Better Hold Tight

Hanging Out

Catarina's POV

I held up the paper. Ok, so we needed to ask basic questions like favorites and opinions about certain things. Then, we need to hang out at each other's houses afterschool. Well, that should be fun!

"Favorite color?" I ask. I raised my purple-poof pen up in the air. It was a troll pen and the hair of the troll was purple. It also smells like grapes but the pen didn't come like that. I added sour grape perfume to the hair every other day so that I always have something good to smell when things don't smell right in the air. Smart, right?

"Black." He responds. It doesn't sound like his favorite color. I mean, sure he wears it all the time and I'm sure everything he owns is black too. But when someone asks your favorite color, you're supposed to be excited over it. Even Jade, whose favorite color is also black, gets excited over talking about the greatness of black. I write down black. He sighs and rolls his eyes. "Lemme guess, pink?"

"Unicorn pink." I nod. He gives me a weird look before shaking his head and writing that down. Or at least I assume that's what he's writing down. "Favorite food?"

"Spaghetti, you?" I wasn't expecting him to answer so fast.

"I like sushi. And hamburgers! I love hamburgers! But not with cheese, though." I write down spaghetti for him. I really hope I spelled that correctly. I hate spelling things like that. I think there's an "h" in there somewhere. Maybe two? Is there an "i", "y"or two "ee"s at the end? Grrr, I really don't know how to spell that. I'm definitely not going to ask him, though. He'd just make fun of me.

"Right. Favorite show?"

"Winx Club and Vampire Diaries." His mouth falls slightly open. "What? The guys are hot." I shrug.

"Ok," he says slowly. He begins writing that down. "Mine is South Park, thanks for asking."

"But I didn't ask," I respond. Maybe I did. Was I speaking out loud? But then again, I wasn't even thinking about asking him that. Maybe it was just an automatic response. He sighs and stares at the packet. I guess we were done speaking. I wanted to look, too. So I leaned over and looked at his packet with him. He almost fell out of his chair when my hair swung over and slapped him in the shoulder.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Language!" I exclaim. I plucked him for his language. His eyes darkened to a quite threatening shade but I assumed he was just doing that because he was able to make his eyes his favorite color, or at least something close to it. "I was looking at the packet with you."

"Don't you have your own?"

"No, she only handed out one per group. I think that's kind of a good thing because we're already cutting down so many trees to make paper. The teachers just don't understand that if we cut down all the trees, we won't be able to produce enough oxygen and then we'll all suffocate because we're inhaling our own carbon dioxide. And just think, there will be so many sick people because their respiratory system will have basically collapsed and then the sick air would be flying all over the place and people will be inhaling that and we'd all get even sicker!" he raised an eyebrow at me. I sigh. Not even he understands the extremes of our situation! "See, you don't even understand."

"I understand exactly how global warming works, Cat. I'm not an idiot. And that's not even fully true. We still have the smaller plants to produce. Plus, scientists have discovered a species of animal, more like bacteria, that produces oxygen, too." I pinch the bridge of my nose like he does sometimes. I still don't know what it does for you but I feel like it should be done at this moment.

"I didn't say we wouldn't have any oxygen produced. I'm saying we won't have enough. There are 7 billion people and counting on this earth. You think some little plants and some new organism can support that?" I shake my head. "No, no, mister. I think not."