Snow Business

Chapter 3:(Keira)- Fancy Friday

Chapter 3: (Keira)- Fancy Friday

       The next morning, I was aroused at 5:15 by my obnoxiously loud alarm clock. Usually, I didn't wake up until I had only half an hour to get dressed and make it to school, but today was Fancy Friday, and I felt obliged to make myself look presentable. In case you were wondering,  Fancy Friday is really just another name for Orientation Day at my school because we have to dress up and act proper.

       My school, Apache Academy, is half boarding school, half a school in which the students commute to every day. We have students from at least 13 different countries, but most of those countries are European.  We’re known for our ski and snowboard teams, along with the obscene amounts of scholarships given. My entire family, along with most of the students who live in Roster, go on at least partial scholarships, because without them, no one would be able to afford the school.

Since we specialize in snow sports, we go into school early so that we can leave early to go our practices before it gets dark. School starts at 7:15 and ends at 1:30.  If you chose not to take a lunch period and played a sport, which would exempt you from a gym period, you got to leave at 12:30, which is what most high school students do.

Every year, on the Friday before Thanksgiving (or Fancy Friday) we all have to dress up in formal uniform and sit through a two hour assembly where we are forced to rave about how wonderful Apache is, which isn’t hard to do. But Fancy Fridays are rather boring due to the large amount of time sitting and listening to all of the upperclassmen or distinguished students brag about themselves.

       I put on my “formal uniform”, which was a pair of black stockings, a black skirt, a pale blue button up oxford with a light blue and navy striped tie, and a navy blazer that had the Apache Academy logo embroidered on the top right hand corner.

       The reason that I had woken up so early was so that I could actually do something with my hair. When I was younger, I’d had thin, brown hair that sort of just did whatever it wanted, so I let it grow rather long and suffered through the lengthy periods of time when my mother would take a comb through the mat of hair in an attempt to make it actually look like hair and not a rat’s nest.  But when I was a freshman in high school, the downhill snowboard team had made a bet with the speed skiing team that we could reach the bottom of the mountain faster than they could. We, of course, had been proven wrong and I was forced to dye my hair blonde along with the other boys on the team. Since then, I had just decided to keep it blonde, and it was the only unnatural thing about my appearance on most days.

       After I finished curling my hair, it was already six o’clock and I went to the kitchen to see what the news for the day was. According to my dad’s note on the refrigerator, he would not be home until that night because one of the men at the firehouse had called out sick… again.

I decided to toast waffles for Chase to eat as he ran out the door because there was no doubt in my mind that he would be running late this morning  just as he is every other morning. As the waffles popped up, I heard whining and scuffling sounds coming from the kitchen door that lead to the backyard. When I went to investigate, I saw that it was our dog, Boomer, who was a huge white husky that resembled one of the dogs that Rolf Harris sang about in the Australian Christmas song, “Six White Boomers”.

“Again?”  I questioned to no one in particular.

It’s not that the dog would have been cold or anything, since it was a massive arctic-bred dog, but Chase really needed to start to remember to bring him inside at night.

The dog immediately travelled to his empty bowl and waited with a haughty expression on his face for me to fill it up with food.

I put the waffles onto a paper towel and spread peanut butter on the top of one and flipped it onto the other to make a sandwich (my family’s less-sloppy alternative to syrup), and ran upstairs to wake Chase.