//------------------------------//
// Equestria Girls Cheese Sandwich Reviews Bronies, The Musical  
// Story: Cheese Sandwich Reviews Stuff 
// by scoots2 
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EG Cheese Sandwich Reviews Bronies, The Musical 

[Note: this contains some spoilers for Rainbow Rocks.]


Dear Pinkie: 

Thanks for the book, and especially for the letter. I know we stay in touch all the time, but . . .

That was you just now, actually. Yeah, I’m fine, as you know, because I just texted you back to say that I’m writing to you. I should probably finish writing this first, but . . .

I think you fell asleep with the phone in your hand again, so I can get back to writing this letter. I have a paper due in English tomorrow, but I’ll write something up in the morning. English is mostly spelling and making stuff up, and I can “participate” on a book I haven’t read like nobody’s business, so I should be good to go. 

Ah, Double Gloucester. I forgot it was the drama unit and that we’re supposed to hand in a review of a theatrical production, and we were supposed to see that gangster Julius Caesar, and I didn’t, because I’m having roommate problems. Oh, well.

Anyway, this is to say thank you for the letter and the glitter ink and the swirly handwriting and the cake frosting and the chocolate smear you got on top of page two, because it’s like having you here, even if it’s only for a moment. It’s like a kiss, which we didn’t get to do very much before I had to leave. I put my hand on your letter and I know your hand was on it too, so it’s almost as though we were holding hands, isn’t it? Especially since either way, my hand gets a lot of cake frosting on it.

Something must have happened to our campus mailman, Mr. McFeely, because when I went to get my mail, he was singing “a horse is a horse, of course, of course,” over and over under his breath, and muttering, “Cheese Sandwich. Right.”

I said, “Yeah?” 

He jumped straight over the counter and then squeaked out “package for you,” shoved the book and the card at me, and then ran into the back. I think he was hiding among the mailbags, but I decided to let him have some privacy.

When I opened the book, I saw, “Your mail pony took a wrong turn. I think this must be for you. Don’t worry too much about Pinkie. Whatever it is, she’s got this,” with a big hoof print underneath. I’m pretty sure I know who wrote that. I’d drop him a thank you note for the hat if I could. It’s become my second favorite, right next to the boater, and it fits perfectly. You should probably let Sunset Shimmer know about the package, though. I don’t know if it’s because of us or because your friend left a portal jammed open, but if we’re getting misdelivered packages like this, there may be gremlins in the system. 

I think I know now what you meant when you said it was too bad I hadn’t been at CHS when something exciting was going on. And here I thought that the Cake Festival was pretty tense. I wish we’d had half of those musical acts auditioning back then. I can’t help being worried, but as Other Cheese said, you and your friends had this, and you had it beautifully, especially Sunset Shimmer. Looks like she took those friendship lessons seriously. I don’t think I could have been any help, and I probably would have been in your way, although I’d like to think I wouldn’t have been a total chunk of Gorgonzola like Flash Sentry. I don’t know why he thought his band Flash in the Pan would win anything. With songs like “Save Them Whales” and “Bedroom Spackling Project”? Seriously?

Trixie sounds as though she’s gone a bit loose in the flue. Looser, anyway. I thought she seemed nicer to both of us at the Cake Festival, and at least she was trying to help, but now you tell me she’s doing things like dumping you and your friends under the stage floor. Why she’s back to being jealous of you, I don’t know, but Sunset Shimmer told me she had just enough of the wrong sort of magic to cause a lot of trouble. Anyway, be careful, ok?
So that’s what you meant with that status update about the slumber party! Sounds like you guys had a lot of fun. I wish I’d been there. Scratch that, scratch that, that’s not what I meant at all, and it would have been a terrible way to meet your sister, too. Just give my best to everybody. And leave out the bit about the slumber party, ok?


Anyway, I don’t have anything nearly as exciting to report. Blah blah blah, settling in, classes, and oh, yes, there’s my roommate. He’s a really nice guy, but he only talks about two things: how amazing and fantastic the little town he’s from is, and how he isn’t gay. And he talks about those two things all the time. And he talks a lot. It was driving me crazy. And what was driving me even crazier is that my nice guy roommate was so obviously unhappy.

You know how miserable it is, being around someone who’s unhappy. We’ve GOT to make them smile and we’ll knock ourselves out until we do. And I was around him practically 24/7, and it didn’t help at all that he was pretending to be happy with a big cheerful smile on his face. The clash between the giant grin and the “I am unhappy; please cheer me up” signal felt like getting stuck between two different stations on a radio dial: all hiss and static. I tried playing the accordion a lot to drown it out, and he’s so stubbornly nice about everything that he didn’t even mind. I told jokes. I juggled until my palms got numb. I gave up and wore headphones, and I could still hear him talking about the pleasures and wonders of wherever it was, and since there isn’t a lot there, that meant hearing about the flagpole and some trees and the post office and the school and some more trees, over and over and over, and no matter how much he talked, what I was actually hearing was “I am unhappy.” 

