Queen of Environmental Club

QUEEN OF ENVIRONMENTAL CLUB

ISBN: 978-0-9710485-7-7

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Queen of Environmental Club Copyright © 2011 S.I. Decker

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QUEEN OF ENVIRONMENTAL CLUB

By S.I. Decker

Chapter One

I was tweaked! Completely psyched.

Environmental Club was THE place to be at my school. It was totally sick! All the cool people were joining. And why not? Movie stars were high on the environment…politicians…famous authors. And sitting in that drafty, chalk laden room, in a hard, uncomfortable chair, I, Rosalee Tatiana, was fighting the old ozone depletion battle with the best of them.

Entering my first ever Environmental Club meeting was like walking into the teen Academy Awards. All of the pretty people were there. Every worthwhile designer was represented, and not an out of date style existed in the room.

Well, not until my friend Cia and I walked in.

My denim capris and belly baring tee were just barely within acceptable fashion parameters. Cia’s plaid, knee length skirt, ruffled blouse, and black tights with shiny Mary Janes would have earned her a stoning in a less civilized locale. At passive-aggressive Forest High it just earned her an avalanche of disdain and a popsicle like reception. Not fatal in the truest sense, but certainly lethal to the normal teen’s self esteem.

Cia didn’t even notice. Her self esteem was lead coated.

Wait…rewind…let me give you some background. My name is Rosalee Tatiana, Rosy for short. I’m your typical high school junior…medium height, medium intelligence, and moderately popular. As the fortunate recipient of lean genes, thick red-blond hair, and wide blue eyes, I’m even moderately attractive.

In a regular, not ugly, but not spectacular way.

I considered my best trait to be my determination (also classified as stubbornness by my parents and considered my worst trait). If you asked me, I’d tell you my worst fault is an annoying tendency toward clichés.

As the result of all this moderation running rampant through my life, I’ve been striving to stand out, emerge from the masses, and find my day in the sun since my freshman year in high school.

Again, like any other high school student.

I’d tried math club, but quickly discovered it wasn’t cool, and numbers weren’t my friends. I’d tried being manager for the football team, but learned that collecting sweaty, stinky towels was not my favorite thing. My attempts to start a fashion club hadn’t gone over too well. It might have been the Farmer Dan overalls and tube top I wore to the first meeting that did it. Or the rainbow hued high-tops with striped socks.

I loved those shoes.

But none of that mattered anymore. I’d cleared the slate…embarked on a new day…put all of that behind me and found a way to join the cool kids. At last. I was on the cusp of societal evolution. Hitting the sand with the biggest waves. In the limousine with the fat cats. Shopping at Saks with the rich girls…

Crap! You can see what I’m talking about with the cliché thing, right?

Whatever…I’d hit the mother lode.

I’d joined Environmental Club.

Okay, now that you know who I am, let’s get back to that first meeting.

Cia and I sat down in the back row and I settled my face into my own version of the smug expressions I was seeing all around the room. There’s nothing like being part of something universe changing to make a girl feel good about herself.

The environment was just the thing.

We were all very smug in that room.

So Cia and I come into the room…

Hold on…rewind again…last time I promise, I need to tell you about Cia.

Her name is Anastacia Plink but we call her Cia. Thank gawd! Who wants to walk around laden with a name like Anastacia?

Ish!

Anyway…Cia was my best friend when we were younger, but then we’d grown apart through middle school. We kind of rediscovered each other at math club. And when I’d been thrown out due to a small case of number envy…totally not my fault…Cia had left with me. Cia was a true friend and a free spirit wannabe. What I mean by that is that she’s not really a free spirit. But she really…erm…wanna…be.

Cia thinks I’m a free spirit, due to my extensive experience in joining and starting clubs. I admit I have been around. In fact I’ve circled the same block several times. But deep inside I was still uncomfortable about my behavior in all of those activities. After all, it wasn’t as if I’d excelled at any of them. In fact I’d pretty much sucked at everything I’d tried so far. But I was nothing if not resilient. And my motto in life continued to be ‘keep my head down and my feet movin’. No matter what ugliness life threw at me.

To Cia, this determined chasing of the high school dream translated into my being a free spirit. I don’t know why and it certainly wasn’t my place to question her rationale.

The girl specialized in numbers. Not common sense.

Okay, back to Environmental Club…sorry.

Pert and pretty Sandra Smithers swayed up to the podium at the front of the room and placed a sheaf of papers onto the document rest. I figured the pages were covered with stick-man portrayals of Seth Parker, our uber-handsome quarterback football star, whom she was dating. Sandra could barely speak the English language, let alone write it.

That’s not to say Sandra was from another country. She wasn’t. She’d been born just a few miles from Forest High. But when she was growing in her mother’s womb, all the DNA, including the junk that was supposed to go to her brain, had apparently been hijacked to build Sandra’s phenomenal physical attributes. Her boob DNA had apparently sold real estate to her brain DNA with claims that it was softer and more comfortable there. Whatever. The end result was that Sandra’s physical attributes made boys forget to breathe and swallow their spit…and her brain struggled just to remember her name.

