Chapter Two

A Chapter by Indigo Oswald

Cassi fails to become friends with Finn and Ali starts pranking her. Meanwhile, their mom gets sick and the Austrians start becoming more active.

CHAPTER TWO

As it turns out I didn’t have to read that stupid booklet because we read it the today in social studies. What a waste of time that I could have been doing something productive… like messing around on the computer watching YouTube videos.

The bell rings after second period and I awkwardly stand up, wondering again if I should follow through with my sister’s plan and try to be friends with Finn. I scoop my binder off the filthy desk and kick my chair into the crevice underneath. Shifting my binder to my left arm, I pick up my social studies textbook with my free hand and I head towards the door.

I don’t want to seem like a creeper by sitting with Finn randomly at lunch. I mean, it’s not like I need people thinking more bad things about me.

I stop at my locker and precariously hold all of my things with my left arm as I try to one handedly twist the right combination into the lock. When it doesn’t open I kick it angrily until it shudders and flings open. I violently shove my stuff on top of my backpack. I slam my locker right as a teacher walks by, causing them to shake their head while scowling. I hate it when teachers do that, especially when you don’t even have them for anything.

I walk alone down the now empty hallway.

“I can avoid Finn for today….” I mutter to myself.

I run my hand across the cold and banged up locker doors as I turn a corner. A whoosh of icy wind meets me when I open the door. I shudder and pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt over my hands as I step out onto the sidewalk. The thing about living up here is that you think it’s going to be a nice couple of days and then the weather changes drastically in one night. You have to be prepared for everything. Once it hadn’t snowed for the whole winter and then we had a giant snowstorm in April.

The light grey sidewalk was starting to get flecked with water draining from the dark clouds above. I sit on the steps leading up to the gym, then, almost half a second later I get up. I hike up the slightly muddy hill to the track, where a bunch of seventh graders are running.

I pull my iPod out of my jacket pocket and stuff the shiny white ear buds in, not even bothering to hide them. Mp3s aren’t allowed at our school at any time of the day but for some reason it doesn’t bother the P.E. teachers. They just look right over them and act as if they were never there.

I trudge around the inside of the muddy trail as slowly as possible just to annoy the seventh graders, who are being forced to run as fast as they can for the entirety of their laps. Almost every one of them glares at me as they pass.

My music is turned up just loud enough to where I can’t hear anything else. Quietly, I hum along.

I turn my head down and watch the ground. With every minute the ground becomes darker and more watery until almost my entire feet are covered with mud.

I glance up.

Everyone is off the track.

“Holy crap!” I shout, ripping the white cords dangling from my ears away from my face. With my music turned up so loud I hadn’t heard the bell ring. I sprint down the muddy hill, almost falling about fourteen times. I throw open the doors to the gym and violently push the door to the girl’s locker room out of my way. I strip off my pants halfway to my locker and throw them across the room. Panicked, I spin the lock and the door swings open, making a loud clang as it hits the locker next to it.

I shove on my gym shorts and run out the door and into the gym. Everyone turns as I sprint across the gym and skid into my squat spot, falling into a cross-legged position.

The gym teacher glares up at me and, with excessive flourish, makes a mark on the attendance clipboard.

I keep my head down and wait for everyone to stop looking at me and start gossiping again.

The teacher motions for us to come closer. “So I want you to split into groups of four and get a volley ball. Work on your sets and serves. Last time I saw a lot of good ones, but you guys need to work on getting the volleyball right in the groove of your arm.” He pauses. “Alright, go get in your groups.”

I awkwardly stand up and look toward my old group of friends. Slowly, I shuffle nearer to them until I’m right behind them.

I open my mouth, about to ask if I can work with them. Then, right as sound starts to come out of my mouth, someone"something taps on my shoulder. I whip around, eyebrows scrunched together.

“Yes?” I hiss.

Finn’s eyes widen. “Uh, never mind.”

Wait… am I supposed to be annoyed that I blew that chance? Maybe a little, but I don’t really want to work in a group with him anyway.

Clenching my hands, I slightly raise my eyebrows and spin on the balls of my feet to face my old friends. They stare at me like I’m insane.

“S**t.”

“Do you see how short her shorts are?”

Obviously this wasn’t going the way I hoped.

Scowling, I grab onto the hem of my shorts and pull it down so that it’s covering as much of my legs as possible. I stomp away, nearly tripping over my untied laces, and ending up in a group with two boys that had unfortunately Beiber-looking hair and a girl with freckles covering every square inch of her skin.

As I flail hopelessly to hit the volleyball I get more and more annoyed. One, my shorts are not two short, thank you very much. Two, I really don’t have any friends which, three, means I should really follow my, four, little sister’s advice. And even though I, five, dislike Finn to the point of wanting him to burn in Hell, I, six, think I’m actually going to non-awkwardly be nicer to him.

