The World Is Always Ending
The tenure of Principal Abacus Cinch came to a sudden close with her resignation in the Mayn of 2015, following the Crystal Preparatory Academy’s failure to bring home the trophy in that year’s Friendship Games, held earlier that month. It was the first and only failure to win the quadrennial event during her entire incumbency.
These particular games settled on a draw after an unspecified incident (rumored to have involved a third-party bomb threat to the home-team’s campus) interrupted the final event of the interscholastic competition – bringing to an abrupt end a nearly-two-decade period of continuous victory in CPA history, which began when Abacus Cinch assumed the office of Principal in the Manuary of 1996.
That was the official story.
Sunny Flare, however, knew the truth. She was there.
The truth was ridiculous, but it was the truth: magic was real, bleeding into Pedestria from portals to another dimension, and Canterlot High School – CPA’s rivals at the 2015 Friendship Games – was a bandage plastered over one of these gaping wounds in reality. It had absorbed so much of the magic coming through that its top students were dripping with the stuff, enchanted with what could only be described as superpowers. It seemed they had a rather unfair advantage.
It was hogwash, of course. The CHS students went out of their way to avoid using their powers until CPA’s poking and prodding put lives in danger.
Yet when one of Sunny’s classmates, a Miss Twilight Sparkle (a girl whose advanced intelligence for the sciences was matched only by her social ineptitude), invented a device to capture this magic, it seemed only reasonable to even the playing field and extend that magic to CPA’s students as well.
…That, and Sunny’s own mother, Abacus Cinch herself, was the one pressuring Twilight the most to do so. Whatever reservations Sunny had about tampering with forces they ill-understood (which, narratively, is almost always an act of ruinous hubris), they fell to the wayside when her own mother’s approval was on the line. And so, Sunny joined in on the peer-pressuring, knowing full well Twilight lacked the nerve to refuse.
They all had their motivations. They all had their excuses. They all had their gormless ignorance.
When that profaned magic transformed Twilight Sparkle into some manner of avenging angel, straight out of Tartarus, instead of giving everybody at Crystal Prep superpowers to match, Sunny knew in her heart that CPA had this coming. This was the divine punishment their arrogance could only ever have been rewarded with.
Thankfully, one of the rival CHS students managed to talk that terrible angel back down to earth in a display of her own magic, and nobody had to get hurt.
But Principal Cinch would not be able to explain this loss to her faculty, her superiors on the Canterlot Board of Education, nor to law enforcement authorities. They’d think she’d lost it, raving about magic and ‘trained attack plants’. Her perfect record was irrevocably tarnished with no satisfying explanation.
She also lost one of Crystal Prep’s best students. Twilight Sparkle anchored the school’s performance metrics at the top of every intellectual category. While she’d survived her involuntary angelicization… she also never wanted to set foot in CPA’s halls ever again, except to clear out her locker and her secret research lab that Mother pretended not to know about. La Tartaglia was going to stay with the enemy at CHS, where she’d already made six friends who were ever so happy to have her.
…For someone Sunny never particularly cared for, she wasn’t sure why Twilight’s betrayal stung so much. Sure, CPA was losing one of its most gifted minds, but they still had Sugarcoat. The school would survive. There was no material loss, and yet she still felt its sting.
But beside those minor losses, Mother had also lost all the respect her students and faculty paid her. There was fear, of course (fear of her power over their futures and job securities, fear of her ability to make their lives a living hell if they did not fall in line) but the respect – the standard that backed the entire secret economy of favors, bribes, and debts which had erected itself around the Principal (and, by extension, her daughter) – was gone.
For some, that respect died when she came home without the trophy; for others, it perished when she turned tail and ran away from the monster she had played her encouraging hand in creating. Either way, her word wasn’t good for what it used to be, and there were many pending transactions, so to speak, whose balance of value had changed practically overnight. One favor falling through, here or there, could have disastrous consequences for a dozen more.
And so, rather than face the debt-cascade to come, and all the angry parents and disloyal teachers it would bring to her office, Abacus Cinch resigned her post immediately after school let out for the summer. She was close enough to retirement age, anyways, and her appointed successor, Dean Cadance, was a competent woman in her own right. She could deal with all that.
And that was how Sunny Flare’s sophomore year ended.
…
Summer was quiet, but tensely so. Mother seemed… frankly less stressed than ever, but not any warmer because of it. The drive and ambition that seemed to animate her just sorta evaporated, and not much remained to fill the absence. What used to be the tail-ends of evenings she spent silently reading in the living room, after wrapping up her taken-home work for the day, became entire day-long sessions buried in a book.
But she also took a more active role in the house. Not only did she continue to cook dinner and shop for groceries; she picked up many of the chores which had previously been Sunny’s sole custody. She had to occupy herself with something, or else she’d go mad, she said, but she was fooling herself. There was a hunger in her that had lost its appetite.
Meanwhile, Sunny also kept herself busy and, more importantly, away from the silent tension at home.
For starters, witnessing the camaraderie among Canterlot High School’s students had opened her eyes to what friendship could possibly do for her.
