Note: This is NOT a story about Mischa Barton. Mischa is just what we call Marissa Cooper.
Title: It's Not Easy Being Misch
Summary: Mischa comes to understand why Kermit the Frog found it so terrible to be green and spend each day the color of the leaves. As Mischa copes with the results of a Biology experiment gone horribly wrong, in which she becomes dependent on chloroplasts to survive, she comes to love and appreciate the pale nature of the skin she once took for granted.
Dedication: Love always to Abraham L., you are truly our moral compass and the light of our lives! Silver Beach, The Peas, and AP Biology teachers who've gone MAD! We'd also like to give mad props to our love, Campbell, a truly rad guy.
For disclaimers, please see notes at the end of the story. Thanks for reading and please review!
MISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHA
6CO2 + 6H2O + Sunlight--> C6H12O6 + 6O2
In the Harbor High science lab, the students of the AP Bio class are working diligently on their photosynthesis labs. Mischa and her partner Mary Camden are attempting to use their spectrophotometer to measure the photosynthetic rate of chloroplasts under varying conditions. Suddenly, a mad scientist bursts through the door! The class screams out in surprise, but then calms down when they realize the mad scientist is their Biology teacher. This mad scientist then rushes towards Mischa with a large syringe filled with bacterial plasmids with the gene for producing chlorophyll and hands her one. The mad scientist wants the class to take their photosynthesis lab a step further, by using biotechnology to genetically engineer bacteria into photosynthesizers. In order to do this, the class was required to cut the gene coding for chloroplasts from a plant's chromosome, using restriction enzymes. They were then to cut the bacterial plasmid with the same restriction enzyme, allowing the ends of the bacteria to bond to the "sticky" ends of the restriction fragment. DNA ligase was then introduced to seal them together. With the gene now in the plasmid, the plasmid is then reintroduced to the bacteria, which will then accept the new DNA and incorporate it into its genetic library.
Mischa accepts the bacterial plasmid she had prepared the day before from the mad scientist, and she then approaches her sample with the syringe, in order to mix this plasmid with the rest of the bacteria. However, she accidentally nicks an artery in her arm instead of reaching the petri dish of bacteria! In the shock of this incident, Mischa accidentally injects the whole syringe of bacterial plasmids into her blood stream.
Mischa, then in a panic, rushes off to the school nurse, while Mary Camden yells at Mischa for wasting all of their plasmids. Mischa bursts through the nurse's door, and the nurse glares at her angrily as she has to surrender in the game of Twister she had been enjoying with the rest of the school's staff, just to inspect Mischa. Fearing the mad scientist may not have properly cleaned the syringes, Mischa waits impatiently for the nurse to assess her situation. However, the nurse assures Mischa that the mad scientist is a very trustworthy individual, promising her that, "he's been here at the Harbor School for years, Mischa, and has supplied the AP Biology for almost as long as that, and no one has ever died. You'll be just fine."
So Mischa, assured no harm would come of the bacterial plasmid injection, headed off to her car, to begin her afternoon ritual of stalking that mom, Taryn. Mischa hops in her car and begins singing along to her favorite song "Say Goodnight and Go." As she was belting her favorite lyrics, "Follow you home / You've got your headphones on/ And you're dancing," Mischa pulls up to the Newport Yogalates center and heads in to grab a licorice flavored cup of Fro Yo with gummi bears, knowing that Taryn frequents this particular Fro Yo establishment.
While the clerk was fetching the licorice flavorings, Mischa hopped into a nearby empty Fro Yo container, and pulled out her night vision goggles. After a rousing afternoon of following Taryn to Yogalates, the school to pick up her children, the supermarket, a Swingers party, and of course a liquor store, Mischa made her way home.
Settling into her bed after a long day, she grabs a nice glass of tryptophan infused with extra calcium (or, as some might call it: milk) and prepares to sleep, all thought of accidental injections far from her mind. She checked under the bed and in her closet to be sure there were no monsters, boogeymen, sandmen, or pixies about and then promptly fell asleep.
MISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAMISCHAISCHA
The Next Morning...
