Older Mares

Chapters

Cream and Sugar
Picket Signs and Poison Joke
Shampoo Ads and Celebrity Gossip
Pigtails and Bus Passes

Cream and Sugar

Chapter ONE: Cream and Sugar

Cheerilee believed that the quality of one’s coffee, much like the quality of one’s life, had more to do with how much sugar and creamer one added, rather than the excellence of the bean itself. Even if you couldn’t choose your own coffee bean, you could decide the type and amount of creamer you stirred into the mix, and in Cheerilee’s experience, if you had good creamer, then you had good coffee. And Cheerilee always had good creamer.

Sitting at her favorite patio table at her favorite family-owned coffee shop (a rare and exotic wonder here in Canterlot), Cheerilee poured five single serving containers of hazelnut creamer into her coffee and stirred with the vigor of a mare ten years her junior. As she repeated this process of pouring and stirring with five single serving packs of brown sugar (because the sugar must always, without exception, be added after the creamer), the middle-aged college professor mentally jeered at all those poor saps coughing up seven bits for cups of coffee labeled “premium blend” or “imported”, while she doled out a meager three bits for the same black-as-tar liquid rubbish.

Coffee, by virtue of being coffee, was an affront on the taste buds, and if you were paying more than three bits for such sewage, then you were being taken for a proverbial ride. Cheerilee might have felt a modicum of empathy for all the misguided souls overpaying for coffee, but she was too busy basking in her intellectual superiority to worry about others.

Coffee, in her humble opinion, was a necessary evil. She ingested the cups of liquid battery power because they supercharged her mind and body, and were essential if she wished to survive another day of lecturing at the prestigious and largely over-glorified Canterlot University. Like coffee, higher education was also a necessary evil, though Cheerilee had yet to decide how evil—perhaps significantly more so than identity theft and marginally less so than war.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with higher education (the same couldn’t be said of coffee or war); rather, its multitude of flaws stemmed from a million and one outside sources. Underfunding, certain bureaucratic practices, big business, unmotivated students, certain tenured professors, unmotivated teachers, a general lack of equine decency… The list went on and on, and while Cheerilee could spend her mornings dwelling on such injustices, she chose to ignore the fact that some Canter U professors made less money than sanitation workers, and instead, enjoyed her self-proclaimed status as the most intelligent mare to ever purchase a cup of joe.

Two tables away from her, a triad of young, virile male zebras chatted among themselves as they sipped lukewarm tea, their unique diction accented here and there by the melodic spell of internal and slant rhymes. An earth pony waiter passed their table, sun-bleached and muscular, a tray of sweating lemonade glasses balanced on his broad back. An apple cutie mark adorned his robust flanks. Cheerilee chuckled aloud as the zebra's complimented his brawny frame, and because nopony can resist the flirtatious rhyme of an intrigued zebra—that most enchanting of impromptu poetry—the Apple chuckled as well, his face flushing in spite of his doubtlessly conservative upbringing.

Cheerilee didn’t know the zebras by name, but she recognized them from the university, and saw them every morning here at this hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. Like most male Canterlot U students, they dressed in respectable blazers, ties and corny fedora hats, but their lack of brand-name allegiance suggested a heightened sense of individuality, or perhaps a superior monetary responsibility. Even Cheerilee—who considered herself an agent of nonconformity in this backwards world of rampant consumerism—was guilty of sometimes splurging on luxury clothing, if only because her haughty unicorn peers were more likely to leave her be if she strutted down the halls of Canter U dressed in the latest such-and-such by Hoity Toity. But this triad of striped youths had long ago freed themselves of such high-thread-count shackles, or perhaps they had been born free, immuned to Canterlot’s opulence by virtue of their “otherness”.

Cheerilee had always been attracted to zebras, with their striped coats and exotic accents, and these three were especially sexy, despite their obvious adherence to a certain alternative lifestyle. The three of them had been sipping tea and flirting with waiters for as long as Cheerilee had been visiting this coffee shop, and likely long before she ever uprooted her small-town life and moved to Canterlot. She often wondered at their collective origin. Were they brothers? They never flirted with each other, and they certainly looked alike. Nonetheless, Cheerilee feared making the perilous leap to that conclusion, if only because she didn’t want to be mistaken for the the kind of pony who thought all zebras looked alike.

One of the zebras tittered as he placed a front hoof on the Apple’s shoulder, caressing the swell of muscle beneath the waiter’s beige coat. He looked to his friends/brothers and trumpeted something in his native tongue: likely a lewd obscenity, judging by the corner-of-the-mouth snickers coming from the other two. Their chuckles flowed out like a milkshake journeying from blender to cup: thick and creamy and vanilla-chocolate-swirl sweet. Cheerilee lapped an errant drop of coffee from her bottom lip and kicked herself for staring so hard.

She hated them for their gayness—not because she was homophobic, but because they would never have eyes for her, never pin her to a nearby flat surface and whisper dirty rhymes in her ear while rutting her from behind…

The fantasy skirted through her mind without shame. She would have indulged it for longer, but the 234 Mauve Line—that most wondrous of golden chariots waiting to whisk her off to another day of academic drudgery—was due to arrive in… yep, less than fifteen minutes… and the walk to the subway would take her at least ten of those fifteen.

Chugging the last of her fuel supply, Cheerilee smiled politely at the striped trio as she hopped down from her seat and started for the sidewalk. They smiled back, and one of them waved, a prompt and dutiful “Morning, Professor Cheerilee,” rolling off his tongue.

The sweet music of her name on his lips tickled every one of her pleasure centers. Although she didn’t have a single zebra in any of her classes—a troubling fact that she chalked up to biased standardized testing, overwhelming tuition fees, and, in her wildest fantasies, a government conspiracy to purge Canterlot of all ethnic diversity—she figured the striped student must have recognized her from Canter U, and better yet, he even knew her by name. As the train station’s entrance came into view, she hummed a jaunty tune and practically skipped down the spotless street, her mind preoccupied with dreaming up naughty words that rhymed with ‘Cheerilee’.

She was so preoccupied that she stumbled and nearly toppled down the stairs. Luckily, a veil of magic light—warm and pillow-soft—shrouded her body and righted her once again.

“Oh, um, I’m terribly sorry,” she stammered, checking her saddlebags to make sure she hadn’t dropped any of the C-average midterm papers she’d spent the better portion of last night grading.

“It’s no trouble at all, Miss.” The elderly unicorn did a little bow as he adjusted his glasses. “Just do yourself a favor and tread more carefully in the future.” He spoke with the conviction of a stallion accustomed to being heeded, though there was no hint of force or bluster in his tone. He sounded a bit condescending, but Cheerilee nodded graciously and trotted on, choosing not to hold the unicorn’s arrogance against him. His starched suit and upright posture betrayed his allegiance to the upper class, and everypony in Canterlot with money in his pocket and a horn on his head possessed varying degrees of jerkishness. It wasn’t their fault; they were byproducts of a backwards social environment. She could have snapped at the old stallion for his belittling tone, but then she might as well chastise the sky for being blue, or trees for being tall.

The world beneath Canterlot was almost as spotless as the world above. Cheerilee looked to the tunnel walls as she approached that thick yellow line that ponies weren’t supposed to cross, her eyes scanning for traces of graffiti. If you arrived at the tunnels early enough—before the city deployed its mid-morning, government-salary minions to cleanse the walls of teenage rebellion—then you could sometimes be privy to the work of Canterlot’s most talented street artists.

Cutie Marked was Cheerilee’s favorite spray-painter. His work—always identifiable by the initials ‘CM’ scrawled somewhere on his murals and tags—was silly, profane and seemingly worthless. Whether he was scrawling 34-line stanzas of free-verse political poetry on the tunnel ceiling, or adorning train cars with giant murals of diamond studded penises, CM’s message always remained the same: fuck you, and everypony who looks like you. Exactly who CM was telling off eluded Cheerilee, but the sentiment was nice.

Unfortunately, CM’s crass wisdom had already been scrubbed from the walls this morning, a blow felt not only by Cheerilee, but by all of Canterlot’s frustrated fringe rebels. Not that it mattered much. He would be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, armed with aerosol cans, permanent markers and a bad attitude likely brought on by absent parents, bullies, a crappy diet, porn magazines and violent video games; that is, if Equestria’s various media outlets can be trusted with explaining the root causes that produce wayward youths.

To reconcile with CM’s unjust censorship, Cheerilee boarded the 7:30am train without paying, fighting the good, rebellious fight in her own selfish way. This also didn't matter; Canterlot’s superb public transit system hardly needed her measly contribution to shuffle this morning’s gaggle of coffee-fueled commuters to their respective places of toil. Once aboard the train, her impudence was rewarded with packed car after packed car, meaning she would have to stand for the next four stops.

Standing in the center aisle, she cocked her head to one side and was met with a row of five preppy, teenybopper pegasi: three stallions and two mares—a perfect cast for this fall season’s latest tween dramedy. Cheerilee could already see the pilot episode premiering on channel 13—Tuesday nights at 6pm, 9pm eastern time—the title, “Why Fly When You Can Be a Dickhead and Take Up Space on the Subway,” filling the top and middle portions of the screen, saving the bottom for hoof-written-style scribbles of the cast’s names. She glared at the ensemble of potential teenage stars, choosing to remain silent while she prayed to the rating gods that their imaginary show got canceled after the obligatory three episodes.

One of the feathered brats looked especially old for her age, and her plump lips and smooth forehead reminded Cheerilee of her own fast-receding youth. Though many a fashion magazine ad and shampoo commercial might speak to the contrary, Thirty was not the new Twenty, and Thirty-Six was closer to bad hips and hospice care than many might think.

These revelations, among others, had been the greatest catalysts for change in Cheerilee’s life. The day after her thirtieth birthday, Cheerilee rose from bed, trudged to the bathroom mirror and realized that the bleary-eyed mare staring back at her wasn’t good enough. She was too dumb, too ugly, too unsuccessful; and if the laugh lines beginning to fissure across her brow were any indication, she also, clearly, wasn’t getting any younger. In that illuminating moment, water splashed her face, teeth were vigorously brushed, and a decision was made. She would go back to school, earn a degree and live out her childhood dream of becoming a professor at a prestigious university.

And six years later here she was, standing on a packed train car with a gut full of caffeine and heart full of fragile pride. She wasn’t any smarter or better looking than she had been on that fateful morning, but she was more successful—at least in terms of monetary gain and social status—and in the shallow, suburban, consumption-driven wasteland of Canterlot that must have counted for something.

An abrupt stop sent her pitching into the rump directly ahead of her. It was white and shapely and firm… and belonged to an angry-looking unicorn youth, scarred and bald-headed. He craned his neck and scowled at Cheerilee with hard eyes.

“Hooves to yourself, grandma.”

