Cheese Sandwich doesn’t trust books, and he doesn’t like journalists. So why did anypony think he’d make a good book reviewer?
It all began with an unexpected birthday present: the first he’d received in years. Now as he wanders Equestria, moving from party to party, Cheese Sandwich reviews books from a peculiarly particular party pony perspective.
These “reviews” of the My Little Pony books, such as The Journal of the Two Sisters and the Daring Do novels, are also side stories to my main and Equestria Girls Cheese Sandwich and Pinkie Pie story arcs. You don’t have to have read those to enjoy these or vice versa; curiosity about the books and a fondness for party pony shenanigans will do.
Cheese Sandwich Reviews The Journal of The Two Sisters
Boneless 2 and I don’t read lots of books. You’d think we would, I guess, because we’re on the road so much, but when you’re carrying around four different accordions, streamers, a tank, a vintage party bomb, an alpenhorn, several wheels of cheese, dozens of hats, and lots of other stuff, you just don’t have room for books, too. They’re heavy. But this morning, I’d barely gotten up and was flossing my teeth when a saguaro cactus morphed into a mailbox and a package exploded out of it with a lot of confetti, and I knew it had to be from Pinkie Pie, because I don’t have lots of correspondents.
It’s always epically amazingly cool to get a letter from Pinkie, because she actually touched it with her own hooves she always has so many interesting things to write about. And of course, a package is even better. She put in a letter saying that it was a journal about the Princesses, which, to be honest, didn’t sound that exciting, but then she mentioned that it also had all kinds of stuff about her and her friends, including stuff she actually wrote herself. She got me one of the very first copies, and she said it was a birthday present, which was a very useful thing to know.
If you’ve ever talked to a lot of party ponies—and you’re not likely to, because there aren’t many of us—you’d know that party ponies never remember their own birthdays. It’s not that we don’t; it’s that we can’t, for reasons I’m not allowed to explain and wouldn’t if I could. So the nicest thing you can do for party ponies on their birthday is to remind them that it’s their birthday. It’s June now, and I just got a birthday present from Pinkie, so I have to assume that my birthday’s in June. By next week, I won’t even remember that much. So I really appreciated the reminder, because nopony had reminded me of my birthday in a long, long time.
Today wasn’t a party day, and my Cheesy Sense wasn’t going off, and we had a whole leftover quarter of a sheet cake that was only a few days old and just needed a few bits scraped off it, so I put up my hooves and Boneless 2 put up his feet, and we polished it off in one sitting. I ate a bit of cake, mulled it over, and had a crazy idea: why not write a review, just for laughs? I mean, obviously, I'd never publish something like that, but I've got to send a thank you note to Pinkie for reminding me of my birthday, which is about the nicest thing anypony has done for me in years, but then she's a total sweetheart.
This book. WOW. If I could jump out of these words and grab you and make you read it, I totally would, and you’re probably lucky you’re just reading this and you’re not anywhere near, say, a picture or a screen or something.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
The first half is a journal that Princess Luna and Celestia kept when they first began ruling over Equestria, and it was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. It wasn’t at all like the history classes I remember as a colt. I especially don’t remember my teacher, Miss Chalkdust, saying anything much about Princess Luna, only about Nightmare Moon, and only when we didn’t want to come in from recess on time. I’m sure she didn’t mention that Princess Luna liked practical jokes. GLAD TO KNOW THIS, because now I can [epically fantastic practical joke right off the Roquefort Scale, Classified, Top Secret. She’ll never see it coming.] And I had no idea that Chancellor Puddinghead was so cool. Miss Chalkdust always made her sound so boring and Chancellor-y, going to meetings with the Princesses, and she didn’t say anything about setting off trapdoors and shooting Princess Luna out into the courtyard on her hind end. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Chancellor Puddinghead was a party pony, but who would put one of us in charge of anything? Oh, well, we’ll probably never know, because the only kind of pony who would really know would be another party pony, and we don’t usually write this kind of thing down, just because we don’t Emmental.
The second half is a journal Pinkie kept with her friends. I have to admit that I skimmed a lot to get to the good bits. Boneless 2 agreed he’d read the whole thing and tell me about the other stuff, although that’s probably interesting, too. And that’s when I found out some things that almost made me choke on my frosting.
