she would cut a bitch soon as look at you if you fucked with her coffee cup. Coffee is teacher crack. You give them a bigger cup with a better handle and their name permanently printed on it so other teachers can't steal it? Teachers would throw a man into a woodchipper feet-first to get that shit."

"It is bribing them to accept you, sister suffragette…at first. But the bribe isn't the coffee cup or the sweet teacher-crack swag packages –which we'll be paying for, by the way. It's the fact that instead of buying a coffee cup or a calendar or new markers n' shit, they've already got one right there to use, and on their salaries, they'll use it. And they'll see it. And the kids will see it. Every. Single. Day."

"Actually, no. I can manage the calendars, the cups, the swag…if you use somebody like Oriental Trading Company or the various buy-direct custom-printing firms online, you could manage this whole shebang for well under five hundred bucks. And we pay more than that for our softball team." Brian gestured to a picture of an adorable little girls' softball team marked 'The Rainbows.'

"Sure. Custom-printing is insanely cheap compared to what it used to cost, especially when you run things in huge batches. If you only had, say, two hundred bucks to make this work, I could even design you some Gay-Straight Alliance stuff that would work for any school with blank space to Sharpie or print-and-paste the school and schedule specifics in, then offer the same posters to other schools, so everybody could get them for super-cheap. And I foresee a huge market for Safe Zone teacher-crack mugs in particular."

"This could really work then!" Scootaloo squealed with glee. "And all of that by next Tuesday?"

"If God didn't want us to change the world, He wouldn't have given us expedited shipping," Brian remarked. "Then next year after the program is well in place, you'll have a new batch of homophobic little freshmen who wouldn't know shit from mud if they rolled in it, they'll ask 'what the fuck is up with this gay-as-hell Safe Zone shit?' At that point, it's the upperclassmen, the seniors and juniors and even the sophomores, who act like the freshmen are complete tards for not knowing what Safe Zone is and cussing them out for criticizing their tradition. You remember when that Mo*4thers for Healthy Eating group tried to ban the Coca-Cola Polar Bears?"

"Yeah! It made the flame-war over the 'Twilight' books look like a minor quibble with Star Trek! People protect their new normal, and they defend their traditions. Thing is, if teachers see the Safe Zone logo, day after day, on the spiffy cup which contains their delicious brown teacher-crack, they're going to become protective of Safe Zone because in their minds, Safe Zone means the same thing as teacher-crack. If every teacher who completes Safe Zone training gets a complimentary candy dish for the classroom with the logo on it, and which I will rely on the Gay-Straight Alliance to keep topped up, well, every senior in the place is going to equate Safe Zone with 'delicious candy' and 'the little sugar buzz that makes Mrs. Gryle's shitty class tolerable.' Seriously, if that bitch didn't keep mints in her room, I never would have showed up, and she wrote in my yearbook that I was one of her favorites."

"Oh, girl! I only graduated from college two years ago. I had Gryle and that ass-pocket Frink and the rest of them, just like you. If our Mom hadn't had a stroke after Dad died and needed me and Jake to stay close to home, we would have both gotten the hell out of Dodge years ago. My big brother did his first year of student teaching my junior year, only thing kept me from getting gay-bashed even more often than I did."

"Damn straight! This isn't just me paying back a long-overdue favor to people like Katie Chisholm and Sensei O'Riley, it's revenge on all those fucktards like Mr. Frink. Gay equality, tolerance and brotherhood become the new normal in that place, they'll have to live with a lot of guilt." Brian seemed to relish the idea, but then he sighed. "That, and I am too fucking tired of watching my brother come home looking like a PTSD case because he can't save them all."

"Yeah, Jake Malcolm the Bio teacher's my big brother...well, half-brother technically, but we don't count a difference. He came home from work the other day looking like he'd gotten twenty pounds of misery monkey yanked off his back, told Mom and me there had been a protest, and then when you asked him to be faculty advisor, well…I've never seen Jake so proud."

"You bet. He's been looking out for gay kids since his mom and stepdad brought home baby me from the hospital. And Dad adopted him, so he takes his brotherly responsibilities very fucking seriously."

"Well, protecting kids from the same kind of shit that happened to me is a part of it. He also has a major crush on Katie Chisholm in Guidance, but I'm sure you knew that."

