A Beauteous Flower Ch. 04

Chapter 4 - The Pixie, the Doll and the Parking Lot Pugilism

*****

As always, breakfast had been a quiet affair. Madison and her roommates had a tacit agreement that breakfast was quiet time because the rest of the day would be loud and proud.

When she finished her Frosted Flakes, a guilty pleasure held over from her high school days, Madison went to her room and changed into her practice uniform. She said goodbye to her roommates and walked across the hall to Cassidy and Kelly's apartment to catch a ride with them to practice.

Cassidy and Kelly were another odd pair of best friends. They hadn't been best friends for very long actually, as prior to Kelly, Cassidy's best friend had been her previous roommate, Gail. However, Gail had inexplicably and suddenly moved out about two weeks ago, and Kelly moved into both roles of Cassidy's roommate and best friend.

At Madison's knock, Cassidy opened the door and invited Madison in while she and Kelly finished their preparations. Madison plopped into a big soft easy chair in the living room and waited patiently. Her car had a flat tire and her student loan payments, and her recent pedicure conspired to keep that tire flat until her next paycheck. Fortunately, many of her teammates lived in the same complex, so it was easy enough to find a ride.

As she waited, Madison sensed an odd aura that pervaded the apartment. Nominally the apartment appeared the same. It was brightly lit as always, and soft jazz music played in the background. Cassidy and Kelly both went about their familiar routines to get ready to go to work, but there was none of the normal bounce to their activity. Something was off, but Madison couldn't quite put her finger on it. It was as if things were slightly out of rhythm.

Cassidy was an impossibly energetic and dainty woman, and it would not have surprised anyone to find out she had little fairy wings on her back. It seemed like she never slept, and she was entirely too giddy, like someone who drank way too much coffee. Cassidy would dance to any music at any time, and she giggled and tittered and jabbered constantly in a high-pitched Minnie Mouse voice.

She sported two crystal green eyes like someone had set huge emeralds in her head. She had long fiercely roan hair, which she wore fastidiously straight with one curtain bang over her left eye. Cassidy thought that hairdo gave her a mysterious appearance, and she went on and on about how it made her look like Emma Stone. It didn't, but Cassidy was still pretty, and tiny and frail to the point that it seemed a stiff breeze would waft her away to whatever fairly-land she hailed from.

Due to her small size it only took a few sips of alcohol to lift Cassidy into a party mood. In her small hands, bar glasses looked way too big, and bouncers and bar tenders constantly asked to see her ID. That suited Cassidy just fine as she dated a steady stream of bar owners and special guest deejays, and the frequent identification checks were a great icebreaker for her. Deva had once wryly noted that Cassidy didn't date anyone who didn't work after dark and that, if the trend continued, Cassidy would eventually wind up married to Dracula.

That would have probably suited Cassidy just fine, as she practiced Wicca and claimed to be a white witch. In the light of day, it seemed a rather silly claim, but when night fell it seemed that the desperately horny or desperately in love teammates would try any silly thing. Cassidy had a steady stream of clients for her love potions and spells that allegedly tilted the odds in their favor, and for a few extra dollars Cassidy would hook them up with an aphrodisiac potion to ramp up their intended's sex drive too.

Cassidy giggled along like a magical wisp, but she did sport a few huge traits. The first was an outsized personality that dominated a room with sheer force. She was impossible to ignore and if she ever sat still, she still would have demanded attention. But Cassidy never sat still. Instead, she flitted around the room tirelessly and by the end of a party, she had met every person at the party, committed their names to memory and nattered some personal factoid out of each of them.

Then there were Cassidy's saline enhanced breasts, which she referred to as "my girls". It wasn't the best boob job Madison had ever seen, and it wasn't the worst, but Cassidy's enlarged chest looked unnaturally swollen on her waif form. However, everyone was either too polite or too horny to point that out to her. Maybe when the back pain kicked in later in life Cassidy would realize her mistake, but until then Cassidy was a size zero girl with size "D" boobs of which she was inordinately proud.

The next huge thing was more of a collection of "friend-of-a-friend" stories rather than an established fact, but everyone on the team told those stories as if they were true. The persistent team scuttlebutt was that Cassidy had an unusually large sexual appetite and dark whispers told of a wicked witch inside Cassidy's white witch exterior. When Madison joined the team, she received several warnings that when Cassidy got drunk, which owing to her minuscule size occurred somewhere between her third and fifth pull on her first drink of the evening, every other woman in the room had to keep their eyes on their men.