Sure, she would call her own quintet her friends if asked, but really, they were just her fellow top students. Sugarcoat was the smartest (now that Twilight was gone), Indigo Zap was the most athletic, Lemon Zest was the most creatively-gifted, and Sour Sweet was a quick-learning wildcard with a diverse range of talents. It was only natural that Sunny Flare, who was fortunate enough to be talented in all of these fields, took her place among them as their queen.
As a plus, of course, they built a sort of living wall around her, whose bricks performed well enough in school that they didn’t need too many favors of their own. In exchange, they kept the doglike masses from cozying up to Sunny as a pretense for prying out whatever advantage they believed Sunny could extract from her mother.
But she wanted something more. All five of them did. It’s not like they didn’t know what friendship was, or that they didn’t have any of it to go around… but where those ‘Rainbooms’ at CHS grew a blooming garden with the devotion they had to each other, Sunny’s companions barely sprouted weeds through the cracks in the irradiated crystal concrete.
Sunny had never felt the sense of belonging she saw on the other team. Even though Sugarcoat and Sour Sweet had been by Sunny’s side since freshman year began, she never got the impression she shared the kind of bond with them that they had forged with each other. And then when the duo of Lemon and Indigo nominally joined the trio the next autumn, they remained better friends with each other than anyone else in the group.
But maybe that could change.
To start, she and her comrades managed to guilt-trip (read: look and be pathetic enough to earn the pity of) Twilight Sparkle into inviting them to a sleepover with her new friends…
…Whereupon Sunny did not put on one of her better performances, but the less said about that, the better. Long story short: she almost burned the two group’s bridges then and there with an accurate but poorly-received impression, and she didn’t even make her friends laugh, anyways, so it really wasn’t worth it at all.
(People always said Sour Sweet had an obnoxious laugh, but they were just artificial kiss-ups who only let out a polite chuckle at most when it was socially advantageous to do so. Sour was basically the only one in the entire school who put her whole belly into the cackles that spilled out whenever she heard a good joke, or they were talking s— about one of CPA’s innumerable tw—waffles. It was the most wonderful sound in the world.)
In any case, after that fiasco, Twilight humored her former classmates for a few more sleepovers, but Sunny couldn’t shake the feeling these were more like condescending lessons in how to be friends with each other (so they could get out of Twilight’s hair) than actual gestures of goodwill. Sunny and co. took the hint, and stopped trying to tag along.
In any case, they did take more pains than they used to to get the whole gang together, whether for lunch at whatever restaurant her friends wanted to try out, or hosting their own private sleepovers at either of the two houses that would have them, but it was difficult going. Sugar’s family lived out in Rockville, and Sour was even worse: while her mother technically paid rent on a duplex for her sister, Syrupy, to stay in (and Sour, if she liked, but she preferred to board at CPA with Sugar), they returned to their family farm all the way in Mansachusetts for the summer, as soon as Mayn and their lease were over – so there was pretty much just the one half-month she was available for anything. And, of course, nobody wanted to have a slumber party under Abacus Cinch’s roof.
Still, compared to last summer, when everybody started their sophomore year as basically strangers all over again, the five juniors seemed as closely-knit compared to their classmates as the Rainbooms must have to theirs.
But Sunny couldn’t spend the whole summer idle in the company of her peers. She was sixteen, and though she had used her mother’s sedan to earn her driver’s license, she still needed a vehicle of her own. She couldn’t tag along on Mother’s daily commute anymore, and the woman refused to let Sunny drive her car unsupervised.
Since Sunny didn’t want to rip a chunk out of the family savings, she decided it was time to start saving up for a car – one fresh-brewed iced latte at a time.
…She still thought about that time when she showed up to a group hangout after work, still in her coffee-stained green Astradoes apron, and Sour Sweet joked about being unable to resist a woman in uniform. At least, Sunny had to assume it was a joke. Sour was always such a tease – that dangerous combination of hilarious, transgressive, beautiful, and just a little terrifying that made her so… admirable.
Well, anyways, by the time junior year began, Sunny hadn’t earned enough to avoid taking the bus, but there was always next summer. It was undignified, but it was better than walking.
Fortunately, the Lemon estate was on the same route that passed by Sunny’s place in Canterlot’s nicer suburbs, so she wasn’t riding alone. It was a tad strange that such a moneyed family would stick their eldest daughter on the bus, but Sunny supposed that schedules and deadlines haunted everybody in the modern age.
Regardless, Sunny was relieved to have Lemon Zest’s company on the bus, even if that company was usually just sitting in silence, reading an ebook or scrolling Ritter on her phone, next to her dead-asleep friend while the screamiest, growliest, noisiest “music” Sunny had ever heard bled through the designer headphones firmly fastened over the slumbering metalhead’s ears. That girl was going to go deaf before she turned twenty-five.
…
On the afternoon of Friday the 30th, Octoeber, 2015, Sunny was extra-grateful that Lemon Zest was more interested in her music than making conversation. It’s not that they were mad at each other or anything; it’s just, on that particular day, Sunny really didn’t need Arlecchina’s d—ed unflagging cheeriness. As dark and edgy as the music she banged her head to was, Lemon herself was just this undammable font of oblivious joy. Sunny wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a frown last longer than ten seconds on her face.