Pinkie’s an Apple? She seems to think she is, anyway. Braeburn’s an Apple, and after that long road trip and trashing that pizza place together, he says I’m like his brother now. If Pinkie’s an Apple, and Braeburn’s an Apple, and I’m like Braeburn’s brother, is this something I should worry about? Because I already get a lot of “oh, is she your sister? You have the same hair!” Actually being one of Pinkie’s distant relatives is the last thing I need. although really it’s probably never going to matter anyway. Who do I think I’m kidding?
I knew Pinkie was upset when I showed up to throw Rainbow Dash’s birthday party, but I didn’t know she was so upset that she was planning to retire permanently as a party pony. Why didn’t she tell me that? I thought she was just going to quit the party or leave Ponyville or something. Pinkie, not a party pony anymore? That would be like the sun never coming up! Come to think of it, that almost happened, but yeah, it would be like that. Anyway, it all came out ok, and we’re friends, omigosh, and Equestria pretty much recovered from the cliff you almost pushed it off, Cheese, genius move there.
But NOW we are up to the bit where this is the greatest book ever, ever, ever written, because there are pages and pages of sheer brilliance and heartwarming wisdom by Pinkie herself! And they’re not just regular diary entries, but her own reflections, which you, the reader, cannot help but find both enlightening and true. Such as:
“NEVER EAT ONE HUNDRED CUPCAKES IN AN AIR BALLOON WHEN RETURNING FROM CLOUDSDALE IF RARITY IS WEARING A BRAND-NEW FROCK THAT SHE DOESN’T WANT COVERED IN CUPCAKES WHEN YOU SUFFER FROM FLIGHT SICKNESS.”
See? That’s true. And I’m sure you can apply this to your own lives.
I’ll just finish with this quote from Her:
“I ask you, Diary, what kind of world do we live in where one day a year ponies can’t just lolly and gab all day long? I’ll tell you what kind of world, Diary—a world that needs a lot more pinwheels and piñatas.”
This book will change your life. I’m telling you.
Oh, and there are some bits with Princesses and manticores and battles in it and stuff. Those were pretty cool, too.
Cheese Sandwich Reviews Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks: The Mane Event, and the Daring Do novels
I’m the last pony I’d ever have picked to be a book reviewer. For one thing, I don’t know many journalists, and I can’t stand the only one I do know. For another, I don’t do a lot of reading. It’s not that I can’t read; I just don’t trust books. Books are not a party pony’s friends. When The Great Ponyacci yanks you aside and says “listen, sonny, I’m gonna show you something,” he doesn’t have to add, “and don’t tell anypony, and for Celestia’s sake, don’t write it down.”
But Pinkie sent me a book last June for some reason or other, and Boneless 2 and I read it and then sat down and wrote a review. Then I edited it a bit by crossing out all the parts where I gushed about Pinkie, note to self, don’t do that this time, removing some unnecessary stuff, and I sent it to Pinkie, just for laughs.
Well, the next time I was in Ponyville, I went to Sugarcube Corner after closing, hoping maybe Pinkie had a little free time, and Pinkie ran straight to me and kissed me, oh wow, I still can’t believe that’s a thing that happens, and then I realized we had an audience, including Princess Just Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and about a hundred fillies staring at us with gigantic eyes. “Um, hi?” I said.
“Heya, Cheesie!” Pinkie said. “You’re here at the perfect time! Your review got printed in the paper! See?” She trotted over to a table, picked a newspaper carefully folded to a specific article, and brought it over to me. I spread it out on the floor and read it. To my horror, all the stuff I’d scratched out had been put back in.
“Yep!” said one of the fillies, a smart little thing with a big red hair bow. “We left in all the funny bits!”
I cringed. “Just how many ponies have read this?”
“Just about everypony,” said one of the other fillies. “Pretty awesome, huh?”
I looked up at them. Now that the initial shock had worn off, I realized that it wasn’t hundreds of fillies, just three, and that I knew them: Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle. On the other hoof, Scootaloo had just said “almost everypony” had read it, including my gushing about Pinkie. Pretty humiliating, but it was too late to get the spray cheese back in the can now, so I simply asked, “Did you like it?”
Princess Twilight rubbed her chin with her hoof. “Well,” she mused, “it did provide an overview, but it left out some important details and showed some marked authorial bias towards . . .”
“It was awesomely fantastically terrific!” said Pinkie, bouncing across to me and flinging her front legs around my neck. “I loved how you talked about all the party pony stuff!”
