This chapter draws inspiration from "Terror on Cupcake Street".
I readily acknowledge that this isn't my best work, but I have been stuck on it for awhile and have recently gotten half a dozen requests that I start posting again to this, so I figured that I would snowplow through the next prompt and hope for smoother
writing next time. If I stall too long, the writing doesn't turn out well, so skipping forward is likely a favour to us all. :D
I hope this "short and sweet" bite of story finds you all well and happy. Blessings for good days!
...
To set the record straight, Jade West did not like parades. Let that fact stand. She may have compromised momentarily after hearing that any performance on the parade float would be televised, and she was smart enough to detect a good opportunity to promote her skills. It was not true compromise, not really. It was a strategic marketing strategy.
At least that was how she justified it to herself.
But.
She still did not like parades.
Also?
Why did it have to be Cat who was picked to choose the theme of their float? As much as Jade loved Cat, she did NOT like her aesthetic, and being forced to decorate a giant cupcake float while Cat giggled uncontrollably for a week was not Jade's idea of a good time.
Also not her idea of a good time? Being forced to wear candy pajama onesies in public. It was all smirks and snickers when she thought Cat was just torturing the boys - Beck looked ridiculous, although still inexplicably hot (which irritated her as much as it amused and confounded her), but Andre and Robbie were total dorks. However, at Tori's flat question, "You know she wants us all to wear 'em?", Jade's amusement crashed. She turned to Cat with folded arms.
"I will pop your head like a zit," she stated harshly. Cat cowered a little with her hands up over her ears.
"Graphic!" she said reproachfully, looking at her best friend. With that sulky pout and sad chocolate eyes, she was a dangerous package of cuteness. And, oh! Jade knew she was in for it.
She let the others think that she only ended up wearing the candy onesie because it was required by some teacher, but the truth was that it only took a record-breaking measly twenty minutes of Cat's wheedling at home that night before Jade broke down and agreed to wear the least miserable of the candy onesie prints. The idea that she had been so easily manipulated by her "cupcake friend" had her on the very edge of all her nerves by the time the cupcake was finished and they were all in "costume" (the only way she could think of this whole disaster without wanting to die of shame for wearing the most babyish and embarrassing sleepwear she could imagine publicly).
Jade spent the evening on the float in a terrible mood, snapping at Cat over her hyperness because how else was the emotionally inept teen going to convey how annoyed she was at the hold Cat inexplicably had on her, making her love her despite all odds?
It really wasn't fair - at least until the inevitable drama of the evening gave her something morbid to laugh at as compensation for her current humiliation. And then (once they were all safe again) Jade had some of the best laughs of the night.
Still, she did cringe any time Beck used the nickname "Cupcake" for Cat for the next few weeks. Could she be blamed?