Mischa awoke in the bright morning sunshine to check out her beautiful looks, and to her horror, rather than her usual pale appearance, Mischa was GREEN! She screamed loudly, waking Julie Cooper, Kaitlin (who was home for the summer under the bribe of allowing China to live in the home), and China. Kaitlin and Julie Cooper both came to yell at Mischa for disturbing them.
Julie Cooper, seeing Mischa's amphibian-like pallor, said, "Mischa, you've been drinking again, haven't you! You're so hung over that you have actually turned green! I wasn't sure that was even possible!"
Mischa then responds, "I swear I've only had cow's milk (with only the additives of tryptophan and calcium), none of that fermented sugar and starch has been in my body for at least three days! How dare you accuse me of abusing saturated hydrocarbons!"
Julie retorts, "Then what is wrong with you?"
Mischa, enraged, responds, "You really want to know what's bothering me? Do you really want to know what's on my mind? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH." Still in this rage, she catapults an inflatable Boohbah bed, which she purchased the day before at Target, at Julie Cooper.
Julie Cooper, insulted by Mischa's antics, then storms out, unwilling to help Mischa. So, Mischa, desperate for help, catches a ride from that small worm from Richard Scary, Lowly Worm, in his apple car, and makes her way to Harbor High in hopes that the mad scientist can help her.
Bursting through the door of the science lab, Mischa yells out for the mad scientist. He comes rushing in, arms encumbered with strange plants and bottles of hydrogen peroxide. "Oh what a tragedy!" he exclaims as soon as he sets eyes on Mischa. Mischa, knowing the scientist knows her condition must have arisen because of the bacterial plasmid injection, asks, "What! What has happened to me?"
Muttering to himself and not looking at Mischa, the mad scientist says, "This was not supposed to happen. You were supposed to be careful! Oh how terrible! What'll we do!"
Then, realizing Mischa was waiting for answers, he addressed her, "I'm sorry, Mischa, there is nothing I can do. You've injected yourself with a bacterial plasmid with a gene that allows for the production of chlorophyll. Your DNA then took up this gene, and your body is now producing chlorophyll. I'm sorry; you are now an autotroph." The mad scientist then walks out of the room, leaving Mischa in her misery.
Rushing out to the hallway, Mischa desperately searches for some support from her friends and classmates, as the mad scientist has only provided madness. Mischa just could not believe that she was no longer a secondary consumer and that she would now have to live her life as a primary producer, dependent on sunlight.
Mischa began her long trek down the school's main hallway.
To her right, she sees Uncle Jesse perched upon a giant grand piano, belting out her favorite song, "Forever." Although this event would ordinarily send Mischa out of the stratosphere with excitement, her melancholic state colored everything in her life, and even Uncle Jesse could not help her. So, she continued walking down the hallway.
She next spotted that guy Brad, who looks like a drug addict straight out of Clueless, Hocus Pocus, or some other 1990s film, from that kissing booth. Brad giggled when he saw Mischa's green skin and immediately began chanting, "Mischa is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S!" While Mischa would ordinarily have a ravenous craving after even one thought of a banana, she no longer even cared. Because she now produced her own food, she had no place in her life for treats such as bananas.
When Mischa next encountered Tigger bouncing giddily beside her, she didn't even join in, like she normally does.
She bypassed Joey Potter canoeing down the hallway, didn't even blink when she saw Conan performing the string dance and growling at her, and was even able to resist the Siren-like singing of the Sanderson sisters as they sang, "Come Little Children" or chanted, "a muck, a muck, a muck." Not even Tom Cruise standing right in the hallway, simultaneously interviewing Holly Fischer as a potential girlfriend and leading Scientology seminars could shake Mischa out of the shock of turning green.
She didn't even notice the boys who decided to strip in the hallways in order to trade clothing to confuse their teachers, nor did she hear it when someone screamed out in odd little song and kneeled in agony and made unnecessary hand gestures, in true Nick Carter style.
She didn't take the free sample of Tropicana orange juice infused with calcium and vitamin D that the mad scientist offered her, and she didn't even listen to his explanation of the health benefits that the calcium would offer in strengthening her bones, the muscles of her heart, or the neuron synapses in her brain. The Calcitonin hormone received no love from Mischa that day.