“Oh, um, s-sorry. I didn’t mean too—”

“I mean it. Touch me again and I’ll break you in half.” The spiral-shaped tattoo obscuring his left cutie mark declared his allegiance to a street gang called the Kirin Sisterhood, or the ‘Spirals’, as they were better known by officers of the Royal Guard. They were harmless for the most part—all bark and no bite—but even so, Cheerilee didn’t make a habit of picking fights with angry unicorns. Some could perform only the most rudimentary of spells, while others could turn you into a hot pretzel with a flick of their tails. This one looked like rather dim, but she saw no reason to take the chance.

“I’m sorry, really. I promise it won’t happen—”

“Hey! Leave that old mare alone, ass-wipe!”

“Yeah, what kind of shrimp-dicked pussy picks fights with the elderly!”

“Senior citizens deserve respect for their years of wisdom and numerous contributions to the well-being of modern Equestrian society!”

“That’s right! Fuck off, you skinhead, racist pile of dogshit!”

To her surprise, it was none other than the teenyboppers who leapt to her rescue. Suddenly their dull dramedy had transformed into a kickass cartoon adapted from an obscure indie comic series. The title “Subway Sentries!” popped into Cheerilee’s mind as the fearsome fivesome leapt from their seats and formed a wall between herself and the ‘skinhead, racist pile of dog-shit’ (who was also a fascist that never sent his sick mother postcards on her birthday, or any of the various postcard-appropriate holidays).

A shouting match ensued, and somewhere between a biting “Why don’t you suck me off, shit-for-brains?” and a particularly hostile “Come at me, bro!”, the word ‘Pigeon’ was uttered—a racial slur that compared pegasi to rats with wings—and a fight broke out. The Subway Sentries jumped the skinhead, pummeling him into the floor and likely earning enough ratings to green-light a second season.

Cheerilee shook her head as she stepped off the train, happy that she’d misjudged the feathered freedom fighters but upset that she’d been refereed to as ‘elderly’ at least five times by five perfect strangers. She left the Subway Sentries on the train, confident in their evil-vanquishing abilities, and hustled back to the surface world, where Canter U waited just a few blocks away.

A billboard featuring a Royal Guard dressed in purple armor urged passerbys to enlist, declaring “CELESTIA WANTS YOU!” in bold black letters, though for what purpose Cheerilee couldn’t begin to imagine. Maybe her highness needed more handsome colts to kiss the golden shoes, preen the royal feathers, and occasionally stroke the royal ego. Cheerilee was a language professor, not an economist, but even she could see that the nation’s current unchecked military spending was a greater threat to Equestrian welfare than any of the thousands of imaginary enemies the monkeys in golden clown suits were supposedly protecting them from. Surely, she mused, the citizens’ taxes could be better spent on education or health care, instead of overpaying the military to safeguard the well-being of three (or was it four now?) immortal, all-powerful goddesses.

But what did she know? She was a lowly professor of a dying art, and she was late for today’s first lecture to boot. She was still six long years away from being tenured, which meant she couldn’t afford to mess about like some of her pompous (unicorn) peers and coworkers.

She was halfway up the ivory steps when a jovial, “Cheers, Miss Cheers,” caught her ear and prompted her to spin around. Before she knew what happened, two pegasus ponies swooped out of the sky, and several rough hooves seized her and shoved a black, burlap sack over her head.

She didn’t bother resisting her assailants, knowing already that escape was impossible. Instead, she grumbled under her breath and tried to keep track of her saddlebags, annoyed that she was being kidnapped.

Again.

Picket Signs and Poison Joke

Chapter Two: Picket Signs and Poison Joke

A band of student protesters haloed the perimeter of Canter U, brandishing picket signs that spelled out, or perhaps merely hinted at, a slew of lofty demands. Wisps of magic light buoyed the signs in midair, while the magic of lazy indignation, bloated self-righteousness and barely concealed racial prejudice buoyed the unicorn activists that held them.

Their leader—a stallion with a grey-black coat and the strongest chin in Canterlot, probably a guard in training—held a bullhorn to his mouth and shouted, “We, the hard working stallions and mares of this fine country, refuse to stand by and allow these third world invaders to come into Equestria, steal our jobs, overrun our communities, endanger our families and tarnish our very way of life!”

The line of protesters erupted into a cannonade of cheers, filling the air above Canter U with inspired aphorisms like “Go home gryphons!” and “Equestria is for Equestrians!”.

Although Cheerilee was standing on a rooftop across the street, and currently surrounded by three members of Canterlot’s most notorious street gang, she still found time to scrutinize the drivel spewing from the protester’s bullhorn. In her steadfast (albeit passive-aggressive) one-pony war against “The Mare”, she always made time for calling bullshit, even while tattooed hooligans shook her down for protection money.

“Can you believe these ignorant jerks?” said Cheerilee, gesturing toward the mob of would-be social activists.

“Bunch of bloody animals if you ask me,” said one of the hooligans: a brawny pegasus stallion dressed in snug jean shorts, fishnet stockings and a wrinkled, tied-above-the-navel shirt that said “Rapists Gonna Rape,” in glittery pink letters. He sported a pixie cut that couldn’t have been gayer if it was made of refracted multicolored light, and his long eyelashes fluttered like butterfly wings with every blink of his made-up eyes.

As he hovered above the rooftop, Cheerilee ogled the truism printed on his shirt, torn between ambivalent feelings of amusement and disgust. A wry remark popped into her head, but she quickly stifled it, choosing not comment on the pastimes of Canterlot’s rapist community (an upstanding bunch, she was sure). Instead she muttered, “Animals is right,” with a revolted tone that evinced a sense of solidarity. Her show of camaraderie won over the apparent rapist and/or rapist supporter, and he shot his fellow toughs a collaborative glance, as if making sure everypony was on the same page. Then, apparently pleased, he stepped back and gave the floor to a pegasus mare with a face full of piercings and the acronym ‘DOD’ tattooed across her neck.

“Now I know you haven’t got me money, Ms. Cheers, and that’s fine—really it is—but you must realize I have to break your bloody kneecaps now.”

The mare threatening to break Cheerilee’s ‘bloody kneecaps’ bore an uncanny resemblance to Fluttershy, an observation that instantly ruined her attempt at sounding menacing. She was a top enforcer for the Canterlot chapter of a nationwide gang known as the Daughter’s of Discord, and the owner of the single most ridiculous and infuriating name Cheerilee had ever heard: Flocka-Flocka. Although the schoolteacher prided herself on being an educated mare, and could rattle off many facts and figures without effort (granted most of them were perfectly useless), the name Flocka-Flocka befuddled her, much in the way the word ‘befuddled’ befuddled many of the students in her language class.

Flocka-Flocka... Was it a reference to some obscure young adult novel or underground indie movie? Was it a joke? A play on words? A anagram, maybe? And why two Flockas? Why wasn’t one enough…?

In the distance, the lead protester shouted more nonsense into his bullhorn, arguing the merits of strict border-control laws while simultaneously complaining about the lack of cultural diversity on his own college campus. How he could hold both contradicting ideas in his mind at once confounded everypony on the rooftop. She and Flocka-Flocka (maybe ‘Flocka’ was the Minotaurian word for poultry) exchanged cringes, unable to ignore the protesters’ indignant shouts.

Cheerilee and Flocka-Flocka had been business associates for nearly four years, and by means of Stockholm Syndrome, or perhaps a permanent caffeine-induced state of delusion, the dignified college professor considered this tattooed hoodlum her friend. They had first met in Canter U’s student store, after Cheerilee’s old poison joke dealer was chased out of the neighborhood by the Daughters.

Things had been much simpler with her old dealer. They met on campus once every two weeks where they made their drug transaction, and he often awarded Cheerilee discounts for being one of his best regulars. Sometimes they’d smoke a bowl together at the end of a long day, then stumble into their favorite gryphon-owned pizzeria and pig out on cheap deep-dish vegetarian specials. The owners didn’t care that they always reeked of poison joke, and they didn’t mind that the pizzeria smelled like cooked meat, grease and clogged arteries.

Those were the good old days, during Cheerilee’s second year in Canterlot while she was still attending school at Canter U. Now she had to deal with Flocka-Flocka and the Daughters, who went around harassing ponies like they were some kind of donkey cartel. Heh, 'donkey cartel'; the comparison tickled Cheerilee’s funny bone. She couldn’t imagine a lowly goon like Flocka pushing hardcore drugs in Appleloosa’s deep south, decapitating buffalo in borderline ritual killings and leaving behind cryptic warnings for rival gangs. Actually, no, she could definitely imagine it—not the ritual killing part, but the cryptic messages bit didn’t seem that farfetched. All she had to do was picture the words ‘LA FLOCKA’ carved into the wall of an abandoned grow house, and a mess of poison joke stems arranged on the floor in the shape of a feather.

Wait… La Flocka-Flocka… was the name of donkey origin? (Cheerilee really should’ve known this, given that she was a language teacher).

“The fuck are you smiling about, lovely?” said Flocka-Flocka, speaking in the Trottingham accent that was common among the Daughters.

“Yeah,” said the second pegasus stallion, who Cheerilee assumed was also a member of the capital’s rapist community. “The fuck are you smiling about?”

“Lingerie!” snapped Flocka-Flocka. “What did I tell you about echoing me while we’re give ponies a shakedown?”

“Sorry, boss.”

“Don’t say ‘sorry, boss’, just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Cheerilee often wondered if Lingerie’s parents had predicted their son would grow up to become a cross-dressing hooligan, or if the name ‘Lingerie’ had acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, dooming the poor soul the moment he escaped the womb. He was built like a rhinoceros, and wore a filmy chemise lingerie number that Cheerilee couldn’t have pulled off ten years ago.

“Come on, Flocka, can’t you break my kneecaps next week?” said Cheerilee. As a way of maintaining order in discordant world, Cheerilee never referred to the gang enforcer as Flocka-Flocka. She had decided long ago that one ‘Flocka’ was more than enough, and that two was outright preposterous. “It’s too early for this shit, and I’m already late for my first class.”

Flocka yawned, displaying a mouth fraught with jaundiced teeth, tinted yellow by years of coffee and cigarette abuse. “Oh, fuck off, Cheers. You think I want to be up at this bloody hour surrounded by horny nitwits? You think I like shoving black sacks over pony’s heads and dragging them up and down these long ass city blocks?”

“You dragged me across the street,” Cheerilee interjected. “I can still see the school’s entrance from here.” She gestured toward the steps where she’d been standing a moment ago, largely unimpressed with Flocka’s lazy kidnapping.

“I’m here on business, Cheers,” Flocka continued, ignoring Cheerilee's smart remark. “A business that you insist on fucking up by not paying me and me sisters when you’re bloody supposed to.”

“Pay you? With what money?”

“With the money you’re supposed to collect from your fucking johns!”

“The other mares don’t charge. How am I supposed to get laid if I’m the only pony charging?”

