Happy Holidays

Yesterday was the last day of school before Christmas, and Juice had entered yet another phase. I was in the middle of asking her “Juice, why are you dressed like that?” when the short guy in our class who always wears an orange shirt and green sweatpants ran right between us, pushing her back against the wall. “Take that!” he shouted.

“I told him I wasn’t really from Star Trek,” Juice said. “Sheesh!”

“Stupid Trekkiephobe,” I sighed, looking up into my empty locker. “I’ve tried to come up with dogs and cataclysms to attack him in my dreams, but I think I’ve got a better chance of carving a picture in my nose.”

“Who cares if he raids your locker?” Juice asked. “At least he does your homework for you. He made fun of my haircut, and he cut it for me! Male haircutters are all a hundred percent jerks.”

“He’s the one who threatened me to wear this hat or marry him,” I said, holding up a large white puffball I had cast onto the floor of my locker. “And so many people laugh at me when I wear this hat that sometimes I wish I had married him. I just wish I knew his name.”

“But he hung your sock on the office bulletin board!” Juice exclaimed.

“And he knows I’m afraid of bulletin boards,” I whined. “I’ll never get it back, and that was my favorite sock.”

“Mine too.”

“I wish I didn’t have to share socks with you, especially when we have to wear them at the same time.”

“It’s sort of hard to walk that way, klutz,” Juice said, drinking out of the water fountain with the words “Drink me” graffitied on it. “But that’s what happens when friends combine their money to buy clothes that neither of them can afford by themselves.” Suddenly she turned toward me and stuffed quick-drying plaster in my mouth. When I asked her why she did that, I don’t think she understood what I was saying.

“Face it,” she said, “you hate me, not him. Good. The truth is, I’ve hired him as my temporary twin. We must persecute you until you say ‘Merry Christmas.’”

“In a public school? I’ll stick with the plaster in my mouth, thanks,” I said. Unfortunately Juice still couldn’t understand what I was saying.

Mphwy Cwphmph.