“And everypony at school liked it, too!” squeaked Sweetie Belle, racing over and running in a circle around us. “I liked the funny bits. I thought they were cute.”
“And you left out all the boring parts, so we knew which parts to skip!” agreed Scootaloo, joining her friend in her orbit.
“Which is something I always want in a book review,” Rainbow Dash pointed out. “I mean, I’m not going to waste my time reading boring stuff.”
Twilight Sparkle gasped. “A reviewer can’t do that!” she insisted. “There’s no such thing as the boring parts of a book! And anyway, how can you get a real idea of a book’s value if you don’t even read the whole—”
Apple Bloom walked over. She didn’t race around like the other two; she just looked straight up at me. “Which is why,” she said, “we want you to write some more. The Cutie Mark Crusaders are the Cutie Mark Crusader Entertainment Editors now and we’re lookin’ for new material for the Foal Free Press, and funny, un-boring book reviews are just the kind of thing we want.” She walked up even closer until she was practically nose-to-nose with me, or would have been if she wasn’t so short.
“Uh-huh,” I said, dropping my head down to her level. “And since it’s the Foal FREE Press, I’m guessing I’ll get paid in . . .”
“The innocent laughter of little fillies and colts,” Apple Bloom said firmly, her eyes meeting mine with an unwavering stare.
Beside me, Sweetie Belle skidded to a halt. “I thought the ‘Foal Free Press' meant Miss Cheerilee lets us publish what we want, and didn’t Featherweight start charging a subscription fee?”
“Shh!” hissed Apple Bloom.
Well, I shouldn’t have done it, but the fillies drove a hard bargain, and besides, Pinkie still had her front leg draped around my neck and she was smelling like cake frosting and it was making me distracted. I agreed that yes, if they sent me a book, I would write a review for the Foal Free Press and they all bounced up and down and Pinkie brought out some cupcakes and we all had some, and I forgot about it. I was counting on them forgetting about it, too, but they didn’t. And that brings me up to this morning.
~~
I had just gotten up and was trying to put together some breakfast, because Boneless Two is even more hopeless at cooking than I am. We were getting low on supplies. There was cold cereal, which would have been more appetizing if we hadn’t had cold cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the last two days. I thought about pouring some coffee on it, just to make it a bit more interesting, and warmer, too. Autumn had set in in earnest now. Thick layers of orange, red, and yellow leaves blanketed the ground, and it was so cold here in the foothills of the Unicorn range that we could see our breath in front of our faces, or at least, I could. I was looking forward to getting the fire going and taking off some of the chill.
I hadn’t seen Pinkie since midsummer. Cheesy Sense had batted me around like a ping pony ball all over Equestria for months, with almost no down time between parties, and I was running out of steam and out of magic. I’d begun to think that maybe I’d been kidding myself all along, and that the real reason I kept going back to Ponyville was simply that I love Pinkie and miss her a lot, but I really do run low on magic. I can only headline so many parties and cheer up so many ponies and show them pure Joy for so long on my own, and when there’s too much going on and too many parties back to back and too many ponies who are too unhappy for too long, I start to feel tired and run down. I need to see Pinkie’s smile to remind me why I do this and why it’s important. And that’s when I know it’s time to go home.
I found myself just sitting there, staring into the flames, sipping coffee, and waiting for something to happen, when I heard a metallic noise next to me. I turned to see a mailbox door flapping open and shut—not the mailbox, just the door. A pink hoof and foreleg protruded from it, threw a box through it, waved, and disappeared. At the same time, I heard something blundering through the trees. I got to my feet, put Boneless Two behind me, just in case, and turned to face whatever it was, bracing myself to fight it or run from it or whatever I had to do.
Something in a blue suit staggered into my campsite on its hind legs, muttering, “what now? And Grandma said there were good jobs at the post office!” Then it stopped dead, took one look at me, dropped its bag, and screamed. I know Boneless Two and I look kind of scruffy when we’ve been out on the road for a while, but I still think that was rude.
Meanwhile, I was trying to think where I’d seen things like him before, and then I remembered. I’d seen a whole lot of his species when Pinkie pulled me through a portal so we could clear up a problem for another Pinkie and Cheese. That world was full of things that looked just like this one. In fact, I’d even kissed one on the nose, which was kind of gross, but the look on his face was totally worth it.
