“This is, like, really lame.”
Diamond Tiara scowled at the ponies standing proudly behind their hand-painted ‘tabletop gaming club’ sign until they were cowering under the table.
“You’re right. You’re so right, you know?” Silver Spoon drawled in response, tossing her plait and rolling her eyes as they trotted past. “It totally sucks that this stupid school makes us join one of these clubs.”
The pink filly nodded in response. “I should have got my daddy to send me to Canterlot High for Fillies. They don’t have any of this stupidity.” She over-emphasised the last word and drew a few looks, but she shrugged them off with a look of indifference.
The pair continued to strut around the gym, looking at each stall in turn and rejecting each of them.
“I don’t know how we’re going to pick,” Silver Spoon said, sighing. “All of these ponies are so uncool.”
“So uncool,” Diamond Tiara added, walking past the chess club without a second look. “I thought high school ponies were supposed to be mature and sophisticated.”
Silver paused in thought for a moment, irking Diamond Tiara who wanted to keep walking and get upwind of the nerds. “Hey, Tiara, how about the school council?”
“Why would I want to join those goody-goodies?” Tiara replied, scowling at her friend. “Sounds like a total blast.”
“But they have all of the power,” Silver reasoned, looking over at the school council stall. “They even get money from the school.”
“Money, huh? Well, it’s gotta be better than anything else here.” With a shrug and a toss of her mane, still pinned beneath her signature tiara, the filly flounced over towards the council stall with Silver Spoon hot on her hooves, adjusting her glasses with a hoof.
“Oh, baubles,” Tiara cursed, coming to a skidding halt halfway there.
“What’s up, Tiara?”
“Look.” She pointed a hoof at the stall, which was currently crowded with three familiar fillies who looked excited to be joining the school council.
“Ugh, I can’t believe the cutie mark crybabies got there first,” Silver Spoon said with revulsion. “Even once they got those stupid marks they still stayed in that silly group.”
Looking to the heavens, Tiara let out a giant sigh. “What now, Spoon?”
There was only one option. Their fallback option. The school newspaper.
“Hi, we’d like to join the newspaper,” Silver Spoon said in a bored tone, barely bothering to look for the club president. “Can we have the sign-up sheet or whatever?”
“Yeah,” Tiara said uselessly, staring aimlessly into the middle distance.
“Are you two Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara?” a smart-looking pony asked, giving them a stern glance. He seemed older, definitely a senior, and judging by the way his nametag was precisely placed on his shirt, a bit of a pain in the flank.
“Um, yeah, sure. Why?” Tiara replied, finally looking over the ponies sitting at the stall. None of them seemed very impressed.
“Well, you see,” the president began, pressing his forehooves together, “we know about the ‘Foal Free Press’ incident. And we really can’t allow you to join.”
Both fillies gave him equally poisonous stares, but to his credit he didn’t flinch.
“Sorry. The principal told us.”
“The principal?” Tiara began to yell, but Silver grabbed her and dragged her away before it became an incident. They didn’t need an incident on their first day of high school, especially if the principal knew who they were.
“Ugh, such idiots. I’m glad we didn’t join, actually, because they looked really boring,” Tiara rambled, trying to cover her burning embarrassment.
“Yeah, yeah,” Silver replied earnestly, doing the same.
“You know what? I’m done with this. I’m just going to tell the teacher that we’re not doing any of this,” Tiara finally declared, waving a hoof over the contents of the gym. “She can’t make us and my daddy can always come and sort it out. I’m sure I can be exempt.”
“Yeah, sure,” Silver Spoon nodded, following her best friend out of the hall with only one longing glance at the cooking club, surrounded by giggling fillies already having a good time.
“We’ll go and see her right now,” Tiara steamed, her hoofsteps louder than they needed to be as they headed back through the halls to their classroom. “She’d better listen to me.”
“I’m not listening to you, Diamond Tiara. Everypony has to join a club, no exceptions,” their teacher said firmly, stonewalling them admirably.