“The other mares are criminals, Cheers. They sell drugs. They steal shit. And they bloody pay me when they’re bloody supposed to.”

“Well we can’t all be young and carefree,” Cheerilee complained. “Some of us have real jobs, with real bosses that will filet our asses if we’re late for another class.”

“Are you dizzy, lovely? Are you out of your fucking head?” Flocka shoved her forehead against Cheerilee’s, driving the teacher back as she stared her down. “I got a boss too, you know. And when she finds out I didn’t collect all of this month’s insurance fee ‘cause some old slut with a soggy cunt doesn’t want to pay her due, she’s gonna march down to me crib, cut off me legs and use me bloody kneecaps to break your bloody kneecaps. Is that what you want, Cheers? You want us both to be hobbling about with busted kneecaps?”

“I think this fixation you have with kneecaps is unhealthy. I know a shrink—great guy, affordable—”

Flocka jabbed Cheerilee in the throat, making her croak and clutch at her neck. “Cadenza’s cunt!” rasped the hurt schoolteacher. “The fuck was that for?”

“I’m sorry I had to do that just now—I really am—but you need to learn to shut your fucking mouth and listen when somepony is talking to you,” said Flocka. “I don’t like using violence, Ms. Cheers, but you’re not giving me any options here. I can’t go back to me boss empty-hoofed and spare you an arse kicking. It just don’t work that way.”

“Flocka, please, it’s broad daylight,” said Cheerilee, massaging her throat. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m pretty sure assaulting a college professor across the street from Canter U is going to make headlines.” Cheerilee rammed her forehead into Flocka’s and shoved her back. “I’ll pay you what I owe, alright? Just give me until tomorrow morning, and I promise you’ll have your money. And stop jumping me outside of the campus. It’s not exactly conspicuous.”

Flocka glanced around, as if worried she were being watched. “Fine, I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” she huffed. “And I better not hear a single bloody excuse from you when I come knocking, understand?”

“Luna, Tia, and Twilight, would you relax? I’ll have the money, okay.”

Flocka glowered. “One of these days I’m gonna break your spine over me stifle.”

Cheerilee glared. “Not before I rip out those piercings and make you eat them—”

“You keep talking like that, and I’ll knock every one of your fucking teeth out of your fucking skull—”

“—I think I’ll black those pretty eyes of yours too—”

“—gonna mash up your bloody big mouth—”

“—smash your ribs to splinters, you shit-eating—”

“—throttle you one of these days—”

“—cave in your skull with a—”

Without warning, Flocka snatched Cheerilee by the chin and yanked her into a rough, open-mouthed kiss. They rose to their hind legs and held each other close, hooves roaming over fur as their tongues rolled and lapped.

“Fuck,” Flocka gasped between kisses, “I love it when you talk dirty like that.”

“I missed you too, baby.”

“Hey.” Flocka grabbed the back of Cheerilee’s neck and wrenched her face away. Their eyes met. “Please pay off your debt tomorrow, Cheers. I don’t want to break your bloody kneecaps—I really don’t—but I love me job more than I love you.”

“Why do you always have to be like that?”

“Like what?” Flocka released Cheerilee’s neck and returned to all fours. “I’m not being like anything; that’s just the way things are.”

“Stop it,” Cheerilee laughed. “When are you going to drop the tough mare act and admit you want me?”

“When a bloody flying pig shits on me head, that’s when.”

Cheerilee laughed again and pecked Flocka on the mouth. “Why are so vulgar all the time?”

“I’m a criminal. I got an image to uphold.” Flocka bent her stifles and flared her wings, ready for a quick takeoff or a quicker rutting. “Climb aboard, Cheers.” (Hmmm… the latter it is then). “Me and the girls are going to grab a bite and pass around the pipe for a spell. You’re welcome to tag along if you like.”

The phrase, ‘you’re welcome to tag along if you like,’ was actually Flocka-talk for, ‘you’re welcome to rut me silly with the first dick-shaped object you can find lying about--if you like’. As a language professor teaching at the prestigious Canter U, Cheerilee understood every foreign tongue from Minotaurian to Gryphonic to Donkish, but there were few languages she comprehended more thoroughly than Flocka-talk. It was a simplistic tongue, limited to a few repeating sounds like ‘bloody’ and ‘fucking’, or sometimes ‘bloody fucking’, when she was feeling especially creative.

“Sorry, but I can’t,” said Cheerilee. “I need to get to class, I’m late enough as it is.”

“Shut your fucking cock-slot and climb on me back.” Flocka spun around and gave her rear a playful wiggle, enticing Cheerilee. It was tight and firm with youth, worthy of the older mare’s envy.

Knowing she would regret this decision roughly three hours from now, she climbed onto Flocka’s back and looped her hind legs around the thug’s barrel, giving it a playful squeeze.

“In the mood for a quick roll, are you, lovely?” Flocka purred.

“Shut up and fly,” Cheerilee chuckled. “And take me someplace trashy, where the food is greasy and the napkins are brown.”

“Aye, Miss Cheers.”

Several wing beats later, the trio of thugs and their passenger were high above the boorish student protesters, riding a swell of warm springtime air that whisked them away toward empty calories and good times.

A blue-tinted haze of noxious gas and feel-good vibes billowed from Cheerilee's nostrils, mixing with the water vapors that flitted from the exhaust pipe of her newly stolen Reins Royce: a luxury steam-powered carriage that cost more money than Cheerilee had accumulated in her entire life. Flocka and her gang had pinched it from the parking lot of an upscale theater a few blocks from Canter U. There had been numerous vehicles too choose from in the lot, all of them over-overpriced and too gaudy for words, but when Cheerilee spotted one bearing a licence plate that read "The 1%", it became obvious which asshole deserved to has his driving privileges revoked.

With her lips wrapped around the nozzle of a glass pipe, she took a second hit of poison joke and let her mind float away with the smoke, daydreaming about the dozens on chemical substances polluting the atmosphere: CO2, THC, whatever junk they put in aerosol cans. Contrary to whatever nonsense the heads of Canterlot’s Weather Control Department would like you to believe, capital city air was far from the cleanest in Equestria—an unfortunate fact that had more to do with incompetent weather workers than mass corporate pollution, or Cheerilee's recreational drug use.

She blew smoke in Flocka's face before passing the pipe, her lips puckered in a flirtatious O. Smiling, Flocka took a hit, pressed her lips to Cheerilee's and breathed smoke into the older mare's lungs. Her kiss carried the chemical stink of blazing poison joke leaves, as well as the greasy aftertaste of thirty-minute-old veggie burgers. As they kissed, Cheerilee thanked the junk food gods for her Gryphonic brothers and sisters—those shameless peddlers of cheap empty calories.

Cheerilee didn’t love fast food—as she had little interest in the culinary arts in general—but in her war against all things upscale, the potent combination of fat, salt and sugar was one of her most invaluable weapons. She loathed the so-called “fine dining” establishments plaguing every other block of her new home, and was currently boycotting all unicorn owned-restaurants, especially those that had garnered high esteem in the culinary world.

The concept of fine dining annoyed Cheerilee, but the absolute worst was this pervasive upper class notion that cooking was some kind of “art”—as if baking a cheesecake were an act akin to painting a masterpiece or writing a novel. No. No, no, no; absolutely not. Cheerilee didn’t care how much time, effort or preparation went into creating that perfect dinner entrée; real art didn’t end up floating in a toilet bowl hours after being ingested.

“What’s that little pea brain of yours mulling over now?” said Flocka, reading the distant expression on Cheerilee’s face. She took a second hit and passed the pipe to Lingerie, who was dozing in the passenger seat, his highlighted mane flouncing in the wind.

“The absurdity of the modern condition,” said Cheerilee.

“What?” Flocka laughed. “Be specific, lovely. The ‘modern condition’ is a bloody broad topic.”

“Food as art.”

“And what’s so absurd about treating food like art?”

“Because food isn’t art. Art is art. Food is fuel.”

Flocka cocked an eyebrow at this. “Just because your palette is less sophisticated than a starving zig-zag’s doesn’t mean you get to decide what’s art and what’s not.”

Cheerilee wrinkled her nose at Flocka’s callous use of the word ‘zig-zag’—a derogatory term for immigrant zebras—but withheld the cataract of smart-ass remarks that flooded her brain. Rather than drown the hapless thug in downpour of sarcasm and droll wit, she muttered, “See, that right there is the problem with you Canterlot ponies: your priorities are all screwed up.”

Flocka cocked her second eyebrow. If she'd had a third, she would have cocked it as well.

“The reason you’re all so fat is because of your relationship with food,” Cheerilee explained. “You eat when you’re bored, you eat when you’re depressed, you eat for pleasure, you watch ponies eat on TV, you make celebrities out of chefs, you waste as much food as you consume, and you have the audacity to criticize food you don’t like, and even dispose of it—all while those starving zig-zags suffer miles away in obscurity. It’s disgusting. You’re all disgusting.” As she rambled, her speech patterns gradually shifted into her trademark ‘Instructor Mode’, a form of expression accented by smugness, glibness and several other noun forms of adjectives bearing negative connotations.

Flocka chuckled as the driver—the apparent rapist in the front seat—passed the pipe back to her. “You know what I like about you, Cheers?” She sparked her lighter, took a quick hit and said, “You have no idea how completely full of shite you are. It’s bloody adorable—really it is.”

“I’m not full of ‘shite'," Cheerilee assured. "I’m full of cancerous punch lines and despair for my fellow Equestrians.” With a drug-induced chuckle, she reclaimed the pipe and sucked back a another cloud of noxious fog. “And who cares about art anyway? Art isn’t gonna save my job, or my precious kneecaps.”

They shared laugh, agreeing on this undeniable, always-present verity. Despite her affinity for rash behavior and love of surprises, Cheerilee enjoyed having a few constants in her life, even if said constants were the ever-looming threats of occupational termination and fractured leg joints.

Outside of the luxury Steamer, Downtown Canterlot sped by at roughly sixty-seven miles an hour—not fast enough to melt the city into a single amorphous blur, but quick enough to obscure certain details: the words scrawled on billboards, the shapes of traffic signs, the clothing worn by pedestrians. Or maybe it wasn’t the speed warping Cheerilee’s reality, but the drugs, playing their tricks on her mind—their practical jokes. Either way, she preferred this simplified version of Canterlot; it was free of bus stop advertisements for cuteceñera dresses and smug celebrities beaming from on high, their shit-eating grins enlarged to massive proportions and superimposed on the sides of highrises.

It was nice to get away from it all, even if her vacation remained confined to city limits. The streets of the Canterlot's Downtown areas were just as squeaky clean as the uptown roads, a grievance Cheerilee remedied by tossing an empty plastic bag out of the Steamer—that simplest and most holy of all drug-carrying receptacles.