Team lore was rife with salacious stories about how Wicked Witch Cassidy would shamelessly hit on any man in range, regardless of his relationship status. The corollary to these stories was another persistent rumor that Cassidy necessarily swapped out her best girlfriend every six months or so due to the fact that in a drunken moment Cassidy would press in a little too close to her girlfriend's man, give him a good eyeful of her bodacious breasts and tell him in a playful giggle-whisper that she had no gag reflex whatsoever and loved to give spectacular blow jobs. While no one was sure if those rumors were true, everyone was sure about Cassidy's blow job prowess claims because Cassidy was only too proud to sing her own praises in that department.

Next to the minuscule Cassidy, Kelly appeared as an Amazon. As cheerleaders go, Kelly was biologically predisposed for the part. She was a tall, leggy, blond-haired, blue-eyed Kansas farm girl with the wide-open and innocent aura of a newborn deer. She had big, perky natural breasts, a narrow waist, and a firm apple of an ass that looked exquisite in everything she wore. If a Hollywood director called down to central casting and asked them to send up a honey-sweet country bombshell, they would have sent Kelly. She radiated the hot farm girl vibe and that made her sexual nitrous oxide to every male libido with a sight line. When she went out to jog every morning, a person could very nearly track her progress by the sound of ambulance sirens as she witlessly caused men to crash their cars while they stared at her Lycra-clad body rather than the road.

Kelly was so country hot that her conversations inevitably sounded like flirtation. Yet she was so innocent that if someone called her on it, she would go all doe eyed and confused and ask, "What? What did I say?" in her honey-suckle mid-western accent, and even that sounded dirty-flirty. She was so sweet that the sexy things she did seemed innocent, but so sexy that every innocent thing she did seemed sexy.

She had the type of innocent sexuality that sunbathed topless at a hotel pool and was honestly surprised when the wives and mommies got snippy with her. Kelly was oblivious to the fact that she was a married woman's worst nightmare; an effortlessly attractive woman, blissfully unaware that not every woman on Earth would get naked in front of God and everyone without an ounce of self-consciousness. Kelly honestly didn't understand that what made those wives and mommies so snippy was that when they had nightmares that their husbands cheated on them, it was a sexual siren in the guise of Kelly that fucked their husband insensible and lured them away from their families.

Yet the thing that bothered people most about Kelly was that lucky glow about her. Everyone, except for maybe Kelly, knew Kelly would drift along aimlessly on the breeze of life until she landed softly in the cushiest place, and she would never have to worry about a thing or work a day in that life. It was just a matter of time before Kelly got a five-carat diamond from some smitten oldster with millions in the bank and an Olympic size pool for Kelly to decorate with her naked body.

The only thing that redeemed Kelly from universal feminine loathing was that Kelly lacked the capacity to do anything intentional. There wasn't an ounce of malice aforethought in her and she wielded her sexuality like a six-year-old would wield a pistol; negligently, unpredictably, and wholly ignorant of the damage she could do with it. But no matter what Kelly did, other women could rest assured that it was not premeditated, and that put the blame squarely where it belonged; on the men who fawned over her.

That's not to say Kelly was an airhead. An airhead would have had no thoughts in their head whatsoever. On the contrary, Kelly's mind was full of thoughts, but they were dangerously insipid thoughts. For example, somehow Kelly had gotten the idea that if she wore high heels during sex, she couldn't get pregnant. She avoided hot tubs with men in them because somewhere she had obtained the belief that simple existence in a hot tub with a man could lead to a pregnancy. She believed in all manner of ghosts and Bigfoots and alien conspiracy theories, and she wouldn't go anywhere near a Ouija board. Suffice it to say, Kelly had plenty of thoughts, but they usually weren't worth anything.

This made Kelly highly suggestible, so if on the rare occasion her thoughts had some kind of value, they certainly weren't Kelly's original thoughts. She merely repeated those without a cite to her sources. This property made her a perfect current best friend for Cassidy because Kelly heartily agreed with whatever Cassidy jabbered out to the rest of the world. Together they prattled and giggled and pranced through their days without any discernible cares in the world. The vibe of a ride to work with Cassidy and Kelly would cheer anyone up.

