in the pines chp.2

Lucy sat in the driver’s seat, watching the dashboard clock flip from 7:09am to 7:10am. Naturally, she’d been sitting there since seven on the dot, thoroughly tired from about four hours of sleep - but who knew how easy it was to get lost in an internet rabbit hole of Top Ten Prom Trends That Are To Die For?  

No more late nights, she promised herself, what with hockey practices starting back up in two weeks time. The chances of that promise being kept was slim to none, but still - it was the thought that counted, right? With a sigh, she tied her hair back into a ponytail and fired up Big Blue’s engine, pushing on the gas.

It wasn’t until she pulled into Park County High School’s parking lot did her spirits heighten, spotting two familiar faces sitting in the courtyard by the school’s front entrance (‘courtyard’, of course, making an open area of concrete with a few benches sound way too fancy). Nonetheless, Lucy grabbed her bag from the passenger seat and hopped out of the car, locking it up behind her before bounding across the lot, engulfing Lucky Day and Vivi Sykes into a monstrous bear hug.

“How the fuck was Aspen?!” She crowed in greeting. The Days and Sykes families were very close, and often took holidays off together; Lucy hadn’t seen Lucky nor Vivi since before winter break. “Wait, before you tell me - Wendy broke up with Stan. How nuts is that?”

“Seriously?” Vivi raised her eyebrows, “When? Why? It’s not like ‘e barfs on her anymore, right?”

Lucky laughed as Lucy shook her head, “I think it was literally, like, the day after you two left.” She replied, sitting on the other side of Lucky. Their classmates filtered past them, some choosing to hang around the courtyard, others leaning against their cars in the parking lot, but the majority searching for warmth inside the school building. The only reason Lucy was hesitant to head inside was because she shared homeroom with neither Lucky nor Vivi, both of whom she desperately wanted to catch up with.

“Vivi hooked up with a waiter from our hotel!” Lucky blurted gleefully, as if she had been containing this information for a while. Lucy gasped as Vivi scrambled to explain herself, waving her hands frantically.

By 8:24am, they were all late to homeroom, too lost in each other’s stories of upstate Colorado and juicy Park County gossip. Lucy crumbled the pink tardy slip in her palm, tossing it in the garbage can as she loped into homeroom, plopping down in the desk in front of Clyde Donovan.

Clyde wasn’t cool, even though Lucy had once found out that people who didn’t know him thought he was. Truthfully, he was kind of a huge dork. But when you’re starting quarterback on a high school varsity football team, an air of coolness comes with the title - Lucy knew better, though, especially from somehow being assigned to the same homeroom as him since freshman year, by some stretch of luck. As soon as she sat down, Lucy snatched his phone out of his hands,


“What’s good, Clyde?” She grinned gleefully as about ten emotions flooded over his face - shock, confusion, and annoyance being the primary three.

“Hey, Luce,” He grumbled back, scowling as he reached past her. They both stood at a solid six feet, but Lucy had much longer limbs - she dangled his phone just out of reach, swatting at his grabbing hand. “Give it!” He whined, and she finally relented, tossing it back at him. He fumbled and it clattered to the floor.

“Nice, quarterback,” Lucy commented as he stooped down in his seat to retrieve it. When he reappeared, his annoyance seemed to have faded away in the very brief time he was gone - he was grinning, as if he had just remembered something amazing,

“Guess what?”

“What?” Lucy replied automatically, resting an elbow to Clyde’s desk and her chin to her palm. Clyde, who was very broad, and even a bit hulking since football season began a couple of months ago, was practically bouncing in his seat,

“My parents said we can use the upstate house for after prom.”

Lucy gasped, “No way! I thought you said that they were for sure going to say no!”

“Took some convincing, and shoveling a shit ton of snow over break, but they gave me the ok this morning!”

“Yes!”

They high-fived (Lucy’s hand coming back a bit sore, both of them forgetting Clyde’s strength) in elation, and Lucy laughed out loud from excitement. There was a lot of reasons she loved talking to Clyde, but, as of late, one of the main reasons had been that he was the only guy she knew who loved talking about prom as much as any of her girl friends. Granted, he was more excited about getting smashed at after prom, but still, it was nice to have a male point of view on the whole topic in general; just the other day, he had listened to her talk about all the different types of limos they could take, and he had some legitimate input on the subject. During break, they had gone over about a billion places to go for the after party  - the Donovan’s upstate house was prime real estate. Lucy leaned down, rummaging around in her bag to retrieve a pretty pink piece of stationary with neatly written cursive written down the length of it - a list.

“What’s that?” Clyde craned his neck so he wouldn’t have to read it upside down.

“Checklist.” Lucy replied, “I saw Wendy Testaburger had one in her planner and I made her write me one - she has a way better memory than me, y’know?”

Clyde nodded sagely, “No shit. Remember that time in seventh grade you forgot your thing for the oral presentations and started reciting Space Jam - “

“Anyway,” Lucy raised her voice, ticking off the box next to “after prom”, written in Wendy’s signature purple gel pen.

“ - but you only knew Michael Jordan’s lines - “

“Anyway,” Lucy repeated, louder this time, and Clyde’s words died down into snickers. She shook the stationary in his face, “Wanna read it? It’s pretty fuckin’ concise.”

Clyde took the paper from her, looking it up and down. As he read, Lucy’s attention drifted to the rest of her homeroom, looking for familiar faces. Well, by senior year, everyone was a familiar face - but their high school was so big, many names escaped her. She surveyed the ones she know; Rebecca Cotswold seemed to have chopped off half her curls during break, but it didn’t look too bad in braids. Stan Marsh was sitting in the far corner, of course talking with Kyle Broflovski. It ticked Lucy off, just a little bit, that he didn’t look distraught at all over his recent break-up. Actually, he looked kinda cute - well, more cute than usual. Was he growing his hair out? Or is that stubble a new development?