It could be really grating, especially when she failed to match the mood of the girls around her.
But when Lemon had asked, as the bus kicked into motion, what Sunny’s grades looked like, and Sunny told her they were fine, she seemed satisfied with that answer, put on her headphones, and took to staring out the window, which suited Sunny just fine.
…
It’s not that Sunny hadn’t expected junior year to be harder than sophomore year. She was going up a grade-level at the most prestigious and challenging highschool in the state, and she was enrolled in the Advanced Placement version of every class that had one. Obviously, it was going to be tough.
It was a challenge Sunny was happy to meet. She already spent much of her free time before studying, alone or with her quintet. Now, when the alternative was to dwell on that suffocating quiet waiting for her at home? Studying was a marvelous way to take her mind off of things.
And where before, keeping her grades all-A’s was how she remained in Mother’s good graces, perhaps now a solid report card would be just the thing to lift her mother’s spirits.
Crystal Preparatory Academy demarcated the end of Quarter One as being the last Fingday of Octoeber, which in 2015 fell on the day immediately prior to Ghouloween. Sunny usually loved Ghouloween – particularly, the all-day horror movie marathons she could catch while Mother was cooped up in the home office, too busy with the paperwork brought on by the start of a new quarter to commandeer the living room and the television she insisted on owning despite never using. Even better when Ghouloween happened to fall on a weekend and she could spend the whole day in front of the screen.
This Ghouloween would not be like the ones that came before.
Her stop on the route came all too soon. As Sunny stumbled off, leaving Lemon behind, she genuinely doubted she’d have the constitution to withstand even one measly catscare, let alone anything genuinely horrific. Tomorrow might be a day for hiding in her room.
She held her backpack in front of her, rather than putting it on, as she realized: she had neglected part of her normal routine on the ride home: the de-pinning.
Sunny’s backpack was a generic canvas thing of the same burgundy plaid as her skirt, purchased for her from the campus store. It was of quality make, but bore so little personality that it managed to underflow the stack so hard it wrapped around to being her personality: because backpacks were not part of the uniform (as long as they were left in the locker during class), one’s choice of backpack was one of the few avenues of self-expression available to Crystal Prep’s students, and so, by her mother’s intervention, Sunny had become the only student of her class with a CPA-branded backpack.
She had been content with this mark of her heritage… precisely until her mother resigned and that heritage lost all its status. Now it was just a boring maroon backpack.
To remedy this, Sunny had begun collecting pins over the summer, with which she bedazzled the becarthy out of it on the bus ride to school, and which she stripped bare on the ride home – or there on the sidewalk, as an excuse not to walk down the block and face her mother.
It’s not that her mother had ever expressed disapproval of the pins on her backpack – the woman never got to see them in the first place. Sunny didn’t want to have to answer any questions she might ask.
So off went the Bunker-Girl pins that came with her accidental double-preorder of Nuclear Winter 4: Still Nuclear (shame that the Pop-Girls shipped with them were shoddier products than the replicas she’d already commissioned from a fan; their cheapness did not bode well for the game itself).
Off went the pin Lemon had custom-made to promote her garage-band, whose name had long since changed from Limoncello Catsplosion to whatever it was now, but whose intent on Sunny’s backpack remained the same.
Off went the roseate rainbow a certain same-named Dash had tossed her way with a devilishly-knowing smirk, that time Sunny snuck away from her lunch break to watch the Pride Parade.
The only ones that stayed were the CPA-colored pins that reflected her extracurriculars: Drama Club, A/V Club, Fencing Club… and the only exception to that rule was the pin for Anime Club, which she was sometimes too ashamed to put on her backpack at all.
All in all, it only bought her a couple minutes. The exhaust fumes from the bus hadn’t even completely cleared the area by the time she had lost her excuse to linger.
She wore her backpack backwards as she walked home. It looked extremely silly, but made her feel armored, like she had a bulletproof vest, and if anybody asked, she could just say she was protecting what was inside. Technically, she was.
The shadows felt so long. They weren’t – it was only about 3:30 in the afternoon, and the sun was out in full cheery, obnoxious force, pissing its cold, yellowed light onto suburbia below – but they felt that way.
Standing at the porch-shaded door to her two-story home, Sunny habitually fished out her house-key. The door was never unlocked. Just as Sunny built her tower out of the acquaintances she hid behind, Mother’s tower was hewn from her house. The blinds were always shut, the deadbolt barred the door the moment everybody was inside, the porch lights monitored the lawn from dusk until dawn, the only time anyone ever stepped into the backyard was when Sunny had to mow it back to uniformity, and the Principal never had guests over unless work followed her home. It was a temple to solitude – besides Sunny and Cinch, the only living thing inside was Sunny’s sphynx cat, Riddle, whose adoption had been the hardest-fought battle with her mother that Sunny had ever won.
This routine of vigilant isolation continued into Mother’s retirement. Sunny would suppose that what was once her mother’s place of respite had become a prison, but who was she kidding? It was always a cage, and Mother always held the key to its door. She made this lonely bed for herself.
A copy of that same key slotted into the lock… and unlocked a door that was already unlocked. None of the expected resistance fought the turning of her wrist.