And now she was going to address the room.

I couldn’t wait.

Um. Sandra began. Boys stopped whatever they were doing and sucked in air, just in case their lungs ceased to function.

Sandra giggled and her boobs danced happily.

Drool could be heard hitting the tiles all around the room.

Um, okay.

Sandra was on a roll. She glanced at her friend Becca Fromme, who, though very pretty in a normal, non-breath stealing and drool free way, had normal brain DNA.

Why-are-we-here? Becca mouthed audibly.

Sandra giggled again and bronchial tubes around the room twisted in airless agony. This is Environmental Club. Sandra’s pretty pink lips curved in a smile that showed all of her perfect white teeth. Welcome!

Sandra swayed back to her seat and, almost as one, the boys in the room sucked air and swallowed.

I looked at Cia and she grinned.

Becca took the podium next and began stating the rules and goals of the club. I listened carefully and Cia made notes.

Nobody else made notes. But I was glad Cia did so I could look at them later in case I forgot something. I was really gonna give this environmental thing a good run. Hopefully I could finally succeed at something I tried.

Despite my good intentions, as Becca droned on I started to fade. My stomach grumbled and I looked around guiltily, hoping nobody else had heard.

That’s when I noticed him.

I’m not sure how I’d missed him up to that point. I mean he was sitting right next to me and he was the male version of Sandra Smithers. When I looked at him my lungs clenched and drool pooled in my mouth.

Refusing to lower myself to the subhuman strata of the human male, I forced myself to swallow.

He turned to me when my gaze landed on him and grinned, showing me a deep dimple on each cheek and soft silver-gray eyes with long, auburn colored lashes. His eyes sparkled when he smiled.

He was a total hottie.

I looked at Cia and jerked my head, rolling my eyes in his direction helpfully. Cia looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and returned to her note taking.

I turned back and he was gone.

Hmmm. What up? I wrenched myself around in my seat and looked toward the door, just in time to watch the heel of a black sneaker disappear around the edge of the door.

All I could do was wonder why he’d left so suddenly.

Becca hadn’t seemed to notice the defection. She continued to drone on. We left the meeting about fifteen minutes later, with homework. Each of us was supposed to spend the semester seeking out an environmental infraction in the community and figuring out a way to address it.

As we walked to our cars, Cia and I discussed possible areas where we could do some eco-terrorist type interventions.

My baby sister is a veritable sewer. Cia informed me. She’s got snot and drool constantly running out of her face and horrible, unmentionable stuff spewing from her other end every five minutes. We’d be doing the world a favor if we could figure out how to address some of that pollution.

Obviously, Cia hadn’t taken well to the recently acquired knowledge, about fifteen months ago to be exact, that her parents were not only still having sex, but had, apparently through that most disgusting of parental activities, managed to finally spawn the little sister Cia had never wanted and refused to love.

While most girls enjoyed having a younger sibling to mold and protect, Cia had been far too happy with her solo princess role in the Plink castle. And, after fifteen years of sibling free bliss, she’d thought she was home free. But then her parents had apparently had too much to drink one night and decided to perform deviant acts together.

The results had been horrendous.

Now Cia had to grudgingly share her parents’ attention, sexual deviants though they apparently were…I mean, who has sex at the richly fermented age of thirty-eight. It’s just disgusting!

I don’t think we can get rid of all the babies in the world, though the amount of CO2 they dispense is definitely a factor in the current Ozone layer problem.

Maybe we could just put them all in eco-friendly bubbles.

I grinned at Cia as we reached our cars, sitting side by side at the furthest edge of the school parking lot as always. Bubble babies? It’s worth some thought I guess.

Cia opened her car door and threw her overstuffed book bag inside. Tossing her chin length, black bob, she widened her startling green eyes and grinned at me. I’ll call you tonight and we’ll form our thesis.

I nodded, thinking that at least our idea would be unique.

Cia honked as she pulled away and I waved. I climbed behind the wheel of my car. Before I turned the key I dug in my purse for my cell phone and turned it on. My parents, being seriously out of sync with the rest of society when it came to such necessities as cell phones, texting, and Internet surfing, made me keep my phone off during class hours under the mistaken belief that it would keep me more focused on my work.

Alas, they’d just forced me to use more prehistoric means of communication. Throwing message balls across the room, saying I had to go to the bathroom so I could find and talk to one of my friends in the library, and writing notes on the bathroom wall in siren red lipstick were effective in the long run, but caused more lost work time in my average day than a simple, wht r u waring 2nit would have ever caused.

The human parental unit was not the brightest bulb in the eco-friendly fluorescent light family. But they meant well. And they were good for handing out cash and baking gooey chocolate chip cookies during PMS moments.

I texted my Mom that I was going to stop at Target on the way home and hit send. Dropping my cell phone into the cup holder between the seats, I started my car.

When I looked