We didn’t go straight to the principals office like we had been told to do. I made a quick detour first, ignoring Plum’s objections about disregarding Miss Persimmon’s orders, in order to pick up our lunchboxes from where I’d dropped them.
When we walked into our classroom the colts and fillies stopped their gossiping in order to stare at us. Our hoofsteps echoed in the silence as Plum and I crossed over to our saddlebags to put our lunchboxes away. The second we walked out the classroom door, the excited whispering started up again at twice the intensity.
Plum kept quiet during the long walk to Principal Oak Leaf’s office, which was on the far side of the small school. To the students of Hoofington Elementary, the principal’s office was a place of intimidation and dread, the seat of Authority in the small world of the school. Not too many parents liked it either, though that was for different reasons.
We walked in through the receptionist’s door only to be scowled at by the grey-maned unicorn mare sitting behind the desk. She ordered us, in a tone that landed right on my last nerve, to sit ourselves down and wait until the principal called us.
The seats were small, wooden and cheaply built. Mine squeaked when I sat down, which made the receptionist’s ears flick. Plum sat trembling in the seat next to me, her breathing quick but shallow. The poor kid was having some sort of panic attack. My guess was that she’d never been in actual trouble at school before.
“Relax,” I told Plum. “It’s going to be fine.”
“How can you say that?” she hissed back. “We’re in so much trouble!”
The receptionist looked up and scowled at us. “Quiet, you two.”
Plum shrank back in her seat with a soft “eep” sound. I glared at the old mare, but she was already back to filing her forehoof while pretending to work. I shifted deliberately in my chair, which gave out a metallic squeal in protest. I saw the mare’s jaw bunch up in irritation, and a grim little smile crawled across my muzzle. I waited a few seconds for her attention to wander again before I continued trying to calm Plum down.
“This is just school trouble,” I said quietly, trying to avoid the receptionist’s notice. “We might get scolded, but it’s not like they’re sending us to prison or anything.” I patted her on the back. “Take a deep breath, okay?”
“Okay. Right.” She pressed a hoof to her chest and inhaled, held it for a few seconds, then let it go.
“Feel better?” I asked. Plum offered me a weak smile.
“I said to be quiet!” The receptionist was glaring at us. Plum shrank back and stammered out an apology. Me, I just got mad.
A few seconds went past, and wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly I felt a little restless and had to find a more comfortable position to sit in. My chair squealed like hooves being dragged across a chalkboard, causing the receptionist to flinch as her head snapped up. I stopped before she said anything, sitting there with my hooves in my lap and as close to a look of innocence as I could muster, all while pretending I didn’t see her glaring at me.
Eventually she went back to her filing, and that’s when I started my little game. I’d wait some random interval of time and then shift in my seat. A metallic squeal would echo through the room, flattening the receptionist’s ears and making her clench her jaw. It was never enough at once for her to know for a fact I was doing it deliberately, and I kept quiet otherwise.
I glanced over at Plum and saw her staring at me, eyes wide either with either awe or disbelief that I was deliberately annoying an adult. I shrugged. It may have been petty, but it was still revenge of a sort.
I was interrupted when a stiff-legged and scowling Miss Persimmon opened the outer door, nodded to the receptionist, and walked straight past us on her way into the principal’s office. She shut the door, putting an end to any ideas I might have had of eavesdropping.
“She looks mad,” Plum whispered to me.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered back.
Plum sighed, then leaned against me. I froze, not sure what to do at first. And then I put my right foreleg across her withers and pulled her into a hug. We sat like that for a good few minutes while Plum’s breathing eventually settled back to a normal rhythm. I had to give up my little game with the receptionist, but it was worth it to get the filly calmed down.
We were still sitting like that when the outer door opened again. I looked up as a pair of earth ponies came marching in, a mare and a stallion. The stallion was on the pudgy side, dark brown coat with an off-white mane. He gave us the stink-eye as he stalked by, his ears laid flat and his lips pulled back into an angry snarl. Plum gasped at the sight of him and buried her face in my barrel.