As she watched the bag drift away, she wondered how a city as seemingly orderly as Canterlot could mask such a vast undercurrent of sheer chaos. Racist protesters, sexually confused hooligans, train-riding pegasi, government overspending, homophobic marriage laws, Guard brutality, severe anti-drug laws, economic recession, the desecration of the middle class, corporate greed, bloodthirsty drug cartels, comments on YouView… The entire city had gone completely mad and nopony had even noticed, let alone cared.

Cheerilee sighed as she stretched her forelegs high above her head, wearing a smile that was just for her and nopony else.

Nah… never mind all the social justice twaddle—that was just the drugs talking anyway. As of right this very moment, Cheerilee couldn’t be bothered with the never-ending battle for truth, justice and the Equestrian way, she was too cozy nestled in the backseat of a stolen Steamer as she and her gangster friends went joy-riding around Downtown.

It was midmorning when the drugs completely submerged her mind in a vast cosmic sea of… uh… hmmm… something deep and existential-sounding. Cheerilee wasn’t sure; she was too stoned to think of a decent metaphor. Time didn’t speed up or slow down the way it always did in novels and movies. It flowed at its normal pace, but the events floating in the time stream—bobbing on the surface like forgotten buoys, or worse, like aquatic mines discarded in foreign waters—drifted this way and that, and in no particular order.

Cheerilee sped down the street.

Cheerilee lapped at Flocka’s neck.

Cheerilee belted out off-key notes at a karaoke bar.

Cheerilee licked an ice cream cone (or maybe that was Flocka’s neck).

Cheerilee cried out as a Guard twisted her foreleg.

Cheerilee vomited in a unicorn’s top hat.

Cheerilee moaned in ecstasy, her hooves grabbing at Flocka's mane.

Cheerilee laughed. Cheerilee cried. Cheerilee sped down the street…

…and then she was standing outside of Canter U’s ivory double-doors—three-to-six hours wiser and twice as loose in the limbs. Rosy-cheeked and rancid.

Young.

Her watch was gone. Her saddlebag too. She stopped a diamond dog dressed for work in a janitorial uniform and asked him for the time, hardly flinching when he rasped “Twenty-five after.”

“Twenty-five after what?” she giggled

“After two.”

Wonderful. That meant she had all of five minutes to scurry inside before her afternoon class started. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

Unable to decide whether her inner monologue was being sarcastic or sincere, Cheerilee ambled through the doors, up several flights of marbled steps and then through more doors. She passed many students on her way up, most of them clothed and horny-looking, so different from the platonic nudity of her old home.

Within the metal frame of a hallway bulletin-board, the words “THIS IS A SHARK FREE CAMPUS!” screamed at Cheerilee with comical sincerity. The message was printed on a flier, and below it the stoned professor read “IT HAS PROUDLY BEEN 19 DAYS SINCE THE LAST SHARK INCIDENT.” For reasons she didn’t understand, Canter U's explicit exclusion of aquatic predators made perfect sense.

Inside the classroom, wide windows beckoned Cheerilee in friendly tones. Heeding their call, she glanced through one of their clear faces and spied a gaggle of pegasi jocks playing Frisbee in the quad, catching the disk between their teeth like feathered dogs off their leashes. The scent of fresh apple pie whisked past the classroom entrance—a culinary student venturing from the toil of Baking 103 to the drudgery of Baking 104, working too hard for his own, or anypony else's, good.

A stack of nondescript paperwork sat piled on her desk. It might have been hers. It might have been anyone’s. Curious, she plucked up the top page and squinted down at it, trying hard to marvel at the words on the page.

Words. Her first love. The one that got away.

Outside, protesters held fast to their ignorant beliefs. Inside, Cheerilee returned the page to its stack, abandoning hers.

Students began filing in. A unicorn stallion in skinny jeans and a striped scarf. A lady zebra wearing sunglasses. An earth mare with her mane and tail styled in the same fashion: close-cropped and highlighted at the ends. A snow gryphon boy wearing a headphones the size of dinner plates and... what was that?... some kind of jacket made of feathers?… but… why…?

…Cheerilee stifled a laugh. This kid, how could he stand coming to class today, and in that getup no less. The gryphon boy greeted Cheerilee with a half-wave, half-salute, and, high off her ass, she saluted right back.

When the seats filled, she faced her class as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Indeed, nothing was; she’d given dozens of lectures while tripping on stronger stuff than a few diluted hits of joke.

“Okay, class,” she began. “Today I’d like to talk with you about a very important subject…”

Shampoo Ads and Celebrity Gossip

Chapter THREE: Shampoo Ads and Celebrity Gossip

“That’s a load of bullshit!” shouted the angry buffalo student, catapulting her incendiary opinion like a flaming ball of oil-coated earth—or whatever kind of missiles sieging armies flung at castle walls during battles in fantasy epics. Cheerilee wasn’t sure what siege projectiles were made of. Despite her vast and mostly useless knowledge of both classic and contemporary literature, she knew little of fantasy epics; she had never cared much for the genre. The scope was too big, and she had never been the sort of reader who could enjoy a story where the fate of entire countries and kingdoms were at stake. The modern world was impersonal enough without some author scribbling his sprawling pretend nations into existence, forcing readers to remember dozens of house names, regions, land masses, military titles, sigils (Cheerilee wasn’t sure what a sigil was, but she was positive that every fantasy novel contained droves of them)… It was all too much. Though lately, sprawling fantasy and science fiction novels seemed to be the only stories present in popular culture.

“You and your gang of hate-mongers should take your hypocritical, right-wing bullshit back to the Celestial Belt where it belongs!”

Equipped with little more than a sleeveless blazer on top of a plain button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows (the unofficial uniform of Canter U’s hyper-masculinist, hyper-lesbian population), the buffalo student seemed intent on shouting down the walls of bigotry, as if one voice raised in indignation could disband the hoard of unicorn protesters still manning their posts outside of the campus gates. She was small for a buffalo, but sturdy, possessing the typical rotund and stocky build of her species. A cute face dispelled the menace in her bulging muscles, its warmth accented by her plush earth tone fur and tie-dye feathered headband: an article of clothing she wore with no perceivable traces of shame.

Most of the protesters ignored her raving. They took the Celestial highroad, quelling their urges to engage the fuming lesbian in what would ultimately be the verbal and pseudo-political equivalent of a girly slap-fight. Canter U’s privileged elites might have been a gaggle of spoiled, overpaid-and-underworked racists, but at least they were classy about it. They didn’t go around throwing bricks through the windows of griffon owned business, or rampaging through zebra neighborhoods after dark, hanging striped piñatas from tree branches and setting lawns on fire. That was Deep South territory—old school settler pony shenanigans. Canterlot’s lynch mobs were more sophisticated. They traded their nooses for signs, and claimed civil liberates instead of lives.

One protester, however (because there’s always one every bunch), broke ranks and faced the lesbian head on, practically jamming his muzzle in her face.

“This is a peaceful, non-violent protest. As students of Canter U, we have the right voice our opinions so long as nopony is harmed.” The others nodded their agreement, signs floating overhead like war clubs poised to strike.

“No pony, is right,” said the lesbian. “Or is it just unicorn rights you’re fighting for? I don’t see any herders or pigeons out here fighting the good fight with you assholes.”

Well shit. So it was like that, was it? Cheerilee had been on the buffalo’s side until she let the word “herder” roll off her tongue like the last drop of lava down the canted face of a volcano. It was an old racial slur—a throwback to the days when settler ponies herded buffalo tribes off their homeland and cosigned them to the limited space of designated reservations. And though the jaded and presently unamused schoolteacher had never traveled south of Ponyville, as a proud member of the race the word was meant to demean, she took offense. And lots of it.

The protesters took offense as well, fuming on behalf of their conveniently absent earth pony and pegasi brethren. Or at least they pretended too, perhaps using the buffalo’s verbal slip as an excuse to berate her argument.

“It’s always the same old tired story,” said the unicorn’s apparent front-runner. “Yeah, colonization happened, and a few dozen buffalo tribes lost their land. Get over it, we certainly have.” This statement earned a whooping cheer from the protesters, who had apparently forgotten their sophistication and were now excited to gang up on the lone buffalo soldier.

“Of course you got over it. It didn’t happen to any of you.”

“I didn’t happen to you either,” countered the unicorn. “That’s the trouble with you creatures: you’re stuck living in the past.”

The lesbian drew back a half step, her breath catching. “You creatures?” she repeated with a snarl. “And just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” She pushed her forehead into the unicorns, snorting. “I have half a mind to take that silver spoon you were born sucking on and shove up at your ass.”

“Sure don’t just have half a mind?”

“Fuck you, you fucking uni cunt! Get the fuck off my campus!”

“You first, you under-evolved dyke!”

“Fascist homophobe—”

“Lazy hippie—”

“Asshole—”

“Bitch—”

And there it was: the pre-predicted girly slap-fight. No longer amused, and unable to decide which party was more full of shit, Cheerilee rose from her curbside seat across the street and began heading for the subway. She didn’t want to ride the train home, but after sitting at the bus stop for exactly fifty-seven minutes, the exhausted lump of schoolteacher realized that her white knight and golden chariot weren’t coming to whisk her off into the sunset.

There she went again, thinking about fantasy novels and fairy tale endings. Maybe she was missing a touch of wonder in her life. For the capital city of nation that went by a boisterous title like “The Magical Land of Equestria”, Canterlot felt pretty void of magic today. It was all late buses, schoolyard arguments and faded poison joke highs.

She was in a mood. It wasn’t exactly a bad mood, just the usual heightened feeling of self-awareness that followed all good poison joke highs. She had come down from worse drugs during her college days: herbs and pills and powders that had left her insides feeling rotten once the good times were over. At least the joke always put her down gently, instead of dropping her on her head and kicking in her ribs while she was down.

In one way, both the drugs low and high points were almost exactly the same. They never failed to fill Cheerilee with a sense of emptiness, and strong desire to wander, as if hoping she might stumble upon some hidden treasure or oddity. When she first came to Canterlot, her favorite pastime had been to smoke bowl after bowl of poison joke and then wander around the city for hours after dark, staring up at the spiraled ivory towers, and the billboards and neon signs that so boldly outshone the daytime sunlight.

And if she ventured out far enough—past the hustle and bustle of big city industry, beyond the specialty shops clogged with designer clothing, and the luxury wagon lots, and the cut-from-marble opera houses, and the domed sports arenas were Royal Guards tussled with Leather Wings: jousting, sword fighting, wrestling…

If she managed to wander by all that—to scale the heights of the mountainside city and escape its wellspring of carnal distractions and too-often empty delights—then, standing on a serene cliff at the edge of Mount Canter, she was free to gaze up at the jeweled splendor of the real Canterlot, all twinkling stars in a black-velvet sky that stretched out into eternity. No politics. No cross-dressing gangsters. No mirrors to catch her reflection and taunt her with the creases marring her once smooth skin. No. None of those wretched things. Just a silent beauty that she doubted she could still appreciate today.

