"Heh, thanks. I've been getting more sleep and eating better and stuff." Brooke hated lying to Sarah and Alison, but she couldn't very well say the real reason behind her improved mood and all. She couldn't tell anyone. Even though it had happened a while back, she was still riding that lucid high.
"Eating better? Oh, yeah, 'cause you're totally fat," Alison joked. Sarah followed her lead.
"Yeah, if anything, you could stand to eat more junk food. Bulk you up." The two girls shared a laugh, but the third was not amused.
"C'mon, guys, we've been over this," she protested with exasperation. "I have crazy metabolism. I could eat all the chocolate in China and not gain any weight."
The red-headed girl raised an eyebrow. "I think you mean Belgium. Or Switzerland. You're meta-ing your mixaphors."
"Hey, do I look like a mapmaker?"
Alison looked Brooke up and down, then affected an obviously fake dreamy voice. "I don't know; I might need a map to stop myself from getting lost in your eyes, though."
Sarah, somehow managing a straight face, joined in. "I could just stand here all day and drink up your looks like all the tea in Guatemala." She fluttered her eyelids facetiously as a final touch.
Brooke gave the two of them a very stern look for a moment, before a smile crept over her face and the laughter she had been stifling burst out. "You guys are good. And now I'm hungry. Catch you two after my study hall for lunch?"
"You know it," Alison said. Sarah flashed a thumbs-up. "See you later, Brooke!" The three girls waved to each other and went their separate ways, Brooke still chuckling.
-RN-
"Ms. Reynolds!" A voice that should have been very familiar to the girl called through the back of the library, where fewer people were studying, making it okay to speak more loudly.
And Brooke would have heard the voice, if it weren't for Those Meddling Kids, a local band that had recently cut a demo CD. If anyone claimed she had a crush on the bassist, she'd deny it, but they were at least friends. She'd been listening to the CD almost daily for the past couple of months – at least since December.
"Ms. Reynolds!" the voice called again. This time, though, the person calling her name had found her and was already walking towards her. Brooke was still oblivious, lost in her books and her music. The woman who had been looking for her tapped her on the shoulder. "Brooke."
That finally got her attention. She pulled the headphones off her ears and looked up, her eyes opening in surprise. "Ah! Ms. Cisewski! Sorry, I was listening to music. Uh, what's up?" She knew she could afford a more casual tone with this teacher in particular.
"I've actually come up with something that might interest you," she explained, a warm, friendly smile on her middle-aged face. Brushing some of her black hair out of her face, she moved a hand to the chair next to Brooke. "Would you mind if I sat down?" Brooke smiled back, shaking her head and indicating that it would be fine.
"Now, I don't think I have to say that you are an excellent student in my class," she continued after sitting down. "Your grades have been consistently stellar, and you always show such interest. It's refreshing to see a student pay as much attention as you do. Especially because I seem to put everyone else in your immediate vicinity to sleep." A slight frown drew down her lips.
Brooke laughed a little. "I could throw some pumice at them until they wake up. Lightweight rock. Wouldn't cause too much brain damage. And I know where I can get a lot of it, too." She was only mostly joking, which Ms. Cisewski seemed to pick up on.
"Now, Brooke, that just wouldn't be nice," she said in a reprimanding tone. "But just because it wouldn't be nice doesn't mean they wouldn't deserve it." She grinned wryly, watching Brooke's reaction and waiting for the chuckling to stop before she resumed the point of the conversation. "Other students aside, I've been pushing for the school to incorporate another extracurricular under the supervision of the science department. And this year, now that they've seen such an interest in it from you and a few other students, they finally caved. They're going to let us organize a mountaineering club."
Brooke's eyes lit up. "Mountaineering? Like, climbing mountains for fun? And getting all hands-on with geology and everything?" Her teacher nodded, smiling at the girl's eagerness. "That's... wow, that's really awesome!"
"I take it you're interested, then?" Brooke nodded enthusiastically. "Well, then, we certainly have a lot of planning to do, don't we?"
"Wait, 'we'?"
"Oh, of course! Do you think I'd approach my best student with something like this and not ask her if she'd like to be president of the club?"
"Me? President?" She'd not led anything in her life. That would be... well, certainly a change. Hopefully a welcome one. "I'd... I mean, yeah. Yeah, I'll do that!"
