The horde of dragons swirled in the air, their gleaming, colored hues replacing the sky blue amid the thunderous cheers of the clan. They'd done it! They'd finally conquered the giants and ended the siege that had wrought famine and disease upon their people-
"What are you doing?"
Katie peered over the off-white pages of her book to see Emily brushing her hair over her shoulder. "I'm reading?"
"C'mon, you're supposed to be helping me!"
Emily smacked her gum obnoxiously and positioned herself on the table. Katie looked at her. In the summer between 6th and 7th grade, Emily had hit puberty. She'd grown taller and gotten a new bra.
"This is the last book in the DraconSphere trilogy, you know," Katie said. "Don't you want to read it?"
"Katie, I'm not a child anymore. I don't read children's books."
Incensed, she retorted, "500 pages is hardly a children's-"
"Shh! He's coming!"
Katie placed a pink bookmark between the pages. The sound of the boys' excited conversation preceded them through the hallway and burst into the classroom.
"...and then he slammed through the wall and took out all the vampires with his Sun-Ray sword! Dude, I'm telling you, Slade IV is the best movie I've ever seen."
Emily eyed the two as they approached. "Hey..." she said, turning as they walked right past her. "Hey, Nick."
Nicholas. Last year, he was suspended for sneaking worms into kids' lunches. This year, he was apparently the hottest guy in school. He sat hunched forward, making emphatic gestures to Owen, and offhandedly glancing up at Emily. "Oh, hey, Em. So anyway, it's Slade I and II that you need to see before the fourth one. The third one is a lame prequel."
"But, wouldn't I want to see the prequel?" Owen said.
"I mean, you can if you want, but I would prefer to just keep the action going."
Emily huffed and walked over to their seats, leaning on Nick's desk. "So, how was your summer?"
"It was pretty cool. I went to a summer camp..." Nick looked up at Emily, and a sudden rush of redness betrayed the realization that crashed over him. "I mean, it was chill. Just hung out, you know nothing really happened." He slung his arm over the back of his chair.
"Well, I had a great summer," Emily said, snapping her gum even more obnoxiously.
Katie met Owen's quizzical glance and returned to her reading. As she foraged deeper into the world of dragons and myth, Emily and Nick pioneered a new world of flirtation. More students trickled in, and as Katie looked around, she noticed something different about the girls. They were all noticeably taller, but, beyond that, they still looked different. They all wore trendy, form-fitting clothes. Their hairdos were different from last year - or rather, the same. It was as if they'd gone to the salon together and picked out one hairstyle for them all. Make-up made their eyes pop, their cheeks rosy, and their lips red. Was this change just in the girls? No. The boys all seemed to have gelled hair and styled t-shirts. Every single one of them wore similarly styled, flat sneakers. Except for Owen. He still wore velcro shoes. She glanced down at her own plain blue shirt and cargo shorts. Are we the only ones who didn't change? Discomfort began to set in. That desperate, crawling desire not to be the odd one out. Her mom always said, "you're beautiful just the way you are," but her classmates looked a lot more beautiful right now.
As Katie walked to the busses after school, Emily skipped up behind her. "Guess what?"
"What?"
"Nick asked me out!" She made a little squealing noise.
"That's cool." Katie struggled to muster up some enthusiasm. "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet! What do you do on a first date?"
"I..."
"Maybe he'll bring me flowers! Do you think we'll kiss? What if we fall in love?"
"Love?"
"Well, bye, Katie!" Emily dashed off to her bus.
Hardly a second went by when another voice sounded behind her. "Em's going out with Nick?"
Brooklyn stood there with her, gripping her backpack straps with pink nailed hands. Her big eyes and mouth were framed by curly, blonde hair. Katie replied, “I guess.”
"You know he's a total player, right?"
"No..."
"Well, he is. I heard that he asks girls out just so he can go under the side stairs with them."
Katie raised an eyebrow. Nothing was making sense today. It was like she'd woken up in an alternate universe. "The side stairs?"
Brooklyn gasped. "Don't tell me you haven't heard about the side stairs. It's where couples go to make out and stuff."
Katie felt her face grow hot. "Really?"
"Yeah. Tell Em that she needs to stay away from him."
With that, Brooklyn hurried away, leaving Katie to meander to her bus, lost in contemplation. What was happening? Katie thought she'd gotten life down, but all of sudden, people were acting so strange. All of a sudden there was so much she didn't know. For instance, the next day, she noticed Brooklyn, Scarlett, and two of their friends chatting in the corner. "Hey," she stopped by with a smile on her face.
