Survival Of The Fittest

((Angie continued from here))

Angie was seething. She didn't know how it happened but half of her face had no makeup. It was probably because she rubbed it, trying to stay awake during the most boring mathematics class she had ever been in. Her eyes kept fluttering shut even she had two coffees running in her veins, she was nodding off every time she had to listen. It was annoying, she wanted to stick two toothpick between her eyelids to keep them open, but it wouldn't be that girl on the long term. She realized her foundation and concealer were gone when she looked at her black sleeve and it was covered in a thin layer of makeup.

She headed for the girl's bathroom. She set her purse beside the sink, opening it carefully since she didn't want its content to fall into on the floor. She dug through it, finding some a candy she popped in her mouth, and then she found her concealer. She wasn't going to do a full blown makeup in the girl's bathroom between two classes, she didn't have the time and she didn't want to be late. She just wanted to be presentable in front of everyone so no-one could comment on her looks. That's what she was going for, dabbing the concealer on her blemishes and red spots on the left side of her face.

She assumed she was alone in the bathroom since she didn't hear anybody doing their business or footsteps. Maybe someone was skipping class inside, sitting on the toilet waiting for the day to end. She did that in elementary school, it led to her teacher seeking the entire school while Angie was quietly giggling in the girl's bathroom on the first floor. Looking back at it, she was a pest.

She continued to apply her makeup carefully then looked at the time. She still had about 7 minutes left and she didn't want to be anywhere else so she decided to redo her mascara and her lipsticks, they looked kinda smudged. She also thought about arranging her foundation, she didn't really know. She had all the time on her hands to do so, and she mused about what she would do during the next 7 minutes before she needed to head to class.

((Mercy Ames continued from life observes itself))

Mercy never skipped class, but sometimes she was tempted. She had figured out a long time ago that she was never going to need Pythagorean Theorem or mathematical proofs in her adult life, so why did she have to learn them? Or, if she was going to be forced to take algebra and physics and chemistry for her whole school career, all of the future engineers and math professors shouldn't be able to get away with only one year of fine arts.

Let's be real, a lot of people at this school could stand to gain a little more culture.

So sometimes, Mercy ducked into the bathroom between classes and fiddled with her hair and makeup, and she thought of hiding in a stall at least until Algebra II was over, but she never did. Sometimes it was the thought of her parents finding out and grounding or lecturing her (or worse, acting all concerned when there was really nothing wrong) that kept her from going through with it. A lot of the time, it was more that the bathroom was occupied by somebody who could tell the teacher where Mercy was hiding out. Right now, it was the latter case.

Angie was... sweet? She seemed sweet, as far as Mercy could tell. They didn't talk much. Actually, Mercy was pretty sure that Angie was just coming from the class that Mercy was going to, so she wouldn't be able to tattle, but Mercy's momentary rebelliousness and frustration had already passed by like a faint breeze.

Instead of going into a stall to hide, she just said, "Hey," and stepped up to the sink next to Angie to check her makeup and adjust her hairclips. She was trying out glitter eyeshadow, and she didn't entirely trust that it wouldn't get all over her face.

She heard the click-clacking of shoes touching the floor, stepping out of one of the stalls. It was, obviously, a girl. I mean, she hoped it was a girl. She looked in the mirror, seeing the reflection of the girl, confirming that it wasn't like a janitor or something. She knew that girl, she was from her math class! It was Mercy Ames, she always liked her clothes. She always had the prettiest things. There was something very enticing about pastel color things. In comparison, Angie's outfit looked like she was in a morgue. It was a black shirt with a fading sunset. Under it was written "SUMMER 1984". She had no idea what happened Summer 1984, she just liked the design when she saw it on Amazon. Her vest was white at the center but the sleeves were made up of black and white puzzle pieces. It probably meant something to someone, but she found it pretty so she bought it for like 20 bucks.

The girl walked up to the sink beside her, and arranged her hair clips. They were tiny pastel bears, really cute. Angie didn't think she could personally pull it off because hair accessories were really annoying. They always felt too close to her scalp, making it itch. Other than her high ponytail with her hair falling beneath her shoulder, there was nothing else done to her hair.  Mercy greeted her and Angie greeted her back by waving her hand softly. She noticed her glitter eyeshadow. She found it weird her face was... kinda doing that thing with reflection and all. You know, when the sun hits the water in the pool at the perfect angle and it sends beautiful rays of light everywhere? It kinda looked like that, but less majestic and more artificial with the yellow lighting in the bathroom. It was something else that Angie couldn't pull off, sadly.

She went back to her makeup. Dabbing some product on her cheeks, she softly opened her mouth as she put on some foundation. She decided to gain some reputation and to compliment the girl beside her. She could compliment a lot of things, but she settled on her shirt. It was really pretty, it was the kind of thing she could wear. She could pull that off.

"You look lovely."