Mother was not the type to simply forget to lock the door – and besides, Sunny had most certainly locked it as she left for school that morning.
A mosaic of dreadful fates flashed through her mind as she opened the door, but the suffocating darkness within would not reveal the scene inside to her until she stepped into its tenebrous embrace. Mother always kept the house so dark inside.
What awaited her was no cluttered aftermath of a break-in, nor was it the conspicuous absence of a vanished mother, nor was it, most feared of all, a corpse and a note. These were all consciously very silly things to assume, but that didn’t stop the animal of her anxiety from circling Sunny’s brain like a bat trapped in her bedroom. The reality that revealed itself was much more mundane.
But only some degrees less uncomfortable.
“Welcome home, dear Sunny.”
Mother sat on the couch, dressed-up in her skirt-suit, as opposed to the same house robe she always lounged around in. She looked as though she’d just come home from work. It was a terrible and disorienting nostalgia that toyed with Sunny’s heart.
She stared at Sunny, waiting for her to acknowledge the greeting, which she did a few seconds later than she should have. “Thank you, Mother.”
“You’re quite welcome.” With a nod, Cinch then asked her daughter in that even, restrained, carefully-menacing tone of hers, “Why don’t you take a seat, so we can discuss your latest report card?”
There went any hope of sneaking up to her room and waiting for Mother to bring it up at dinner.
Sunny silently made her way to the couch beside her mother’s armchair. Like everything else in their lives, these, too, were the purplish reds and navy blues of CPA.
She made to withdraw the manilla envelope containing her report card from her backpack, but Cinch stopped her before the paper cleared the canvas. “There’s no need for that, dear. I have been monitoring your grades all quarter.”
Sunny’s heart sank, but she didn’t let it show. She should have known Mother could do that, from her office computer. “Then you know that–”
Cinch cut her off. “That you only held onto your top marks in your Pedestrian Language and Literature, Theatre Studies, and Computer Science courses; while your grades across the entire rest of the board have dropped to a C-minus-average, and you are actively failing in Physical Education.” Her summation complete, she just watched her daughter, expectantly.
“…I take it you’d like an explanation. Mother, I promise, I’ve been studying twice as hard–”
“An explanation will not be necessary,” Cinch said, once again, before leaning forward. Only now, as Sunny’s eyes adjusted to the dark, did she realize what sat on the coffee table: a bottle of wine as darkly violet as Mother’s hair, and two empty glasses. “I would like to offer you a little something to take the edge off.” She filled one glass up near to the top, and the other just halfway.
Cinch did not drink often – just a small amount on the pertinent holidays, mostly. Even on the day she lost her job, Sunny only saw her take a single glass of wine with dinner, and that was it.
On account of being sixteen, Sunny objected, “…I don’t drink.”
“No, but your ‘friends’ do. Misses Zap and Zest, at the very least. I know this because I had to make the exceptional decision not to expel the most promising athlete and musician of your class in their freshman year after they were caught drinking together on the school’s roof. They have since done a much better job of not making it the school’s problem.”
“…So you had blackmail on them. If they ceased to perform to your standards, or… if they didn’t join in pressuring Twilight to–”
She once again interrupted Sunny with, “You have learned well from my example, dear.” The complement masked an edge that could cut diamond. The Friendship Games were still a sore subject. Best not to bring them up again.
“Is that what this is? Entrapment?”
Cinch gave a joyless smile. “Sunny, my dear, as your legal guardian, responsibility for any alcohol you consume while in my household falls largely upon myself; nor does CPA uphold any policy restricting the consumption of alcohol by students off-campus; only that students are not inebriated while on campus. There is simply no way I could leverage this indulgence against you, even if that were what I desired from this conversation, dearie.”
“…Except to loosen my lips. –Perhaps you think I’m lying. I genuinely have been giving my studies my all this semester, I promise!”
“I know. I believe you.” These words of trust that would have been so warm from another woman’s mouth sent shivers down Sunny’s spine. “Which is why I invite you to have a small, size-appropriate drink with parental supervision. It does wonders for the nerves.”
Sunny did not reach for the glass. “Then you also recognize that the faculty are retaliating against me for what you–” Sunny caught herself. “In the wake of your departure, I mean.” It was the only answer that made sense. Without a Cinch to punish or revenge themselves upon, the closest scapegoat was her daughter. It was happening everywhere, not just her gradebook: she didn’t get a single speaking role in the school’s play that quarter. “I hate this as much as you do. What can I do?”
Cinch just chuckled. If one did not live with her, then one would not be able to distinguish innocent mirth from the baleful delight of holding something over the source of her amusement. They sounded quite alike in her mouth.
Sunny knew the difference.
This was her real laugh. There wasn’t the underline of power to it.
Why was it her real laugh?
With a smile, Mother said, “There’s nothing that can be done–”
Even as Sunny interrupted her mother, she knew she would rue it. “Nothing at all? Seriously?! This has to be illegal, or at least against district policy! There’s got to be some authority I can report this to!”
Panting just from those few sentences working her up, the aforementioned regrets sank in as she watched the humor wash away from her mother’s face.