Deep in thought, I don’t notice that the volleyball is headed for me and not Beiber-Hair 1. So, of course, (seven) the volleyball hits me directly in the mouth.

My mouth bleeds all over for the rest of the day, getting in the way of pretty much everything I do. I’ve still got a stained white washcloth stuffed in the left side of my mouth when I flop onto the couch at home.

Two hands land on my stomach with unneeded force and I groan with unneeded volume.

“So how did it go?” Ali asks, tucking her short fiery hair behind her ears so that it isn’t hanging in her face while she looms over me.

“Wha?” I ask through a mouthful of rag.

“Are you and Finn friends now?”

I scowl and rip the washcloth out of my mouth and rub it and its bloody goodness all over the little crap’s face.

“Go. Away.” I snarl. “My mouth has been bleeding all over the fracking school for the last three hours and everyone thinks I’m even more of a w***e than before. I. Do not. Feel. Like talking.”

“I’m going to have to talk to you sooner or later.”

“Later.”

A few hours later after my mouth has stopped bleeding Ali comes back.

“So…”

“What, Ali?” I sigh. “Just ask me.”

“Finn?”

Oh, crap. On one hand, I don’t really care about being friends with Finn… but on the other Ali might, like, kill me in my sleep or something if I don’t report some sort of progress.

“Uh…”

Ali scowls.

“Yeah, actually.”

“Damn right.” Ali mutters.

I can feel my eyes widen. I’m really glad I said that, I wonder what would’ve happened if I told the truth.

“So, you’ll have his phone number?”

I stare at her for a minute. “Yeah, I do.” You know there is something horribly wrong when a fourteen year old girl is afraid of her nine year old sister.

“Text him.”

What? How the crap am I supposed to do this.

“Now, please.”

I slowly, unsurely pull my phone. Still looking at her determined face, I slide it open. Then I nervously open up a new text message.

Ali is staring me down as if my life depends on this.

Panicking, I type in a random number then ‘whats up’.

I reluctantly press send and slide the phone shut. Almost immediately it starts vibrating.

‘whos this’

‘silly, its cassi’

‘?’

‘cassi from school you gave me your # today’

With every text Ali looks more and more suspicious.

There’s a long pause before my phone vibrates again. ‘uh wrong number...?’

Ali rips my phone out my hands. “Uh huh.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so.”

“You can’t just make friends in one day, you little crap.” I shout. “I don’t even want to be friends with him.”

Ali puts on a look that makes her seem as if she thinks she knows everything just because she spends all her freakin’ free time hanging around mom. “I know you’re angry but this is something you have to do. This Finn boy may be annoying to you but you should just power through it.” I can’t tell if she’s being serious or making fun of mom. “You have a deal.”

I stare blankly.

“Power through it... as in you’ve got yourself a new friend tomorrow after school.”

I quietly use only the balls of my feet to make my way from the front door to my room. I can’t hear Ali anywhere in the house but that doesn’t mean she isn’t lurking in the kitchen waiting for exactly the right moment to jump out and start pelting me with what ever fruit she can find. Another day has gone by and guess what I’ve failed to do?

Talk to anyone named, or, in fact, even friends with Finn.

Slowly and silently I place my hand on the doorknob. The knob creaks as I, as if I’m arthritic, turn it. The door shudders, sounding ominously loud in the peacefulness of the house. I inaudibly breath in, not letting my heels touch the floor as the door opens inch by inch.

Out of the blue, a fit of coughing echoes throughout the house. Starting in my mom’s room and shaking every door and window.

I squeal, jumping, a shiver making it’s way up my spine, while I fall through the door and face-planting into the ground. Could my mom have picked a better time to cough?

I’m staring at the floor when a cascade of unexpected liquid covers my back and head. A thunderous clang from my right causes me to flinch. A red plastic bucket, of course. The same one I used to fill with sand at the beach when I was three. I gingerly close and re-open my eyes, watching the beige sludge drip from my bangs. Gently I raise my hand and flick my bangs out of my face so that the unknown substance isn’t leaking onto my face.

“What the hell is this?!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

I can hear the groan of my mom’s bed as she leaps up, along with the thud of her feet hitting the floor. Her door flings open, crashing into the wall. I imagine I must look extremely amusing, half my body inside my room, half out, covered in some mysterious pale brown muck, but when she catches sight of my lower half in the hall she doesn’t start laughing or anything. She shrieks and noisily runs to my side.

“What happened to you?” She squeals.

I pull myself to my feet, picking up the red bucket. I turn around to face my mom. Then, determinedly, I push past her and sprint, screeching insanely, into Ali’s room.

“What. Did. You. Do?”