She turned toward the girl and smiled. She cocked her head to the side slightly, eyeing her shirt and its colors. It was better when it wasn't in the reflection of a mirror. She especially liked the color gradient.

"Where did you get it?"

((Mikki Swift continues from There's Nothing Wrong With 'Better'))

Everything had been set up. All the drafts had been double-drafted and triple-drafted, sent to Charelle and Forrest, and then drafted a final time, posted on her outlets, and now came the clever part.

See, flyers were normally lame. They were old. If you wanted to get some hype going for your party, you usually just started an event on Facebook, added people, and they added people and whoop, you had something crazy going on. Mikki was all about that life, but if she was just going to invite people to a Facebook event, then it'd be no different from any other party. What would build all the hype? You couldn't just be your own hype-lady, that'd be boring.

Instead, Mikki had taken the one important phrase from her brainstorm and begun to market it in the best way she could.

#SwiftBall.

The hallway in the Math Department was clear, so Mikki snaked her hand into her bag, retrieved a handful of sheet paper, and threw the small handful of flyers into the air, watching them scatter to the wind. They were pretty simple things, they had all the information everyone would need to know about what was going on with the party. She'd hyped it up to Erika and Forrest and Charelle and Andy and they'd hyped it up to their friends and probably them to their own friends, but that didn't get everyone. She needed to hit key locations. Lockers, hallways, bathrooms, leave no location un-papered. She wasn't rich enough to literally plaster everything in her flyers but it's not like she wasn't going to try anyway.

Mikki wandered into the bathroom, and saw two girls. Hispanic chick and Asian chick. Angie and Mercy, or whatever. She slid up beside them, pulled a chapstick out of one of her jacket pockets, and started applying it in the mirror like it was fifty cent lipstick. It sounded like they were having a conversation just as she rocked up, so she left them to that for a few seconds. After she'd finished applying the chap, she put the stick away, reached back into her bag, took out two fliers and slid them across the counter.

"Yo, Cortez. Be there, 'kay?"

She turned to the other girl.

"You too."

The tiny blonde then spun around, looking at the stalls. Some were open, some weren't. Mikki took another handful out of her bag and threw two under each closed door, before shooting upright, banging twice on the last door.

"Swift Ball! April 20! BYO and BYA!"

And with that, Mikki flashed the two girls at the mirrors a smile, a backwards peace sign, then disappeared off to her next class.

The only thing on the fliers scattered across the bathroom was the Instagram logo, the Twitter logo, a name, and a date. And that would be all they'd need.

((Mikki Swift continued elsewhere))

And then right as Mercy was about to turn to Angie and find something to compliment her about in return, Mikki just barged right in, threw fliers all over the place, and then waltzed back out after ordering both of the girls already occupying the bathroom to "be there".

Yeah, uh. Mercy probably wasn't going to be there. She wasn't sure if her parents were hip enough to know April 20th's significance, but Mercy had spent enough time with people her own age to have it figured out, so that was strike one for the chances of being allowed to go. Strike two was the lack of anybody she was actually friends with and wanted to hang out with.

Strike three was that even if the first two points didn't apply, Mercy wasn't going to pick up any fliers off the bathroom floor to get details. Sorry, Mikki.

"Thanks," she said to Angie after things had settled back into awkward peace in the wake of Mikki's departure. "Um, my makeup? I got it at... Claire's..."

Heck. She really had bought it at Claire's, but was that too much of a kiddie store? She hadn't thought of a good lie before she started speaking, but why lie about where she'd bought her makeup in the first place? Angie seemed like more of a PacSun person than Claire's, though.

"I got my hair clips there too," Mercy added, just in case Angie was about to ask.

Oh, that was Swift. Pun intended, she smiled at Mikki as she went by, inviting everyone then leaving as soon as she entered. She knew about the party, her and Mikki had discussed about it earlier the same day. Duh she was going to be there, who did she think Angie was? Mikki and Angie were friends and she learned about it in advance, obviously she was going to show up.

She forgot about Mercy's presense for a good second until she laid her eyes back on her glittering shirt. It was really pretty, the more her eyes looked at it, the more she wanted it on her. Mercy spoke to her and she raised her eyes, making eye contact with the girl. As bitchy as it sound, she almost laughed at her answer. Claire's? She also shops there, and the only people she meets are ten year old dragging their mom there, and other teenage girls avoiding cameras.

Her lips curled into the shape of a smile. Mercy hadn't answered her question correctly, but Angie assumed it was because she wasn't clear enough. At least she knew where to get that eyeshadow now, and the little hair clips if she felt like it. She looked away briefly, seeing her reflection in the mirror. She wasn't done with her face, she must be looking like a clown. She turned her eyes back at Mercy and asked the question again, but more precisely.

"I mean, where did you get that shirt?"

"Oh." There was no reason to feel embarrassed about flubbing a vague question, but Mercy still felt a blush creeping up her neck. She leaned over the sink to hide it, instead busying herself with double-checking the makeup she had already looked over. She tugged at her sleeve, sparing a glance down at the soft watercolor-style rainbow gradient on her sweatshirt.

