The Tay-ming of the Shrew
"I keep telling you, you disgusting little slimeball, stop following me around, or else you're going to get creamed so hard that Dairyland is gonna have a new star attraction!" The desperation of the girl's voice was only matched with the feebleness of the insult she'd slung. Nevertheless, the words rung loudly through the halls of Royal Woods Middle School, and one person was around to respond to it.
LYNN LOUD: HALL MONITOR.
Lynn loved the rush that came with being able to sprint through the halls without being rung up for it, the thrill as she dived in between conflicts, the giddy pleasure she felt on writing someone up for something and leaving it to a higher authority figure to enforce. Sure, sometimes she got some sour looks, but who were they going to report her too? A teacher? If they did their jobs properly, you wouldn't need monitors. In this crummy world, the best you got was Lynn Loud…
…Who was The Best, of course, so maybe it wasn't so bad…
Lynn had no time to continue pondering, as she raced down the locker-filled hallway by Mr. Mu's room, desperately trying not to make a siren sound with her mouth (maybe she could put it on her phone or something), seeking out the sound of the disturbance. She turned the corner, already lining up her righteous speech to lay down on the perpetrator. Or the victim, if the perp had already managed to bounce.
"Alright, Lame-wads! The craziness ends here, and it's time for Lynn-sanity instead! So, get your butts back against the wall, and don't make me ask—"
Lynn's voice faltered, as she noticed who she was talking to.
Splayed out on the ground was her little wiener brother, Lincoln, looking slightly more bruised than she remembered him being that morning. And standing above him was Taylor. Lynn knew her from the school softball team, which was ironic, since Taylor definitely wasn't a team-player. She had a hell of a swing though.
Lynn wasn't a genius by any means, but she ha seen Lincoln lain out from a fight enough (often from her trying out some new kata's out on him during sparring) to know that he'd just been clobbered by the girl.
"Hey, Taylor!" Lynn said, starting to go red in the face. "Have you been beating up on my little bro? Cause if you have, I'm gonna get mighty ticked off." She cracked her knuckles for dramatic effect, then tried to cover her flinch of pain when they did pop enough to be audible.
"Loud?" Taylor asked, finally comprehending who was talking to her, and who had busted up her beatdown. "You're related to this little creep?"
"You're darn right I am." Lynn fired back. "And if you lay a finger on him again while I'm around, I'm gonna go Medici on your butt." History was not her forte.
"Medieval, Lynn…" Lincoln said, groaning from the floor.
"Quiet, Stinkoln, the girls are talking now." She said, maintaining eye contact with the lanky eighth-grader.
"I ain't scared of you, pipsqueak." Taylor said, squaring her shoulders. "And I was in the right for giving your little bro a trouncin', anyway. The little creeper has been following' me around the school for the last two weeks. He's always just… There. Around. I can't scratch my own butt without being afraid to find him behind me trying to sniff it."
"Last I checked, this school was a free country." Geography wasn't Lynn's forte either. "People are allowed to be wherever their business is. Just cause you keep seeing him around, doesn't mean he's got anything to do with you… Unless he's spat in your cereal in some other way, in which case, I'm all ears to hear you out on it."
Taylor gave Lynn a scowl that an elderly man seeing kids stepping onto his lawn would be envious about.
"I don't have explain myself anymore to you, cop. And if your little runt of a brother comes near me again, I won't hesitate to pound him so deep into the ground, he comes out all the way in Connecticut." Taylor wasn't particularly good at geography either.
Lynn stood her ground as Taylor walked past, checking the sporty Loud as she did. Lincoln remained lain out on the floor until Taylor had turned the corner, after which Lynn promptly hoisted him up by his lapel and onto his feet.
"Thanks, Lynn…" Lincoln replied, his eyes failing to focus in a single direction.
"No worries, bro. All in a day's work for a big sister…And Hall Monitor." She said the second part with a slight smirk. Exercising her power felt good. And it felt even better when she was protecting the weak and innocent, or whatever. "But if she tries to clobber you again, just say the word and I can have her bike impounded in the teachers' lounge before you can say tater-tots."
"I don't think she has a bike…" Lincoln answered warily.
"Details, details…" Lynn waved of his criticism.
"Well, uh… Thanks again, Lynn… I'll see you out the front after school…" He gave her a shaky finger-gun, and started to sidle off back towards the bathrooms. Lynn guessed he was going to change his undies from peeing himself from Taylor whaling on him. Or from seeing his big sis's awesomeness on display.
