The Part Where Dinky Hooves Was Raised Better Than This
As all young colts and fillies know, lunch is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast goes by too fast and dinner always comes too early, but lunchtime—rain or shine, school day or weekend, inside at home or out on the playground—is perfect. For half an hour between history and math, anything is possible. Secrets are traded, friendships are strengthened, contracts are written in saliva and blood—and above all, absolutely no grownups can hear a word anypony says.
Even if that word, whispered between three fillies ensconced within the jungle gym, is one that none of them are supposed to know.
“Are you sure you heard it right?”
Mouth full as it was with mashed-up buttercups, Dinky Hooves found it harder than she expected to bend hers into a frown. Once she chewed a bit more and swallowed, she fixed Peachy Pie with a powerful stare, throwing in an eyeroll and a sigh just to drive the point home.
“I was right there,” she told her. “And they said it twice.”
Beaten back for the moment, Peachy Pie pursed her lips and hunched over her yogurt cup. A lull followed, buzzing with tension, until Sunny Daze leaned in to break it. “But… Fluttershy?” she asked. “Are you sure you didn’t just… I dunno…”
“She said it,” Dinky insisted. “And Rainbow Dash too. Both of them said they were… they said…”
Dinky threw a furtive glance towards the schoolhouse, matching Peachy and Sunny’s more anxious movements. Satisfied they were still alone, she wet her lips and scooted forward a bit, until her head hovered inches from the tips of her friends’ muzzles. She let the moment play out, silent and terrible, and then…
“Peeved.”
The word cut through the three fillies like scissors through silk, like hoofsteps outside their bedrooms when they were supposed to be asleep. Peachy shuddered as Sunny bit her lip, and an electric thrill rippled through Dinky’s shoulders, tickling her spine and tingling inside her chest.
She’d tapped into something bigger than herself, some secret power none of them could comprehend. It sounded so simple: just a few letters, some probably repeated, all mashed together into one whispered syllable. But here beneath the jungle gym, it was anything but. It was a grownup word—a bad word—and Dinky Hooves was the only one who knew it.
“I don’t get it.”
As Peachy’s eyes widened and Dinky’s narrowed into slits, Sunny Daze squirmed in place. “I mean… why aren’t we supposed to say it?” she went on, fiddling with an emptied string cheese wrapper in her lap. “It’s just a word, right?”
“It’s not just a word!” Dinky replied, with all the haughty confidence of a foal who’d rather enjoyed not feeling like one for a moment. “Millie didn’t want me to hear it. She wouldn’t even tell me what it means!”
“What does it mean?”
Peachy swiveled her uneasy gaze Dinky’s way, ready as Sunny was to hear her response. Too late, Dinky realized her mistake. “It… um…” She chewed on her tongue in thought. Why had Fluttershy said that word? What in Equestria would justify an action so patently adult?
“... angry,” Dinky semi-educatedly guessed. “It means you’re, uh… really, really mad.”
Like a pendulum on a string, Peachy’s head swung back towards Sunny. “Why wouldn’t they just say they were mad, then?” Sunny asked, her nose wrinkled with unsated skepticism.
“Because they’re grownups.” Dinky didn’t hesitate this time, her lungs refilled with newfound confidence. “That’s who grownup words are for.”
“That seems kind of silly,” Sunny said.
“Well, so do grownups half the time,” Dinky argued back. With a knowing shrug, Sunny conceded the point. “And that’s not the important thing anyway. The important thing is that we’re not supposed to say it.”
“But you said it,” Peachy meekly pointed out.
“That’s different!” Dinky paused to take a sip of grape juice, her hoof angled to hide the blush dawning over her cheeks. “Just because we’re not supposed to say it doesn’t mean we can’t. You don’t have to be a grownup to act like one.”
“How is saying a bad word acting like a grownup?” Sunny folded her forelegs over her chest, the seedlings of a pout sprouting around her eyes and mouth. “It doesn’t sound like a grownup word.”
“Why would it?” Dinky said, following the time-honored foalish practice of speaking first and figuring out later why what she’d said made sense. “Because… because grownups are boring, and it’s a boring-sounding word. It’s obvious.”
Sunny huffed and leaned back against the jungle gym’s frame, but offered no argument to counter Dinky’s claim. Another quiet moment came and went, reversing its previous course back over to Peachy.
“I always thought it was an animal,” she mumbled, only to shrink back once she noticed the looks her statement earned her. “‘Cause, uh… I-I heard my mom talk about having pet peeves once and I thought… y’know, pets? Like…”
Dinky’s eyebrow shot up, and Peachy cowered beneath it. “I don’t know, I never asked what it meant!” she wailed. “I just… wait, what are you doing?”
Sunny had hijacked Peachy’s train of thought, throwing papers and pencils everywhere as she dug through her saddlebag next to her lunchbox. After a few seconds, she freed a dog-eared book with a red cover from somewhere near the bottom, as thick around as her hoof and filled with thin pages that rustled like fallen leaves when she flipped through them.