"Hey, Katie," Brooklyn said. The other three glanced at her and continued talking.
"...Yeah, he's a total hottie. Maybe I can get him to go to the side stairs with me," Scarlett said. Katie gasped, an audible testament to her confusion.
"Wait - you want to go to the side stairs?"
The group stared at her. The girl rolled her eyes. "Uh, yeah. Everyone wants to go to the side stairs. It's how people know you're cool."
"Besides," another chimed in, "that's how you know a guy really loves you. You don't go to the side stairs with just anyone."
Katie noticed she was red-faced and gaping. She clamped her mouth shut.
"Don't be such a prude, Katie," Brooklyn said. "Everyone's doing it."
Since when? What a stark difference this was from just last year. In 6th grade, kids talked about games, books, and cartoons. Now everyone was making out under the stairs.
"Uh... okay," Katie said, turning away with an uneasy feeling in her gut.
"What a weirdo," she heard them say as she walked away.
Soon everyone seemed to be participating. Guys would approach girls, their faces growing redder with every step. Nevertheless, they would try to maintain composure as they asked the girls on dates that usually consisted of a brief period of holding hands and a trip to the staircase. They used coded language in front of oblivious teachers. They spent lunch periods together and took excessive bathroom breaks so they could sneak off to the hidden places in the school for a few minutes, looking flushed and guilty when they came back. And day after day, Katie watched, wondering if there was something wrong with her for not wanting to join the fun. Wondering what was holding her back. Why she was so scared. Wondering if anyone really loved her. Emily was officially dating Nick. She spent more and more time with him and less time with Katie, leaving her friendless and alone. Katie told herself she was okay with it, but a simmering resentment grew inside, intertwined with a confusing jealousy.
So, Katie took a trip to the mall, intent on redesigning herself. Everyone else underwent makeovers over the summer. Hers was better late than never. She was going to change her hair, get trendy clothes and come back a whole new Katie. A Katie that could be popular. A Katie that could be loved. However, the clothing store was right next to her favorite bookstore. She stood in between the two shops, pondering the tantalizing adventures promised by book display and the intrigue represented by the blouse. Before her floated her own reflection. Her plain haircut, her chapped lips, her horrible fashion, and her flat chest. She gazed up at the white, plastic mannequin on her right. Its body twisted in an impossible pose, it's back arched, reminding her of Emily on the first day of class. She gazed between her reflection in the glass and the mannequin in the display, slowly reaching a distinct, piercing conclusion: That's not real. With heavy conviction settling in her gut, she turned her back on the mannequin and went into the bookstore.
The next day at lunch, she spotted Owen quietly eating by himself. She sat down across from him. "Hey, Owen."
His face lit up. "Hey, Katie."
She unwrapped her sandwich and started eating. "So, Nick ditched you too."
"Yeah." He frowned. "He used to be so cool. Now all he wants to do is hang out with Emily."
"I know. It's so gross."
"Yeah."
"I mean, what do we go to school for? To learn or to make out?"
Owen blushed. "Yeah, I mean... yeah. That's so lame." He stared at his food.
Katie continued. "Whatever happened to having fun?"
Just then, Emily slapped her hands down on the table, making them both jump. "Katie!" she shouted.
"What?!"
"Brooklyn-" she looked worried, confused, and angry all at the same time, her face painted with red splotches. "Brooklyn just told me she saw Nick under the stairs with Scarlett! With Scarlett! He's cheating on me!"
Katie frowned. "Um, well... I'm-"
"I can't believe it!" Emily shrieked, "I'm going to kill her. I'm going to kill her." She pulled at her hair, huffing and growing redder by the second. People were watching. "Oh, that girl is dead. Nick's mine. Nobody goes to the side stairs with my man!"
Katie stood. "Hold on, you don't know anything for sure, Em." She grabbed Emily's hands. "All you have is Brooklyn's rumor."
Tears poured from her eyes as Katie escorted her away from the crowd and into the bathroom. "C'mon, calm down. It's okay."
Emily sobbed into her hands. "It's not okay," she blubbered. "You don't understand. I gave him everything. Everything! And he doesn't even love me!"
