All That Shimmers
Chapter 8: Bathroom Revelations
-ooooooo-
My eye is throbbing as I look up from the ground, figuring out what my next move should be. Apropos of my being punched in the face, her ‘accidental death plan’ simply involves me sabotaging her motorcycle. Granted that doesn’t guarantee her death, but motorcycle accidents can be pretty brutal.
I suppose I can try talking her out of thrashing me. “What the heck is your deal?!” I ask from the floor as I put a hand over my recently punched eye. “You didn’t even go to Fall Formal!” Alright, so I’m not trying very hard. Anyhow, if she decks me a few times and I walk around with proof that someone punished me for Friday night, it might get the rest of the school body who hates me, a.k.a. ‘almost everybody’ to leave me alone for a while. A few might even feel sorry for me if I walk around sporting a few bruises.
Gilda glares down at me. “You think just because I was lucky enough to miss out on becoming one of your mind controlled zombies, you get off the hook?”
She bends down and grabs me be the collar of my jacket, hauling me back to my feet. “Hey! Watch it!” I snap out. “This is a brand new jacket.”
She pulls her fist back and punches me right in the face again. My vision blurs on impact and I stumble back against the bathroom wall. Also, there’s now a sharp pain in my lower lip.
I sure hope the pain means this plan is working.
“So Sunset,” Gilda coos out with a smirk, “if you died here, do you think anyone would bother to investigate?”
I narrow my eyes and wipe blood away from my lip which is now split. “You wouldn’t…” Well she might… Her opinion of me wasn’t particularly high to begin with, but she never bothered to participate in most school events so it was a non-issue for me. Now she has a reason to hate me and I’m sure there’s a long list of people who’d love to just see me drop dead.
Gilda snorts out a derisive chuckle. “Heh, maybe we should find out.” She reaches into a coat pocket and pulls out a black handle. A few quick movements of her hand and suddenly the handle folds out revealing a blade.
Suddenly Gilda has a butterfly knife and this plan doesn’t seem like such a good idea. I’m not feeling particularly great about myself, but I’m not keen on being stabbed and left to bleed to death in a high school bathroom. Chances are she’s bluffing, but she has enough reason to actually just stab me that I’m not going to take that risk.
“I’ll scream,” I say in a warning tone.
Gilda blows out a dismissive puff of air. “Pffft, go ahead. The whole school hates you, do you think anyone will actually come to your rescue?”
Sometimes the truth hurts more than being punched in the face. Like right now, for instance.
Gilda suddenly closes the distance between us so she’s mere inches away from my face. She holds the knife up so I can see it. She grins wickedly at me. “Go ahead, scream.”
I wonder if a couple dozen moons of watching wrestling and imaginary training can really be put to use…
I don’t scream, instead I bring my head down hard, aiming the bridge of my crown for Gilda’s face. A target that’s pretty easy to hit at this range. Her nose makes a satisfying crack as bone hits cartilage and she reels backwards.
… Apparently it can.
Before Gilda has time to react I throw a fist out and it catches her in the side of the head. She stumbles back and catches herself on the bathroom counter, the knife slips out of her hand and clatters on the floor.
She turns and looks up at me with wide, surprised eyes as blood flows out of her nose and down her lips. A bruise is already forming around one of those eyes.
I feel my lips curl up almost on their own accord and my eyes widen to take in the scene in front of me. I throw another punch and watch in satisfaction as Gilda’s head jerks to the side from the impact. I had no clue taking her out would be this easy. Had I known I could hit this hard I would have just taken her out immediately.
Funny, as she’s looking up with me, practically begging me with her eyes to stop, I somehow feel I could easily bash her skull in, and I’m having trouble coming up with reasons why I just shouldn’t.
I pull my fist back again.
“WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING!?”
I look up and Rainbow Dash is staring at me in disbelief.
Suddenly a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t punch a schoolmate to death in a public bathroom come rushing at me, even quite a few sensible ones that have nothing to do with the sudden addition of a witness I’d have to account for.
Slowly, I raise a hand to the side of my head and turn to stare at myself in the mirror.
What the heck… what the hell happened just now?
I reach out and touch the mirror with the other hand, the swollenness of my left eye and lip barely register to me. I think… I think I’m going to cry…
Gilda loses her grip on the counter and falls to the floor. The knife clatters again as its pushes out into the center of the tiled bathroom floor.
