I suppose it was a bit cliché, the chance encounter of Rachelle and I. It's just like the way you'd think an amazing romance drama would start. The girl fussing over something in her hands, the boy off in his own little world, and WHAM! They collide, spilling the girl's books everywhere. They both reach down for the same object at the same time, their hands touch, and they find themselves gazing into each other's eyes. Sounds perfect, right? Wrong.
I mean, it probably would have been better for me if there weren't three distinct criteria that screwed it all up:
1 - The girl dropped her books, yes, but also fell backward and hit her head, which made her hate me from the start.
2 - By falling backwards, the girl inadvertently flashed me, causing her hate to grow stronger.
3 - The girl was and is the most ostentatious, conceited bitch in the world.
After multiple extensive apologies and failed attempts at conveying my sincerity, not to mention her bursting into tears in front of everyone, I eventually ended up carrying the girl's things home for her. She spent the entire time rambling endlessly in a hopelessly fake regal accent about her stark white dress being rumpled and the "Indecency of men to not look when they're supposed to and to always look when they aren't."
The intricate curls in her purple hair, somehow not flattened by her fall, bounced annoyingly up and down as she walked, her four inch stilettos clicking on the ground at the perfect intermittent rate to get under my skin. Her nails, white like her dress, were embellished with three annoyingly shiny blue diamonds each. The color of her blue eyes was unremarkable; the only important thing about them was the piercing and disapproving way they were looking at me. I couldn't shake the idea that I'd seen her somewhere; I knew that I had met her sometime in the past. But then again, I'd been plagued by ridiculously fake and pretentious women before.
"Are you even listening to me?" she snapped, yanking me out of my annoyed pensivity.
"No," I said truthfully.
"And why is that?" she asked, whirling in front of me and stopping angrily, her hands-on-hips posture reminiscent of a certain brown-haired North High student often caught daydreaming about espers, aliens, and time travelers.
"Because you're annoying," I said, shifting my hold on the books. "And frankly, you should pick a better fabric when you make your dresses. That looks like Toyle."
"I am amazed that you would insult a woman of my status -"
"You mean a near destitute dressmaker? What status are you talking about here?"
"Some gentleman you are. Insulting a woman like that. And how did you know I was a dressmaker? And... Poor. How?"
"It's simple." I began. "The first clue was your complaints about your dress being rumpled; you mentioned something in one of them about how 'it took forever.' The second was the obviously machine-stitched collar; a dress anywhere near the level of quality you're attempting to pull off would have hand-stitched hems. Following that, there's the more obvious clues such as the cheap fabric, which I told you earlier looked like Toyle, your 'dress making for cheap' book in my hands, your lack of exorbitant jewelry, and the fact that you haven't used any fancy little grooming tools from your purse yet, meaning you don't have any; a woman like you would want to show them off."
Her jaw dropped and her angry expression faltered; I could almost see the gears in her head turning as she wracked her brain for a comeback. "I... You... How...?" She stammered, dumbstruck. Her fake accent was gone.
"Observation," I said. "I mostly see the small things, and hardly the bigger ones. And it's the small ones that make all the difference. It's both a blessing and a curse."
"So you -"
"Can tell that you received an important phone call earlier this morning and had to leave before you were done applying makeup, and so the left side of your face has less cosmetics than the right? Yes." She was dumbfounded; her blue eyes had lost their accusing arrogance. "Can we get moving again already?" I continued. "My arms are tired."
"Yes," she answered, her regal accent coming back into her voice. "And I don't see why we stopped for so long. Don't talk so much."
I sighed and closed my eyes, trying to block the noise as she launched into another rant. I opened my eyes again as we turned a corner into the richest neighborhood in town. None of the buildings were under three stories tall, and all of them were at least 5,000 square feet; the cars parked in the driveways were all at least 50,000 dollars in value, if not more. For a poor girl, she lived in a pretty exorbitant neighborhood. The buildings grew in size as we walked, one of them reaching six stories.
Suddenly, the road ended, and we stopped at a small, three room, one story building, barely 500 square feet. The exterior of the building was in shambles; it was nothing compared to the luxurious houses preceding it. One thing that struck me as odd was sitting in the front lawn, near the door: A couch. The girl walked up to the door, reached into her pocket... And found nothing.
"Oh, how can it be?" she cried in fake anguish, throwing herself onto the couch as if it were for that specific purpose. "This is THE. WORST! POSSIBLE! THING!"
Something in my brain clicked. I remembered where I'd seen her before; I could recall how I knew her. The crying to get me to carry her things, the accent, the hair, the dressmaking, the catchphrase and the couch... It had to be her. I just didn't want to believe it.
I snapped myself out of my reverie and walked up to the door; I set her books down on the front step and fished a bobby pin out of my pocket that I'd been saving just in case I had to pick the lock to get into my house. Instead of using it on my front door, I sacrificed it on hers. When she heard the door creak open, she leaped up from the couch, thanked me enthusiastically, grabbed her books, walked inside, and slammed the door.
I stood there unmoving for a second before I started the long walk back to my house. Everything she'd done... Everything she'd worn... Everything she'd said... It all coincided with the character perfectly.
Either this girl had an uncanny personality resemblance, or I had just spent two hours with Rarity.
