Some more goddess

We’d been sitting together for three weeks, and actually having lunch with each other for two, when we decided to create the world.

“Don’t eat that,” she ordered me, pointing at the substance on my lunch tray (even now, years later, I still hesitate to call it food). “It’s nastier than a swamp of dog poo.”

“A…what?” I looked down at the greenish tray and stuck out my tongue. “Great. Now I can’t eat it.”

“Throw it out,” she told me, and handed me half of her own sandwich. “You ought to start bringing your own food; this stuff will make your face swell up again. I’m still convinced it was cafeteria food that did that to you in the first place.”

“I think if it was, more people would have turned into bloated toads,” I commented. “And parents would have complained. Parents always complain, like they think that changes anything.”

She nodded, and we spent a few moments contemplating the silliness of adults.

“Anyway,” Megan chomped on her sandwich and poked her bookbag as if checking to make sure she’d put her most recent book back in properly. “I bet the cafeteria does have some kind of disease they put in random students’ food, to test what happens to them.”

“Why the heck would they do that?”

“Because they’re trying to create an army of mindless zombie warriors to take over the town, and they’re testing out the formula.”

“I didn’t become a mindless zombie warrior.” I reached up to touch my face, reassuring myself that it was, once again and at long last, completely normal. If a bit scrawny. And uneven. And…well, I was a teenager. My face would never be nice enough.

“Nope – you just got real ugly,” she shook her head as if this made her point exactly. “Yours was a bad test. They probably got files somewhere saying but a failure that particular cafeteria lady was.”

I tried to imagine the fat little woman at the lunch line as a mad scientist slipping manufactured zombie-drugs into unsuspecting high-schooler’s food, and couldn’t quite get around the concept. “Tell me,” I asked Megan, feigning awe, “how is it you know so much of the ways of the world?”

“Easy,” she shot back, accepting my mock praise with dignity. “I’m a goddess.”

“A goddess? What, like the Goddess of Good Grammar?”

She glared at me. “No, doofus, not like a goddess of anything. Just a goddess.”

She sat back – no, it was more like a slam – and folded her arms. Even in as little time as I’d spent with her then, I’d already begun to learn some of the signs. She looked angry for no good reason, which meant that she’d just said something that she expected would turn into a fight.

“So…” I bit my lip, debated what to say. “How do you know?”

“Know what?”

“That you’re a goddess.”

She shrugged, frustrated and uncomfortable. “I write stuff.”

I thought about that for awhile. I, like most bookworms, had a deep love for stories. And I had tried my hand at writing my own several times – with varying results. I had invented creatures, people, and worlds often enough to think of myself as a creative individual…but I’d never thought of myself as a creator. It was a new, startling concept for me. “I think I’d like to be a goddess too.”

“You need training,” she told me sternly. “I’ve seen you writing in your notebook, and you always leave off halfway through a sentence, or you only write a couple paragraphs then turn the page and start over.”

I stared at her – I hadn’t known she was paying such close attention to me during our quieter lunches.

“Then…will you train me?” I held my hands out and bowed as much as I could from a sitting position. “Oh Divine One, wilt thou show me thy ways of power, yea verily, unto great renown and so on.”

Megan eyeballed me. “Are you mocking my divinity?”

I shook my head. “No! Well, maybe. But just a little.”

“Get your paper and pen,” she ordered, sitting up straight. “Exercise number one: if the world were perfect, what would it be like?”

“Perfect for you or for me?”

“Perfect for everybody. Duh.”

I scratched my head, making a show of thinking hard. “But your definition of perfect might not match mine.”

“Perfection is not subjective,” Megan pointed a finger at me. “That’s why it’s perfection.”

“But it’s impossible to create something that everyone likes!” I waved my pen back at her. “There’s always gonna be someone who doesn’t like it, no matter how good it is.”

She pointed at the blank paper. “Try.”

“Slave driver,” I muttered.

“Less whine,” she shot back. “More write.”

goddess part 1

This is weird. I was thumbing through some old story ideas in an old notebook, and somehow….this formed in my head. I wrote an outline for a whole story in about an hour (and I never finish an outline. It’s a curse or something), and then wrote a whole chapter. It’s now 2330 and I need sleep something fierce because I have to go to work in 6 hours, but I feel the need to post at least part of it.

Megan, forgive me the liberties I took.

………

Genesis

“Always remember how powerful words can be; visualize how you want the world to be and then write it as if it were a fact already. Good luck! – Mrs. Birch”

Commandment the first: Upon reaching your new domain, you must choose a Goddess-in-training as soon as possible.

I was a mutant lobster the day I met the most important person of my life.

It’s hard enough being thirteen in a new school without waking up one day and realizing that you have a terrible allergy to the shrimp you ate for dinner last night. I begged and pleaded with my mother to let me skip school – how could I face hundreds of strange kids with my cheeks swollen and red, my skin blotchy and rough with rash marks, and my eyes almost black around the edges?

