Karissa

Pressure

"I love  the way New York looks at Christmastime," Jesse said with a sigh, tapping his pencil against the side of his hand on the desk and staring out the window at the falling snow. Admittedly,  I was feeling a little bit jealous, and the way my parents were treating me now meant I'd never get up for a visit over break.

"Well, you're not there yet," Rosemary reminded, a subtle-as-a-gun nudge to say stop daydreaming and get back to actually concentrating in class.

"I can't believe you convinced me to take this class," he moaned. "The workload is, like, killer. I don't understand how I can juggle this and learning everything for Fiddler."

Rosemary snorted.

"Like that's difficult for you, Jesse...and trust me, you'd rather be here. Dominic says he can barely handle the kids, that he's this close to getting in fights every other day, and Lavender says the guys act like they have no concept of her personal space. They really should have an Honors 12th grade History class.... I mean, neither of them are that dumb, and just because you can't take AP...."

Karissa leaned over and nodded.

"Yeah, Lavender says - " Her phone buzzed in her lap, and I touched my lips in mock horrified shock.

"Karissa Monroe! You bad girl! What a little rebel! Maybe my parents were right that I'm being corrupted," I pouted. Jesse and Rosemary could hardly stop laughing....until their own phones started buzzing hysterically.

"Hypocrites," Karissa giggled, but Jesse had already put the phone to his ear.

"What? You did what? Should we come down there? Are the appropriate people notified? No, but you think they'll eventually get there. Is there blood, guts and gore? Are you possibly in legal trouble? Stop firing questions at you...ok. Well, Rosie and I are coming, so just hang tight and don't go with anyone if they try to take you down."

"Are we invited?" Karissa asked, pointing to us, and Jesse shrugged.

"I think you may want to see this."

Lavender was standing on top of a desk. From a distance, she looked radiant and statuesque in her lace miniskirt and heels, but then we got closer. Her face was sweaty, and that famous blond ponytail was limp and ragged.

"I can't believe you...." Jesse waited for her to step down before he embraced her, laughing.

"What, you don't think I'm tough?" Lavender pouted. Surveying the scene of mild carnage before us, her eyes popped.

"We did all that? Where's the teacher?"

"She got terrified and ran out," Dominic murmured, pinning one of the interchangeable senior burnouts to the floor with his foot.

"Why?" Rosemary said pointedly, firing her question, a powerful nuclear missile of one, at Dominic (who only looked slightly sheepish. Rosemary's confrontations tended to steal away a little bit of his pride.)

"We got tired of it," he answered simply, shrugging those massive shoulders, "tired of the spitballs, the pranks...the dummy jokes."  It was a big blow to Dominic's vanity for the one-celled organisms of the senior class to be picking on him for his intelligence. Sure, school was a struggle - that no one would deny - but his learning disability had gotten better, and he was a whole lot smarter than any of those morons. Dominic would go on to make something of himself, despite the fact that he was pulling a C average, while those cretins would just become greasy adult versions of their current selves, with low-level jobs and cheating wives.