“How do you spell it?” she asked without looking up. When neither Dinky nor Peachy came up with a reply, she grit her teeth and shot the former a disarmingly plaintive glare. “How do you spell the stupid grownup word?”
Dinky swallowed hard, her teeth already hovering around her tongue. “Well… it starts with ‘p’. Then ‘e’... and another ‘e’. And… I guess another ‘e’. And then, um… ‘f’?”
“Here!”
With Dinky and Peachy peering over her shoulders, Sunny bent down close and scanned one page with particular focus, moving her hoof down as she read and then stabbing it towards a line near the bottom.
“‘Peeve. Vulgar verb’,”, she read. “‘To annoy or irritate somepony. Derived from peevish’, which means…” She shifted her hoof another inch. “‘Easily irritated, especially by unimportant things’.”
Sunny sat back from the dictionary and looked up at Dinky, a move which the more grownup of the two chose to take in stride. “See?” Dinky said with a tentative smirk. “Told you it meant ‘mad’.”
“Technically, it means you’re annoyed,” Sunny grumbled, though even she didn’t sound convinced of her position. Peachy, meanwhile, looked more perplexed than ever.
“Wait, so…” she said. “If it means the same as ‘annoyed’, then does that mean we can’t say that either?”
“I don’t think so,” Dinky replied. “‘Annoyed’ isn’t, um…” She craned her neck over Sunny’s head again. “... vulgar.”
“So what can we say?” Peachy asked. Both she and Dinky looked at Sunny, who wasted a moment sighing and acting dramatic before flipping through to the back pages of her book.
“Synonyms: irritate, annoy…”
“Those are both fine,” Dinky assured both her friends. “The dictionary already said those.”
“... irk, gall…”
“Yeeeeah…” Dinky said, less assured this time. “Keep going?”
“Pique…”
“Probably okay.”
“Exasperate…”
“Definitely grownup.”
“Vex…”
“That just sounds scary,” said Peachy.
“Like a robot word or something,” Dinky agreed.
“Nettle…”
“Isn’t that a plant?”
Sunny looked ready to say otherwise, but the lunch bell robbed her of her chance. Their discussion thus tabled, the three fillies gathered up their trash and made their way back towards the schoolhouse together. As they filed into line with their classmates outside the front door, Peachy sidled up next to Dinky to whisper in her ear.
“I had no idea grownup words were so complicated…”
“Yeah,” Dinky mouthed back. “No kidding.”
“It’s still a dumb word,” Sunny muttered up ahead of them.
“You’re a dumb word,” Dinky shot back as the line began to move. “Geez, Sunny, sometimes you can be such a killjoy.”
With no warning whatsoever, the world around Dinky went mad. A collective gasp rippled through her entire class, followed by a deathly silence punctuated by gobsmacked grimaces and gaping stares. Peachy’s hoof shot up over her mouth, and Sunny recoiled as if she’d been slapped, tears filling her sightless, shimmering eyes.
Dinky looked from her to Peachy and back again, then at every one of her classmates in turn and finally at Sunny again just to make sure this was really happening. By all evidence she could see, it was..
“... what?”
Instead of answering her, nopony said a word or—seemingly—even breathed. In the lack of chaos that followed, Miss Cheerilee entered the conversation like a thunderstorm. “Dinky Doo!” she barked from the head of the line. “That is a very inappropriate thing to say!”
Sandwiched between her classmates’ collective horror and her teacher’s unbridled wrath, Dinky could think of no other course of action but to blink a few times and wonder whether she’d hit her head ducking out from under the jungle gym. “It is?”
Miss Cheerilee elected not to answer that question, and instead yanked Dinky out of line so she could shepherd her forcefully back towards the door. “I am sure you didn’t learn that kind of language at home, young lady!” she hissed once they were outside. “For goodness sakes, don’t you know better than to call another pony something like… something like that?”
Dinky blinked again. “I…”
“Well? I’m waiting, missy!”
“It…” Dinky mumbled, each word taking ages to piece together. “It just means she’s being a spoilsport… like, acting kinda lame and being all…” She shook her head, then shook it again twice as hard. “Okay, wait a minute…”
But Miss Cheerilee wouldn’t wait, even for a second. “You stay right there,” she ordered, pushing down on Dinky’s shoulder until her rump landed hard on the schoolhouse’s front stoop. “We’ll see what your parents have to say about their daughter’s behavior.”
“But…” Dinky sputtered after her as she turned to storm back inside. “You… wha…”
The schoolhouse door slammed shut before she could get a full word out, leaving her with only a blank wall to shout her single coherent thought at.
“How is that a bad word?”
If anypony heard her, they didn’t say so. Alone and confused, Dinky slumped onto the stoop and put her head between her forehooves, doing her best to rub some sense into her skull. She didn’t know what just happened or why, but there was one thing she certainly did know now.
Grownup words were not to be trifled with.
