The Truth About Girls (Vol. 1)

by TheMareWhoSaysNi

Applejack's Secret Admirer (part 1)

Rainbow Dash opened her eyes suddenly, her breath short and her forehead trickling with sweat. Her room was pitch black, except for the small cloud-shaped night-light she always kept at the back of the room. The digital screen of her alarm-clock displayed three in the morning.

Like each time it happened, her heart beat so hard in her chest that she had the impression any movement could exhaust her. She didn’t try to wipe the cold tears along her temples until the pulsations hadn’t quieted down.

Almost five years… Almost five years and yet, memories from that dreadful day when everything had crumbled were still coming to shake her in her sleep. The nightmare no longer haunted her nights each time she closed her eyes, however it didn’t mean that when it did come back, it had no impact whatsoever on her emotions.

It was early, but Rainbow Dash knew… She wouldn’t be able to fall asleep immediately. She groped around in the dark, found her bedside table lamp’s button. The room went from the complete darkness to an almost blinding light, and she had to blink before she could get used to it.

The big house was plunged into silence, a silence to which she forced herself to get used to as well, though it sent her back to her loneliness, again and again. Even her tortoise Tank still was absent, hidden under a pile of leaves in the huge aquarium where he carried out his hibernation. There still was her old favorite plushy, but she knew the comfort it would bring wouldn’t be enough and could even make her cry.

Not really sure of what she was going to do, Rainbow Dash slipped her feet inside her sleepers and took her white robe, the one which made her think about some big fluffy cloud. At least there was something a little cozy in that house too big for herself alone.

Darkness once again was what welcomed her when she got out of the room. Some strange urge took over her and she turned on each and every lights of the floor, as well as in the bathroom, the one for the wooden staircase, the huge living-room and the opened kitchen.

Nothing had changed since she had moved in Canterlot by the age of ten, after her father had purchased Canterlot Airlines, threatened of clearance sale, and that her mother had integrated the royal fleet of stunt flying in order to be with the rest of the family. Of course, everything was embellished with taste, but for Rainbow Dash it lacked soul in the whole with its high-end model hi-fi and cinema set, its very modern cream-colored furniture and this huge suede couch.

In the kitchen’s fridge, she picked a fresh bottle of water and sipped long swallow directly at the neck. Her mouth was dry and furred, her throat scalding, with some kind of ferrous taste going up. This unbearable silence buzzed in her ears, and she suddenly felt that if that whole house would disappear, her life would get better.

Usually, she would have go down at the private gym her mother had installed in the basement, but even this Rainbow Dash didn’t feel like doing. She just wanted to take refugee between her mother’s arms, and knew very well that was a wish impossible to get granted.

One by one, she turned off the lights, in the opposite way than earlier. Bit by bit, disappeared behind her the freezing gusts of a blizzard. Back in the small cocoon that was her bedroom, that she had tried her best to decorate in order so it would fit her usually dynamic character, when the past didn’t come and dragged at her ankles, she sighed deeply.

Throwing herself on her bed, she hid under the blankets which reminded her of the caves she used to build with her childhood best friend, before she went through her phone directory, looking for a good soul to bring her the human warmth she lacked.

Twilight needed her uninterrupted eight-hour sleep, Fluttershy could be scolded off by her parents if they surprised her on the phone so late at night. Pinkie Pie would probably be a little too restless for what she wanted… As for Sunset Shimmer, they both weren’t close enough yet for Rainbow Dash to confess her about something as personal as her nocturnal frights.

Out of the seven, Applejack for sure was the most likely to understand. Shortly before Rainbow Dash, she also had to go through the dreadful ordeal of mourning, as her parents had both died in a car accident. Although their stories and the way their respective family had dealt with the grievances of the after were different, of course…

From another point of view, Pinkie Pie also had to learn how to live away from her parents, nevertheless, Applejack had been a witness of what had happened in Rainbow Dash’s life after Firefly passed away, and knew best what had been the consequences of it.

She first sent a message, in order to take the temperature… If Applejack didn’t answer, she wouldn’t insist, and would try to find any other way to find comfort, like reading for the fifth times the latest adventures of Daring Doo.

*Are you sleeping? *

Her eyes staring at the bright screen, Rainbow Dash whispered a series of “please”, as if it was some lucky incantations. Her heart beat inside her chest like in the middle of a suspense scene in the most gripping of thrillers, and she thought she felt new tears on the edge of her lashes when less than one minute later, her phone’s ring echoed under her blankets.

“Let me guess… Ya did dat nightmare again?”

Applejack was speaking in a very low voice, probably not to take the risk to wake her little sister up, Apple Bloom, sleeping in the nearby bedroom.

“Yeah. Sorry I wake you up… again.”

“Dat’s nuthin’, c’mon. Ah wasn’t sleepin’ well anyway.”