Rainbow Dash looks down in shock. “Gilda, is that your knife?! Did you actually pull a knife on Sunset Shimmer?!”
Gilda frowns. “I wasn’t gonna… I mean… I just wanted to scare her…”
Rainbow Dash smacks a palm over her eyes. “I can’t…. I can’t even look at you right now.”
Gilda scowls at Rainbow Dash. “So you’re taking the side of the girl who can turn into a demon and tried to mind control most the students here?”
The comment cuts me deep enough that I kind of wish she had just stabbed me. Tears start streaming down my face and I bite my throbbing lip in an attempt to choke back sobs.
I’m not even sure what I am anymore, and it scares me.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had a nerve struck by that comment, because Rainbow Dash has Gilda by the jacket collar in an instant.
“YOU LEAVE HER ALONE,” Rainbow Dash screams. “AT LEAST SHE’S TRYING TO MAKE UP FOR WHAT SHE DID AND NOT PULLING FRICKIN’ KNIVES ON PEOPLE!”
“Okay! I get it!” Gilda says as she jerks out of Rainbow Dash’s grip. Still woozy, it would seem, she almost falls back to the ground. Catching herself on the counter.
As shaken up by this whole thing as I am, I admit I’m just a little proud of that.
Gilda attempts to make it look like she planned her little tumble all along by turning the tap on and washing some of the blood off her face.
Rainbow Dash lets out a tremendous sigh. Who came blame her? She just walked into a bathroom only to find a friend of hers about to fillet one of her quasi-friends and both of us have some nasty looking injuries. Not a fun mess to suddenly find yourself in…
Gilda grabs a paper towel and wipes away the blood and water from her face. She quickly realizes the bleeding from her nose isn’t going to stop soon and grabs a wad of paper towels, holding them to her face. “I’m going home… ” she announces as she woozily retrieves her weapon. “If you want to be first in line to have their brain snatched when demon girl here decides she’s done faking playing nice, that’s your business.”
As much as I’d love to say, ‘If I was faking, I’d probably do a better job of being nice’, the part of my brain that’s supposed to automatically deliver snark is still working with the rest of my head to sort out what happened and just how it seemed I would have no trouble, both mentally and physically, caving someone’s skull in with my bare hands. What escapes from my mouth is some pitiful sounding mumbling.
Rainbow Dash shoot me a small concerned look then turns to Gilda. “You are not riding your motorcycle home!”
“Pffft, thanks mom,” Gilda replies derisively. “But I can get—” Gilda is cut off as she apparently finds standing up difficult. She smacks her head on the bathroom door frame as she collapses to the ground, her eyes unfocused and her head wobbling. It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Truth be told, I’d probably laugh anyway if I were in a better mood.
“You can’t even stand right now!” Rainbow Dash cried. “How the heck are you going to drive a motorcycle home?!”
Gilda woozily stares up at Rainbow Dash. “Well what the hell do you suggest I do?! Call one of my parents? Bet that’ll go over well, provided I can even get one of them to show up at school…”
Rainbow Dash shakes her head as she takes her backpack off. “I can’t believe I’m doing this…” She digs her phone out of her backpack. “I’m calling my dad.”
To my surprise, Gilda’s eyes widen and she seems worried at the suggestion. “Ba… Blaze? You can’t… you can’t tell him I got… uh…” She trails off as she glances at me briefly. She looks back at Rainbow Dash. “You gotta tell him I gave better than I got…”
“You pulled a freakin’ knife on someone! You’re lucky I’m even making the call, let alone making sure you don’t crash your bike on the way home.”
Gilda quickly stands back up to her feet and gives Rainbow Dash a panicked expression. “You absolutely can’t tell him I did that! He’d never look at me the same way again.”
Rainbow Dash lets loose another heavy sigh and helps Gilda walk out of the bathroom. She turns to me as she’s heading out. “Wait here,” she says. “Let me just sort this out.”
I nod weakly. Self-defense or not, it would be nice if this was handled discreetly. Thrashing Gilda is likely to make anyone think twice before cornering me in a bathroom, but I think I did a little more damage than I could just get away with given my current reputation.
Rainbow Dash leaves with Gilda and I’m left to my own thoughts.
I take another look in the mirror. Well I do know one thing about myself, I’m a wreck. I have got blood trickling down my lip and a nice, swollen eye. I begin cleaning myself up.
