Rising Shards

Iris and Maia asked some more students around the snack bar if they wanted to join, but we had no takers. After we each grabbed a paper cup of fruit punch, Maia dropped her head to the bar and groaned.

“Maia, can I ask them then?” Iris asked. “You said we could if we got desperate.”

Maia groaned, not lifting her head from the bar.

“OK, fine, let’s ask the love trio.”

“Yay!” Iris said. “Have you met them yet, Zeta?”

“Love trio?” I asked.

Iris giggled and led us away.

“I know they’re around here somewhere,” Iris said.

“OK, but who are the love trio?” I asked.

“Just…brace yourself.” Maia said.

“I see them!” Iris said. “Alright, follow my lead.”

Three Kanibari girls were standing near the water’s edge. One of them, a raccoon Kanibari, was holding up a camera to the water. The second girl, a Kanibari fox, looked like she was practicing fighting stances while the third, a Kanibari deer, was quietly knitting.

“Oh, I know them.” I said. “I mean, I’ve seen them in class, but I’ve never really talked to them.”

“Then you don’t know the majesty of the love trio.” Iris said.

Iris waved as she got their attention.

“Hey, ya’ll! Howdy. And hello and stuff.” Iris said. “You guys find a club yet?”

“No,” the raccoon Kanibari said. “Maybe we could join them?”

“I don’t know, KJ…” the fox Kanibari said.

“They could be offering just what we were hoping for!” The deer Kanibari said.

“That’s a great idea, Rain! You’re so smart!” The fox said, her tone completely changed from a second earlier.

“You guys haven’t been introduced to Zeta yet, have you?”

“I don’t think so,” Rain said, offering a delicate handshake. “I’m Rain.”

I shook her hand and had a sudden crisis that I had introduced myself to a lot of people so far that day without following Stella’s handshake rule. I suppressed the thought and promised myself I’d catch up on handshakes with all of them later.

“Rain is most beautiful student in the entire school.” The fox said, practically with sparkles in her eyes as she looked at Rain.

“I would start with my knitting as my best feature,” Rain said.

“Well, that is one of your many, many abilities.” The fox turned back to me and offered her hand and nearly crushed mine when I shook it. “I am Amara.”

The raccoon girl gave a lazy salute next. “I’m KJ. Hold on, don’t move, I need to get this shot, it’s perfect.”

KJ held up her camera and got really close to Rain. I was pretty sure neither Amara nor I were in this shot.

“Perfect,” KJ said. “Rain, you truly are a star. This movie will be incredible.”

“Oh, stop,” Rain said as KJ hugged her. Amara looked at the two and had a twitchy smile for a second that looked terrifying.

“I feel like there’s a lot to unpack here,” I said.

“I’ll say,” Rain said. “We were just saying how we were hoping we could find a club as well as continue work on KJ’s production.”

“Yeah, that’s…exactly what I was thinking,” I said. “You use that camera for video?”

“Uh huh,” KJ said. “It gets way better shots than a phone. Cost me a fortune.”

“So do you guys want to join our club?” Maia asked, barely concealing how close her patience was to running out with these three.

“As we said, we’re starting a club too, so maybe you can join ours!” Rain said.

“The only idea we’ve come up with so far is beach exploration.” KJ said.

“It’s all Rain’s idea,” Amara said. “Rain is so smart to come up with something that good.”

“Actually, it was KJ’s idea.” Rain said.

“Oh,” Amara said. “It isn’t that good of an idea. What else do we have?”

“OK, you’re in with us because we don’t know ours either,” Iris said, cutting off whatever tension the three were going through. “That makes seven, we just need one more!”

The love trio cheered and jumped around as Maia cringed.

“We don’t have much time left,” Maia said. “Let’s just head over to the registration booth and hope we can pick someone up on the way.”

“What’ll we tell them our club is then?” I asked.

“We can also hope we’ll find a really good idea between here and there.” Iris said. “We’ve got about…half an hour.”

The love trio began brainstorming club ideas loudly, and with each idea Maia seemed to speed up.

“You can’t have a rock club, it’s redundant.”

“What does that mean?”

“How about a rocks club? You know, like for music rocks?”

“I think we need a rock music club.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said!”

“That’s a great idea, Rain.”

Maia directed Iris and I to her. “Alright, there’s the table. Let’s get this over with.”

“What about the eighth member?” I asked.

“We’re gonna have to wing it,” Maia said.

We approached the registration booth, which had piles of clipboards with papers on them. A teacher with a green visor came over to us. She had a nametag on that said ‘Mrs. Junea.’ But with an exclamation point on it so it actually read ‘Mrs. Junea!’

“If you’re registering your own club, you’ll have to sign your names here.” Mrs. Junea said with a tone that sounded like she was either lifting something heavy or just got done lifting something heavy.

We all wrote our names down, and then got KJ, Amara, and Rain to stop babbling club names and got them to write theirs two.

“So that’s six,” Junea said, in that adult tone that adults do where they get ready to really passive aggressively ruin a day. “You need all eight members present to sign their names.”

“Right, we just need to…go get them.” I said.

“Wait here one second,” Maia said.

“Maybe like fifteen to thirty seconds.” Iris said.

Iris muttered “crap crap crap crap” as we circled around.

“What do we do?” I asked. “We have to do the three day rule thing if we can’t get this club registered.”

“Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap…” Iris said.

“Give me a second to think,” Maia said as she started to bite her claws. “Give me fifteen to thirty seconds to think.”

“We have like ten minutes before the registration closes,” Iris said.

The idea part of my brain was getting overwhelmed by the scared part of my brain. My semester would be effectively ruined if I had to spend it at a bunch of random clubs I didn’t want to be in. And after seeing the clubs, there were a lot of clubs I really didn’t want to be in.