“Is there something wrong?”

Rainbow Dash felt some kind of hesitation from her friend, but quickly she answered everything was fine and she just worried about her future rodeo competitions.

“Where are yar Pa dis time?”

“I can’t remember, some island… Tax heaven type. Well, we also are the tax heaven type, but... Anyway, one day, maybe bailiffs will come and strip this house entirely. That would be pretty cool, actually.”

Each time she said something like this, Applejack knew she was only half joking. Her father was away so much and so often she probably spent much time with the house-cleaning lady than with him. By dint of loneliness, she permanently dreaded the moment when she would have to come home, face to face with her own person.

Unlike her image and what her dear reputation let the others think, Rainbow Dash wasn’t in love with her own reflection. She wasn’t really different from most of her friends and of the people surrounding her.

“Hey, Applejack… Do you often think about the future?”

“Like anybody else.”

Like anybody else…”, Rainbow Dash repeated dragging on every syllables.

She had been living for today for years, worrying about the future only when it was an absolute necessity, like when an important exam came closer, for example. What was in store for her she had no idea, and each time she tried to envision it, a fear of emptiness clasped her throat and made her want to do something crazy just to put immediateness back at the center of her preoccupations.

What was strange was that sometimes thinking about the past had the same effect. Sometimes she even thought she was a lost cause.

“Ya still have time to think ‘bout it, ya know. Don’t ya worry yerself sick wit it.”

“Me? Who said I worried about it? That’s for boring people!”

What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh, like the adage was saying.

“Yup, of course… Dya want me to stay on the phone til ya get asleep?”

“That would be great.”

“C’mon, close yar eyes, I’mma sing ya sumethin’”

Rainbow Dash put her phone on her pillow and obeyed, still hidden under her blankets. Applejack’s melodious voice, with this Southern accent smelling good of sun and hay resounded through the speakerphone. The lullaby was the one she sang to her own little sister when she had bad dreams, and she hummed the lyrics with the same affection, though both friends were the same age.

When her own parents had died, Applejack had to grow up faster than the others. Brand new responsibilities had weighed upon her shoulders, and if she had been through her moments of great sorrow and pain, everything had been going so fast she had been able to get her head out of the water quite quickly. And she hadn’t been alone, her grandmother and her brother had been there to give the love she needed, to tell her she was beautiful and cherished.

At her mother’s death, Rainbow Dash’s life had collapsed completely, and her relationship with her father had been wiped out overnight. Only child, whom grandparents didn’t want to hear about since they’d been against Rainbow Blaze and Firefly’s marriage, there had been no branches to which the very young girl she was then could have hung to.

Powerless, Applejack and Twilight had witnessed the slow declination of their best friends, down toward the unthinkable, toward hell.
Bygones were bygones, yet it kept on hovering over her at times, as a pernicious version of the musical mobiles. It was a cursed period, but which had contributed to strengthen their friendship like nothing else did.

Once sure Rainbow Dash was sleeping, Applejack pressed the small red phone on her screen. The digital clock in the right corner showed almost four in the morning. Yet, her phone vibrated again.

Ten unread messages. How this person had got her number she didn’t know, and to be honest, it started to scare her just a tiny bit…

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In the rearview window of one of the cars parked along the sidewalk, Sunset Shimmer replaced the midnight blue ribbon of her uniform. Now she had redeemed herself, she wanted to give an irreproachable image of her, and if she took example on Twilight Sparkle, who was respected for her intellect and not because she inspired fear, it also went by an implacable presentation.

She was almost done with her community services, and finally started not to dread to meet her former friends in Canterlot’s streets. They had been expelled from school and forced to go in a Juvenile Center, but one day, they would be free again. At this moment, Sunset Shimmer hoped they would have forgotten about hating her for her denunciation.

In the schoolyard and classroom of Canterlot High, she was treated with an indifference she thought was comforting. For some persons, it was the worst thing that could be happening… For her, it was the sign that her past of little brute had been pushed aside and she was treated like any other students, concealed among a crowd of other anonymous persons.

In the course of a corridor, she was surprised to see Pinkie Pie waving to tell her to come nearer. It wasn’t exactly the start of class, and a lot of students were still hanging around outside chatting or finishing their breakfast. The bunch of five were sitting directly on the floor side by side, their bags at their feet.

When Sunset Shimmer stepped closer, she caught sight of Rainbow Dash busy writing in a notebook on her laps, a book of mathematics and a calculator in front of her.

“If you had done your exercises when the teacher had given them, you wouldn’t be here today, Dash”, Twilight lectured her.

“Everyone’s not fond of homework like you.”

“I’m not fond of homework. I only like to do my work all in good time.”

“I haven’t done anything in maths”, Pinkie Pie said with pride. “I’ll copy on Dashie. How are you, Sunny? Have you done your math exercises?”

