Y'all, I'm beyond excited for today's Indie Fall Fest post featuring K.R. Conway!
Don't forget to stop by the kick-off post and enter the huge giveaway!
On Kira Adams' blog today, she's featuring Tiana Warner!
Pansies for Peace
by K.R. Conway
Standing in the door to the silent cafeteria, I knew Ashley and I had been right all along. Our classmates, once cloaked in our crimson colors, were now entirely decked out in blue and staring at us. Even worse, their eyes all matched, now a dull gray tone rimmed in an awful green haze.I felt Ashley grip my hand tightly and whisper an escape plan that involved lots of running and a shitload of praying.
Unfortunately, I knew we couldn’t outrun this.
East had invaded West. Invaded the minds of our once thriving school, turning a blistering rivalry into an all-out invasion. My classmates were evolving into minions – zombies – for Principal Banes.
It all started two weeks ago with a baseball game and a stupid flower.
You see, the rivalry between us and the Easties was nothing new, but in recent years it had gotten a bit out of hand. A slight misunderstanding at the last baseball game, which turned America’s favorite pastime into an all out brawl, was the tipping point for the faculty.
The teachers wanted a truce, but at first no one could come up with a solution, not that we really wanted one.
Easties always saw themselves as so superior, with their midnight blue jackets, centralized campus, and the claim that they were the first.
First to open.
First to win.
First freakin’ everything.
But we WestEnders had a take-no-prisoners approach with baseball, and oddly, cheerleading. We dominated in those two arenas and no one could take that competitive spirit away from us.
Except Principal Zellwagon.
She was my own, five-foot tall nightmare.
See, there were three things that were undeniable when it came to Principal Zellwagon: she loved books, hated sports, and was addicted to the school’s garden.
I, on the other hand, avoided the library, lived for baseball, and thought the garden was a place to toss my gum wrappers.
So when she came up with the “Pansies for Peace” idea, I nearly puked . . . along with most of the school. Her idea, along with East’s principle Mr. Banes, was that our schools would exchange flowers – potted, living reminders that we should share our successes and joys equally.
Everyone had to plant and grow a friggin’ pansy. I quickly learned that a flower in my Red Sox bedroom made me look like a pansy as well. God, I hated that weed.
The schools exchanged flowers (along with a few evil glares and decidedly unfriendly fingers), and the days rolled by without anymore of Principal Zellwagon’s dumb ideas.
But then something weird started happening.
Our students started acting less like WestEnders and more like . . . Easties. It started first with Zellwagon’s Garden Club who, granted, were little off to begin with. They began wearing blue more often. Started talking like Easties, saying how great the East teams were, and how cool East’s campus was.
And the Garden Club began growing more of those irritating, devil-red flowers from the Easties, handing them out to the other classes. Like, LOTS of them.
My teammates and I always ditched the nasty little things in the garbage – and so did the cheerleaders (and they’re chicks, so their hatred was pretty hardcore to ditch flowers).
That was two weeks ago.
Today, Ashley and I are apparently the last Westies standing, and I’ll be damned if we are going to let East take our school from us . . . even if our former classmates ARE creepy as hell.
Because I believe the words “FREE TIME” refer to a parallel universe from which I am banned, I find myself also on the Board of Directors for the Cape Cod Writers Center, a member of the SCBWI, and the driver of a 16-ton school bus. Apparently I tweet my random thoughts @sharkprose and yup – I am on Facebook, because even my BFF’s dog is. I can’t rank below a dog . . . seriously, I need more friends. The dog is killing me.
I am also the author of UNDERTOW, a dark, Urban Fantasy YA, which follows 17-year-old Eila Walker, last in a brutal race of humans and her unlikely allies, including a soulless boy who becomes her beloved bodyguard. The second book in the series is STORMFRONT launched the summer of 2014, and will be followed by a prequel novella, CRUEL SUMMER, in early 2015. UNDERTOW is also on WattPad.
I live on Cape Cod with my two children and husband, two odd shaped dogs, and a cage-defiant lovebird that sleeps in a miniature tent. This is Cape Cod – even the animals are nuts.
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