He ignored my glower and instead turned to the receptionist to demand, “Where can I find the principal?”
The receptionist’s eyes narrowed as she pointed to the only other door in the room, which had a big nameplate on it reading “Principal Oak Leaf”. The stallion snorted and marched over to the door, flinging it open before heading inside.
The mare that entered with him didn’t follow right away, staying out in the reception area for a few seconds. She had a big build, bigger than most stallions I’d seen. Her coat was a light yellow, and her short-cut mane was a sandy brown over her darker brown eyes. She also had a definite resemblance to Vanilla Sweet, though without that look of sneering contempt that Vanilla usually threw our way.
Her eyes gave nothing away as she looked us over, though her lips were pressed together and her features were hard. I glared at her defiantly, with Plum’s face still buried in my chest and my foreleg still draped across her shoulders. The mare turned without a word and followed the stallion into the principal’s office, shutting the door quietly behind her.
Almost as soon as the door closed, I heard the stallion start shouting. After a few seconds, Principal Oak Leaf raised his voice in weak protest, but he never stood a chance of slowing down the stallion’s tirade.
With the door shut, most of the words were muffled, making it hard to make out most of what was said. Even so, I was still able to make out a few of the things being said. Words like “incompetent staff” and “barbarian children” floated out from behind the doorway. Every time the yelling spiked in volume, I could feel Plum shiver against my coat. My jaw was starting to ache from how hard I was having to clench it shut.
After a few minutes of having to put up with that garbage, the reception area door slammed open once again as an out of breath Mulberry burst into the reception area. She had a light sheen of sweat all over her and her saddlebags were loose, having slid halfway around her barrel. It was clear evidence of them not being cinched on tight enough, and I figured she must have put them on in a hurry. Her panicked eyes caught Plum’s right away, causing the filly to moan a little and make a valiant but futile effort to hide behind my back.
“Let me see you,” Mulberry said firmly. Plum hesitated before dragging herself out from behind me. I heard a short soft keen of distress from the back of Mulberry’s throat at the sight of her bruised, dirty and grass-stained daughter, who was busily staring at the floor and refusing to meet her mother’s eyes. Mulberry rushed forward, smoothing Plum’s mane back with a hoof.
“Are you alright?” the mare asked, forcing her daughter’s head in different directions so she could look for more bruising, all the while ignoring Plum’s protests. “Oh, your poor mane. Here, let me—”
“Don’t,” I said, holding up a hoof as Mulberry pulled a mane brush out of her saddlebag.
She hesitated, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow. “Why not?” she asked.
“Don’t hide the evidence. Let them all see what Vanilla Sweet and Ivy did to her.”
Mulberry gave me an odd look but she still put the brush away. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” she asked us.
Plum fidgeted with her hooves for a few seconds, then started talking. “I was by myself on the playground when Vanilla Sweet found me. She called me a few names and pushed me around a little. And then she started hitting me. Then Cinnamon showed up and pushed her off of me, and then Miss Persimmon showed up and stopped it. That’s all.”
“That’s not all,” I said.
Plum shot me a panicked look, her eyes darting to her mother and then back to me.
“She’s your mom,” I told her. “In order to help you, she has to know everything. Don’t hide anything, okay?”
That earned me another confused look from Mulberry, but Plum nodded and took a deep breath.
“I had a fight with Cinnamon, so I left on my own to go cool off,” the filly said, her tone level for the first time since we’d sat down. “I was upset. Vanilla Sweet and Ivy found me over by the jungle gym, and Vanilla started calling me names. I don’t even remember most of what she said. Well, except for ‘Dummy Plummy’.”
I rolled my eyes and snorted. When the two members of the Pudding family looked at me, I explained by saying, “Making fun of a pony’s name like that is seriously the most moronic way to get a rise out of them. It’s basically admitting that you’re too much of an idiot to come up with something better.”
Mulberry smiled at that, and Plum giggled. The filly was in slightly higher spirits when she continued.