“Sunny?” Sunset Shimmer asked opening her eyes wide.

It was the first time she was given such a nickname. In fact, although they let her to hang around with them occasionally, she never had felt she was a part of the band until now.

Once the surprise was over, she answered with a smile that, indeed, she had done her homework and that she had found it laborious at times.

“Laborious? It’s canned dog’s wee, that damn thing! Who’s the moron who invented this?”

“Thales. And he wasn’t a moron, Rainbow Dash, the opposite.”

“This is what you say because you’re fond of homework.”

“I’m not fond of homework!”

“There we go again”, Applejack said shaking her head with consternation.

This restless atmosphere early in the morning would scare some, Sunset Shimmer knew it. And nonetheless, she was feeling very at ease among all this turmoil. It never failed to make her smile, and to make her think the day waiting for her would not be as bad as she’d have thought when she had opened her eyes.

She knew the five girls shared a very strong friendship and that it would be a little complicated for her to get integrated. They had a past in common, made of secrets she had no access to yet, and of ordeals crossed together, that she was in light years away from knowing. Even Fluttershy who had been accepted in the circle only since a couple of months, seemed to share with the others a bond of a certain intensity.

No doubt what she had made Rainbow Dash go through a few weeks ago should have strengthened their solidarity even more.

What Sunset Shimmer regretted a bit, it was not to be in the same class than the rest of the band. If they had been together, it probably would have contributed to make her feel legitimated among them.

When it was time to separate, Applejack invited her to have lunch with them and the fact that each seemed to be enthusiastic about this idea, smiling and waving at her, added warmth to her heart.

It helped her to face the hours of class spent with no one to talk to. At least, she wasn’t completely alone.

Pinkie Pie was the first one to step inside and the first to spot something unusual on Applejack’s table, located right behind her. An envelope with nothing written on it had been put right in the middle of the wooden desk. She waved it in the air as if it was a flag.

“Hey, AJ, you have mail!”

The young girl froze catching glimpse at the envelope between Pinkie Pie’s hands. If she didn’t want her friends to see what worried her since now days and days, if not weeks, she hadn’t to let anything show. Before they could spot it, Applejack came together, and acted as if she wasn’t shaken by it when she took back the envelope from her friend’s hands.

“What is it? A letter from administration?”

“No way”, Twilight claimed, unequivocal. “It’s not at all a habit for the school.”

With the calmest of behavior, though her heart thumped in her chest like an overexcited tambourine player, Applejack unsealed the blank envelope, inside of which there was a paper clumsily folded in two.

The writing with a black pen was irregular. The letters weren’t formed completely and sometimes taken with jerks. It gave the sensation that the author had been submerged by an urgent feeling when writing.

All four gathered around their friend in order to read the content in their heads.

“Applejack,
I see you every day at school and in TV commercials and I think you’re really extra cute. You don’t know who I am, I know yet I am your biggest admirer there’s no one who’s interested about you more than me. Each time you are on my screen I think it’s sure you’re the girlfriend I want to date with. I know everything about you absolutely everything and I wanted you to know that I love you, I love you and if you become my girlfriend I’ll never cheat on you I’ll never let anyone be cruel with you I’ll do anything you’d asked me, anything for you so please, please, please, say yes and become my girlfriend.
Your number one admirer.”

For the girl in question, there were nothing new in this letter. It roughly matched the content of the messages she kept on receiving on her smartphone which was in fact vibrating in her bag. She went around the room with her eyes, trying to have a glimpse whether this mysterious admirer was in her own class or not but she saw nothing unusual.

Not to panic them, she hadn’t said anything about the messages to her friends. As long as it remained clumsy confessions, Applejack tried to convince herself it wasn’t that bad and that she could deal with it. But the letter brought about major changes…

“It could’ve been cute if it wasn’t a little creepy”, Pinkie Pie claimed at the end of her reading.

“It almost sounds like it’s been written by an 8th grader”, Twilight outdone.

“Who’s that guy?”, Rainbow Dash questioned.

As her only reaction, Applejack just shrugged. She had the answer to none of these questions and wasn’t sure she wanted to look for them. Maybe things were going to calm down as fast as they had begun and all this story would soon be forgotten. She certainly didn’t want to spend all of her days scared to be followed by someone obsessed by her. It was the kind of detail which could drive anyone crazy.

She was a person with her feet on the ground and the one who would make her lose her grip wasn’t born yet, of this, she was convinced. Or at least, she tried to convince herself it was the case.

Author's Note:

The evilish Author's Notes, once again

Well... Just to warn that this fiction gets me more time to write and translate than "Only One Speck of Dust", so if sometimes the day of publication changes, just don't panic. That's all, folks !

Comments

[Dusk_Writer]

I think I may know who the stalker admirer is, but I can't be sure…

That scene with Dash though…