Smiling Through the Pain

Genesis

In the beginning God created heaven, and earth.

And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.

And God said: Be light made. And light was made.

It was a chilly autumn day in Wilmington, Delaware. The six kids sat in a circle underneath a tree. They'd just come out of rehearsal, all were preparing for performances in December.

And God said: Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat:

And to all beasts of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to all that move upon the earth, and wherein there is life, that they may have to feed upon. And it was so done.

And God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.

They'd just started high school and were still getting used to their new environment. Westbridge High, a tumultuous, heaving mass of two thousand students was quite a bit different from their middle schools.

He looked towards Sodom and Gomorrha, and the whole land of that country: and he saw the ashes rise up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace.

The six were trying to figure out how to distance themselves from a member of their performance group without destroying any chance of them getting a good grade. This "member" had recently started dating a skateboarder/singer that went to school with them. Soon enough the two were inseparable. It was, as Izzy put it, "disgusting".

Miki was planning on doing standup for her performance, and chimed in with a perfectly humorous way to drop this "member". "How about we tell her that her vocal chords are shot and she's a liability to the group". Caitlin followed with "why don't you tell her that we hate her while you're at it?"

Mimi added, "I'll just print out what I have in my burn slides about her. She'll never want to work with us again." "Why don't we actually print out all the burn slides and make it seem like she wrote it," Jules suggested. They laughed about it, how outlandish? Though not one of them truly considered setting off a firestorm of gossip at their school, the moment they shared together would become a catalyst for an action packed four years.