However, contrary to Madison's expectations, the ride to the practice facility had a somber undertone. The conversation was standard superficial stuff, mostly constrained to the new cosmetics that Cassidy and Kelly had tried the other night, but there was an undercurrent of moody tension. For her part, Cassidy was not completely her normal chatty self and kind of brooded as she drove. Kelly tried to take cautious sideways glances at Cassidy, but Madison noticed because Kelly lacked the capacity to be subtle. The overall mood made Madison a little uneasy.

Halfway to practice, Cassidy stopped to get gas and while she was out of the car Kelly whispered, not very quietly because she lacked the capacity for subtlety and she was in the front seat and Madison was in the back seat, that something had recently come to light about Gail's sudden departure. She couldn't fill in the details because Cassidy was still in earshot, but the hastily hissed upshot was that Gail had done the deed with Cassidy's intended man and then moved in with him. Kelly said that for the last two days Cassidy had reeled between hopeless tears and wrathful fulmination.

Madison responded with a low whistle. This was a touchy thing. While her promiscuity with other women's men was hushed speculation, it was a well-known fact that fidelity in Cassidy's relationships, even the most embryonic ones, was sacred to Cassidy. She would brook no approaches by rival females, real or imagined, to her current man. If Cassidy even cast her eye on a man, she believed that he belonged to her, lock, stock and barrel, and no woman could come within range of him without risk of Cassidy's ire.

That in and of itself wasn't unusual, but to back up that insanely large jealous bone, Cassidy was a pint-sized scrapper; a literal Tasmanian Devil of violence. An enraged Cassidy spewed vitriol and transformed into a dervish of tiny fists and feet. She was fearless when it came to physical confrontation and would throw down like a demon with any woman and mercilessly kept up the attack until her opponent fled or, more likely, someone intervened to save her opponent's life. That made people think very hard before they ran afoul of Cassidy, but it seemed that Gail forgot that fact and got flirty, then busy and then cozy with the man Cassidy was sweet on. Given that information, the unusually somber tinged mood in the car made perfect sense.

Before Kelly could entirely fill Madison in, Cassidy hung up the gas pump and the trip to the practice facility continued in subdued tones until they pulled into the parking lot. Cassidy parked her car and they all got out and started to greet the other assembled teammates. Amid the impromptu meet and greet, Gail pulled up in her white SUV.

Mid-wave, Cassidy's eyes flashed green fire and she swooped across the parking lot like a scrawny falcon. Gail unwittingly opened the door before she saw Cassidy's approach and as a result, Cassidy clinched the still seated Gail in a headlock and pounded three left hands into Gail's startled face. Not satisfied by the fact she had bloodied Gail's nose and fattened her lower lip, Cassidy gave a vicious twist and turned the headlock into a hip throw, which spilled Gail out of the car to a stunned seat on the hot pavement.

Gail blinked in shock as Cassidy snarled and closed in for the kill, keen to beat the daylights of out her stunned prey. However, just as Cassidy seized a micro-fist full of Gail's hair and cocked back her other fist to deliver another fusillade, the other teammates intervened. Cassidy shrieked with rage at their interference, and it took three girls to hold Cassidy still while two other girls disentangled Cassidy's hand from Gail's hair. While Cassidy spat and caterwauled, the others lifted the battered Gail to her feet.

"You bitch, I'll kill you!" raged Cassidy as she struggled to escape and land another blow. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

Gail dabbed at the blood that ran from her mouth with a Kleenex one of the other girls handed her. She looked dazed and confused as she felt her swollen lip.

"What?" Gail asked incredulously. "Oh, my God!"

"He's my man!" Cassidy screamed, apparently oblivious to Gail's condition. "That means hand's off, you moron!"

Gail recovered her wits enough to sneer at Cassidy.

"There was no ring on his finger! It's your own fault, you know! You didn't close the deal! You're just jealous that I did!"

Cassidy emitted a screech of blind fury and another girl had to latch on to the scrum of bodies that held Cassidy away from Gail. Gail smirked triumphantly as Cassidy squirmed and thrashed to get free.

"You only wish you were woman enough for a guy like that, Cassidy!"

"I'll kill you!" squalled Cassidy. "Let go of me!"

"That's enough!"

All heads snapped towards the newly arrived Ivy. She stood straight and imperious with her hands on her hips and her jaw jutted out in challenge. Ivy let the silence drag as she panned her gray, unblinking gaze over the knot of cheerleaders. Finally, her gaze settled on Cassidy.

"Go home and cool off, Cassidy. Take the day off. I'll clear it with Adalina and Mrs. Selene."