“Yep,” he said, flopping down on his bed so that it rattled and squeaked, and kicking off his cowboy boots, “ain’t nothin’ like the sight of those trees this time of year, when the leaves are goin’ all pretty.” I was about to snap and tell him that a tree was a tree and to shut up about the trees, when he added, “helped plant ‘em myself, too, when I was no higher’n that,” and he held his hand out at waist level. 

All of a sudden, I got it: he’s homesick. I can hear you saying, “well, DUH, Cheesie,” but how was I supposed to know? I’ve never been homesick myself. I guess I’ve never really had a home to be sick for in the first place. But now at least I knew what the problem was and how to fix it, and he drove us out to an apple farm and we got bushel after bushel of apples, and I threw a party in the dorm with all kinds of apple stuff and bobbing for apples, and I got hold of a mechanical bull and a DJ booth. Everyone in the dorm came, and their friends, and friends of their friends, and a good time was had by all. Technically, I think we must have broken a couple of rules, because campus security came around after a while and said a bunch of stuff about noise restrictions and fire codes and window breakage, and the party had to end at only four in the morning, but my roommate made a lot of new friends and I thought finally, FINALLY, this is over.

It wasn’t. 

He slowed down on talking about home back in wherever, but he started talking even more about how he wasn’t gay, not that there was anything wrong with that. Nope, not gay at all, not A-tall, not even the least little bit. He must have reassured me that he wasn’t gay about fifty times. 

I kept changing the subject, but every time he did it, I got a little bit madder. I wanted to say, “Hello? Went to all-boys’ schools three years in a row over here; it’s not exactly a new concept.” I suppose I could have told him that I was straight and told him about you, but if I’m going to tell someone about you, it’s going to because I want to talk about you and how completely amazingtastic you are, not as a chip in some game of “Let’s Prove How Heterosexual I Am.” 

I couldn’t figure out exactly why he kept giving me this information. Was he gay and trying to see how I’d react? Was he lying to me? To himself? Was he straight and assumed I was gay and was trying to ward me off? I had no idea. The only thing that was clear was that he was anxious and lying about it. Being around that was sheer misery. It’s hard to cheer up an anxious person, especially an anxious person who’s trying to pretend nothing is wrong.  He didn’t have to tell me anything, but if he was going to go out of his way to fudge with the truth, I couldn’t trust him. I wasn’t going to tell him about you, or bipolar disorder, or magic, and certainly not about ponies. 

I was getting tired of trying to distract him and changing the subject and saying “uh-huh,” and I’d started to avoid him whenever I could. I could tell that was making him sad, and that was even worse, being around someone who was both anxious and sad. I couldn’t figure out how to stop him from driving me crazy, let alone how to cheer him up. 

Friday morning we were eating breakfast in the dining hall. I was wondering how I was going to avoid him all weekend, and playing the harmonica to drown out the noise of his anxiety, when he interrupted me. 

“Hey,” he said. “Psst. Cheese. Cheese. Buddy? You busy today?”

I looked up at him. He always looks like a cowboy from an advertisement—hat on indoors, suede vest—and it didn’t go with the chocolate cereal he was eating. 

“Well,” I said, “I was going to . . .” I realized I didn’t have any specific plans. I was just waiting for a party, or some kind of indication that I was supposed to go make someone laugh.

I was trying to think of something, and I must have taken too long, because he said, “Because I’d like to head on in to Manehattan today and I don’t know where anything is. Seems like I could get lost real easy up there. You don’t have to come along,” he added quickly. “Telling me how to get where I’m going will be fine. That, and where I can park the car. I hear it’s tough to find places to park.”

“You were going to take your car?” I said, dropping the harmonica back on the table. “That’s insane. You don’t need a car in Manehattan. You’ll get stuck in traffic and double back on a lot of one-way streets, and you will never, ever find a parking space. People leave them to their children in their wills. There’s a train station right here in town. That’s what trains are for. What did you want to go in to Manehattan for?”

“I hear there’s theatres.”

“Lots of them,” I agreed. 

“I hear there’s shows.”

“Plenty of those, too.”

“There’s a show I want to see. Just tell me how to get there and back, ok, buddy?”

“Oh, all right,” I said, and picked up my coffee cup. “What show did you want to see, anyhow?”

He told me.

They say you can drown in a couple of tablespoons of liquid.  I spluttered for a long time before I could finally wheeze, “You’re kidding me.”

