Suck it, Flu

I took Kaeden to OMSI on Sunday, and he loved it. Five hours of bliss for him. Days of flu for me. But despite the evil virus or whatever the evil thing is, I have written enough to provide an excerpt. Tomorrow I will kick the flu out of my diseased body and get my word count back on track!  Fresh cuteness pictures tomorrow. I can barely type right now, let alone hold my potato-sorry camera-steady. 

Through a horse's ears

“We know. It can’t be the easiest thing to contemplate, taking that trip all alone. You may love horses, but you have to admit, they aren’t shining conversationalists,” Stan points out, giving up all pretense of discussing Les Miserables. “You aren’t your mom, content to look at only woods and horses for days on end, and that’s not a good or bad thing, it just is.”

“That’s true, but at least I’m not my aunt,” I tell him. They know my aunt is one of those people who can’t really function being alone, part of the reason she thrives in the constant contact world of fashion.  George laughs. “No one is quite like your aunt. Her plan is to be Meryl Streep from Devil Wears Prada, and we know she’ll be there someday soon.”  George worships my aunt and follows her around shamelessly whenever she’s in town, then shows up to school for weeks after in the latest fashions. He’s the only other one of our group of friends not heading straight into college. Instead, he’s following my aunt Giselle to New York to be her intern of sorts.  

I smile when I remember the last time Aunt Julie was visiting, back around Christmas, and she’d heard what had happened to George. George is one of the few openly, and happily flamboyantly gay boys at our school. Right before the Christmas break, some of the knuckle dragging hicks from the football team had somehow caught an episode of Glee on TV. Instead of taking the show’s message of tolerance and diversity to heart, the jocks had cornered George in the library and tossed red slushy all over him.  Since Stan, our other friend Huon and I had been there, the library had dissolved into a general brawl, with the jocks coming out the worse for it. Just because we were self-labeled nerds didn’t mean we didn’t know how to fight. All of us had taken karate lessons at one time or another, and Huon had stuck with it to become a brown belt. All of us except for George were suspended for two weeks and we all had to go to mandatory counseling, but it was worth it to protect our friend. My aunt had gotten wind of the incident from my mother, and she’d offered to let George come to New York after graduation. If there was one thing neither my mother nor aunt would tolerate, it was discrimination and ignorance.

“For the most part, I’ll be happy to be on the road, and it won’t be like I’ll be completely isolated. I’ll have a cell phone and a back-up, and it’s not the dark ages anymore.  We’ll all be a text away, but everyone will be busy with their own things.” This is what has my mind wandering. I love my friends, even after years of being stuck with them, but will we survive afterwards? It’s Calista who’s the reassuring one, as always. “It’s not like we’ll never see each other again, it’s called holidays and homecoming and our families still live here.” She thumps me on the back. “Cheer up, o morose pearl. At least it’s finally spring, right?” This does ease my tension, and I’m finally able to focus on the book. After all, Calista is right. You don’t just stop becoming friends overnight, no matter how scattered we get.