“What about a date?”

Lucy’s attention snapped back to Clyde. He was still looking over the list curiously, his comment a bit off-hand. “What?” Lucy asked, though knowing full well what he said.

“A date. Like, to prom. Shouldn’t that be on here?” He shrugged, handing the list back to her. As he started talking about how they should go off campus for lunch (“Taco Bell has this new thing, it’s like a supreme version of the taco supreme - “), Lucy barely listened. Instead, she stared at the checklist - which only had one thing checked off - and bit her lip.

How could she forget about a prom date?

++

“Wendy.”

Wendy’s heart jumped in her chest as she swiveled around, hugging the large, beautifully printed posters to her chest. Everyone should have been in homeroom by now; the sudden voice had startled her.

Craig Tucker stood before her, stone-faced, blue chullo hat forever on his head. Token Black and Tweek Tweak lingered further down the hallway, talking lowly with each other (with the occasional yelp from Tweek) as they waited for their friend. Wendy’s face grew cold, never having any reason to act friendly towards Craig and those guys. Of course, she didn’t have any real reason to act rudely towards them either; but after years of listening to Stan bitch about them, her opinion of Craig Tucker wasn’t exactly amazing. She pursed her lips,

“What do you want? Is this about Stan? I’ll have you know that we broke up two weeks ago, so I’m not his carrier pigeon anymore, thank you very much. ”

There really wasn’t any other explanation for Craig even looking in her direction, unless it was about Stan; the animosity between the two groups of friends was kind of amazing. It was never acted upon, but they still merely avoided each other at all costs. If, for whatever reason, they needed to talk with each other, it was through some convoluted game of Telephone - God forbid any one of them were assigned group projects with each other. Wendy thought the entire thing was childish and ridiculous, but then again, it had been going on since they were literally children.

She blinked when he held something out to her; Wendy hadn’t noticed Craig holding a crumpled poster in his hands.

Lola, who was very artistic, had designed the posters herself. They were bright, eye-catching, and printed on thick, heavy paper filled with heavily saturated colors and text that urged the reader to buy prom tickets as soon as they went on sale next week. This particular poster, however, was scrawled over with a thick black marker:

FUCK PROM

Wendy’s nose crinkled in disgust; she could still smell the chemical of the Sharpie, “What the fuck?” She scowled, resisting the urge to stomp her foot. Instead, she snatched the poster out of Craig’s hand, inspecting it closer, “I’ve only been putting these up for, like, an hour.” Her head snapped up, glaring at Craig accusingly,

“Did you do this? Or Clyde? Or - did you?” She stopped there, knowing Token was too sweet and Tweek was too paranoid to be accused such a thing.

Craig, who wielded one hell of a death glare, narrowed his eyes at her, “Why the fuck would I tell you about it if I was the one doing it?” His nasal, monotone voice was as condescending as ever; their conversation came to an abrupt close when he held up his middle finger in her face. Before she could say anything about it, he was already walking away towards his friends. Wendy watched them go, waiting until they rounded the corner before stomping one foot against the floor, letting out a frustrated shout,

“Fuck!”

++

“Like, how dumb am I that I forgot to even think about finding a date? I think I’m going senile, dude.”

“You don’t, like, need a date. I mean, there’s no rulebook. Go by yourself and, like, have a ball, Luce,” Jamie Jameson said with a flourish of her hand, the other tapping a fluffy pink pen against her History notebook, “That’s so, like, you, anyway.”

“What, showing up alone and partying by myself?”

“Uh, yeah. You’re a one-gal party. Don’t need no man!” Jamie encouraged. Lucy gave her a half of a smile - Jamie always said the right things. The Jameson's moved to South Park four years ago, and Jamie assimilated surprisingly well into Park County’s student body; Lucy became friends with her within weeks of freshman year. And yet, even with high school coming to a close, people still referred to Jamie as “the new girl”.

“Girl, it’s easy for you to say,” Lucy stretched her long legs up onto her chair, sitting cross-legged, “You have Kyle. Lucky has Clyde. Vivi has Kenny.” She counted off her fingers and groaned, “I’m gonna be the only dumbass standing by myself in the prom pictures!”

“True,” Jamie gave her a sympathetic look, and the conversation was dropped once their History teacher walked in and class began. Lucy paid little attention, doodling in the margins of her notebook. Jamie really did have a point - she didn’t need a prom date. It wasn’t incredibly imperative…but still, it’d be nice to have someone to take pictures with and dance with and maybe hook up with at the end of the night. And what was Lucy supposed to do in Clyde’s upstate house while her girls were off making out with their boyfriends? Prom was still four months away; she had plenty of time to find someone to party it up with, come May.

Lucy’s thoughts were briefly interrupted by the teacher walking by, handing back last week’s test papers. Lucy shoved the C- into her backpack and leaned against her desk with a heavy sigh, gazing out the window. Heavy winds pressed against the glass, rattling the window panes, as brittle trees in the distance quivered under the pressure. Further, the trees grew more dense, packing together to form the outskirts of one of Park County’s many pine forests; Lucy had spent many a nights wandering into those forests (though never too deep), always with a big pack of friends, and never without a cheap pack of beer. Winter showed no signs of letting up, the conifers serving for the only source of greenery; Lucy continued to stare, momentarily transfixed at how absolutely dead everything looked.

God, those pine forests were creepy.