A fantasy… Maybe that’s what Cheerilee was missing now. Maybe that’s what she was looking for: a fantasy…

On her way to the subway station, she didn’t come upon any fantasies lining the ivory streets, just her favorite liquor store and old-fashioned newsstand. She entered the store and purchased two drinks from the donkey standing behind the counter. The first was for her roommate: a bottle of cheap whisky imported from the Antler Isles, the word “STAG” scrawled on the its label in barely legible, uppercase cursive. If words written on labels could think and feel, then STAG would have been the kind of asshole who basked in the perceived sensuality of his own steroid-juiced physique. He was sexy and he knew it, or at least he thought so, and he couldn’t figure out why all the pretty mares that populated his favorite bars and nightclubs kept scrunching their faces or giggling at him as they trotted by.

The second drink was all Cheerilee’s: a tall can Zapp Apple’s Sparkling Orange Juice. She wasn’t sure how a pony named Zapp Apple had stumbled into the orange juice business, but she was glad that the universe apparently had a sense of humor, even if the joke was a bit obvious.

“Hello, beautiful,” she cooed, cracking open the can. “And just where have you been all my life, hmmm?” With her bottom plopped lazily on the curb, sitting beside the newsstand, Cheerilee tilted her head back and took a long swig of her precious sugar water, enjoying the acidic burn of carbonation and artificial flavoring as it spilled down her parched gullet, nurturing her parched soul…

Okay, so it wasn’t as dramatic as all that. Not the kind of life-affirming moment you’d read about in a coming of age novel, or see on the big screen during your favorite life-on-the-road indie movie—you know the ones, where the lead character gets cancer and goes on a journey to “find herself”, then later learns a lesson about enjoying the small things in life while watching the sunset with a witty train-hopping drifter, all of it set to the lazy plucking of acoustic guitar rifts… or something like that…

Nah, it wasn’t all that, but it was still pretty nice. She didn’t know this Zapp character, not personally anyway, but as the high fructose corn-syrup gushed down her throat, she thanked him for his steadfast dedication to safeguarding all that was simple and self-indulgent. “Cherish the little things” was Zapp’s upbeat, after-school-special message. He was a true Equestrian hero, thought Cheerilee, even if his nutrient-free swill was currently eroding the enamel off her teeth.

“You actually gonna buy something today?” said the stallion working the newsstand, talking around a stalk of hay that poked from the corner of his stubbly mouth. His jaw was huge and round, like a pelican carrying a boulder in its bill, and his eyebrows were hairy caterpillars wriggling above grey eyes.

“Shampoo ads and celebrity gossip,” said Cheerilee. And that was all.

“I hear ya,” said the stallion, seeming to understand her cryptic response. “But pushing ads pays my bills, and this ain’t one of them fancy-schmancy libraries in your fancy-schmancy school. So buy something or—”

“Or beat it?” she interrupted with a dismissive tone. “Yep, never heard that one before. And are you positive you didn’t mean to say ‘your fancy-schmancy learnin’ house’?” she added, mocking the gruffness of his voice.

The stallion rolled the stock of hay from one corner of his mouth to the other. “One of these days you’re gonna say the wrong thing to the wrong pony, and I hope to Celestia’s ivory snatch I’m there to see it when the shit finally goes down.”

“When the shit finally goes down?” Cheerilee parroted. “Who talks like that?” She belched, not bothering to cover her mouth. “That’s what I like about you, Fancy-Schmancy, you have no style whatsoever.”

She had been referring to the stallion behind her favorite newsstand as “Fancy-Schmancy” for almost six years now, because any adult capable of un-ironically uttering nonsense like fancy-schmancy, even during a casual conversation, deserved to be labeled as such. Cheerilee wasn’t crazy about labels, but she did want to live in a world where spades were called spades, and the intellectually superior didn’t have to pretend that morons weren’t morons.

“Did you get a chance to check out this month’s issue of Now?” Schmancy sneered as he plucked a magazine from the rack that stood behind him. “Your marefriend is on the cover.”

Cheerilee never read Now Magazine. To do so would have been unethical—nothing short of a sin against all equine kind. If today’s newspapers were rags, then Now was a discarded shred of toilet paper that was so thin you couldn’t use it to wipe your ass without bits coming loose and sticking to the insides of your cheeks. She was stalwart in her refusal to acknowledge Now’s existence, so, naturally, she dropped her can of simple pleasure, rose to all fours and snatched the periodical from Schmancy grubby front hooves. Her eyes flashed over the title, then the cover image, and the shock alone shaved ten years off her life. She stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared also, or rather it smiled, grinning with lips and teeth and an arrogance that belonged to Cheerilee’s most hated of hated rivals: A. K. Yearling.

“What?” was the best rebuttal she could manage. Had the planet recently spun off its axis? Was up down and down up? Why on the fruit-bearing earth was A. K. Yearling on the cover of Now, and could her shit-eating grin have been any wider or any shit-eating-er?

Everypony that knew Cheerilee was aware of the special strand of hatred she carried in her heart for A. K. Yearling. They also knew that their so-called “rivalry” was entirely one-sided and only acknowledged by the presently distressed schoolteacher, mostly because Yearling was a nationally acclaimed author who had seventeen bestselling books, nine movie deals, several vacation homes, a small fleet of private jets and absolutely no idea who Cheerilee B. Cheery was.

“A look inside the mind of Equestria’s No. 1 wordsmith?” said Cheerilee, reading the subtitle aloud as though it were a statement deserving harsh scrutiny.

“I’ll never get what you have against Yearling,” said Schmancy. “She’s a good writer, my foals love her stuff.”

“Your foals are six! Can’t you see what she’s doing? Getting them while they’re young and don’t know any better.”

“That ain’t true. My wife enjoys them books too.”

Cheerilee flipped open the magazine. “No offense, Schmancy, but your wife is married to you, and she looks like a Paleozoic herbivore. So you’ll have to pardon me for not taking any literary suggestion from her.”

“One of these days,” said Schmancy, gnawing on his stalk of hay.

“Blow me.”

Flipping through the rag, Cheerilee breezed past celebrity gossip columns and shampoo ads, searching for the madness printed on page 34. Once on the correct page, she found yet another photo of Yearling, this one even more stomach-turning than the first. The supposed “author” (a term all sane ponies used lightly when speaking of Yearling) was sitting hunched over a typewriter, no doubt pretending to be in the throes of creating something of actual worth. Below the image, printed in bold letters that were several times larger than the rest of the printed text, Cheerilee eyed the words, “Process? I don’t really have a stringent one. Storytelling is fluent, and what works for one narrative might not work for the next one.”

She reread the quote twice more, scowling. Celestia, Cheerilee knew, had always been a pro at populating the earth with high-quality assholes, but she really did a number on the mold the day she planted the demonic embryo that was A. K. Yearling in some innocent, unsuspecting mare’s womb. She imagined that Celestia and Luna had created both herself and Yearling at the same time. They had chatted about it and everything. The conversation had probably gone like this:

CELESTIA: “Hey, sis, let’s make a smart, witty, drop-dead gorgeous earth pony mare named Cheerilee! She’ll be crazy sexy and sweet as a button and all the stallions will want her to birth their sons and daughters. It’ll be awesome!”

LUNA: “Cool idea, sis! But while we’re at it, let’s be total pricks and create this other ugly, stupid pegasus mare with a coat that looks like vomit and a hideous monochrome mane! We’ll call her A. K. Yearling, and make her super popular despite being a total loser!”

CELESTIA: “Neato plan, sis! But why would we do something so fucked up and terrible?

LUNA: “Just to fuck with Cheerilee! You know, ‘cause we’re both such brainless jerks! And skanks!”

CELESTIA: “Yay, skanks!”

LUNA: “Skanks rule!”

And then they made out for ten to fifteen minutes before going back to Celestia’s private champers to offer her current “favorite student” some late night tutoring. And by ‘tutoring’, Cheerilee meant child molestation. Lots and lots of child molestation.

While pondering the validity of Celestia’s supposed ability to create life (she was pretty sure Legend Crackers debunked that fable during the season two finale), Cheerilee continued scanning the article, not really reading it, just looking for lines to wrinkle her nose at. She lost all of her shit—or at least the vast majority of her shit—when she read the words “Edited by A. K. Yearling” written beneath the last line of the article.

“What kind of prick edits her own…?”

To Cheerilee’s surprise, the voice that trailed off before completing that thought hadn’t been hers. Excited, she looked up from Now in search of her potential soul mate. But unfortunately, the universe’s sense of humor could be just as cruel as it was obvious. The lesbian was standing beside Cheerilee, her face scuffed, her proud uniform ruffled and torn at the collar and sleeves.

Catching Cheerilee’s eye, she lowered her magazine and said, “You’re Professor Cheery, right?” Her voice was smaller than it had been during her fight with the unicorns. And judging by the rips marring her blazer, the battle hadn’t remained a verbal one long after the schoolteacher had left. "I heard about that speech you gave your class today," she said, her eyes glittering in a I-totally-haven't-been-following-your-for-the-past-hour kind of way.

“Yeah, I was really high when I spouted all that crap,” said Cheerilee, fearful (and a little flattered) that she may have just acquired a stalker. She looked the shabby lump of buffalo up and down, trying not to be rude and scrunch her face. “You okay?”

“Huh?” the lesbian’s eyes flicked over her tattered uniform. “Oh, haha, yeah. One of those uni jerks took a swing at me. It was kind of impressive, actually. I didn’t think any of those prissy ponies had it in them.”

“Lucky it was just unicorns. Now if it had been a gang of herders or pigeons…”

The lesbian looked down at her front hooves. “Hey, I didn’t really mean that stuff I said. When I was a kid I had some bad run-ins with, uh, with ponies like you. But I’m not like that—like the unicorn jerks, I mean. It just slips out sometimes, you know?”

Cheerilee cocked an eyebrow. No, she didn’t ‘know.’

“Uh… so you read Now?” stammered the lesbian.

Cheerilee returned the rag to its shelf. “No,” she said flatly.

“Oh, uh, me neither. It’s pretty lame.” The lesbian glanced around, perhaps searching for the best escape route. “Hey, Zapp Apple’s, huh?” she said, pointing at the can sitting on the curb. “I love that stuff. You mind?”

A nod from Cheerilee indicated that she didn’t, and her new friend and/or future stalker sat down on the curb and helped herself. “Mm, that’s, uh, that’s pretty good. I’m more of a mango girl myself, but the orange isn’t, uh, it isn’t bad either.”

Cheerilee sat down beside the lesbian. She couldn't help but smile inwardly as she watched the poor, hapless soul stumble about in search in some commonality that could link them together, and perhaps bridge the cultural divide that stood between buffalo and pony.

