Andre walks with Cat to their next class. She's chattering on about smiling, and he loves it because A) it's super entertaining, and B) he doesn't even have to contribute. Anyways, they're walking and he sees Tori trying to shove a French horn into her locker. Poor French horn.
"Tori!" he calls out to her.
"What's up?" Cat asks. She's got this flower in her hair and it looks pretty. Anyways, Tori goes,
"I'm having a horn problem!" she yells, flinging her arms out, exasperated. "Why do I have to play an instrument anyway?"
"Everyone at Hollywood Arts has to play an instrument," Cat states, but she looks like she doesn't enjoy that rule too much. However, Andre knows for a fact that Cat is an excellent pianist, guitar player, and drummer. Plus, the girl's always messing around on her little DJ machines.
"Okay, well I sing," Tori says, and Andre can't help but think that she's really cute. Her hand flies up to her neck and she says, "My throat is my instrument. I'm a throat player." Andre shrugs.
"Doesn't count."
"And it sounds kind of gross," Cat adds. Andre laughs cause his lil' friend is hilarious. Shaking his head, he turns back to Tori.
"Why'd you pick the French horn?" he asks. Tori shrugs and looks down at her horn again.
"I don't know. I like French fries, French toast…"
"One time, when I was eating French toast at a restaurant," Cat cuts in. Andre wonders where Cat's going with this, "I started laughing, and then I started choking," here Cat's face grows solemn, and Andre bites back a chuckle, "so the lady who ran the restaurant made me leave." After that, there's a sort of silence while Andre lets it sink in, and Tori just wonders what happened. "So let's hear your horn!" Cat says with a smile.
"Yeah, play that funky music white girl," Andre encourages. Tori makes a face at him and replies,
"You know I'm half Latina."
"Then hit it muchacha!" Andre laughs. Tori leans down and places his lips on the mouthpiece, and Andre can't help but think about how good those same lips would be at kissing. He's rudely (and loudly) awakened from his daydreaming when Tori begins to actually play the horn.
It sounds a bit like an elephant. A really constipated elephant that's being eaten alive by a tiger and is falling down a hole. Yeah. Kinda like that.
"I think it's broken," Tori comments, and Cat nods from where she's standing next to Andre.
"Here, let me fix it," Andre says and holds his hands out for the 'broken' horn. Tori hands it to him, and he begins to play the way he learned from Cat's brother (before he fell out of a building and went crazy).
He sees Cat clap and step towards him, smiling. He bets she misses the sound of that horn. Cat's brother used to be so good. Then his parents pulled him out of school because of all trouble he kept getting into.
"It's not broken!" the girl giggles to Tori, too wrapped up in the music to really think about her words. Andre feels a little bad for making fun of Tori by being so good, but he figured that Cat deserves it. Plus, Andre misses the horn.
"Now, if I throw a punch at Cat, like this," Russ is saying while he positions Cat. Tori's still nervous about this whole 'stage fighting' thing. She thought that guy was beating up Beck! So what if she tried to stop him?
Anyways, Russ swings at Cat's face, and she gasps.
"It's easy to see that my fist didn't connect with her face!" he says.
"Thank you," she responds earnestly. Tori can't help but wonder what's up with Cat. Did she expect him to hit her? Russ gives her an odd look, then repositions her so that she's facing the audience.
"But if we stage it from a different angle, then," he's saying, "like I showed you," that was directed at Cat, "sound effect ready?" he asks Mr. Stevens.
"All set," the man replied.
"To the audience or camera, it'll look like this," he says. Tori leans forward in her seat, on guard in case something goes wrong. She's a little protective of Cat, because not only is the bright girl pretty much her only female friend in the whole school, but also for some reason it just feels natural to protect the impulsive redhead.
Russ swings, and the sound comes at just the right moment. Cat's head snaps to the right, and she gasps. It's so convincing that Tori almost jumps out of her seat. Then Cat brings her hands away from her face and smiles.
"I'm okay, everyone," she reassures them, and they all clap for Cat and Russ.
Tori's stabbing her lettuce, and Cat feels bad for it. It didn't do anything wrong. Tori's just nervous for her fight scene with Jade. Cat's glad that she has Beck because he's a great actor, and she knows that he won't hurt her.
"Just look at her," Tori growls.
"Who?" Andre asks, confused.
"Jade!" Tori snaps back. "I guarantee you she's telling Beck all about how she's gonna punch me when we do our scene."
"I wonder if mirrors work in outer space," Cat says, because scientists haven't figured out if there's antimatter, or dark matter, or just no matter at all yet, and she hopes that when Russia finally builds that moon base they've been working on since 2006, she'll be allowed to move there, and when she goes, she wants to be able to know how she looks!