Still not sure what happened back there. Initially I just wanted to keep from getting stabbed, but for a few moments there, I wanted nothing more to hit Gilda until she stopped moving, and I’m not even sure why.
That isn’t me… it can’t be! It just can’t!
I try to choke back sobs, but fail this time around. I start bawling in the bathroom.
People should pay me during drought season to stand in their lawns…
HA! Take that, me!
“… HeheheheheHAHAHAHAHAHAHAWHOUAAAHOUAAHOUAAHOUAAAAOHUAAAAHUOAAAAAA…”
I hate myself and want to die. I’m sitting here, staring at myself in the mirror with a hand on either side of my head and wishing I had the strength to cave my own head in.
I start breathing short, shallow breaths very rapidly. Alright, calm down… Hyperventilating in the bathroom isn’t going to get me anywhere. I need to figure out what’s going on here.
Is the thing inside me slowly gaining control? Did it take over because I was in danger, or did I somehow allow it to take over for the same reason? I guess I can test these hypotheses in different ways, but I really don’t want to!
What if someone else attacks me and I actually do kill them?! Heck! What if someone just makes me angry enough and I suddenly snap and start beating the heck out of them?!
I’m not a monster! I’m not!
I slump down on the bathroom counter, resting an elbow on the counter, and my head against my palm.
Get a grip. I mean… I spent all day yesterday getting mad at Snips and Snails and didn’t feel an urge to cave their skulls in… Uh… any more than usual, that is… I should be fine provided I can avoid anyone else who might want to stab me.
… Hopefully that’s not too difficult.
I clean myself up a bit more and look up as Rainbow Dash walks back into the bathroom.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Tha… hhehh… thank goodness you got here… If you hadn’t showed up—”
“You would have beaten Gilda into a greasy stain?” Rainbow Dash suggests as she raises an eyebrow.
The fact that she’s probably right sends shivers through my body. If Gilda regained her senses enough to pick up her knife, I might have been in danger. However, I’m not sure how much of a fight she would have put up with a few more blows to the head.
I lose it again almost immediately and start sniffing and sobbing. I guess on the bright side I’m not having to fake distress over this incident, but the fact that I lost control of myself and almost inflicted serious damage or even death to someone is a little too much to bear. Honestly, with the scene I’m making I’d think I’d need to tone it down a bit if I were faking…
“Hey, chill… it’s alright,” Rainbow Dash says as her expression softens. “I uh… I just had no idea you were the wrong girl to get into a fist fight with.”
Yeah, me too…
“Hick… Just go…” I utter quietly.
Rainbow Dash looks at me as if I had just announced I was a unicorn from another world… you know… if she didn’t already kind of know that…
“What?” she asks flatly.
“…Ju—Just go…” I stammer out. “I don’t wa…don’t want to… hhehh… hhehh… huh-huh-hurt you” I don’t want to hurt you…
“Ya—You don’t… hhehh… don’t… owe…” I swallow “… owwa me anything…” You don’t owe me anything...
“So jus—just… just go… ” So just go.
I don’t know if my collection of half stammered, half sobbed out sentences completely get through to Rainbow Dash, but she just folds her arms over her chest and tilts her head.
“That’s not happening,” she informs me.
“Ba…but…”
Rainbow Dash shakes her head. “Look, if I can call my dad for Gilda after she pulls a knife on one of my friends, I’d be a real jerk if I just abandoned you here.”
I feel my heart skip a beat at the word ‘friend’. “But you… hhehh… you barely…”
“Hey, you’re going through a tough time right now,” Rainbow Dash replies. “I get it… uh… kinda… and I’m not just going to abandon you because things are a little tougher than either of us thought…”
I manage to put a lid on my crying long enough to stare at Rainbow Dash.
She continues, “… Like it or not, you’re my buddy, a’ight? And I’m not just going to go away ‘cause you’re having a bad day.”
The lid on my sobbing quickly blows off and I start bawling again. I wrap my arms around Rainbow Dash and start sobbing into her shoulder.
She seems surprised at first, but she returns the hug.
“Th—thank you…” I say quietly.
Rainbow Dash just chuckles and tightens her grip a little. “It’s cool. We’re all here for you…”
I hope that’s true… or rather… I hope what’s wrong with me isn’t enough to drive everyone away. And, if they are dead set on sticking by me… Well… I just hope the ‘dead’ part remains an expression…
Little by little, I think… I think just maybe I’m beginning to figure out what friendship is really about.