She was cute. Partially stripped of her proud uniform, and wholly of her indignation and passionate loathing, the little buffalo soldier seemed like an entirely different creature. The fire in her words had been doused by a drizzle of unsure ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’, and she was hesitant to meet Cheerilee’s gaze.

Where had all that passion gone? Had they beaten it out of her? Smothered the fire in her chest with the trampling jackboots they’d been wearing since birth? In a way, Cheerilee felt just as bad for the unicorn protesters as she did for the downtrodden buffalo soldier. Their ignorance was a hand-me-down from their parents, and from their parents’ parents, and the copious media outlets that refused to portray the buffalo, or the gryphons, or the minotaurs, or the zebras, or the diamond dogs as anything more than Applewood villains, job-stealing wretches, disease-ridden charity chases—morons, perverts, criminals, and, in their wildest, most fanciful claims, victims in desperate need of aid from the superior equine race.

But was any of that bigotry the fault of those sign-waving youths? Was it fair to expect a child to grow into a righteous adult when all of her mentors where foolish and hateful? If anything, it was Cheerilee’s fault, and the fault of her generation—the older mares—the ones who had been charged with mentoring the next generation of youths. But where were they now? Where was she? Sitting on the corner nursing a half-empty can of liquefied tooth-decay, her snout buried in the folds of a shit rag as she bemoaned the fall of modern literature.

If the upper class brats were in fact brats, then it was her fault. And if the little buffalo soldier was weak without her anger and hatred, it was because the older mares refused to step aside and let her be strong.

“You can finish the can if you want,” said the schoolteacher. The lesbian nodded and continued to drink.

They sat beside each other for a long time, not saying anything. Their moment of silent reverence was ruined by a speeding Reigns Royce full of stallions dressed from head to hoof in mare’s clothing, jewelry, accessories. A white-faced and blue-coated stallion manned the screaming metal death trap, his licorice-black lips pried apart by a whooping laugh. His mane and eyelashes fluttered in the wind—romantic in a kind of perverted way—and beside him another stallion was hanging out of the passenger side window. As they blurred by, the passenger puckered his painted mouth and blew Cheerilee a kiss, then waved goodbye with a foreleg clad in racy fishnet stockings.

The not-at-all startled schoolteacher leaned forward and watched them go, noticing the pair of stallions humping like jack rabbits in the backseat, their manes worn in cheerleader-ish pigtails, and the license plate swinging from the pumper that stated “The 1%” in earnest black letters.

Two Guard chariots raced after the Steamer, sirens wailing.

“Did you know that guy?” asked the lesbian.

Cheerilee’s shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “We’re friends. I’m sleeping with his boss. They all want to break my kneecaps. It’s… complicated.” It really wasn’t, but saying ‘it’s complicated’ was much less complicated than explaining why she owed several hundred bits to the Daughters of Discord.

“Sounds simple enough,” said the lesbian. “You’re a Nightwalk Mare, am I right?”

This frank statement surprised Cheerilee, though it honestly shouldn’t have. The Nightwalk Mares weren’t exactly some big secret. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

“Uh, sure.” And then it was back to groping blindly in the dark, searching for that magic thread that would tie their lives together. “So, uh, that A. K. Yearling is pretty lame, huh? You know she’s actually Daring Do, right? Talk about shameless self-inserts.”

“Thank you!” Cheerilee exclaimed. “That’s what I’ve been saying for years!”

And there it was. They were tethered now. They would be forever.

After chatting about and laughing at Yearling’s countless literary missteps, Cheerilee halted their prattling with a friendly, “I like your style, kid. I don’t think I caught your name.”

“It’s Strongheart,” said the lesbian, the buffalo soldier (the potential stalker), the new friend. “Little Strongheart.” And she flashed a smile that was anything but small.

Pigtails and Bus Passes

Chapter FOUR: Pigtails and Bus Passes

Though Cheerilee was a mare of many social shortcomings, she prided herself on being an excellent roommate. During her college years, back when she shared a dorm suite with three other mares—all of them at least a decade her junior—Cheerilee had always taken great pains to be as courteous as possible to her suitemates, and especially her roommate: a bookish little darling named Tulip. She was always mindful of Tulip’s sleep schedule, and often took great pains to sidle about the dorm after returning from wild Tuesday night block parties—a feat she achieved even while very tipsy, or hallucinating on the party scene’s latest designer drug.

The dorm had been a sacred place. A place that demanded respect. All clothing was to be worn or put away, never left draped across the backs of chairs or sprawled out on beds. Lights were to be switched off while others were sleeping, and headphones inserted if one wished to use the radio while the other was studying. And, finally, no colts. Ever. And while Cheerilee had been guilty of breaking this rule numerous times, she never took a stiff sophomore cock between her legs while her roommate was in, or straddled a hunky water polo jock on a bed that wasn’t hers (because there was just no excuse for rudeness like that).

But nopony was perfect, and if Cheerilee was guilty of one infraction—one itty-bitty breach of the agreed upon social contract between mares sharing the same living space—it was this: she was powerless against the allure of toiletries and other bathroom sundries that didn’t belong to her. Soaps, shampoos, conditioners, lotions (mmm, especially lotions): all were fair game in the restrooms that Cheerilee shared with other mares.

Now, humble reader, before you judge this social irresponsibility too harshly and label Cheerilee a selfish miscreant, or worse, some kind of bath salt-pinching kleptomaniac, you should take a moment to understand the guilty mare’s situation. Cheerilee had “bad fur”: an embarrassing condition usually associated with equines of the striped variety. And while she could afford decent coat-care products, she had never belonged to that all-too-common appearance-conscious ilk who could justify parting with nine bits for a single twelve ounce bottle of lotion. Her products were cheap, and couldn’t even begin to subdue the knotted and dried out rebellion that was her fur.

It was strange, really. She had no qualms with shelling out landslides of cash for designer clothes that put her on par with her wealthy unicorn peers—those giants of academia who had grown fat and happy from textbook sales, government funded research grants, and every manner of general ass-kissery imaginable. Besides, clothing was inherently frivolous anyway. All money spent on scarves or boots or cute baby-tees was money wasted, so it made little difference whether one wasted a single bit or a hundred.

But lotion was different. Lotion was a necessity (at least it was too Cheerilee), and its producers, marketers and distributors had a moral obligation to sell their product at a fair price. It was perhaps to the tiniest of tiny gripes she had ever fixated on, but no less important than global climate change (a byproduct of Equestria's habit of irresponsibly tampering with natural weather patterns), or the discontinuation of Hoofstess snack cakes (a true national tragedy, if ever there was one). After all, how could a society expect to solve the big problems—poverty, national security, racial discrimination—when the cost of decent fur moisturizer was worth the same as an hour of minimum wage labor?

Tipsy from several swallows of her own self-righteousness, Cheerilee squirted a generous helping of cherry-almond scented “Sheek” onto the frog of her upturned forehoof. It was her roommate’s lotion, and though rubbing the cream into her dry fur racked her chest with pangs of guilt (mild as they were), the rich scent and deliberate, pseudo-hip misspelling of the word ‘chic’ had been too alluring to pass up.

Perched upright on the toilet seat, she coated her forelegs first, then gave the bottle another squirt and moved down to her barrel. She frowned as her hooves fondled the dollop of extra paunch that refused to melt off her underbelly, no matter how many hours of her life she sacrificed to the campus running track. Compulsive exercising had never been an aspect of Cheerilee’s life before moving to Canterlot, but with her good-looks and fast-fading youth at stake, she had found the motivation to lace up her best running shoes and hit the track at least once every other day. All things considered, it was hardly her worst compulsive habit.

More distress flooded her features when the journey down her belly culminated at her lap, where she was subjected to the demoralizing sight of two plump tubes of... Celestia’s ivory snatch, were those her thighs? She seemed to stumble upon them, as if surprised to find the fleshy mounds resting below her hips. They weren’t exactly fat, at least not according to her roommate, who insisted that Cheerilee still “curved in all the right places”. But they were thick enough to make the older mare long for her twenties, back when her hinds were tight, her ass shapely, and displaying either won her free drinks at night clubs, and forlorn mornings when she woke the following day in a stranger’s bed. Alone. Spooning with some dreamy young stallion, but alone.

Dislodging herself from the comfort of the toilet seat, and the discomfort of old memories, she found her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Her hip young friend Sheek had really taken the years off. Her coat shined with regained youth, her spirits too, and she beamed like the lovely twenty-something she would always be at heart. Puckering her lips, she winked and blew a kiss meant for the buffalo lesbian, wondering if Thirty-Something Cheerilee could still seduce a horny college student with same flare Twenty-Something Cheerilee was notorious for.

Her coat looked fuller now, healthier, but her mane still lacked a certain bounce, and her face seemed plain under the scrutinizing fluorescent lights. She had always believed in the illuminating powers that resided in all private bathrooms. Show her a mare that had never spent at least three hours sprucing in the solitude of a restroom, and Cheerilee would show you a soul who didn’t know herself. The restroom was a mare’s temple. It spoke to her, and right now, it was insisting that she wash her mane.

Still using her roommate’s products, she washed and conditioned her mane in the sink, then dried her hair and wrapped it in a towel—a trick she’d learned from one of her suitemates back at university. Next she pulled open a drawer under the sink and retrieved two cylindrical tubes: one full of black eyeshadow, the other of matching lipstick.

Makeup. Hmmm. What did she have to say about makeup…

While pondering the possible evils of blush, lipstick, concealer, hoof polish, eyeliner, hair dye (did hair dye count as make up?), her ears perked at the jingle of keys sliding into the front doorknob.

“LuNe! The mare tomb raider! Fiction narrator! Sword Art player hater…!”

She chuckled at the random rhymes blaring from her roommate’s headphones, which doubled as a miniature boom box when the speakers were turned outward. Lunar Landing—the newest album by underground rap sensation, The LuNe! (and yes, you do always have to write her name like that)—had become the unofficial theme song of Cheerilee’s apartment, and consequently, her life. She had yet to decide if she actually liked the album, or the wacky rap artist responsible for its creation, but, on a whole, it was… different. Sometimes in a very good way.

“…Superior Spider-mare Spider Slayer! The master masturbator! Oh it must be, Loony—lunar space invader…!”

Now Cheerilee’s roommate was singing along, her tongue wrapping around each nonsense rhyme with half the dexterity displayed by The LuNe!. She was an interesting character, this LuNe!—a lyrical enigma that also went by such colorful derivatives as “Loony”, “Loony Toony”, “Loony Tuesday”, and Cheerilee’s personal favorite, “The Lune in the Moon”.

Her style was markedly different from the average pop rapper. During her more serious songs, her voice resonated with the raspy vibe of a blues vocalist, lonely, soulful and jazzy in a way that could squeeze tears from the dried out ducts of even the most jaded of jaded individuals, be they hipsters, punks, goths, greasers, thugs… And during other songs—songs like the one presently blaring from the hallway—she sounded like a cartoon chipmunk playing harmonica after going to town on a helium canister.