"Oh, Em, I'm so sorry." Katie embraced her shaking, sobbing form feeling nothing but guilt for simultaneously thinking this was the logical conclusion of rushing into things with no forethought. They stayed like that for a long time until, gradually the heaving sobs died down to the occasional shudder and Emily finally broke away. Katie's shoulder was soaked with cold tears and snot.
Emily sniffed. "I'm not feeling well. I think I need to go home."
"Yeah," Katie agreed, "you don’t look too good."
Emily frowned, tearing up again. "Yeah, I've been red for days and a little itchy. I hope it's just an allergic reaction or something."
"Yeah, me too," said Katie, noticing a little tickle in her throat.
Emily stayed home from school the next day. She skipped the day after that too. And the day after that. And the day after that. But Katie seemed to be the only one who noticed. Kids continued giggling, flirting, and exchanging fleeting glances with flushed faces. That was an odd feature Katie noticed. Everyone involved in this new culture was constantly red of face, as if they were trapped in a state of perpetual embarrassment. Maybe they were. Nick and Owen never hung out together anymore. Nick, who spent his days perched between Scarlett and Brooklyn, had left his friend far behind, but Katie, on occasion, observed Owen's accusing, rueful stare. She would have preferred to lose herself between the pages of books rather than pay much attention to others, but she just couldn't shake the disturbance squirming in her gut.
After over a week, Emily finally came back to school. Katie sat in silence, across the table from Owen, reading in the empty, early-morning classroom when she walked in coughing and hacking. Dark rings around her eyes stood out from her peeling, red skin.
"Holy smokes, Em!" Katie ran toward her, "What happened to you?"
"I'm sick," Emily rasped.
"Okay, with what?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. They just put me on antibiotics and said I could go back to school." She looked at Katie, a desperate plea in her bloodshot eyes. "Can I sit with you?"
"Of course."
To her surprise, the other kids shuffled into the classroom with the same peeling, red faces. The coughing was a cacophony of phlegm and rasping. No one talked. No one made eye contact. They just piled into the desks, flecks of skin dusting the tables as they scratched. Half the kids weren't there.
The teacher walked in and laid his shoulder bag on the front desk. Amid the constant coughing and scratching, he took his papers out of his bag, uncapped his dry erase marker, and squeaked an equation onto the board. Finally, he turned around and addressed the noise. "What is going on in here?" He surveyed the class from right to left "Are you guys all sick?"
The class' silence hung heavy like a damning admission of guilt.
With a grunt, the teacher packed his materials back into his bag. He pointed at them. "You know what? I don't get paid enough to catch your disease. I'm calling the nurse up here." The whole class shifted as they watched him go.
They sat in silence for a minute. Then, Scarlett, who was staring daggers at Nick rasped, "You bastard. You did this to me."
Nick started to reply, but choked out a dry, grating cough first. "What? I know you've been going to the side stairs with Joey, you slut."
"Hey!" Joey stood up, "You went to the side stairs with my girlfriend?"
Katie watched with bulging eyes as the class transformed into an angry, bickering mob. It wasn't clear who threw the first punch, but the students soon converged in a slowly churning circle of rasping, hissing, kicking, and coughing. One person would slap, but the other lacked the strength to retaliate, so the would-be brawl quickly dissolved into winded, frustrated participants returning to their seats.
Nick huffed. "Say whatever you want, man, but I didn't start this."
With that, the class fell back into relative, wheezing silence. The nurse arrived and, startled, called the CDC. They quarantined the entire building. No one was allowed to leave until they identified and attributed a source to the illness. Which meant everyone had to report what they'd been up to the last few weeks. If not for their already splotchy faces, Katie imagined that they would be blushing as, one by one, they all repeated that they'd taken trips under the side stairs. One boy buried his face in his hands as the hazmat aide asked through his suit, "So how many girls did you... take under the staircase just last week?"
"I don't know, man. Four? Maybe five?"
The gas mask distorted the aide's breath as he turned to his coworker. "Jesus, Bob. If I was getting as much action as these kids, I'd have a disease too."
"No kidding," Bob replied as he scraped a skin sample into a dish. "When I was in 7th grade, I was still putting worms in girls’ lunch boxes. I don't know what's gotten into kids these days."
The Reddening turned out to be a non-deadly, but very contagious disease. The doctors informed worried parents that their children would probably endure periodic outbreaks of flaky, red skin for the rest of their lives. In contrast to the adults' subsequent outrage, the kids accepted the news with subdued sobriety. The fun, while wild and enthralling, had come to a jarring halt.
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