He shook his head.

Now I knew what I was doing with my weekend. There was someone I had to try to make happy, and there was a party I had to throw, and they were both right in front of me. 

“Ah, Roquefort,” I muttered.







~~




I know you never had much of a chance to see Manehattan, which is too bad, and we’ll have to fix that someday, but here’s something you should know about Manehattan theaters. There’s Bridleway. There’s Off-Bridleway. There’s Off-Off-Off Bridleway. And then there are converted warehouses in the Flowery, which was where we found ourselves that evening. 

I’d figured that since I was obviously supposed to throw a party for this poor schlemiel, I might as well do it right. Remember my parents made a big deal about getting an apartment in Manehatten and bringing me “home?” Well, of course, after all that, they’re almost never home. Separately, together, I don’t keep track of it and it doesn’t even matter, but the point is that there’s a perfectly good apartment up there and someone ought to get some use out of it. I dragged him onto the Manehattan train and we stopped off for some decent groceries—I don’t care what anyone says, there is nothing like a Neigh York deli—and I used my key and there we were.

“Real nice,” he said, as he dropped his backpack in the hall. “Sorta small, but I guess y’all bundle in together, all cozy.”

“I’m an only child,” I reminded him. 

“Oh, right,” he said. “I sure am looking forward to meeting your folks.”

“Um . . .they’re not exactly here,” I replied. He’s got these big honest eyes, and I could tell he disapproved. “They’re never here. Really.”

“But it’s such a nice place! They’re never here? Not even when you come home?” he wondered.

“Home? What home?” I shrugged. “They moved here about three months ago and dragged me along. I’ve been in boarding schools for years.” 

“That’s too bad,” he said.

“It really isn’t,” I insisted. “Now let’s get this lox and cream cheese in the fridge.” He grabbed a couple of bags, shaking his head, and I led the way to the kitchen. 

I don’t know why people make such a big deal about this, Pinkie. Maybe he’d feel differently about it if he knew what my mother was really like, but that was one of the things I’d marked “private.” 

He sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, and I started stashing the groceries in the fridge. “You can’t miss what you’ve never had,” I pointed out. “And at least I don’t get homesick. You were really homesick for the last couple of weeks. It was a huge bummer.” For me, too, I didn’t add.  

He leaned way, way back in the chair, teetering on the back legs, and it was sort of funny to imagine my mother’s reaction to that. “Well, yeah,” he admitted, “but seems like everybody ought to have somethin’ or someone they love well enough to miss ‘em when they go away.”

I was really glad I had my head in the fridge right then, because sometimes missing you is like a punch in the gut, and I didn’t want him to see the expression on my face. I put a smile back on before I closed the fridge and turned around. 

“Hey, this is a party, not group therapy. Are you up for a madcap Manehattan weekend?”

All four legs of the chair came back down with a thunk. “Sure am!”

“Well, then, let’s grab a bagel with a schmear and go have one!”

So I dragged him all over Manehattan—up to the Park and down the Avenue and down to Qirintown for an early dinner and then I took a look at the address he handed me and realized it was in the Flowery. The Flowery’s not a bad neighborhood, but it’s not a great one, either, and definitely not the kind of place someone thinks of when they think of Manehattan theater. 

“How’d you even hear about this show, anyway?” I asked, as he slurped up the last of his Quirinese chicken. He’d given up on the chopsticks after I told him that jabbing the food with one stick wasn’t normally the way people ate, and had resorted to a spoon.

“Oh, well, uh,” he said, eyes firmly fixed on his plate, “I kinda heard about it online.”

He’s terrible at lying, but I was trying to cheer him up, not grill him for how he learned about musicals, so we simply headed out for the Flowery. It was weird how at home I felt: almost as though I’d known the place forever, and that of course there should be a theater there, and that I’d known that forever, too. I was itching to play my accordion, but I hadn’t brought it with me, so we just went in and sat down. 

It was a very small theater. We had to go up a flight of stairs, where the ticket guy was also selling candy and T shirts and explaining where the one bathroom was, and then we grabbed our seats. My roommate was beside himself with excitement. “Haven’t you ever been to a theater before?” 

“Nope!” he exclaimed, taking off his hat for the first time that day. “Not unless you count school plays and stuff like that. This is amazin’!”

The house lights came down, but the theater was so small that the light from the stage lit up the house, too. And it all began—with a puppet show. Four colorful, dumb but cheerful little pony puppets, bouncing up and down in a puppet theater with a tinsel curtain. Then the ponies came out from behind the stage, held by four girls in long, glittery dresses: a yellow one, a white one, a blue one, and a pink one. Four ponies. Four girls. Four pony girls.  It was like magic. 