Cheerilee had nicknamed the latter delivery style “Nonsense Mode”, and the point of it was apparently too see how many random rhymes she could spit out before using up her allotted sixteen bars. It didn’t always make sense, but if nothing else Cheerilee could sense and appreciate The LuNe!’s supreme love of the Equestrian language. Where most of other rappers were “hard” or “gangsta”, The LuNe! was a “tobacco-packing acrobat on the fast track to back-tracking back to her downtown flat”. And that was pretty fucking rad.

“I hope you’re not in here getting pretty with my shit again!”

Cheerilee jumped at the loud voice, then turned to find her roommate leaning against the door jam, striking a casual in pose in her grungy band-themed t-shirt and lumberjack-looking flannel. Both articles of clothing belonged to Cheerilee: her old weapons in the quasi-cold war on social terror. Only the headphones belonged to her roommate. Cheerilee had always preferred the less conspicuous ear-bud style headphones, because assuming that everypony within a ten mile radius would enjoy your music was just plain rude. And there was no excuse for rudeness.

At the transitional age of thirty-nine—officially too old to go club hopping with any semblance of dignity, but still young enough that her peculiarities were regarded as “weird” and not “eccentric,” not yet—Cheerilee’s roommate/best friend/older sister, Berry Punch, possessed the youngest soul in Canterlot. Maybe all of Equestria.

“Nah, I’m just playing,” she said from the doorway, her voice a whisper beneath the noisy music. “I don’t mind you using my stuff. It’s a fuck-ton of a lot better than the crap you’re always buying.” She joined Cheerilee at the sink, eyeing her sister’s reflection with impish curiosity. “Going out tonight?”

“Yeah,” said Cheerilee. “Downtown. I need to borrow some change for the bus.”

“Why don’t you just buy a bus pass?”

“I don’t need a pass. I don’t ride the bus often enough to justify having a pass.”

“But if you had a pass you wouldn’t have to scrounge for change all the time.”

“It’s not that big a deal. Plus with the new pass system you don’t even save any money. Buying a month pass costs exactly the same as just paying for each individual ride, so there’s no point in having one.”

“I think the point is that you wouldn’t have to scrounge for change.”

Cheerilee unwrapped her mane and tossed the towel aside. “Do I seriously need to stand here and explain to you why it’s cheaper if I just pay for each ride? Are we having that conversation right now?”

Berry turned her music down. “I’m just saying it wouldn’t kill you to get a bus pass.” She pulled open a drawer, retrieved a brush and began working it through on her mane. “And just so you know, you’re dead wrong as usual. Your way isn’t cheaper.”

“How do you figure?”

“It’s like this: say you have to ride the bus tonight but all you have is cash. So what do you do? You could stop at a liquor and by a bottle of water in order to break your big bills. Which works out fine, except now you’ve just spent a bit twenty-five on a bottle of water you didn’t even want—”

“Who says I didn’t want the water?”

“But I know you, Cheers, and I know you aren’t gonna buy that bottle of water. You’re gonna buy a bottle that Sparkling Zapp Apple sewage—”

“I’m gonna buy a can, sis. It comes in a can.”

“Okay, so you’re gonna buy a can of liquid garbage. And that can will cost a bit fifty, instead of the aforementioned bit twenty-five, am I right?”

“You are.”

“Of course I am.” Happy with her preening, Berry set the brush on the counter. “So now you’re out another twenty-five cents, and your bus ride that should have only cost you a bit fifty—that is the price of a bus ride nowadays, right? A bit fifty?”

“It is.”

“Of course it is. So now your bit fifty bus ride is three bits. You’ve doubled the fare. You understand that, Cheers? You’ve doubled it.”

Cheerilee pursed her painted lips in the mirror. “You done yet?”

“Give me a minute, I’m on a roll.” After squeezing a glob of liquid face soap on her hooves, Berry began washing her face, still talking as she splashed water on the counter. “So now your bus ride is twice as costly, right?” she said, her voice swimming through a jet of water to reach Cheerilee. “But wait, it gets deeper.”

“Of course it does.”

“Let’s say this habit persists—and it’s you were talking about, so I know it will. What happens next, you ask? Well, after pulling over to buy your crappy soft drinks every day before riding the bus, eventually your teeth start to rot, and you get fat and unhealthy. Now we both know your medical and dental plans are laughably terrible, so it’s pretty safe to say you won't be able to pay off any of the medical bills you're sure to acquire. And I know you, Cheers; you’re so image conscious that becoming that fat and ugly will send you plunging into a never ending miasma of depression.”

“I am not image conscious.”

“And once that happens you’ll start binging on ice cream and snack cakes. You’ll get even fatter, even uglier, even more depressed—and then one day I’ll come home from work and be mildly surprised to find lying in the bathtub with your throat slit.”

“You wouldn’t be surprised. I’d leave a note on the door.”

“Hmmm…” Berry paused to ponder this. “...that would be the polite thing to do. I’ll remember that when I’m planning my own suicide.”

“Just make sure you proofread your last words, please. I don’t want to stumble upon your hanged corpse in the yard after working all day and have to read your error-riddled suicide note.”

Berry chuckled. “Well that doesn’t matter much, ‘cause I’m positive you’ll kill yourself before I kill myself.”

“Because I’ll be fat and unhappy?”

“And broke.”

“And lacking a bus pass?”

“Exactly.”

Cheerilee took a moment to let her sister’s cockamamie logic sink in.

“So can I borrow the change or not?”

Berry chuckled, but her head shake was a dejected gesture. “I feel like you’re not grasping the lesson here.”

“There’s a lesson? And here I thought you only wrote for entertainment.”

Another chuckle. “Seriously, sis, not having a bus pass in a big city like Canterlot is irresponsible. What if you need to get somewhere quickly and you don’t have any bits on you? You should think about these things more. You know, actually make plans for once in your life.”

“I make plans. I was planning to ask you for bus money.”

For reasons Cheerilee didn’t readily understand, her sister suddenly broke into a hysterical laughing fit. Her body shook as she clutched the edge of the countertop, her face pointed down toward the sink. “You’re a fucking idiot!” she practically shouted between great gasping laughs. She teetered as though she might topple over, and the sight of her sent Cheerilee plunging into a laughing fit of her own. They leaned against one another for balance, clutching their stomachs and blinking away tears, their reflections cheek to cheek in the steam-smudged mirror.

Cheerilee B. Cheery and her sister Berry P. Cheery looked alike, but not in a traditional way. On a crowded downtown street they could be mistaken for twins, with their purple coats, similar builds and matching dimpled cheeks. But when apart from others and standing side by side, their differences exposed themselves. When it came to their coats, manes and cutie marks, Cheerilee was dark where Berry was light, and light where the older mare was dark. She wasn’t her older sister’s physical opposite, but her negative, her features inverted as if by some clever act of photo manipulation.

Only their eyes held a similar brightness, though at times Berry’s could span wide and twinkle with a brilliance normally reserved for stars. And during those always too-fleeting states of radiance, they didn’t merely reflect light—didn’t settle for playing that too simple game of catching and rebounding enjoyed by the whites and the irises of so many others.

Sometimes Berry’s gaze radiated its own light. Sometimes it really shined.

The sisters Cheery shared other marked differences, but the most noticeable—other than Berry’s starlight eyes—had to do with their varying levels of beauty. To put it plainly: Berry Punch was attractive, whereas Cheerilee was attractive for her age. The schoolteacher was the kind of mare who had been a catch during her younger years, and though her beauty had yet to wane completely, and likely never would, she was no longer the drop-dead gorgeous piece of ass she had been.

Berry, however, had a timeless face and a body to match. And unlike other older ponies who had managed to age gracefully, Berry was beautiful without looking younger than she was. The faint creases above, below and around her eyes told the whole story—thirty-nine and going on forty; no turning back now—but she wore her wrinkles with the same confidence that younger mares wore their baby-soft skin. Even the decades of late night jobs, mild drug abuse and hard drinking had failed to steal away her natural beauty.

It baffled Cheerilee. Impressed her. Made her seethe with the worst kind of envy.

She had always blamed her mother for this difference in looks. While she and her sister shared the same father—Dreary D. Cheery: a miserable scumbag of an earth stallion—they had each squirmed into this world via different wombs. In fact, they didn’t discover their sisterhood until six months after Berry scribbled her name on a hospital donor list. She had been on her death bed then, in desperate need of a new kidney and a portion of somepony’s healthy liver. Cheerilee had been that somepony, a perfect match. And the day they met with Berry’s doctor to discuss the details of the operation, one of the nurses popped into the room with two folders containing medical records, and the some astonishing news.

Cheerilee still remembered how Berry had laughed then. It was the same way she was laughing now: with all of herself. Lungs, heart, lips, teeth, muscle, fat, bones, sinews, nerves, pores, fur—everything. A full-body laugh, so loud and violent that the doctors had wondered if it was healthy.

Both mares had been floored by the news. Sisters. Living just two houses away at the time, and sisters. And to this day, though the addiction was still trying to kill her, Berry never quit drinking.

“The bottle helped me find my sister…” she once told her doctor, years after the surgery that saved, or perhaps merely prolonged her life. “...maybe someday it will help me find myself as well…”

“You working tonight?” said Berry, her laughing fit almost at an end. A few more snorting chuckles escaped her, and then she settled down enough to pull off her shirts, one after the other, and toss them aside. It was something she rarely did: toss things aside. Ambitions. Relationships. Habits. Mannerisms. Responsibilities. She was a hoarder of nouns—ponies, places, things, ideas—and was slow to part with any of the possessions that made up her collection.

“No, I’m not working tonight. I’m not a working mare, okay. It’s not a job.”

“Need a partner in crime? We could work the horny sisters angle again. The Not-Johns go nuts for that kind of stuff, remember last time?”

Cheerilee wrinkled her nose. “Fuck, no. That was perhaps the single most awkward moment of my life.”

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”

“It was. You make the weirdest noises while getting pounded from behind.”

“Only from behind?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t make a habit of documenting your sex life.”

“Weird how? Was it like…” Berry paused and looked away, as if pondering something that required every ounce of her brain power. “…funny-weird or gross-weird?”

“Weird-weird. Foreign-art-house-indie-movie weird.”

“Subtitled or dubbed?”

“I can’t imagine that would make a difference.”

“Come on, subbed or dubbed?”

“So I owe Flocka a ton of money,” said Cheerilee, trying to shift the topic of this meandering conversation. “She’s gonna break my kneecaps if I don’t pay her off soon.”

“Donkish Art-house or Draconian animated? Draconimation? Is that how you say it?”

“Are we still talking about this?”

“I feel like I’m saying it wrong.”