I decided to lighten the mood. I pulled my serape up over my nose, pushed my black hat down over my eyes, and gritted out, “Out here in the San Palomino, nopony can hear you scream.”
In retrospect, this wasn’t a good idea, because he just screamed some more. I pulled the serape back down. “Oh, for pony’s sake, we’re not even anywhere near the San Palomino! Calm down. I’m not going to eat you.” I trotted back to the fire and sat down.
He held his front feet in front of his face. “All I had to do was deliver the mail!” he wailed.
“Well, go ahead,” I said. “Deliver it.”
He rubbed his eyes. I was still there when he opened them again. “Oh, heh, heh. This is like that show from when I was a kid, right? Say, couldja just say ‘Wilbur?’”
I sighed. If this was what it took to get my mail, I’d have to humor him. “Wilbur,” I said.
“Couldja give it a little more ‘rrr’ on the ‘r?’” he said, holding two parts of one hoof a little way apart.
“Wilburrrr.”
“Ok,” he said, wiping his hooves on his pants. “Couldja say, ‘I am Mr. Ed?’”
“No!” I snapped. “Just give me the mail!” He was beginning to look alarmed again, so I added, “And pour yourself some coffee, too. You still look nervous.”
He came closer and sat by the fire, carefully placing his bag down by his side, and poured himself some coffee. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s been a tough morning.”
“I can tell, Mr., um . . .”
“McFeely,” he said. “Speedy McFeely.”
“Cheese Sandwich,” I said, holding up one hoof to shake his.
He stared at me over the rim of his coffee mug. “Cheese Sandwich? Is that a joke?”
“Is ‘Speedy McFeely’ a joke?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
He placed the coffee cup down and rummaged in the bag for a moment. “Here,” he said, giving me a package. “Sorry about screaming like that. Now if you’ll excuse me for a moment, this is the part of the dream where I find all the Easter eggs.” He wandered off among the trees. I figured he’d have to come back sooner or later and that he couldn’t get too lost, so I turned my attention to the package.
It was wrapped in brown paper, and an envelope with “Cheese Sandwich” was tucked under the strings. I put the envelope to one side and ripped the brown paper off the package. I couldn’t understand why Pinkie had tied the strings so tight. Usually only a unicorn would knot string that tightly. Finally I pulled the paper off and a brightly colored book slid out, with Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks: The Mane Event on the front cover. I flipped it open and read: “Heya Cheesie toldja you should of been here when something exciting was going on lol,” in pink glittery writing.
I already had the uneasy feeling that this package wasn’t meant for me at all, and then I noticed that the full mailing address had “Cheese Sandwich, Pranceton University” on it. I put the envelope to one side, because I knew me liked my privacy and wouldn’t want me reading my mail, although something addressed to Pinkie would have been even worse because mushy stuff creeps in no matter what I do. I wasn’t sure if I should read the book, either, but it was a book, and I was a book reviewer now, right?
The first, most obvious thing was that a lot had been going on that Pinkie Pie hadn’t told me about, and if the other Pinkie Pie hadn’t already told the other Cheese Sandwich about it, he was going to be very worried. The second was that I was bored. I had Boneless Two skim ahead to see if there was anything interesting I was missing, and he was bored, too. It was too bad, because I could tell that the actual events were probably pretty interesting, but the way it was described was making me bored. And the Cutie Mark Entertainment Editors had asked me to tell them where the boring bits were, so I have to say that honestly, nearly the whole book is boring.
The book’s set at Canterlot High, which I’m not really familiar with, but if Pinkie and Applejack and Rainbow Dash are anything like the Pinkie and Applejack and Rainbow Dash I know, and they seem to be, something’s got to be wrong with the way Flash Sentry’s described as “handsome and dashing” on page 28. The Flash Sentry I know isn’t “handsome and dashing.” He’s more like what ponies back where I’m from would describe as a nebbish. A nice-looking nebbish, but he’s still a nebbish.
My Pinkie The Pinkie I know only appears on pages 69, 76, 80, 213, 214, and 215, so of course those are all interesting pages, but something’s gone wrong there, too. Pinkie’s a genius, and I’m not surprised that she understands the concept of how portals work so easily. Trust me—I have first hand knowledge of this. But I absolutely can’t see her asking, “what did you learn?” Party ponies don’t ask stuff like that. It makes me question the author’s sources.