“Sunny, dear,” Cinch said, in a very low and very cold voice, “I remind you of the merits of waiting your turn in the conversation to speak. You are nearly a grown woman, not the thoughtless toddler you used to be.”
“…Sorry, Mother.”
“When you do not let me finish speaking, you prevent yourself from catching key details. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Cinch eased up, but only a smidge. “The reason there is nothing we can do is because nobody is retaliating against you.”
Sunny bit her tongue and resisted the impulse to ask what she meant.
“I have not been out of communication with Ms. Cadance these past months. She has often found herself in need of advice navigating the, ah… more political aspects of her new position.” The wanton corruption, Sunny assumed she meant. “In turn, I have been checking in on you and your associates. Understand this, Sunny, dear: while I may not trust individual members of the faculty not to retaliate against you, I do place a great deal of faith in Ms. Cadance to keep her staff in check.”
And here in Sunny’s mind, Principal Cadance was suspect number one.
Sensing her daughter’s doubt, Cinch explained, “Ms. Cadance is, shall we say, a true believer in CPA excellence.” These words carried a great deal of pity and superiority in equal measure. “These idealistic types make for excellent lieutenants, but poor leaders. No doubt, the integrity and principles that made her such an excellent Dean are now sowing the seeds of future difficulties. She is simply not equipped to confront the realities of charter education.
“Her reign over Crystal Preparatory Academy, however short it lasts, will, however, be an honest one. She will endure until a few years beyond your graduation, whereupon she will either be washed out by the Board, after accruing enough complaints from tenured faculty and donor families; or, if she wishes to retain the office of Principal, she will learn to conduct herself in the manner of her predecessor.”
The predecessor whose cynical, petty ruthlessness resulted in her early retirement.
Mother took a moment to sip from her glass, which Sunny took as an opportunity to ask, “So, if it’s not retaliation, then what is it?”
Something about that question made Cinch go back for more than just a sip. That couldn’t be a good sign. The two of them gulped at the same time, for reasons so mechanically different yet so emotionally alike.
When Mother finally looked her in the eyes – her expression softer than ever – and said, “Sunny, dear… you’re not as gifted as I’ve led you to believe,” all of the worst fears she’d come up with over the last month came true.
Part of Sunny begged to remain in denial. “No. No! That can’t be true. I put in the work! My classes are hard, but they’re hard for everyone!”
“They are not hard for everyone, I assure you. Just ask Sugarcoat how her AP Statistics course is treating her.”
All Sunny could say was, “No…”, as she fought not to shatter into a thousand pieces.
“Yes, Sunny. There is no retribution in play; it is simply that your grades now accurately reflect your performance.”
“…But my perfect GPA…”
“Perfected by my own intervention. I do not believe you fully comprehend the amount of influence I have spent, protecting you from your own mediocrity these past two years.” She wasn’t even angry. Just disappointed. Pitying, even, and perhaps regretful. “There were points at which I could have leveraged that pull towards a directorial position on the Canterlot Board of Education, but instead chose to remain Principal until, at least, you had graduated and could no longer be negatively affected by the decision to have Ms. Cadance take my place. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men.”
Sunny felt her body petrifying, her face assuming a blank, glassy-eyed neutrality while her mind retreated inwards – as it always did when it became too unbearable to engage with the immediate situation outside its cranial fallout shelter.
Not that her psyche gave her much reprieve (after all, the bunkers in Nuclear Winter were seldom the safe havens they masqueraded as), nor that she lost awareness of what was going on out there: she still heard her mother’s voice, as though through a tinny loudspeaker, and saw her take another drink of wine out the corner of an unmoving camera that was her eye.
As Sunny tried to think of a single accomplishment since middle school that could not be credited to the grace of her mother instead, Cinch urged her, “By all means, the offered drink has not been rescinded. I understand this information is difficult to hear.”
But still, Sunny abstained from the glass. Even if she wanted it, her arm wouldn’t budge. Struggling to speak, she got out, “…It won’t fix my grades,” the words staggering clumsily off her numb and tingling tongue and scraping quietly through paralyzed jaws.
“No. It won’t.”
Part of her still wanted to cling to hope. “…Now that I know where I’m failing, though, I know what to study…”
“Perhaps. It would surprise me greatly, however, if you were indeed to turn this around.” Another evac plane shot down, but not without a counter-suggestion: “Personally, my recommendation is that you discuss transferring out your Advanced Placement courses with Ms. Cadance. While it is rather late in the semester, she may be willing to make an exception. I would project upwards of twenty-percent increases in your performance, at the mere cost of being unable to leverage these classes towards college credits.”
For a moment, it really seemed like Mother understood the horror and grief going on in her daughter’s head, but that suggestion made it plainly apparent all she cared about were the mercenary particulars of performance and future prospects, not Sunny’s feelings. She seemed utterly uninterested in ameliorating any of the devastation of finding out her life was a lie.
Sure, it was a practical, actionable solution. It was also surrender. Out of Sunny’s worst nightmares was paraded a slothful, mutant demon called “Average” – an utterly unremarkable horse, except for the long-necked head it kept down so low as to lazily drag it along the ground and trample on its own throat as it trotted along – and here Mother commanded her to get over herself and ride the hideous thing if her feet hurt so bad.