Ali looks up from her book. She’s sitting on her bed, cross-legged, hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Innocent-acting little she-devil.

I scream and lunge myself onto her bed, bucket raised above my head. Ali screams right along with me as I bring the bucket down on her little brainpan.

Mom rushes into the room, flailing her arms just like I was doing in volleyball. “Cassi Marie Tyler.”

Does she think just saying my name is going to stop me? Yeah, right.

The sludge drips all over her bed. I violently swing my arms around, hitting her at every possible angle.

My mom wraps her arms around me from the back and pulls me off Ali.

Still screaming, I flail, trying to get back into the position where I can beat Ali’s guts out. Feeling like a little toddler who doesn’t want to take a bath, I kick my mom in the stomach. Her arms loosen just enough for me to wriggle out of her grasp. I fall to the wood floor on my knees and quickly scramble back up.

“Mom!” Ali shrieks as I bring the bucket down on her head again.

Mom grabs each of my arms , with a great amount of effort, pulls me off the bed and drags me across the now beige covered ground towards the door.

With one last surge of anger I hurl the pail at Ali, watching as the last remnants of goo fly out and through the air. The bucket hits her in the face, and, like any small kid would, she starts crying.

Mom groans and pulls me faster. Halfway out the door she starts having a coughing fit and sling my body around, hitting my head on the doorframe. I angrily ask her to let me walk by myself but she's obviously afraid that I'm going to go and attack Ali again.

So instead she drags me and my throbbing head down the hall to the bathroom.

In between coughs she says, "Take a bath and I'll talk to you afterward."

Although the talking part didn't really sound all that great, the bath did. After all, who wants to have unknown beige goo smeared all over them? Also, the stuff has started to dry all crustily on me, which doesn't seem like a good sign. So I strip down and throw my crusty clothing out the door.

I walk over to the shower and turn both knobs as far as they'll go. I jump in the shower and watch in disgust as the crap covering me slowly rehydrates and drips down the drain. Then I finally realize what the stuff is.

Oatmeal.

She decided to pour a big bucket of freakin’ oatmeal on me. How mature.

I shudder and scrub violently at my head because the oatmeal doesn't seem to want to come out of my hair. Cursing under my breath I grab my hairbrush and yank through the mats of slightly dried breakfast. I glance at the brush and jump, nearly slipping and falling. There is a giant, fresh clump of hair twisted around the brush. Crap.

A quiet flushing sound comes from the other bathroom. I stand, pondering for a minute why I’m annoyed. And then the freezing water hits my back like an anvil. I shriek and flail like an idiot and the brush flies out of my hand, hitting the mirror and falling into the sink with a clatter.

Flush. A wave of boiling water surges over my body. Flush. Flush. Flush. Hot, cold, freezing, boiling.

I can hear my mom screaming at Ali from her bedroom. She bangs on the door of the other bathroom.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Ali was doing in the second bathroom, so I hurriedly turn both taps as far to the right as I can.

In between shouts my mom breaks down into fits of coughing. There’s a loud bang and shudder as she finally gets the bathroom door open.

Scowling, I wrap myself in a towel and brush the rest of the oatmeal into the garbage can under the sink. I throw a second towel on my head and slink back to my room.

I decide that a ratty t-shirt and some old jean shorts are probably the safest choice just in case Ali chooses to pull any more schemes into action. Thankfully at the moment she’s wiping my oatmeal-covered handprints from her neck.

Mom knocks on my door. “Cassi?”

I grunt in approval. She slowly opens the door.

“Ali’s going to help you clean up this mess.”

I turn around from facing my dresser. “What?”

Mom opens her mouth again.

“She’s going to help me?”

She nodded.

“But none of this-” I gesture wildly to all of the crap covering the floor. “Is my fault. She can clean it up all by herself.”

Mom coughs into her elbow. “You’re gonna help, Cassi. You’re the one who tracked it all over the house instead of acting rationally.”

And dumping a bucket of oatmeal on your sister’s head is rational?

“I’m going to go lay down now.” She says. “When you’re done cleaning up could you run to the Shortcut and get me some cough medicine? There’s ten bucks in my purse.”

I roll my eyes and nod, pulling my wet hair into a ponytails.

She raises her eyebrows and leaves my door open as she walks back to her room, careful not to step in the puddles of breakfast.

Not five seconds after, Ali appears with two cleaning rags and a bucket full of soapy water.

We look at each other with the same level of hatred. She throws one of the rags to me.

I let out a puff of air and narrow my eyes, catching it.

Ali drops the bucket between us, like a barrier, like she’s afraid that at any second I will pounce on her and rip her to shreds, feasting on her insides with a bowl of oatmeal. That as soon as she looks away my rag will be covering her nose and mouth and will stay there until she stops kicking.