“She asked me where Cinnamon was. I told her she could stick her head up her tail-hole.”
“Plum!” Mulberry’s scolding of her daughter sounded shocked, a reflex no doubt conditioned by years of motherhood, but I could sense a current of barely-suppressed laughter underneath it. I didn’t bother hiding it as I snickered a little, myself.
“Well, that’s what I said!” Plum said defensively.
“Then what?” I prompted.
“She didn’t like that—” Plum continued.
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“—so she shoved me. I… um…” She looked up at her mother, bit her lip, then admitted, “I shoved her back. And then she hit me. So I jumped on her and… Well, I don’t remember much after that until Cinnamon knocked her away from me.”
“Oh, Plum…” Mulberry said with a sigh.
“That’s not all,” Plum said. Mulberry waited while Plum played with her hooves some more. “Um. Well, Cinnamon and Vanilla started fighting, and I was just… just… angry. I wanted to hit somepony. And then Ivy threw a rock at Cinnamon’s head, and I just… I got so mad. I tackled her and we started fighting.”
“And then?” Mulberry leaned forward, stroking her daughter’s mane and keeping her voice gentle. That wasn’t the reaction I’d have expected from my own mother, that’s for sure.
“And then Cinnamon showed up, Ivy got scared and ran away, and then Miss Persimmon showed up and Cinnamon yelled at her.”
“She did?” Mulberry asked, her eyes widening.
“Yeah. Something about it being her job to stop us fighting, or something.”
That statement earned me a raised eyebrow and an surprised stare from Mulberry, my third odd look of the day from the mare.
“Then we got sent to the principal’s office, and Vanilla was sent to the nurse.” Plum frowned at the floor and added, “I’m probably forgetting a lot of stuff. It’s kinda hard to remember exactly. Sorry.”
“Oh, sweetie.” Mulberry gathered Plum up in a tight hug. I looked away when the waterworks started. No need for me to get caught up in that.
The door to the reception area banged open one more time, this time for my own mother. She stood there, eyes burning and her limbs trembling. She sucked in a breath at the sight of me, and for the first time since the fight I wondered what I looked like. I knew that I at least I had a lump the size of a hen’s egg behind my ear where that first rock hit me.
“You were fighting?!” she said loudly.
“Inside voice, Mom,” I said wryly. “And yeah. I wasn’t given much of a choice. It was two on one against Plum.” I sighed and added, “I only wanted to control the situation. I would have been fine, but Vanilla managed to tackle me after Ivy distracted me by pegging me in the head with a rock.”
Mom’s eyes went wide, and then narrowed as her ears flattened against her skull. Her lips pulled back from her teeth as she sucked in a deep breath, and I barely had time to think “Oh, crap” before she bellowed in a voice that sounded almost supernatural: “Where are the Tartarus-spawned devil children that did this to my sweet Cinnamon Sugar?”
The shouting from the principals office stopped as if cut off by a knife. A few seconds later, the door opened and Principal Oak Leaf poked his head out. He saw my mother and Mulberry, both of whom were giving him a look of pure loathing. I swear, that unfortunate stallion looked like he was going to faint right then and there.
“Oh, this is gonna be fun,” I said with a humorless smile.
~~*~~
Under ordinary circumstances, the office would have seemed huge. Not so much when there were eight adults, two fillies and myself all crammed inside. Miss Persimmon stood next to the floundering principal, looking cool and collected in contrast to her boss’s sweaty jitters. Ivy had been fished out of her class when her parents arrived, and now the three of us were all sitting in student-sized seats arranged along the back wall while our respective parents tried to “work things out”.
It wasn’t going well.
“If we could all just try to calm down,” the principal was trying to say. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“I want these hooligans suspended!” The stallion’s name was Rocky Road. He was Vanilla Sweet’s father, and this was the third time he’d shouted that exact same phrase. “They ganged up on my daughter—”
“That’s counter to the facts, sir,” I said evenly.