Sunny wasn’t going to just say ‘no’ to her mother. That wasn’t something she could get away with – not without an hour’s worth of lectures, at least, and more than anything, she just wanted to hide in her room, alone. So instead, she just said nothing at all.
All for the best. Mother preferred a monologue to a dialogue. “I should hope you understand, for your own sake, the potential consequences of your special treatment thus far becoming public knowledge. You should have nothing to fear of retroactive grade-reduction, as there were no records kept of your proper grades, but it would impair your social and career prospects greatly to gain a reputation as having depended on nepotism to get where you are, no matter how true it is.”
Mother finished her wine in silence, and did not opt for a second glass. Instead, she reached over and placed a cold, blue hand on Sunny’s shoulder, which was the first time she had touched her daughter in years. “I can see you need some time to think about this revelation. I will keep you no longer.”
Then she pulled her hand away, picked up the bottle and her own glass, and vanished into the kitchen, leaving her daughter to sit in crystallized silence with a hollow, yearning sort of itch on her shoulder.
It was several minutes before Sunny regained the willpower to control her body again. It was only enough to lumber, zombielike, up the stairs to the second floor and into the fairy-lit cave that was her room. A slumbering Riddle opened one eye as she interrupted his nap with her presence, stretched his little goblin legs, and promptly went right back to sleep.
Sunny’s backpack missed the post from which it meant to hang and slumped onto the floor, but Sunny did not bother to pick it up. Nor did she turn on her computer, nor prise her phone from the Pop-Girl securing it so that it could be charged, nor even kick off her slip-on shoes as she collapsed back-first onto her bed, where she lay awake in silence for what must have been an hour.
…
Then she heard noises downstairs. The disused doorbell – the front door opening – conversation.
Who could it possibly be?
Sunny heard her mother say something that might have been directions to Sunny’s room, and then as soon as she heard the galumphing stomps of shoes like hers on the stairs, she instantly knew who it was that had come to see her. There was only one girl she knew who could so accurately imitate an entire herd of zebras with just two left feet.
That girl hammered on her door. “Hey, Suzy, open up, wouldja?!”, shouted Lemon Zest, with the same dumb jollity she brought to every conversation.
Sunny did not answer. She almost protested her nickname – Lemon’s choice of affect for pet-names was to cram Z’s wherever she felt like (so: Suzy, Izzy, ZoZu, Sugz, and herself as Lizzy), which became problematic when Lemon’s best friend’s older sister also professionally went by the stage name of Su-Z – but even this annoyance wasn’t enough to stir Sunny from her stupor.
“If you don’t lemme in, I’m letting myself in! You gots five seconds to stop me!”
Ah, the Lemonic paradox: Lemon was probably the kindest girl at Crystal Prep… and also the most blithely inconsiderate. Traditionally, Sunny and the rest of her friends were c—s on purpose, whereas Lemon was a c— entirely because it simply did not occur to her that she was being obnoxious and rude. Sunny was frankly fortunate that she knocked and announced her intent at all (which may have been the product of Lemon’s own journey of self-improvement).
Sunny didn’t have the heart to care one way or another. She let the timer tick down.
Lemon threw Sunny’s bedroom door open with the same force and brutality of a pillaging raider. It was fortunate that Sunny’s misplaced backpack kept it from leaving a new dent in the drywall.
Apparently, she had made it home before making the decision to come over to Sunny’s house, because she’d changed into something more comfortable. Lemon was barely-recognizable as the schoolgirl that sat at Sunny’s side earlier: the mandatory maroon shirt was replaced by a hole-worn black tee for some illegibly-branded metal band, and the girlish pleated skirt was now a pair of snow-washed jeans with rips in the knees that still held onto a dark, mossy-green dye in the seams. Admittedly, the same pink headphones she always wore gave her away, but still: it was, for the most part, a fashion one-eighty.
“Sunny-Suzunny!”
Sunny had, she supposed, recovered enough energy to return the greeting. “…Lizzy la Zest,” she lazily echoed.
“Aw, man, you look like shit.” She swaggered over to Sunny’s bed and sat down beside Sunny’s waist. “What’s up?”
Sunny smelled alcohol on Lemon’s breath. “Bottom’s, apparently.”
Lemon giggled. “Huh?”
“Did you seriously booze up before you came here? How did you even get Mother to let you in?”
“Oh, haha, nahhhhhhhhhh. I just snuck the half-a-glass of wine I found sitting around downstairs. Cinch doesn’t know a thing.”
Based on past experience with Lemon’s normal speaking volume, the woman most certainly knew, now.
“Was there a reason you wanted to see me? I was busy studying,” Sunny lied. Replace ‘studying’ with ‘brooding’, however, and it would be true.
“You didn’t look busy.”
“I was taking a break.”
“Sure, bud. Sure. And I was totally just in the neighborhood for no reason whatsoever.” It was always a bit disarming when Lemon brought out the sarcasm, but the thing to remember was that while she was an idiot, she was a CPA-level idiot, which made her smarter than the average dolt. “C’mon, girl, you and me both know you’re having a shit-ass day. Lemme guess: your grades went in the dumpster.”