Smart of her.

“You get it, don’t you?” She asks as she drops to her knees.

I raise an eyebrow, crouching down near the edge of the beige goo.

“This is going to happen again.”

What the heck? Is she trying to be menacing?

“And again.”

I reach over and dunk my rag in the water.

“And again.”

“Gosh, Ali, I get it.”

“Until-”

Holy crap.

“Well, I’m sure you can figure that out.”

“Yeah.”

The thing is, now I am scared. Now I do find her menacing, because I know how determined she is. This is just going to keep happening, getting worse and worse, until I’ve got serious injuries.

Unless Finn suddenly starts pitying my friendless self and we become inseparable battle buddies.

I blink and scrub the floor forcefully. Great. Just great.

“So are you going to tell me why you’re obsessed with getting me a friend?”

“Just because I care about you.”

Ahhh, the corn is unbearable.

I snort. The only thing she cares about is turning me into a mangled corpse.

“Why are you obsessed with not having friends?”

“You think I don’t want friends?” I shake my head. “Just hurry up, I wanna get this done.”

Ali rolls her eyes and bends lower over the floor.

We’ve gotten our way halfway down the hall, which is a good sign, because there isn’t actually much we can do in Ali’s room as mostly the stuff is on her bed.

“Well it doesn’t really seem like you do.”

“What?”

“Want friends. It doesn’t seem like you want friends.”

“Oh. Well. I do. Just not the friends that you think I should have.”

“You want your old, crappy friends back?”

“They weren’t crappy. I was crappy to them.”

“Well, they should’ve forgiven you.”

Maybe they should’ve, but Ali was really ticking me off. “Just shut up Ali, you have no idea what it’s like, okay? Just shut up.”

“Yeah I do know!” She shouts defensively.

“Shhhhh! Shut up! You’re gonna wake mom up.”

She scowls at me. “You gotta stop treating me like a little kid.”

I stare at her with great annoyance. “You are a kid.”

I hate having this conversation, because Ali always starts acting more like a little kid than usual and it just makes the whole situation so much worse.

“No I’m not.” She hisses.

I hurl my rag at her and stand up. “Whatever, just go put your blankets in the laundry. I’ve gotta go to the Shortcut and get mom some medicine for her cough.”

I don’t look back at Ali when I leave because I know she’s glaring at me with a hatred as powerful as the sun.

I walk down the hall and balance on one foot by the door as I pull my shoes on.

When I open the door a blast of warm, dry air engulfs my entire body. I don’t know what’s wrong with the weather, because it’s only December and we shouldn’t be having temperatures like this for at least another four months.

Although the air is dry there are dark clouds rolling in and it smells like rain. The wind whistles through alleys and between houses, the only thing that suggests it’s winter. The streets are emptier than they should be, considering how nice the weather is. There should be kids on too small, spray painted bikes gliding so close to me that they might run over my toes. But there isn’t anyone.

I walk past the two churches that sit across the street from each other and down the alley behind the apartments. Up in on of the apartments on the top floor of the apartment building two eight-year-old boys were throwing those super bouncy balls out the window and watching as they hit the concrete building on the other side of the alley.

I duck and cover my head, running through the storm of little colorful spheres raining from the sky. I can hear the little boys laughing maniacally as the toss more out into the alley.

“Bomb number twenty-six!” On of the boys shrieks happily, tossing the last ball out the window.

I turn the corner out on to the main street, where only a few cars were darting around.

I look both ways, but it’s not really necessary since the street is so empty.

I sprint across the road toward the little white building across the street with “Shortcut Market” emblazoned in fire truck red on the front.

The door makes a little convenience-store-bell sound when I enter. The store is completely empty except for Miss Muffet manning the cash register.

Miss Muffet isn’t her real name, of course, but everyone calls her that because Moffet, her real last name, is just close enough to make it work. In fact, people call her that so much that she got her name tag changed from “Sheryl” to “Ms. Muffet”.

I walk to the back of the store and grab a bottle of fluorescent orange DayQuil, then walk back to the counter.

Miss Muffet turns her squat, dumpy body from the solitaire game splayed out in front of her.

“What’re you doin’ out and about, Cassi?”

I set the medicine on the counter. “What d’you mean?”

“Didn’t ya hear about everythin’ goin’ on in Portland?”

I shake my head.

She swipes the bottle’s barcode across the scanner. “Seven forty three, please.”

I hand her the money.

“Well it’s been all over the news and everythin’ I assumed you’d know.” She says, plopping the DayQuil into a plastic bag that said thank you all over it. “Everyone’s got their families inside and they ain’t comin’ out ‘til it’s clear. The Austrians are fixin’ to drop a big ol’ bomb on Portland.”

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