"But...."

Ivy held up her hand to silence Cassidy's protest.

"Go home."

Cassidy made an expression of exasperation, but Ivy didn't budge. A good portion of the team sympathetically embraced Gail, who slipped comfortably into the role of affronted party with the attendant tears and sobs of disbelief. Madison found this a bit rich, but kept her mouth shut as she was just a rookie. The girls who had restrained Cassidy cautiously released her and backed away. Cassidy faced Ivy with little clenched fists and cold fury in her stormy green eyes.

"This ain't over," Cassidy hissed.

Ivy raised her chin.

"Yes, it is."

Cassidy shook her head in disagreement, but Ivy glared back at her impassively.

"I said, 'Yes, it is', Cassidy. Let it lie. You read me?"

Cassidy snorted, defiantly shoved her little hands into her pockets and stomped over to her car. That seemed to satisfy Ivy for the moment. She looked around at the assembled knot of shocked woman.

"OK, we've got practice in thirty minutes. Everyone get stretched and be ready."

The clot of empathetic teammates coalesced around Gail. Gail continued to play the part of pitiful victim and sniffled and slumped dramatically against the others as if she needed support to walk. Kelly remained behind and stood next to Cassidy with a helpless look on her face. Madison hesitated and then went to Cassidy's side.

"You OK, Cassidy?" Madison asked cautiously.

Cassidy glared frozen green ire at Madison, and Madison flinched a little. Then suddenly the scrappy demon Cassidy dissolved into miserable tears. Kelly put her hands up to her mouth and sobbed as well, uncertain of what to do, but upset none the less. Madison hesitated and then lightly hugged Cassidy and patted her like a big sister.

"It's OK," Madison shushed.

"I hate that bitch!" sobbed Cassidy through a look of pure malevolence. "I hate her and that pack of idiots!"

"I know," Madison agreed. "That wasn't right."

"I hate her! I hate them!" Then Cassidy's face softened to depression as Madison handed her a tissue.

"I thought he was a nice guy," sniffled Cassidy into the tissue. "I really liked him, you know? I thought he was special, so I waited... and that bitch stole him."

Madison wiped a tear from Cassidy's little face and smiled sympathetically. Cassidy looked so miserable that Madison went with another hug and a stock break-up answer.

"You're too good for him."

Cassidy's shoulders slumped a bit and Madison decided this situation called for something a little more meaningful than the normal platitudes.

"I'm really sorry this happened. This hurts right now, Cassidy, but, like, it's better to find out now rather than later, I think. All I can say is that maybe this wasn't meant to be and now you'll be ready when the right guy comes along. Right?"

Cassidy sniffed and tried to smile her thanks.

"I'll check in with you after practice, OK?" Madison soothed. "Don't worry. I'll make sure your side of the story gets told."

"Thanks, Madison," Cassidy nodded gratefully. "I really appreciate it. You're one of the few good ones around here. You and Kelly."

With that Cassidy sniffed up her tears, got into her car and drove off towards home. Madison watched her go and then took Kelly by the hand and led her to practice, determined to see that equity was done.

After the captains interviewed everyone in the parking lot about the incident, Cassidy was suspended for two days. As for Gail, she got a healthy dose of side-eye from the teammates who had mistakenly believed Gail's proclamation that she was an innocent victim. The sisterhood vibe that Adalina and the other captains preached was one of the pillars of the team girl code, and while it wasn't officially against the rules, Man-Theft in the First Degree was a serious violation of that girl code. In the light of this revelation, Gail's support faded to frosty distance and Cassidy's position was more generally viewed as definitely reasonable, and probably justified after all.

After the suspension ended, Cassidy reappeared at a subsequent practice, bruised knuckles and all, and danced her way through it like nothing at all had happened. By that time, everyone knew why Gail had moved out of her apartment with Cassidy, so as Gail could no longer play the victim card, and she kept a wary distance from Cassidy. A cool eyed Cassidy never even looked her way. By the time practice was half over everyone had relaxed and to the unobservant it appeared the whole episode was in the past. However, it only took Madison one look to know that Cassidy's rage now burned silent and slow, just beneath the surface. Cassidy's wrath plainly wasn't satisfied by a fat lip and a bloody nose and after that day, if anyone mentioned Gail in Cassidy's presence, Cassidy's green eyes would seethe with renewed revulsion. Trouble still brewed, but before anyone realized it, it was too late.