“…How did you know? Did she put you up to this?” It wasn’t entirely a theory that made sense given her mother’s character, but Sunny was in a suspicious mood.
Lemon snorted. “Yeah, nah. I just knew something was wrong when you told me your grades were fine.”
“…You did?”
“Well, duh. If your grades were actually good, you’d have rubbed ‘em in my face like you always do.”
“…I suppose that would line up with my past behavior… –But how would you know whether that’s the reason, or if it’s just because that’s a behavior I’m trying to move past?”
Lemon shrugged. “You know, I didn’t think about that. You got me there.” Nevermind about the ‘smarter than the average idiot’ claim. “But hey, if everything was solid, wouldja really turn down a surprise hang sesh with me?”
“Depending on mood and existing plans… I’d probably go along with it,” Sunny admitted, “but not today. I have a lot of sulking to do, so if it’s all the same… –”
Lemon cut her off. “Cinch tore you a whole new butthole about your grades, huh?”
Perhaps a bit of Sugarcoat had rubbed off on Sunny, because that simply could not stand to go uncorrected. “No, she was… understanding,” Sunny evasively understated.
“Hahaha, my folks, too.”
“Pardon?”
“Oh yeah!” Lemon reached into her back-pocket and pulled out a folded-and-then-crumpled slip of paper, which unfolded into her own report card. She had A’s in her music classes (as was to be expected), high B’s in art, and a B- in AP Bio… but everywhere else, the best grades she got were high D’s. She was failing worse than Sunny. “Yeah, turns out, this is basically what they expected when Cinch quit.”
“Then you already know she was… exercising her authoritative discretion, so to speak, regarding our scores.”
“Haha, yeah, they saw this coming the moment K-denzles returned their bribe, haha. They’re pretty much banking on her being too much of a pushover to kick me out, which, I mean, hahaha, see you guys at grad, y’know?” Lemon elbowed Sunny in the ribs – a lot more forcefully than she likely realized.
For the first time, Sunny lifted her head to look her friend in the face. “Doesn’t it hollow you out, knowing all of your accomplishments were naught but ash and papier-mâché?”
Lemon let out a guffaw. “Nah, haha! I always knew I was a dumbass. Thinking fuckin’ sucks.”
Taking in the anti-philosopher’s sagely words, Sunny’s head dropped back into the indent of her pillow. “…I might have to agree with you on that, dearie.” And for some reason, she decided the best way to spend her evening was with nothing but thinking.
“I know, right? Why do you think I’m high all the time?”
Sunny was aware of at least one other reason Lemon toked, but she was cognizant that it would be massively impolite to bring it up, so she did not. Instead, she just lay there in silence, knowing Lemon would find a way to keep the conversation going in spite of her.
And she did, hopping out of Sunny’s bed with a resounding thump as her canvas sneakers shook the dust off the ceiling. “Anyways, me and the girls figured you could use a pick-me-up, so we’re having a Ghouloween party at Izzy’s all weekend long, and I kinda already told them you were gonna be there, so we’d better get going.”
Sunny glared at Lemon. “You what?”
“Yeah, dude. Get up! Izzy’s dad’s making nachos and I don’t want ‘em to get cold by the time we get there.”
Defensively, Sunny wrapped her bedsheets around herself. “I never agreed to this!”
“What, you think you’re gonna have more fun lying in bed all day?”
“…No.”
“Then what’s the holdup?”
“‘Fun’ isn’t going to get my grades back up.”
“Neither will moping under the covers. You’re not gonna turn into a blanket-butterfly, you know.”
Still, Sunny refused to budge from her cocoon. “…Perhaps I’ll use the weekend to study the next quarter’s material.”
“Lame. Besides, you study plenty already. Why’dja think more studying’s gonna make you do any better?”
“I should think the answer is obvious.”
Lemon shook her head. “Suzy, all you got’s one data point. You can’t figure shit from fuck from that.”
Sunny blinked. Nevermind about the previous nevermind. While she still wasn’t convinced by Lemon’s passing familiarity with statistical analytical procedure, she wasn’t prepared to have a semi-intelligent argument with Lemon that day.
So she switched to a different classic excuse. “You shouldn’t be asking me. You should be asking Mother, and I have my doubts she’ll–”
–From outside Sunny’s door, Mother cleared her throat, because of course she was listening in. “Actually, Sunny, it is my opinion as your mother that this diversion would be for your own good, my dear. I simply ask that you do not partake of anything which might appear on a drug test or the local news while you are at Miss Zap’s, and otherwise entrust you to the supervisory discretion of Mr. Ozone Crackle.”
Well, sh—. Sunny supposed she was out of excuses. “…Fine. If you two insist, I suppose I can attend this party.”
Cinch gave a slight smile before returning downstairs, while Lemon set about unfurling Sunny’s chrysalis.
To raise herself out of bed was to fight the weight of every lead-lined bone and tethering cable-tendon in her body that tugged her back down to the entombing sediment of her sheets. But Lemon grabbed her hand and hoisted her the rest of the way, anemically stumbling out of bed.
“Sick, lezgo!”
“Wait!” Sunny snatched her hand away, and before Lemon could sigh or snort or groan at the delay, she explained, “I need to get into costume!”