But the doctor said the rash would last at least four days, and for my practical mother that was way too long for me to skip school. So I did what any thirteen year old girl would do – I threw a fit, cried until I realized how badly the tears stung my sensitive face, and went to school.

I’d been there a month before the Shrimp Allergy From Hell. I was a quiet girl, more given to reading than gossiping, and shopping and celebrities were about as boring as it got in my opinion. So no, I hadn’t made a whole lot of friends. And suddenly, that first day that I sat in the cafeteria and tried to keep my face oriented at the wall as much as possible, I realized just how much that truly sucked.

To this day, I don’t know what caused the madness, the inexplicable and abrupt ascent into boldness, but the urge to do something other than sit silently in the corner and pray nobody looked at me drove me to stand. Lunch tray held out in front of my like a shield, I scanned the bustling cafeteria.

And then I saw her.

She was sitting in the opposite corner from me, reading. Her blonde hair hung down in front of her face, obscuring her features almost as much as mine, and what the hair couldn’t hide, the glasses and the book did.

She looked like me, I thought. Sans gruesome disfigurement.

Plenty of stories have started with the classic line, “Hi, do you mind if I sit with you?” I don’t know if any of those stories continued with an immediate, “I swear I’m not contagious!” but I bet it isn’t many.

She nodded. “My name’s Melissa,” I offered. Another nod.

I sat, pulled out my own book, and we read. When the bell rang, she slammed the book into her bag as if it owed her, muttered “See you,” and that was that.

Thus I met Megan Chiara Zamie, Goddess of the Many Names.

And everything changed.

————

“He’s just an ignoramus,” she told me, scowling at the laughing eighth grader at the next table. “Ignore him, or he’ll think he’s important.”

“Ignoramus?” I repeated. “What, is that the word of the day or something?”

Megan rolled her eyes. “A good vocabulary is the key to a successful life,” she said, as if reading it off the ceiling. “My dad tells me that a lot.”

“Ignoramus. I like it. Makes me think of hippopotamus.”

“He’s certainly got enough fat,” she answered darkly, glaring over the edge of her book at the boy and his gang of friends.

“He looks kinda skinny to me.”

“Only ‘cause it’s all in his head.”

I giggled a little, then shrugged, trying to act as casual as a humiliated teenager could. “I’ve thought up worse names for myself than that.”

“Worse than Rash-head?”

“Much worse.”

“Like what?” Megan leaned forward, lowering the book she’d been reading. Wishing I hadn’t said anything, I laid my own book down on the table and wiggled a little in my seat. “Elephant Girl.”

She giggled a little. “Nah, the Elephant Man had some kind of bone thing going on – this is just your skin or something.” She pushed at her glasses a little. “You’re more like Chipmunk Girl.”

My gut twisted. Three days we’d sat together, reading, almost ignoring each other except for a greeting glance and brief nods or finger-waves. And now she was laughing at me, just as much as any other kid here. I felt my still-swollen face getting warm. Great, like I needed to highlight the rash any more. Why didn’t I just wear a big neon sign on my forehead that said “FREAK!” and get it over with?

Somewhere around that train of self-pitying thought, it filtered into my brain that Megan wasn’t laughing.

I risked a glance at her face, and it took me a second to realize that she was glowering at the table, that her hands hovered over the book she’d set down like she was only a moment away from snatching it back up and diving behind it. She looked irritated, and for a second I wondered what the heck I’d done to piss her off. And then it occurred to me that she hadn’t looked irritated until she’d spoken. She’d just said something mean, and was gearing up for the inevitable argument.

I licked my lips. “Rabid Chipmunk Girl,” I agreed.

The tight expression on her face relaxed into a startled sort of smile, and she took her hand away from the book long enough to gesture in the air. “Pustule Princess.” This time the insult was a little less tentative. I felt my own shoulders loosening, and the beginnings of laughter growing in my chest as I considered this moniker.

“I give you points for alliteration, but thumbs down for sheer grossness.” I stuck my hands out, demonstrating my point, and turned opened and closed my fingers several times, like claws pinching the air. “Mutant Lobster.”

“Lobsters are already mutants.” She sniffed at my poor imitation of a crustacean. “Pink Puffer!”

“Wobble Blob!”

“Toad Chops!”

As if we were trying to outdo each other, our voices rose, until we were practically shouting with laughter. The boy at the next table and his friends looked at us like we were the strangest things he’d ever seen, and somehow, that only seemed to encourage us. For the first time in my life, looking like a weirdo didn’t feel so…scary. It felt a little bit like victory.

“Splotchy Spleen!”

“Manky Cat!”

I wrinkled my nose, noting with glee that it was finally close enough to it’s normal size to allow that kind of movement again. “What exactly does that look like?”

“Nasty,” she said, and raised a hand as if to forestall any further questions. “Trust me, I know.”