Lynn looked around, and when she was sure nobody was looking, she struck a pose of heroic confidence, much as she had seen in many of Lincoln's wiener books. She was glad he was gone, since if he saw her, he'd never live it down.
Taking another cautious look around, her eyes fixed on a small ball of paper on the ground where her brother was laying. Any other time she would've ignored it, or at least ordered someone else to pick it and put it in the trash, but her rare, seldom used detective instincts were kicking in.
She picked up the balled-up bit of paper and unfurled it. It was an envelope sealed with a love-heart.
She looked horrified as she saw the initials on the back of "L.L.", and, trembling as she did so, she turned to look at the other side of the envelope.
"To Taylor" was written in her brother's tell-tale nerdy scrawl.
Crap.
It was happening again.
She took out her mobile and immediately began to assemble the numbers of her sisters into a new mass text.
They had work to do.
Taylor grabbed her bag from her locker, slung it over her shoulder, and walked through the silent Middle-school halls.
Mr. Mu had gotten her for detention after he found her giving that Elliot guy, a pink-belly. It was a total pile of crap, since Anderson and Pablo were holding down his arms and legs, but somehow, she was the one who had to take an hour after school scraping gum out from under the art-room's desks. She knew the other two would be laughing their butts off about it tomorrow the next day as well.
As she muttered under her breath about her victim's unnaturally sensitive skin (seriously, it went bright crimson in like twenty seconds, it wasn't normal), she pushed open the front doors of the school. The bus was long-gone, so she had a long walk ahead of her to get home. As the doors slammed shut behind her, and she descended the concrete steps of the school's front, her eyes dropped upon a familiar face.
"No friggin' way. Stupid little sonnofa…" She said to herself as she grimaced.
The little Loud wiener. Linrod, or whatever. Standing out in the middle of the sidewalk, standing in the breeze, his white hair looking weird and dumb in the sunlight.
Taylor remembered the kid didn't have a good reason to be there. School had finished an hour back, and she knew he took the same bus as her, since him and his little nerd herd had managed to get them kicked of the backseats of the bus. They'd somehow managed to get Ernie, the guy that let kids throw firecrackers out of the windows of his bus for years, into laying down the law. Now the backseats were taken up by sixth and seventh-grade babies.
But now the little geek was following her around in the halls between classes. She'd even found him going through the cafeteria during her lunch period. Like he was tactically using bathroom breaks to stalk her or something. She was pretty sure if she didn't keep her gym clothes in her locker between classes, she'd find him in the girl's shower-room sniffing at her sneakers or something.
Well, no they were outside of school, and his sister, who Taylor had to admit, had a few skills to back up her threats, wasn't there to save his neck. This time she was going to him a full 360° wedgie, so that the only underpants he would ever sniff again would be his own.
"You." She growled, approaching him.
The word seemed to shock him out of his staring off into space like idiot, and he seemed to jump back and fold into himself, cowering as he approached. She felt a tiny bit satisfied that he still knew that she wasn't going to take his creepiness lying down.
"Oh, hey, uh… What a surprise seeing you here, Taylor…" He flubbed and fumbled with his words, as she neared six feet of him.
She pointed out a finger, wielding it with the force and menace of a knifepoint.
"You have five seconds to give me an explanation about why you're out here, kid. So spill."
The white-haired boy seemed to lose the small amount of verbal power he'd had a moment before and simply opened and closed his mouth mutely. Taylor, quite charitably, did wait the five seconds she'd asked for.
Nobody could say she didn't give him a chance.
"Not so chatty for once, huh? Alright, I'll fill in for ya. What I see is a little creepazoid crawling around, following me like a little rat. Someone who can't even let a lady experience the joy of detention without him taking the opportunity to get his kicks. Well, you messed with the wrong girl, Lame-o."
The kid seemed to gasp as she said the last word, and then began to step backwards unsteadily.
"I'm nipping this problem in the bud. Now." She didn't have any sleeves to roll up, but rest assured, if she did have them, she definitely would've done so. She raised a fist, ready to give a little symmetry to his unchipped tooth.
As the boy took a step backwards, a sudden roaring of an engine seemed to suddenly arrive without warning, and both he and Taylor's heads turned to see the source of the noise: An ancient white and blue minivan rocketed towards them. It was slowing down, but not nearly enough. The brakes were probably so ancient that they'd probably forgotten how to make replacements for them.