He whirled on me, red-faced and sweating. “Don’t you interrupt me!”
My mother stepped between the two of us. She wasn’t quite his size, but she was easily twice as angry.
“Stay away from my daughter,” she said, the warning clear in her voice.
“Your daughter needs more discipline,” he shot back.
“I don’t understand,” Ivy’s mother said. Jade was a creamy green color, tall and willowy. She seemed almost as much at a loss as her husband, a stocky orange stallion whose name was Citrus. “How is our daughter involved in this? She’s such a little angel!”
I saw Ivy blush and look away out of the corner of my eye.
“I’ve always said that Vanilla Sweet was a bad influence on her,” Ivy’s father Citrus said.
Rocky Road started swelling with rage again. He opened his mouth, looking ready to give the orange stallion a verbal beat-down. Before he could get started, though, Ivy managed to get her two bits in.
“No, she’s not!” the unicorn filly shouted. She shrank back when the adults all looked at her. The angry heat in her voice dwindled down to simmering resentment when she continued. “She’s not. She didn’t make me do anything.”
“Sweetie, you’re not thinking clearly,” Ivy’s father Citrus said in what was clearly supposed to be the voice of reason. “I know this is upsetting, but—”
“You never listen to me!” Ivy’s voice came out as a shriek. Then, slightly softer, she said, “If you would just… You don’t pay attention!”
From the looks on her parents’ faces, you would have thought she’d suddenly started talking in Zebrican.
“We’re getting off track,” Rocky Road said, tossing his head. “My daughter is in the doctor’s office right now, getting an X-ray, because that little monster kicked her in the stomach!” He pointed a shaking hoof in my direction.
“Yeah, and think about that for a minute,” I said. “How, exactly, was I able to kick your daughter in the stomach? She’s about twice my size.”
“Keep quiet unless you’re being spoken to,” Jade said. She still looked shaken from Ivy’s outburst. Apparently, she had decided to take her confusion out on me.
“Seriously?” I asked, honestly surprised. I laughed and shook my head. “And who the hell are you to say that to me?” I heard Ivy squeak in shock a couple of chairs over. Her mother just seemed shocked and confused.
It was into this boiling emotional soup that the principal decided to try and dip his ladle. “Well, I think the facts are—”
“The fact is, our daughter is out of control.”
You could have heard a pin drop as every head turned to look at Vanilla Sweet’s mother. Her name was Butter Brickle, and this was the first thing she’d said since the fillies and I had been called into the office. She had just been standing there stoically the whole time while the other parents argued around her.
The first to recover from her statement was her husband.
“What?” His head pulled back like she’d slapped him. “I think—”
“You don’t,” she countered, with an edge in her voice. “I’ve been warning you for weeks now that something like this was coming. You refused to listen.”
“B-but…”
“‘But’, nothing. Our daughter has problems. I’ve been telling you that since the school year started.”
There was a palpable sense of discomfort in the room. Hardest hit was Rocky Road, who flushed an even uglier red than before.
“That’s… Our daughter isn’t—”
She cut him off again. “Our daughter has been picking fights recently, and you know it. And every time she does, she pushes it further. She’s too much like me when I was her age. If it isn’t stopped soon, who knows where she’ll end up? The hospital now, jail later? Or the morgue?”
I felt myself warming up to this mare. She had guts. It isn’t easy admitting that your kid has problems, especially in front of so many strangers.
“Butter, please…” her husband said.
“My own mother tried to knock some sense into me when I was her age.” Butter Brickle scowled, either at the memory or at the thought of hitting her own daughter, I couldn’t be sure.. “She was afraid I would hurt a lot of ponies before I ended up getting locked up. I had too much anger in me.”
“She hit you?” I asked.
Butter Brickle turned to me with a surprised look on her face. I guess some of my own anger had bled through when I asked the question. She nodded.
“And how, exactly, did that make you straighten out?” I asked.