Slightly irritated, Cheerilee removed a pair of froofy scrunchies from her makeup drawer and used them to pigtail her mane. While she was confident that Equestria's intelligentsia had yet to recognize the legitimacy of the word ‘froofy’ (adj. like or having to do with froof, esp. in reference to hair scrunchies), or the use of ‘pigtail’ as intransitive verb (ex. I came, I saw, I pigtailed), these two grammatical missteps were the only ways to describe the following.

One: the pom-pom like rings of fuzz presently choking her mane into the aforementioned ‘pigtails.’

And two: the act of applying said fuzzy rings to said mane.

Her pigtails didn’t exactly resemble the tails of any pigs, and coupled with the black lipstick and eye-shadow (not to mention those thirty-plus years of age smeared all her face), she looked outright absurd. But that was fine. The mask waiting for her in the bedroom closet would pull the entire look together.

“I hear you mention Flocka?” asked Berry. “Are you two still…?”

“Locked in an epic battle of wills for the future of lazy, recreational drug users?”

“Why do you hang out with that loser?”

“We don’t hang out. Our relationship is limited to strict business transactions. She sells jokes. I buy jokes.”

“And occasionally you go down on her.”

“Like I said: strictly business.”

“I told you I found us a new dealer.”

“That’s news to me,” said Cheerilee, practicing her ‘cute-and-innocent’ face in the mirror. She couldn’t decide how much she wanted to downplay her age tonight. “You found a new dealer?”

“Uh, yeah. I buy from the little Apple kid who lives at the edge of town.”

Cheerilee flashed a puzzled look.

“Apple kid. Brown mane. Adorable green eyes. Hangs out around the movie theater a lot.”

Still nothing. Her face was a blank slate.

“All of these things are things, Cheers. We covered this during last week’s sprucing session. I believe you asked me for bus money then, too.”

“I asked you for change. I have plenty of money—”

“—she said as Flocka swung a hefty sledgehammer, its head careening toward Cheerilee’s left kneecap.”

“Har. Har. You’re hilarious.”

“One of has to be.”

Cheerilee tousled her mane, then turned and blew her sister a kiss. “How do I look?” She added a wink for good measure.

“Like an asshole.”

“An asshole half my age?”

“Nope. Three-fourths at most.”

“I’ll take it.” She paused a moment to give her sister a once over, as if just now noticing that Berry had been sprucing this whole time. “So where the hay are you going tonight?"

A precious kind of smile canted Berry’s lips. “I, like any respectable mare my age, I'm going on a proper date with a strapping young stallion.”

“Young, huh?”

“Young at heart.”

“He’s not that unicorn creep is he? The one with the sweater vest who talks through his nose?”

“Upscale does not talk through his nose,” said Berry, defensive. “And no, I’m not seeing him anymore. Momma snagged herself a Guard.”

“Well that’s infinitely worse.”

“Sounds like somepony is jealous of my potentially stable and healthy relationship.”

“More like somepony is worried about staying out of prison. You realize I get high every other day and fraternize with criminals, don’t you? I can’t have a sister who’s in bed with the law. I have an image to uphold.”

Berry turned to face her sister, her eyes on their way to forming a serious expression, but… never… quite… getting… there…

“I don’t like you hanging out with those thugs, Cheers,” she said. “But I’m not Mom, I won’t tell you how to live your life. Just… be careful, okay.”

Cheerilee laughed away her sister’s almost-grave expression. “What’s with the drama all of a sudden? When am I ever not careful?”

“I could come with you, you know,” said Berry. “The date isn’t that important. We could work the streets together; maybe snag a couple of foreign hotties.” She nudged her sister’s shoulder, forcing an impish grin. “Come on, Cheers. I know how much you love, love, love foreigners.”

This was true. She did love, love, love them.

“Nah, you really shouldn’t. I don’t want Flocka and her goons to see you out there with me. They’re my problem, no reason all three of us should get our kneecaps broken.”

“Three?”

“Flocka, too. Something about her boss using her kneecaps to break my kneecaps.”

“What’s with her and kneecaps anyway?”

“I know right? It’s like an obsession.”

“Does she get all touchy with yours when you guys are together? Like, does she go nuts for those sexy purple kneecaps?”

Cheerilee thought a moment. “Holy fucking horse apples, she does! She always strokes them ever so gently while we pillow talk.”

“Fuck, Cheers," said Berry, alarmed. "You pillow talk with your dealer?”

“Look, just because she runs with a gang of sexually confused thugs doesn’t mean she isn’t sensitive.”

“Bloody, fucking sensitive, aye!” laughed Berry, mimicking Flocka’s accent.

“That’s right I’m sensitive you bleedin’ nancy, twat!” Cheerilee laughed back.

Both mares frolicked out into the hallway, sharing a laugh at Flocka’s expense. Yes, frolicked was definitely the right word. Neither she nor her sister had ever been terribly effeminate creatures—at least not in the ultra-girlish way of perky waitresses or high school prep-squad leaders—but something about this moment made them skip and titter with a surging of something that could only be called “female.”

Maybe it was all the makeup, or the way Cheerilee’s pigtails flounced in syncopation with her prance. She was spry for a mare her age—a gift from the Canter U jogging track, as well as the genes she’d inherited from dear old Dreary D. Cheery. The same genes lived in Berry as well, but she couldn’t frolic with even a fraction of her sister’s liveliness. She gave it her best shot though, cranking her player to the highest volume as she stopped halfway down the hall to dance to the musical stylings of the LuNe!.

Had somepony trotted down the hall just then—perhaps a mature, business-minded professional of some sort, dressed in a two-piece suit and a satin noose, his graying mane combed back, or maybe over, anxious to conceal the tells of his advanced and still advancing age… Yes, had somepony like that wandered down the hall, he would’ve stumbled upon a most peculiar sight—and a joyous one!: two mares in odd-looking makeup dancing to nonsensical music, shuffling and sliding and shaking their tails with all the verve of the teenage daughters they had never birthed, but were old enough to have mothered.

Berry opened a door at the end of the hall, and titters flooded into her bedroom. She flopped onto a bed that was big enough for two and folded both forelegs behind her head, lounging as though suspended in a hammock.

“What are we doing?” asked Cheerilee, still dancing like a goofball.

“What?” Berry couldn’t hear her sister over the music. She twisted the dial on her player, lowering the volume.

Giddy, Cheerilee hopped on the bed too, plopping down on her sister. “What are we doing?” she repeated, the questioned carring more weight this time.

“Living.” Berry shoved her sister’s chest with both forehooves, laughing, and Cheerilee shoved her back. They rough housed on the bed, their effeminate prancing giving way to the kind of boyish play each was more accustomed too.

“Stop it!” Berry laughed. She couldn’t seem to stop laughing. “You’re gonna smear your makeup!”

They toppled off the bed together, made up like dolls and tangled in each other’s limbs, panting, their lips close enough for a kiss.

“You gonna wear the costume tonight?” said Berry, grinning with mischief borrowed from her sister.

“Nah. It got torn to shreds the last time I went out. I had to get a new one.”

“You wearing the new one, then?”

“Uh… it’s kinda…”

“Wear it. I can’t wait to see you in it.”

“But you don’t even know what it looks like.”

“Which is why I want to see you in it.”

After a final smattering of titters, both Cheery siblings untangled themselves. Berry returned to the bed. Cheerilee made her way to the closet, swung open the door and began rifling through the clothing. She and her sister shared closet space, so the narrow cubbyhole was packed with everything from silky dresses by Hoity-Toity (Cheerilee’s clothes) to grungy, acid-washed denim jackets (also Cheerilee’s clothes, though she had essentially given them to her sister via an offbeat, hand-me-up transaction).

“Holy freaking horse apples!” said Berry, startling her sister. “Cheers, I almost forgot. On my way home I overhead these bratty looking pegasus teenyboppers talking about you on the bus. They said you gave some kind of speech during one of your classes. They looked kind of young to be college kids, though. They friends of yours?”

“Pegasus teenyboppers…?” Cheerilee felt a happy little tickle in her chest. The Subway Sentries. But how could they have heard about… “Yeah, I know those jokers. No idea where they heard that though.”

“Maybe you have stalkers. A whole gaggle of them.”

A memory flashed through Cheerilee's head. “Speaking of stalkers, this little buffalo lesbian I ran into after class mentioned something about my speech too.”

“Lesbian, huh?” Berry licked her lips, uncrossing and then re-crossing her hinds. “She cute?”

“Depends. You like twelve year olds?”

“I like lots of things. Keep talking.”

“She's built like the offspring of a malnourished circus elephant.”

“Hmmm… short and stocky. Keep talking.”

“Can I get that bus money now?”

“Keeping talking and we’ll see.”

Cheerilee abandoned the closet for a dresser drawer. Where the hay had she put that stupid costume? “Also: if you happen to have any joke stashed in here, I’m gonna need that too.”

“So what did you say during class?” Berry asked, sitting up on her elbows.

“Don’t know. I was really, really high. Me and Flocka smoked like chimneys all morning. I was fucking gone, only just came down a few hours ago.”

“You’ve got strangers talking about you in the street but have no idea why?”

“Not a clue.”

“Typical Cheerilee.”

“Ah, I’m sure it’s nothing. Probably just some bored joke-heads making up shit ‘cause they ran out of… Oh! Here’s that damn thing!” Cheerilee lifted a folded stack of spandex fabric from a drawer. It was black in some spots, purple and yellow in others. “Seriously though, the bus money,” she said, tossing the clothes across her back.

“Really, Cheers?”

“I need change.”

Berry pointed at the nightstand. “Third drawer from the top. There’s enough in there to pay for a bus pass.”

Cheerilee pulled the drawer open. “Thanks, sis.”

“You know it’s bound to catch up with you, Cheers—”

“You’re the best, sis—”

“Someday all that irresponsibility is gonna bite you in the ass like a rabid dog—”

“Love you, sis.”

“And what pony living in Equestria doesn’t have change, anyway? Our economy is predominantly coin based—”

Cheerilee pecked her puzzled sister on the cheek. “Bye, sis. Have fun on your date.” She started to leave, but Berry hopped down from the bed and hooked a fore around her shoulder.

“Promise me you won’t get your kneecaps broken,” she said. “If that little poser Flocka lays a hoof on you I’ll have to kidnap her, torture her for several months and then murder her in cold blood. Thing is, I’m kinda sleeping around with a Guard right now, so I doubt I’ll get away with mareslaughter, no matter how justifiable the killing was. And what does your big sister love?”

“She loves her freedom.” Cheerilee flashed a warm smile. “Relax, Berry. I promise that nothing will happen.” She paused. “And I’ll even buy the stupid bus pass.”

“Look at that,” said Berry, “it can learn after all. Now if only I could get you to stop fucking those stray dogs in the yard. The neighbors are starting to talk.”

“Let ‘em.” Cheerilee hugged her sister, pecking her cheek one more time before cantering out the door.