I picked up a pencil and scribbled a note under the pink glitter. “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.” I turned the book a quarter of a turn and left a hoofprint so that it looked like a giant C, then whistled for Mr. McFeely. He re-appeared, hopping like a rabbit.
“I was hoping that if I acted like the Easter Bunny, I’d find some eggs,” he said ruefully, “but it didn’t work.”
“I think you’re only going to find what you’re looking for when you get home,” I explained, as nicely as I could. “Here. Take this, walk back in the direction you came from, and don’t think about anything too hard.”
He nodded, but he was still very shaken and unhappy. Something obviously had to be done, and I did it. I rocketed straight up in a cloud of confetti, crying, “I am Mister Ed!” and blowing on a party horn.
He smiled. “I knew it,” he said, and walked back the way he came.
I opened the second package. Inside it was a box like a golden treasure chest, with three books inside and a note from Pinkie.
Dear Cheesie: These are the three new Daring Do books which we got a month early but you have to promise not to ask me about how, and Rainbow Dash says you have to write only fantabulously amazingtastic stuff about them or she’ll find all your hats and hide them up in some clouds somewhere, but no pressure. XOXO, Pinkie
I must have been staring at the note for a while, especially the last bit, because Boneless Two gave me a kick in the ribs and I realized I still hadn’t looked at the books. I opened up the first one, Daring Do and the Marked Thief of Marapore, and hoped I wouldn’t have to worry about my hats.
I had to light up some lanterns after a while, because the firelight was too dim to read by, and then I just kept going with the next one. Just before sunrise, I’d finished the last book.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
They’re awesome. They are totally, utterly awesometastic. I mean, obviously they would be more awesome if there was more Pinkie in them, but otherwise I wouldn’t change a single thing.
I’m not much of a reader, as I’ve mentioned, and I’ve always avoided the A.K. Yearling books anyway because of the hype. I may have been wasting my life. These books have everything: erupting volcanoes, ancient relics, prophecies, fights, petnappings! Something new is happening on practically every page. The author even makes library searches cool. There’s just something about them. Something almost real.
And there are all these places I’ve never even heard of before: Ponypeii, and the Isles of Scaly, which have five different dragon tribes, and the legendary lost city of Cirrostrata, somewhere high above the Unicorn Range. The Unicorn Range! I was there now. For a moment, I was tempted just to keep going. I’d only ever felt that ripping sensation once before: an agonizing pull to give parties wherever I was called and to stay out on the open road, and an opposite, agonizing pull to go back to Ponyville. This time, I knew what was happening, and I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t going to fight anything anymore. Still, all these places had to have parties, right? And someday, I’m sure Cheesy Sense will hit, and I’ll be off to Scaly and Alto Terra and maybe even the Forbidden City of Cirrostrata itself. And maybe, just maybe, this time there will be two party ponies instead of one, and those places will see parties like they’ve never known.
It’ll happen. I know it’s got to happen. And when it does, swear on Camembert, it’ll be epic.
Anyway, by the end of the last book, Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, Daring had the opportunity to go on a quest for twenty-two relics, most of which she’d never seen, and I reached for the next book and realized there wasn’t one. I was about ready to scream. How could there not be another book? I actually wanted another book. I couldn’t believe myself. I looked back at the inside of the book and I noticed that there were seven books before this one. Probably Princess Just Twilight had copies, and if she didn’t, Rainbow Dash probably did, and I was going to borrow them and read them all, by Gouda. And maybe by that time, when I’d caught up, there would be more.
I put the last book aside and—
That was a doozy. That was a real doozy of a doozy. It knocked me right onto my back. This party’s going to be huge, I can tell. And it’s going to be . . .?
I felt my right hind leg kick helplessly into the air, propelling my body backwards through the carpet of leaves. Please be Ponyville. Please be Ponyville.
Canterlot. Well, at least Ponyville’s not too far from Canterlot. In fact, I should probably stop there on the way if the Cheesy Sense lets me, because I won’t have the strength to—
—it’s not going to let me. It’s going to have to be enough that I’m heading for somewhere near Pinkie, and that maybe she’ll be there when I get there. And even that thought is enough to make me smile. I roll onto my chest, rise to my feet and turn towards the east, where the sky is flooding with pink: east towards Canterlot, east towards Ponyville, east towards Laughter Herself.
Equestria Girls 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.