“It didn’t,” she admitted with a wry smile. “That took years, until some time after I hit rock bottom. I don’t want Vanilla to have to go through what I did, but I honestly don’t know what else to do with that girl.”
“Therapy!” Oak Leaf shrunk back as everypony turned to look at him. I think half of us had forgotten he was even there. “Um. We can get her into therapy. And anger management classes. All free, through the school.”
“My daughter isn’t crazy!” Rocky Road protested. I could feel Plum squirming in her seat next to me, probably wanting to add her own two bits to that observation.
“Nopony said she is,” Oak Leaf countered. It seemed like he’d dug down and managed to find his courage, because he was now standing straight and tall, meeting the other stallion eye-to-eye. “Therapy isn’t for only cra— er, disturbed ponies, it’s to help ponies deal with issues that they can’t cope with all on their own. If you two are going through a separation—”
“That’s private!” Rocky Road yelped.
The wide-eyed principal slapped a hoof over his muzzle as yet another uncomfortable silence descended over the room.
“Not anymore,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. Plum stifled a giggle by shoving a hoof into her mouth.
Oak Leaf shot me a glare and cleared his throat. “Nevertheless,” the principal said, ”it can help her just to have a non-biased third party for Vanilla to talk to. To help her sort through her feelings and to approach her anger in a non-confrontational way.”
“We’ll think about it,” Butter Brickle said. “What’s going to be her punishment?”
“Well, I think we should send the fillies outside for this,” Principal Oak Leaf said. “Each student’s punishment should be private, don’t you think?”
The three of us trooped outside and into the reception area once again. We waited in awkward silence as we listened to the incomprehensible muttering coming from behind the door, which was occasionally punctuated with a parent’s voice rising in either anger or denial.
“I’m sorry,” Ivy said eventually. I looked over at her and she immediately dropped her eyes to the floor. “I shouldn’t have hit you with a rock.”
“You planning on doing it again?” I asked her.
She looked up at me in shock. “No!”
“Then I can forgive you for that,” I said. “What about Plum?”
“Hey, she’s the one who tackled me!” Ivy said defensively.
“I guess I’m sorry too,” Plum said reluctantly. “But I only did it because you were hitting Cinnamon with rocks!”
“Okay! I said I was sorry!” Ivy said, tears in her eyes.
Awkward silence pooled around us like stagnant water. I cleared my throat. “Look. I don’t like fighting. Plum doesn’t like fighting. I don’t think you like fighting either, Ivy. Am I right?”
She nodded her head.
“So, we only fought because we felt pushed into it,” I continued. “So, maybe what we do is, we stop ourselves from fighting. Plum stops me, I stop her. You stop Vanilla…” I stopped when Ivy shuddered. “Has she ever hit you, Ivy?”
“Not yet,” Ivy said quietly. “Sometimes I’m afraid of her...”
“It’s up to you to decide what you will or won’t do,” I told her. “You don’t have to be friends with somepony else on only their terms. You get to decide what you want, too.”
Her brow furrowed in confusion as she listened to me. I sighed and tried again.
“Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, in order to be friends with somepony. That’s compromise, and it can be a good thing. But there are always things you don’t have to compromise on.” I leaned forward, catching her eyes. “Bullying is one of them. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.”
She snorted and looked away. I remembered back to our first encounter, where she’d obviously been happy enough to go along with Vanilla trying to tease me. I added that up with what she’d said in the principal’s office.
“It’s also a lousy way to get attention,” I said. She looked up at me, startled and maybe a little angry. “Find a better way to get validation of your parent’s love.”
“What do you know about it?” she asked with heat in her voice.
I laughed, maybe a little too harshly. “Come on, kid. You think you’re the only one with a messed up home life?”
Ivy rolled her eyes and looked away with a scowl on her face.
“Maybe I should get therapy, too,” she muttered to herself. “It would be nice to have somepony take me seriously.”
That’s when the principal’s door burst open and Ivy’s parents stormed out like a matching pair of thunderclouds.
“Come on, dear,” Jade said to her daughter. “We’re getting out of this damned school.”