“I don’t care about the rules, I need to be exempt,” Tiara thundered, her hoof pounding the floor. “Right, Silver?”
“Yeah…” her companion mumbled, her resolve broken already.
“No. No exemptions. Go and find a club.”
Diamond Tiara stared into the teacher’s face, knives flashing from her eyes, but the teacher’s defences had weathered years of assault and weren’t likely to give in to a freshpony any time soon.
“I shan’t.” With that, Diamond Tiara sat down at her desk, putting her nose in the air and refusing to listen to any more arguments. Silver Spoon looked nervously at the teacher, caught between two evils, and ended up going nowhere.
Resigned, the teacher tore a sheet of paper from a pad and scribbled onto it. “Okay Diamond Tiara, Silver Spoon, I have a solution. There is one club that is only for ponies who don’t want to join any others, and I know you two will fit in perfectly.”
This caught Tiara’s attention, and the spoilt filly looked up, trying to look nonchalant but unable to hide her interest.
“So it’s sortof… exclusive?” Silver added, using a little tact to try and persuade her stubborn friend.
“Exactly,” the teacher said, folding the paper and handing it to them. “Take this to room C-101 and give it to the ponies in there. The C-building is across the courtyard.”
“An exclusive club… I just knew this school had something for privileged fillies like us, Spoon,” Diamond Tiara said, grinning. “That teacher held out pretty long, huh? I almost thought I might not win.”
Silver Spoon couldn’t reply with the note between her teeth, but she just nodded along. The C-building was the school’s oldest and it looked it, with crooked doors and paint peeling from the window frames.
“Doesn’t look much, but I suppose it has to be kept secret from the rabble,” Tiara said, pushing open the door and trotting through, forgetting to hold it open for her friend. The corridors were deserted, and C-101 was the first room on the first floor, so they didn’t have far to go.
Silver Spoon wanted to knock, but Diamond Tiara snatched the paper from her and barged right into the room, flinging the door open wide and striding inside before Silver could protest.
“Hi, I’m supposed to give you this,” Tiara said, handing the paper over to the nearest pony directly. The pony did not move and the paper flicked through the air before coming to rest on a rickety desk.
As it happened, there were actually only two ponies in the room, other than Tiara and Silver. One was an indifferent-looking pink filly with an electric blue mane pulled into a ponytail, and the other was a spacey yellow pony with a big pink bow and an even bigger up-do.
“Um, who do you think you are, just coming straight in here?” the pink pony asked, giving them both nasty looks as she picked up the paper and began to read. “Oh, dang, Palm look at this.”
The yellow pony read the paper too and shook her head a little. “This is like, really not okay.”
“Totally.”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah.”
Both of them looked at the new arrivals. The pink pony spoke first.
“Well, you’ve found the amusement club. Looks like you’re new members. Sit far away from us and keep quiet,” she said coolly, pointing a hoof to the corner of the room. “Don’t bother us.”
Confronted with two older ponies, even Diamond Tiara’s iron will melted a little, and the two of them made their way over to the corner, only allowing themselves to mutter insults about the other ponies.
“Well, these ponies don’t exactly seem like the kind of cool ponies who get into an exclusive club,” Diamond Tiara complained, sneaking a glance over at them. It seemed as if the other two were discussing some kind of sale that was going on at a nearby mall with fervour that verged on the religious.
“What does amusement club even mean? I don’t see any jokes,” Silver Spoon added nervously, looking around.
“We’re not some lame-o ponies like the cutie mark crybabies. We’re not going to do comedy, if that’s what this is,” Tiara said flatly.
Before they could settle into their seats and regain their composure, the door flew open again with an even louder bang than earlier. They both swivelled around to have a look and spotted a black pegasus standing on the threshold, looking smug.
“Electric Wave!” she yelled with a wave of a forehoof. “Twit!”
“Punk!” the pink pony replied angrily.
“Airhead!”
“Poser!”
For a moment, the pink one was at a loss for words, which the pegasus took as a victory, retreating as fast as she’d appeared and slamming the door.