Andre and Tori both give her strange looks, and she realizes that she didn't explain herself, but she doesn't care enough to clarify. Tori shrugs after shooting Andre a look and continues,
"I mean, what am I gonna do if she really hits me?"
"Bleed? Burst into tears?" Andre guesses, and Cat holds back a giggle.
"I'm serious," Tori whines, and Cat zones out, thinking about the word mirror. It's such a funny word.
"Did you know the word mirror has only six letters, and half of them are Rs?" Cat asks, because it's the first thing she thinks of, and she likes voicing her thoughts.
"Haven't you and Jade been rehearsing?" Andre asks, sounding skeptical about the idea of Jade smacking Tori in the face. Cat agrees with him. Jade's not that mean. She's just dark and kind of scary.
"Yeah, yesterday after school and this morning during study hall."
"And did she hit you for real?" Andre presses.
"No, cause she probably to wait and do it in front of the whole class so she can humiliate me," Tori argues. Cat doesn't understand that, because if Jade really smacked Tori in the face, no one would laugh at Tori. They'd probably just tell Jade it was mean of her to do that. Then they'd get Tori an icepack.
"Well, if she does, she loses half a letter grade," Andre says with a note of finality in his voice.
"Great," Tori says sarcastically. "So she gets an A- and I get a broken eye and a black nose." Andre looks confused. He starts,
"I think you meant-"
"I know what I meant!" Tori snaps.
"My dog has a black nose. It's so cute, like a baby meatball!" Cat says poking her nose, because her dog is really cute and she wants Tori to know that.
"Meatballs are brown," Andre says carefully. It still sets Cat off because when her brother makes meatballs they end up black, but they eat them anyways because her brother is calm when he's cooking.
"You're so mean to me!" she cries and grabs her backpack. Then she storms away to find someone else to sit with.
"Come on," Robbie begs Trina. "Go out with me on Saturday night." He doesn't want her to go out with him, but he sees Cat walking by out of the corner of his eye, and he wants to make a scene so she'll notice him.
"I've already got plans," Trina says, looking away, and Robbie laughs cause, really? No one invites Trina anywhere because no one likes her.
"Sunday night," he persists, watching Cat discreetly.
"You make me sick," Trina says, shaking her head.
"Monday!"
"No!"
"Wednesday!" Robbie starts to raise the volume when he sees Cat looking in his direction.
"Uh oh, she's getting up," Rex says.
"Trina! Wait! Baby!" He adds the last word because Cat's right behind him now, and he wants her to think that he's got girls lined up or something.
"What's the matter?" she asks in that way of hers that makes it sound like she really cares about your problems.
"Trina's in denial," Robbie says, looking down at his food now because Cat's sitting close to him now, and he's afraid that if he looks into her eyes, he's gonna forget what he was talking about.
"You're still on that?" she asks, and just listening to her voice is enough to make Robbie's knees weak. Rex is definitely not ruining this for him.
"She loves me!" Robbie says, hoping to maybe strike some jealousy in Cat. Yeah right, that girl doesn't have a malicious bone in her body. Robbie's eyes drift to her beautiful, red-velvet hair. She has a pink flower in it today, and she looks extra pretty. She probably doesn't even try.
"It was a stage kiss! She was acting!" Cat denies, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. Her voice has risen, and she's probably fed up with Robbie, but he keeps pushing the subject.
"You didn't feel the kiss. A girl can't fake that kind of heat," he insists. While he's talking, she rolls her eyes and raises her right eyebrow. He notices because he's always paying attention to everything she does. This expression is especially cute. "I don't care if she tells me a thousand times that it didn't mean anything," he rambles, not really paying attention to what he's saying.
Then she brings her left arm up, places her hand on the back of his neck and pulls him towards her. She cuts him off in the most exhilarating way – she kisses him. Robbie has been waiting for this kiss since seventh grade when he first fell in love with the spontaneous, sunny girl.
Stars explode behind his closed eyelids, and he makes a funny choking noise in the back of his throat out of surprise. She's so good, moving her lips against his in ways that make him forget how to breathe. He wonders how many boys she has kissed for her to know how to kiss that way. He hopes he doesn't bite her or something stupid like that, because he's never really done this before, and he wants it to be as special for her as it is for him. It's passionate, it's tender, and it's…
"See?" she says, her voice high and carefree. Robbie can't believe it, and the first thing that tumbles out of his mouth is,
"I want you to meet my parents." She almost chokes on her carrot, and she gives him that look that says you're a weirdo. God, how can she be so gorgeous and so… so perfect? She doesn't even know it.
In fact, she seems to have forgotten the kiss completely, or at least it didn't affect her in the slightest. Now she's sipping her lemonade and watching Jade get splashed with soda or something. She's just so cute. Robbie's so in love.