Ms. Cisewski smiled. "I thought you would. Now, if you'll just come to my room after school today, we can talk about this more. The period's almost over, and I wouldn't want to make you late for your next class." Almost on cue, the end-of-class bell rang. "I'll be waiting for you."
Brooke was positively beaming now, even while she was gathering up her books. "I'll be there, Ms. Cisewski."
Putting a hand on the girl's shoulder again, the teacher spoke up. "I think we can be on a first-name basis with each other now. Call me Joy."
Taking a brief moment away from her books to process that, Brooke grinned. "Heh, all right. Thanks, M... uh, Joy."
-RN-
Even while she had been talking about it with Alison and Sarah, Brooke couldn't believe it. A mountaineering club, and she was going to be president alongside her favorite teacher! It was like some incredibly geeky dream come true. Not that she was complaining; this would combine her two loves: Geology and thrill-seeking.
Thrill-seeking.
No, wait, that was a bad thing.
If she got caught up in something like this, it didn't take a math genius to realize that it could add up to a lot of stuff happening that she really didn't want to happen.
But climbing mountains... whatever that could lead to, it didn't mean it would. Besides, it would really give her a chance to get hands-on with the things she was most interested in.
After a minor crisis, she resolved to meet up with Joy in her classroom after all. The meeting hadn't taken all too long, but she still had to wait until 4:30 for the late bus to come pick her up. The two of them had made an executive decision to hold meetings for the club after school on Thursdays, with possible activities including bake sales to raise money to actually rent all the mountain-climbing equipment they would need.
Neither of them really knew how much interest such a club would garner, though, which was a major stumbling block. Joy had mentioned a few other students, but "a few" could have meant three, bringing the group to a grand total of six people. But, well, they would climb that mountain when they came to it.
-RN-
Meetings came and went over the course of the next two years. The club hadn't grown much, plateauing at around twelve or thirteen people during its most popular meetings, where Brooke and Joy offered free food. Sarah had attended nearly every meeting in its entirety for the first year, and well into her and Brooke's sophomore year, as well. After that, though, her interest apparently waned and she stopped showing up as frequently. When questioned about it, Sarah would give the noncommittal answer of her having other things to do; she never elaborated further.
Leading up to her junior year, Brooke sometimes felt that she was just being overwhelmed with work. The first semester of her sophomore year had brought her biology and pre-calculus, not to mention a more advanced English class and Driver's Ed. She'd had to cut lunch out of her schedule to keep a study hall during the school day, since she knew she wouldn't have enough time to keep up with everything and still be an effective president if she'd just waited until the end of the day. Her elective course, which was a requirement for Murakami High, remained focused on the earth sciences; she had elected to take one of Joy's higher-level geology courses. Though it was still nothing entirely too challenging, taking two sciences definitely had pushed her to the brink of being overworked.
The stress of her school day, combined with the natural high she got from the mountaineering club (which had, in fact, finally raised enough money to climb a mountain as the last meeting of her freshman year), drew her to Jump City's desert more and more often. She had found herself constantly making bargains, saying that she would only do this once more and then never see the place again, and yet after every terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day (which, fortunately for her, were few and far between), she brought herself to the desert on foot and cut loose with her powers, flying farther and farther distances at greater and greater speeds.
To the best of her knowledge, no one had seen her escapades at all that year, and even her parents weren't savvy to her deeds; taking two sciences (and therefore performing two lab experiments per week) had its perks, after all. When the beginning of her junior year had come around, however, she began to worry.
No one from school had seen her; or at least, no one from school who actually went to the school. It had been a brisk September day and the school year, her junior year, had just started; she, fresh off the high of the semiyearly mountain-climbing excursion in late August, had decided to ring in the new year with another ride through the desert. Either she had left earlier than she had meant to, or the streets had been particularly busy that night, but regardless, someone of fading familiarity had seen her riding on a rock, doing a circuit of the desert. Of course, she didn't know that immediately. And she wouldn't; not for several months more.
-RN-
The bleary winter of that year was finally subsiding, as February 15th had finally brought about the first sunny day Jump City had seen in months. Unfortunately for Brooke, that same dreary feeling did not seem to want to leave her alone. Not even 24 hours earlier, on the Valentine's Day that she would come to call "That Stupid Bloody Sunday", Anthony, bassist for Those Meddling Kids and her boyfriend for nearly six months, had broken up with her.