"That, and that doucher Gray left a hell of a mess. The Gay-Straight Alliance will be able to patch up a lot of it. Plus, it's about time he had something to do in the evenings. Mom's doing a lot better, I own this franchise now, and he needs to stop living like a monk. Don't hesitate to keep him out late, now."

"Brian Malcolm." He extended a hand, which Scootaloo shook with her prosthetic. "You know, I am really digging your Borg hardware, pony-girl."

"And a Star Trek fan, too?" Scoot smiled flirtatiously. "Is this Guardian Angels for Straight-Ally Ponies day?"

"Make that the biggest queen since Princess Celestia showing up for corporate sponsorship!" Brian grinned, picking up a fresh, hot stack of new posters from the machine he'd chosen. "Isn't this the most fabulous thing you have ever seen?"

They looked professional as could be, there were easily fifty of them, and they were three times the size of Scootaloo's original document.

"Here's a tape-gun to hang 'em with, and I'll just get these bagged up for you before you're late for homeroom." Brian effortlessly wrapped the posters in brown kraft paper and then a quick pass with clear cellophane so the day's rain wouldn't bother them. The whole parcel draped neatly onto Scootaloo's back and tucked against her saddlebags. "Give 'em hell, sister suffragette!" Brian called as she headed off toward the school.

She was still galloping when she got to her locker and found Josie, Melissa and Christina waiting.

"Sweet! We can put them up during first period. Mr. Frink's showing a movie rather than doing actual lessons and thinks we're on official cheerleading business," Josie explained. "That, and you can only watch him try to justify 'Alice in Wonderland' based on Lewis Carroll's being a mathematician so many times. I swear that guy just likes white rabbits."

"And if I can get the proof emailed to Demi, he'll put it into morning announcements and in with the rolling news updates on the screens," Melissa added.

"…Really? You guys…I didn't even have time to ask if you wanted to join the group, I've been so busy with-"

"Was there the half-ingrown toenail clipping of a chance that we wouldn't?" Josie asked. "We're your friends and we're Conner's friends and whether a friend's gay, straight, bi, transgender or too kinky to live-" here she raised an eyebrow at Melissa, "no one is so rich they can throw away a friend."

"I told you, Demi and I were buying whipped cream and Hershey's syrup for the A/V Club's ice-cream social."

"Since when has the A/V Club ever done anything with the word 'social' in it that wasn't followed by 'media' or preceded by 'remedial'?"

"Stereotyping much? I suggested it and Demi agreed. We need to diversify the membership. Also, he says he'll have every one of his people there for the Alliance meeting tonight on pain of no XP or cut of the loot drops for a week," Melissa informed Scootaloo with a smile. "Given his D&D games and WoW raids are the key social events of their calendar, I think you should plan for all twelve of them to show up."

"And the cheerleaders took a vote. I…informed them of my slight misrepresentation of your involvement with the protest to the media," Josie blushed a bit at this, "and it was decided that I am on super-secret cheerleading probation until the end of the nine weeks as punishment and that the entire squad is joining the Alliance as part of my apology to you. I will just owe all of them a favor, in accordance with the ancient code of the cheerleaders."

"I'm thinking I may have to rent Laurie out as an emergency-backup prom date, fix some busted computers and possibly Xerox all my physics and math-class notes."

"I know a place where you can meet all of your Xerox needs," Scootaloo explained. "We have actual corporate sponsorship!" The girls oohed and ahhed over the details of the arrangement. "Plus, he's Mr. Malcolm's little brother. Isn't that so awesome!"

"That is pretty sweet!" Josie agreed. "Brothers do make for wonderful social capital. I might even forgive Melissa for depriving me of half my Emergency Backup Prom Date inventory someday."

"Eh, true. Sooner or later they were bound to revolt. Though they do both look damn good in boutonnieres."

Josie glared, Melissa grinned, and the girls all cracked up laughing, heading off to touch base with Mr. Frink before hanging all the posters there were to hang.

In their glee, nobody noticed how quiet Christina had gotten after seeing the Gay-Straight Alliance becoming reality.

Our girl Scootaloo 1 of 3

by Cozy Mark IV

Ch 18: Protecting Family