Mischa didn't blink when someone swallowed fire, like that guy in the beginning of Aladdin, and she didn't even accept a ride on the camel that Rory Gilmore was so excited about teaching her to ride, after having learned in that movie.
Though she normally has oodles of school spirit, Mischa didn't even care to participate in the school pep rally that was also going on in the hallway. While Captain Hook, Captain Jack Sparrow, and a child accused of piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America roused other students into frenzied excitement on behalf of the water polo team, Mischa walked on solemnly.
Mischa ignored investigative reporter Richard Quest as he tried to get the scoop on the very first autotrophic human. He tapped her shoulder, and Mischa responded with an icy glare. Quest shrugged and responded, "Sometimes you just gotta do what you just gotta do, if you wanna get the interview."
Mischa walked away and immediately found that crazy inventor from Back to the Future and Wayne Zolinsky, who both wanted to inspect her and learn how they, too, could create photosynthetic humans.
Angry, Mischa stormed away and immediately found Carl Linnaeus inspecting her, in order to try to put her into a classification system. Shocked, he decided he had found an entirely new kingdom, something neither fully plantae nor fully animalia.
Spotting her "friends" playing UNO while singing the newest Topanga song (the hottest new artist out of the Philadelphia area), Mischa made her way over, hoping the people who cared about her would accept her and her new color. However, when her "friends" spotted her they let out wild yelps of horror and ran from the scene, but not before throwing fresh eggs from the school's resident chicken directly at Mischa.
Dejected and heartbroken, Mischa headed for the door. She had to exit the school's dark corridors immediately, because the lack of sunlight was beginning to have catastrophic effects. Her limbs had begun to wilt, as she had not had any exposure to sunlight or water in quite some time now. She stepped through the door, and seeing the bright green leaves, Mischa compared her own coloring to those leaves and began singing:
It's not that easy being green,
Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.
When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold...
or something much more colorful like that.
It's not easy being green.
It seems you blend in with so many other ord'nary things.
And people tend to pass you over 'cause you're
not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
or stars in the sky.
Mischa finishes her song, and the school chicken walks up beside her. Mischa sits next to the chicken and strokes its hot pink feathers and sighs, "Well, at least I have you, Colonel."
They sit together, and Mischa looks at the green arm she has wrapped around the pink chicken. Suddenly, she exclaims, "See, Colonel, pink goes good with green!" The chicken nods.
The EndDisclaimers: We do not own Mischa (sadly), nor do we own the mad scientist, the hot pink chicken, Mary Camden, or Topanga and any of her musical compositions. We cannot lay claims to the study of AP Biology and cannot claim loving it either. We do not own Kermit, his song, or the color green. We also do not know how one's DNA would uptake genetic info that would bring on the production of chlorophyll, so please do not ask how this would work. We also do not own licorice Fro Yo, Yogalates, Taryn, or the stalkerish song "Say Goodnight and Go." Also, though we love them greatly, we do not own UNO, Boohbah blow-up furniture, or bacterial plasmids. We only wish we could have come up with the beautiful concepts that are Julie Cooper, Kaitlin Cooper, China, Lowly Worm, Uncle Jesse, Tigger, Joey Potter, Holly, the Sanderson Sisters (even though they scare us), calcium infused juice products, that guy from Aladdin, Rory Gilmore, Richard Quest, and that group of pirates we mentioned. We also don't claim ownership over the inventors from neither Back to the Future nor Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The only form of ownership we have over the song "Hollaback Girl" is the form in which it's totally on every mix CD we create. We don't own that guy, whose name we think might be Brad, from that Kissing Booth scene in season one of The O.C., and we also do not claim to have thought of the beyond brilliant idea of Mischa screaming and catapulting furniture. We have no rights over vehicles made of apples, and we also have nothing, nor want nothing, to do with Tom Cruise or any of his current endeavors. We don't own Carl Linneaus or any of his classification systems. If you've gotten this far, you'll probably agree that it's not certain we even own a place within any of his normal classifications, particularly within the genus/species group of Homo Sapien. We also do not own that idea that pink and green go "good" together, since we got the idea from the show Wicked. Also, since they seem to be quick to sue, we have no connection to the RIAA and have absolutely no claims over the association, any of its affiliated artists, or any of their songs. Thanks for reading, and please review!