"He just dumped me for some skank!" Brooke's voice echoed off the walls of one of the school's bathrooms. As they tried to always be, Sarah and Alison were with her, standing outside the stall that Brooke had sequestered herself inside.
"Hey, c'mon, Brooke," Sarah started, her tone comforting. "There's plenty of other people around. Besides, you don't need someone like him around. He dumped you on Valentine's Day, for Christ's sake!"
Alison recognized that Sarah had a point, but didn't think she was exactly going about it the right way. "His band's going nowhere, and it doesn't even look like he showers. He's totally not the guy for you." She smirked. "Besides, I heard him calling his new girlfriend 'Cleopatra'. His history sucks, or his spelling sucks. Either way, you're too smart for him."
Sarah grinned, and even Brooke broke through her sadness and vindication to smile. Maybe they were right. Maybe this was just a fluke. They were never even that serious. They had kissed a few times, but she didn't really find herself wanting (or needing) to feel that. She had her own ways of getting those same euphoric feelings, anyway. She needed Anthony like she needed the last boy she'd had in her life.
Her friends perked up when they heard the distinct sound of the stall door unlocking, and greeted Brooke with compassionate, caring looks when she stepped out. Her eyes still red, she walked over to the sink and turned on the water. "I'm gonna clean myself up. Then we can get out of here and hit lunch. Could one of you hold my hair back?" Sarah reached out to keep Brooke's hair under control while Alison looked on.
After a brief moment, the three girls left the bathroom together, Brooke looking a deal more presentable. All three knowing what she had meant when she had specifically said "hit lunch", they began walking through a series of out-of-the-way hallways until they came across one of the back doors of the school. While Sarah pushed open the door and Brooke kept watch, Alison pulled an innocuous piece of hard plastic – maybe from an electric razor cover, maybe from an old binder; one man's trash, at any rate – and placed it at the bottom of the door frame so it wouldn't lock behind them.
Closing the door carefully, Brooke looked to her friends and said, "I'll drive." Their lunch period was technically still going on, so they had maybe a half hour to get to the pizza place and get back to school without getting caught, but Brooke had done the run in less time before; all three of them knew it'd be no problem.
The three girls piled into Brooke's red VW Beetle – not by any means a brand new car, but it got her from point A to point B with minimal cramping for the passengers. Her parents had bought it for her a year ago, and she already had her provisional license, so technically she was driving illegally with both Sarah and Alison in the car, but she'd done it a million times before and had never been pulled over for it.
Regardless of legality, Brooke and company quietly peeled out of the school's parking lot and, in a matter of minutes, were only just getting out of the car at the best pizza place in the city. Loads better than what they served at Murakami, Brooke thought.
"It's a nice day out," Alison started, the group opening the door to their lunch spot and walking in. "We should eat on the second floor today." The second floor featured pizza al fresco – or at least, that was how its employees described it. Everyone else just called it open-air pizza. But Brooke and Sarah nodded in agreement as they approached the counter.
"Hey, Armando," Brooke said with a smile. "Uh, we'll have—"
Armando, standing behind the counter, cut her off. "Brooke! Sarah! Alison! I would be a very bad employee if I didn't know my favorite customers' orders!" The girls laughed along with him as he cut two slices of pepperoni and one of mushroom from the oven-fresh pizzas under the glass next to the counter.
Brooke and Sarah taking the pepperoni slices and Alison the mushroom, they paid for their food and waved back at him as they made their way to the staircase. "We'll be back tomorrow," Sarah called over her shoulder.
Brooke, having reached the top of the stairs first, almost fell backwards down them when she saw five very familiar faces scarfing down pizza at a table nearby. One particularly off-color face specifically stuck out at her. She even saw his lips move to wordlessly say two syllables that held increasing significance for her.
Sarah was first to Brooke's side, followed by Alison. "You okay?" the former asked, but after a quick look around, the latter moved to stand in front of Brooke.
"You want us to deal with short, green, and nerdy?" she asked. As if on cue, the boy in question stood up.
With him walking closer to them, Brooke shook her head. "You guys eat lunch. I'll take care of this." The way she had said it left no room for questions. Alison and Sarah taking their leave, Brooke bridged the gap between her and the green teenager. In the same tone, she said one thing to him.
"You and I need to have a talk."