Lemon snapped her finger-guns at Sunny. “Oak nuggins! I’ll be downstairs seeing if I can pregame more wine outta your mom.”
“…Yeah, good luck with that, dearie.”
…
After some delay, Sunny met a Lemon who, to her great dejection, was no more inebriated than she was the last time Sunny saw her, at the bottom of the staircase. Sunny now wore a bright blue Bunker 111 jumpsuit and clutched a travel bag full of beauty and hygiene necessities.
“Damn, Suzy, where’d you get that?”
“I may have placed a commission with our dear Rarity.” Sunny knew how to assemble a stylish wardrobe from existing clothes (she considered herself something of an artist at robbing and repurposing the costumes of previous CPA theatre productions), but she was no seamstress.
“Oh yeah! The new game’s coming out pretty soon, ain’t it?”
“Eleven days. I have to say, I’m a smidge concerned whether it will meet the high bar for storytelling set by New Reno, but I suppose I can only wait and see.”
“I’m sure it’s gonna be fine. We good to go?”
“Yes, I think so.” Standing by the door, Sunny turned to face Abacus Cinch and tried to put their earlier conversation from her mind. “I suppose that means we’ll be leaving, Mother. Have a good night.”
“You too, dears. Though, Sunny, dear, if I might have one last word with you in private?”
Oh, dear. “…As you wish. Meet you outside, Lemon.”
Lemon took her cue to leave as Sunny approached her mother and waited, with bated breath, for whatever she might still have to say.
Taking a pensive moment to look into her child’s eyes, Cinch eventually said, “Though you have lost my academic oversight, you are not without resources. Your friends, as little as we care for their various shortcomings, are an asset to you which I find myself regretfully lacking in my retirement. Do not let them slip through your fingers. They may be all you have, but you have them…” A face that softened as she spoke remembered the need to put on the appearance of hardness. “Have I made myself clear?”
“…Yes, Mother.”
“I just want you to understand how lucky you are.”
Frankly, at that moment, Sunny felt half like she could clear out all the casinos in New Reno and half like a piano was going to fall on her head the moment she stepped outside, but she gave a more subdued answer: “I’m starting to get that picture.”
“Good. I presume I’ll see you Manday afternoon, if not that morning. Have some fun, dear.”
And then Cinch hugged her daughter. Sunny couldn’t remember the last time that had happened – she had to be in elementary school, at the latest.
The wine must have been influencing her mother’s judgement… but that being said? Sunny did not protest this. Cinch was a cold-blooded bag of bones, but she was the cold-blooded bag of bones that raised Sunny.
When Mother let go, half a minute later, it felt all too soon, but it seemed reason had returned to the woman, and, with something of an uncomfortable blush, Cinch set about preparing something for herself to eat for dinner and ignoring Sunny’s presence in the room.
Sunny stammered out a goodbye as she left her shelter and rejoined her acquaintance at the sidewalk, where Lemon’s high-end cargo van was waiting for her, gleaming an eye-searing lemon-yellow and lime-green in the setting sun.
“She nag you some more about school?”, Lemon asked, throwing open the driver-side door hard enough to shake the whole vehicle on its springs.
“No, nothing like that.” Sunny wasn’t sure if Lemon would believe what Cinch actually had to say. Instead, she circled around to the passenger door, tried to open it, listened to the engine start up, tried the handle again, knocked to remind the driver she was there, and finally climbed in when Lemon sheepishly let her in.
The radio was blaring some playlist of Ghouloween staples from the pre-smartphone music player hooked up to it. The Demon Dash threatened to burst Sunny’s eardrums before she imposed herself on the sanctity of Lemon’s drivership and turned it down to a level that could facilitate conversation.
“Ughghghghghghgh”, Lemon gargled, “whatcha got against Bobby-Pin Picklock?”
“Nothing at all, dearie; I’d just like to still be able to listen to his oeuvre tomorrow, instead of going deaf today.”
“Suit yourself, haha. I’m here for a good time, not a long time, you know?”
It was at that point that Sunny remembered something about her friend’s sobriety. “I think I should drive, actually.”
Lemon shrugged and scrambled to climb over Sunny, to the latter’s eeking alarm. “If you wanna do all the work, I’m not gonna stop ya. Just thought I’d treatcha tonight.”
Awkwardly shuffling over the clutch and into the driver’s seat, Sunny replied, “You’ll treat me by allowing me to avoid an auto accident.”
Lemon grumbled something about how she drove high all the time and it was fine, which Sunny did not dignify with a response.
Instead, she changed the subject as she familiarized herself with the console. “You know, in the backstory of Nuclear Winter, the world ended just before Ghouloween.”
“Legit?”
“Indeed. That’s why you can still find your typical pumpkin-ghost-spider decorations in the places where the elements and the scavengers haven’t taken them down.”
“Aw, poor suckers. ‘Least we’re gonna make it. We’re gonna have to party that much harder in their stead.”
“So you say, but I remind you, it’ll be a few hours yet before the 31st.”
Lemon punched the driver in her shoulder, slightly swerving the vehicle. “Don’t jinx it, Suzy.”