"Um, it's from... some online store? 'Grab My Look,' I think?"

She wasn't actually sure where this top had come from, now that she thought about it. Mercy got most of her clothes from the mall and outlets around town, but every so often something caught her eye on Pinterest or Polyvore, and if she had any extra money or some occasion coming up that would let her get a gift from her parents, she'd zero in on that and find the website it was sold on.

Mercy shrugged at Angie, recovering some of her casualness. "I'd have to look again, honestly. I don't completely remember."

(amount of time earlier is very little)

and then Beryl burst into the bathroom, and she was a bit tired and showing it in her lazy pant, she'd run in a silly gait all the way from the auditorium because she'd lost her sense of when the bell had actually rung, and she'd realized she had time only when she'd already wasted time to avoid wasting time, and anyways she could still check in on the Decathlon's co-captain, who she knew had Calc BC and stayed in her classroom early, and first Beryl could stop in the bathroom to check her appearance, and that was because sometimes it could get a little frazzled when she had an attack

and then as Beryl strode in she noticed two people, and more importantly the bathroom was more colorful than it usually was, and that was because of the nuclear proliferation's worth of fliers in discrete type fonts exploding over the exposed floor, and some half underneath closed stall doors, and those particular ones looked like they'd suffered from the unfortunate malaise of air resistance

so then Beryl floated ghost-like through the scene, irreverent of what was actually happening, and she plucked away one of the papers that had settled right underneath the lip of one of the doors, and she barely registered the slightly shocked grunt of protest from the other side of the door, something something 'stop it with all the damn paper' in an efforted pant, and Beryl ignored that and continued to sluice through the scene in a single run-on sentence's worth of not really being there

and she knew there was that one crack in this particular bathroom mirror's adhesive in that spot right above the sink closest to the entrance, and she hovered that-a-ways for a moment, and with rescued flier in hand she set about her spontaneous mission with purpose though she didn't belong in that scene in the first place, and she quickly jury-rigged tape with which to help secure the flier from drooping as she slotted it into the crevasse between mirror and counter, she'd found a very convenient post-it note tucked away into the pocket of her long skirt

and she casually murmured "I like your shirt too!" as she drifted back out the way she'd came

Really, she still wasn't mentally there at all. It was hard to muse on actually messaging a boy (but which one?) with less than pure intent when one's mind was actually pure, purely blank.

(the next part also happens barely later on)

Beryl. She barely knew her. She knew she dated a girl in the past. Maybe she could introduce her to Ramsey so they could befriend each other. She wasn't sure if that would work but they were both gays, so they probably had a lot in common. She knew that Beryl was kinda weird though, she didn't know if Ramsey would like that. Maybe not actually, she needed to do more investigating before continuing.

Anyways, like Mikki, she left as soon as she came in, she didn't even use the restroom. If anything, Beryl looked lost like a deer staring a headlights. I guess school was really taking a toll on others mental health and all, as if like they were becoming zombies going to one place then to the next without having any reasons to do so. Angie vaguely liked zombies, they were kinda cool since they came back to life like Jesus. He was the OG zombie, it should be in the next version of the bible.

She yawned softly, feeling the morning caffeine wearing off. She looked at Mercy and smiled. She got the pretty shirt online. She could do the same, just needed to google 'pastel gradient shirt' and she'd find it. She kinda hoped it would be at a store near her since she wouldn't need to order it online. When she ordered things from websites like Amazon, her parents would often be suspicious of it. She would quietly explain it was clothing and they shouldn't worry about it. They didn't really understand the whole A E S T H E T I C aesthetic, but that was fair, she didn't expected them to understand that their daughter had an aesthetic she had to live up to. The A E S T H E T I C aesthetic was her way, she had to work with it, become one with it and become the A E S T H E T I C aesthetic.

Judging her makeup was enough, she started packing her things quietly back into her purse. Her makeup started filling the half-red, half-white bag while they went in their allocated areas.

"Well, thank you Mercy." she said smiling, "Catch you later, gotta' go to class and all."

With a soft wink, she picked up her bag and waved Mercy as she exited the bathroom.

((Angie left that thread.))

Beryl came and went, leaving a faint compliment in her wake, and then Angie more or less did the same, and Mercy was alone with her reflection. Mercy met its eyes in the mirror. It seemed as vaguely baffled and mildly relieved as she was.

"People here are weird," she said to it after a few moments' silence.

Mercy took one last look at her makeup and was satisfied that it still looked acceptable, and then she hurried out of the bathroom so that she could make it to class before the bell.

((Mercy Ames continued in-

On second thought.

Mercy spun on her heel just before she reached the bathroom door, grabbed one of Mikki's fliers off of the countertop, and completed her 360 to actually exit the bathroom this time.

((Mercy Ames continued in Sisyphean Self-Maintenance))