For a minute, I had a total panic attack. Stilton! I thought. He knows! He knows about me, he knows about Pinkie, he knows about the magic, he knows about the ponies! He knows everything! I actually thought that maybe he’d picked this play to let me know he knew and was just toying with me for who knows what reason, but he was too busy enjoying the girls dancing, and pretty soon, I realized that the show wasn’t about you or your friends, or anything like that. It was just about some guys who liked a TV show and were being given a hard time for it. Whew. Still, it was eerie to watch a show about a high school where guys watched shows about magical singing pony girls, and it was really hard not to think about you when the pink one was singing. 

The show was cute. There were a few nice love stories, a guy who sings a song about the Sears Roebuck catalog, and a lot of bullying. I’ve always had much bigger problems than TV shows, to be honest, and it was hard to believe that watching or not watching a TV show could be such a big deal. That said, some of the characters in the show treated it as though it was a big deal, banning clothing, physical threats, and worse. Much worse. 

Pinkie, I was horrified. I’ve been to several high schools now, but I’ve never seen anything like this, and certainly not at CHS. Honestly, I’ve seen psych wards that were safer and kinder than the school in this show. Maybe I’ve been luckier than I knew, or maybe I’ve never been a target. Who knows, maybe if I hadn’t met you when we were kids, I could have been. Who knew there were so many kids who wanted to make so many other kids miserable on purpose? That’s the exact opposite of what we do. I was appalled and turned to my roommate. 

“Do people really do this?” I hissed under my breath.

“Not when I’m around,” he said, and I believed it.

Anyway, it had a happy feelgood ending, and everybody sang and hugged, and I had to loan him my hanky, because he was sobbing by then.
I thought we should take a taxi, because it was getting late, and he sang tunes from the show the whole way there. “Love what you love what you love what you love,” he sang out the window, waving his cowboy hat while I cringed, but I noticed that a lot of people waved back.

So we went back to the apartment and ordered pizza and ate it while we sprawled all over the living room. Guys don’t really have slumber parties. We just eat a lot of pizza late at night and wonder exactly what girls do at a slumber party, because you seem to be having much more fun than we are, and we don’t exactly go to sleep so much as pass out with our face in a half-empty box. He couldn’t shut up again, only this time he wanted to talk about the music and the girls in their glittery dresses and the ponies, and it was a nice change from boosting his hometown or how he wasn’t at all gay.

I was poking at the pizza in the bottom of a box and wondering how long I had before I passed out and what you were doing right then, when I heard a cough. “Psst. Hey, Cheese? Buddy?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not sure.”

I had no clue what he was talking about. “Not sure about what?”

“I’m not sure about being gay. I just don’t know.” I didn’t say anything, but waited for him to go on. He was leaning forward with his head between his hands. “I didn’t want to make no trouble talkin' about it, so I’ve been trying to figure it out on my own. Back home, it’s not so bad, but there’s so many people here . . . ” and his voice trailed off.

Suddenly, a light bulb went on. My roommate is a very good-looking guy. Anyone would say that. You would, too. And he’s very friendly and smiles and says ‘howdy’ to everyone. I realized that he must have been hit on at least ten times since we started out this morning, by both men and women, and that this happened to him all the time. He’s far away from home, he’s trying to figure himself out, which I think is probably what college is for; he misses home and he smiles at everyone because that’s how they do back home and he’s just being what he’d call sociable. But around here, nobody smiles at anyone without a really good reason, so lots of people try to get into his pants, all the time, which can’t be helping. He’s homesick, he’s confused, and he was trying to talk to me in his own, special, stupid way, because he trusted me. Because he thought of me as a friend.

Pinkie, I guess I am a total chunk of gorgonzola. I still stink at friendship. But I’m trying my best. I didn’t want to say, “it doesn’t matter,” because of course it matters, to him if nobody else. I didn’t want to say, “I don’t care,” because he was hoping I would care, and I realized that actually, I did, and I was his friend after all. 

“It’s ok,” I said. “It’s all gonna be ok. You want any more of the pepperoni? Because I think it’s getting gluey.”

There it went, the last of his anxiety, because he had a friend. And I guess I have one, too, plus I’d done my job, which I know is what you’d want me to do. I swung my feet up on the coffee table.

“Braeburn, you’re not gonna believe this, but . . . ”






~~



Anyway, that’s all that’s been going on. It’s nothing much, but I just realized I can rework some of it into my essay for English. I know you won’t tell the last bit about Braeburn, because it’s not my secret to tell. 

And I hope you won’t tell this, either: that you are my Beautiful, that I adore you, and that everything I do and everything I am is better because there is a you in this world.

But I don’t think that’s a secret to anyone.

Yours,
Cheese