Silence fell over the room, broken only by the grinding of Electric Wave’s teeth as she seethed. The yellow pony, Palm, patted her on the shoulder comfortingly.
“She’s a dweeb, Lex,” she said sagely after some thought.
Lex looked over at Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon and turned a strange shade of red. “What are you staring at?”
“A pony who just got slammed,” Tiara replied, raising an eyebrow.
Lex’s expression darkened. “Whatever. You’re a dweeb too.”
While Diamond Tiara and Lex sulked, glancing occasionally at each other and then scowling, Palm and Silver shared sympathetic looks. After a minute or so, Palm got up and trotted cautiously over to where Silver was sitting.
“Sorry, that was Black Swan. She’s a total goth-poser-loser, but she like, won’t leave us alone because she’s just jealous,” Palm assured the younger pony.
“Tiara and I have the same problem with a bunch of ponies,” Silver nodded. “They follow us around and everything.”
“Really? Are they, like, at this school too?” Palm asked, smiling.
“Unfortunately.”
With the ice broken, Silver Spoon relaxed and told Palm all about the cutie mark crybabies and their stupid little baby crusading club, which attracted the attention of Lex, who seemed curious.
“So they actually made capes?” she asked suddenly, trying to contain a snort of derision. “Not only is that totally immature, but capes are really unfashionable.”
“Totally unfashionable,” Palm agreed. “Like, totally.”
“Plus they got us thrown out of the school newspaper,” Tiara added, rolling her eyes. “We were just getting all of the good gossip and they went all goody on us.”
“Those are the worst kinds,” Lex agreed, finally cracking a slight smile. “Black Swan once got us thrown out of this like, really cool café, but since then it’s turned really lame so it doesn’t matter.”
“Totally lame,” Palm added. “They don’t even do coffee any more.”
Silver giggled. “Where do you go now?”
“After school? We usually like, eat snacks in here then go to the mall,” Palm said, carefully adjusting her mane. “It’s pretty fun.”
“What’s with the amusement club thing? Do you tell jokes?”
Both Palm and Lex laughed. “Yeah, right,” Lex said derisively.
“We didn’t want to join a lame club when we started here, so we just like, made this one up,” Palm said.
“The amusement thing is totally to fool the teachers,” Lex added. “We just gossip.”
“I’m Diamond Tiara,” the younger pony said, pointing a hoof to her chest. “This is Silver Spoon.”
“I’m Electric Wave and this is Palm Spring, but everypony pony just, like, calls us Lex and Palm,” Lex replied.
“You two should get cool nicknames too. Like, for sure,” Palm said. “I can’t think of any.”
“Silver and Tiara sound, like, really fashionable.”
“Like jewelry.”
“Totally.”
“Yeah.”
Tiara and Lex went off into a discussion about how much they hated lame ponies, leaving Silver with Palm.
“So, where do you get your cool accessories from?” Silver asked, pointing to the giant bow. “When I go shopping with my mom, we never see stuff like that.”
“You go shopping with like, your mom? Oh, like, my. You need to come to the mall with us, like, basically, like, right now or something,” Palm said, fanning herself with a hoof. “We know all the best places, right Lex?”
“Like, totally. The best ones.”
After school, the four ponies headed for the exit, still discussing how deeply uncool parents were.
“Oh, look, Silver,” Tiara said, pointing towards the exit at a group of three familiar ponies, this time accompanied with a larger group.
“That’s like, the school council. Black Swan is like, all friendly with them and stuff,” Lex said, rolling her eyes. “Total dorks.”
“Totally,” Tiara added with an identical eye roll. “Those are the cutie mark losers we told you about.”
The four ponies trotted onwards, and as they reached the exit and passed closest to the cutie mark crusaders, all four turned to look.
“Losers.”
“Dweebs.”
“Dorks.”
“Crybabies.”
Satisfied by the looks on the faces of the three crusaders, the four ponies headed out of school and walked in the direction of the mall, a new friendship formed. High school was going to be fun.