“Honey, language,” Citrus admonished. Bad timing on his part. His wife wasted no time and censored no language in letting him know exactly what she thought of that. The bickering couple, with an embarrassed Ivy in tow, could be heard all the way down the hallway.
Vanilla’s parents came next. Rocky Road glowered at the floor while Butter Brickle led him out. She stopped by us briefly.
“Sorry about Vanilla,” she said. Her husband said something that sounded like a resentful attempt at an apology, no doubt forced out of him by his wife.
“I really am sorry about Vanilla being in the hospital,” I said. “I hope she’s going to be okay.”
“I’m sure she will be,” Butter Brickle said with a half-smile. Then to her estranged husband, “Come on, Rocky.”
Muttering under his breath, he followed her out of the reception area.
Another minute or so passed before Mulberry and my mother came out. Mulberry looked upset and angry, and Mom looked frustrated and uncomfortable all at once. They were talking softly together, much to my surprise. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw my mom just talking to another adult.
“We’re going, sweetie,” Mulberry said shortly to Plum. “I tried to talk him out of it, but you’ve been suspended for the rest of the week for fighting.”
Plum squeaked in dismay and swayed in her chair. I put a steadying hoof on her shoulder.
“That idiot principal,” Mulberry said loudly. “‘Zero tolerance policy for fighting’ my tail.”
“At least the girls aren’t badly hurt,” Mom said, surprising me by being the voice of reason for a change. Mulberry sighed and nodded.
“True,” Mulberry said, then sighed heavily before looking at her daughter. “The important thing, sweetie, is that you’re not in trouble with me. I don’t like that you were fighting, and you should have walked away, but you didn’t start it.”
Plum heaved a sigh of relief before asking, “What about Cinnamon?”
I honestly could not have cared less what my “punishment” would be.
“The same thing,” my mother said with a frown. “Suspension for the rest of the week. Oh, and I signed that permission slip for the school play for next week that you must have forgotten to take home.”
That devious… I cracked my mouth open to give her my exact thoughts on the subject, but I was cut off by Mulberry, whose loud gasp stopped us all in our tracks.
“I have a great idea!” the purple mare said with a grin. “Since you two need to be cleaned up, and since we were talking about it anyway, why don’t we move our mother/daughter spa day to today?”
“What?!” I hate to admit it, but my voice sounded a little panicked and squeaky when I said that.
“I don’t know…” My mother was rubbing at her left foreleg with her right fetlock, a nervous mannerism I recognized from my first childhood. “I should probably get home.”
“Oh, come on, Almond,” Mulberry said, nudging her with a shoulder. I blinked, trying to remember when Mulberry had learned Mom’s name. “The girls have had a rough day today, they could use a treat.” She smiled hugely at my mother, then. “It’ll be fun! And it’s a good bonding experience with the girls. And I have a coupon! What do you say?”
My mom hesitated. I felt a horrible premonition twisting in my gut.
“Mom…” I said, trying to make the warning clear in my voice.
She blinked at me as I glared at her. And then she looked at the eager puppy eyes beamed at her both from Mulberry and Plum.
The puppy eyes beat my glare by a solid mile.
“Okay,” Mom said quietly with a shaky attempt at a smile.
“Alright!” Mulberry said cheerfully.
“Yay!” Plum said happily.
“Oh, hell no!”
The protest erupted from my mouth with all the force and fury of a volcano, only to fall flat when the sole reaction was from the damned receptionist; she treated me to a lemon-sour scowl on her wrinkled old muzzle as Plum and the two moms trotted through the office’s outer door.
Twenty minutes later, I found myself standing outside of the Happy Hooves spa. Mulberry was talking softly but excitedly to my mother, who was nodding along with a plastic grin pasted onto her muzzle. All the while, an overjoyed Plum Pudding alternated bouncing in circles and vibrating with excitement over her very first spa trip.
“How is this my life?” I muttered as Plum Pudding lowered her head and began pushing me inside.