Taylor watched in slow motion as the kid stumbled backwards off the edge of the curb and into the path of the vintage vehicle. Taylor's closed fist suddenly sprung open as she used the momentum that she was about to use to punch him out, to instead grab him. Her fingers made a desperate grasp towards his lapel…
…And missed.
The minivan reached a crunching halt, bopping the white-haired boy and making him fly a few feet away. Taylor looked on, horrified to see him lying on the ground, facedown and writhing sluggishly.
"Jesus Christ!" Taylor said, the enormity of the situation that had just occurred.
Desperately looking for help from the driver of the car that had just struck the kid, her eyes instead met the individual in the passenger-side.
Lynn Loud. Who was pointing a finger accusingly, right at her.
"That's her." The dwarfish girl said, grimly.
Taylor took a step back. Was she accusing her of getting her brother hit? Taylor supposed it must've looked like she was backing him right onto the road…
"No! I didn't mean for him to get, hit! I—"
Her protests were cut off as the back door of the van slid open, and a small crowd of girls swarmed out like cockroaches leaving a half-eaten can of beans that had just been kicked.
In moments, she was surrounded. By blondes, brunettes and even a black-haired little emo. She vaguely recognised beaver-faced girl and a punk who used to go to her school a few years earlier. A tall blonde one with sunglasses was holding a friggin' toddler. She might've been able to punt one of them, but then she'd bet that the rest would descend on her. She was boned.
"You're sure this is the one, Lynn?" A tall blonde teen said, hopping out of the driver's seat.
"Yup. This is the one who's beating our baby brother up." Lynn said, descending from the van's step, and striding towards Taylor.
"But… I… You hit him with your car! You've gotta get him to a hospital or something!" Taylor said, pointing of towards the boy, hoping that if they were his family, as some of them seemed to be, that they'd drop their attention on her to look after him.
The alpha blonde looked over to the fallen form of her brother and frowned.
"Literally not again." She said, rolling her eyes, leaving Taylor stunned with her response. "Lisa, do you mind taking a look?"
"Affirmative." Taylor looked down to see a shrimpish little kid, maybe a couple of feet tall or so, come walking out of the collective crowd to go over to the collapse heap of white-haired pre-teen that was lying on the road in front of the van. She picked up the boy's head, and began prodding and laying her fingers on his head and neck. Then she took out a small penlight from her pocket, and began to shine the thing in his face.
"Vitals seem to be within acceptable parameters, though judging from his pupil's diminished reflexes, I would wager he has a minor concussion of some kind." She then proceeded to pull out a frankly enormous needle from a back-pocket. "This should do the trick."
The little girl proceeded to shove the syringe into the boy's neck, much to Taylor's horror.
"A small concoction of uppers, downers, tranquilizers, and a compound of my own concoction that should leave him extra susceptible to our orde—I mean, gentle suggestions." The girl gave the most unconvincing smile that Taylor had ever seen. "I will run a more thorough physical examination later tonight."
"Okay. Can he understand me?" The alpha blonde said to the little brunette.
"Affirmative." The little girl said, walking back over towards the group.
"Good." The Alpha blonde said, with a soft smile. "Alright, listen up twerp. There's no more room left in Vanzilla, so you'll have to walk back home. When you get there, I want you to go straight upstairs, and rest back in your room. And if I see you downstairs playing videogames or reading comics, I'm literally going to turn you into a human pretzel, got it?"
The boy rose from the ground like a zombie, and stared at his assumably older sister's commands. He gave a sluggish nod, and then turned and began to shamble off in the opposite direction as Taylor and the others.
Taylor now realised she had a brief window of opportunity to escape while they were distracted, and tried to very subtly edge out of the crowd of collected girls. Her left hand was grabbed by a ropy arm, clad in a braided-leather bracelet, while her opposite shoulder was powerfully grasped by the powerful grasp of Lynn Loud.
"Where do you think you're going, brah?"
"Uh… home?" Taylor asked, hopefully.
"Very funny." Said the buck-toothed brunette. Luan. Loud. The class-clown who managed to get the entire school's staff trapped in a single bathroom one April Fool's.
"You're coming for us for a little ride…"
Taylor looked down to see the source of the voice, and saw the tiara-framed face of a little blonde girl. There was a fire in her eyes and a violence in the wide smile that she flashed, that convinced Taylor that she might actually be the devil.
She felt herself being shoved bodily into the back of the van, and could only look on in terror at the slowly shrinking figure of the creepy boy that she regularly beat up.
Something told her that wherever the ride went, she wouldn't enjoy it.