Read this first!

The asterisks are stopping points, they are not swear words. This is not all one paragraph, but hte stupid bloggong format doesn't let you see it.

At last, it is here!

The first chapter of my story! If you see something about you, like your name or your personality, umm... it had nothing to do with me, don't sue me. *runs away* By the way, If you have an idea for the name of the story, comment it to me.

“♪We were talking together, I said what’s up with this weather, don’t know…♪” CLICK. I shut off the stupid alarm clock. My name is Mackenzie Lawrence, and I am not a morning person. ”TGIF,” I muttered as I hauled myself out of bed and put on my favorite T-shirt and khakis. I’m not exactly what you’d call a tomboy. I tried to tame my wild dark hair into submission and brushed my teeth. I had my normal breakfast of a raspberry smoothie and a piece of toast. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and ran to the bus stop down the street from my house, where I was greeted by my best friends Hannah Smith, Olivia Dunham, and Angelina Gardener. Hannah is a little ray of sunshine, Olivia is an über-cynic of doom with a sense of humor and hair the color of ripe tomatoes, and Angelina is smart and quiet except for when she is singing. “Kenz, guess what?” said Hannah, running her fingers through her perfect blonde hair. “I’m getting my braces off February 12th!” We all squealed with happiness for her. Hannah had had her braces on since fourth grade, and now, in seventh, she was ready to get rid of them. The big yellow turtle of a bus lumbered down the street and screeched to a halt before us. We climbed on and found our usual spots, then talked the entire bus ride about the movie night we would have in honor of Hannah’s straight teeth. Much too soon, we had pulled up to Northern Valley Middle School known by most as “The Pit.” “Cheers to another long day,” Olivia groaned and we filed off the bus and parted into twos for class. Hannah and I had the exact same schedule; it was sort of frightening. First was P.E. We had to run the mile in those oh, so fashionable T-shirts and black shorts. Luckily, class was inside. It was nice for a January day, but in Colorado, weather changes more often than I change my clothes. Second period: science. Olivia was there, but Angelina was in a higher class. It was forty-five minutes of listening to Mr. “Simon” Saize drone on about density. Mr. Saize was this sixty year-old guy who was bald and wore a suit every day. He was so boring sometimes, but don’t let that fool you. He hated me as if I had tracked mud into his house and then burned his grade book, though of course I hadn’t. Hannah, Olivia and I played tic-tac-toe the entire time until “Simon” started staring at me. “Detention, Ms. Lawrence. See me on Monday morning.” Ugh! “Sorry about your detention,” Hannah sympathized after science, practically shouting over the noise in the crowded hallway. “It totally wasn’t fair.” “Since when has Simon been kind?” I said, more weary than angry. “You have a point there.” Angelina said, slamming the door of her locker shut. Third period was Orchestra. Ms. Coleman is nice, but a little strange. She always wears a tie-dyed T-shirt to school, even though that isn’t in the dress code and has posters like “Peace through Music”. Our concert isn’t for another month, but she makes us prepare way ahead. She always puts me in the first chair, even though I’m not that good of a violinist; Hannah is the good one. Ms. Coleman makes it seem like I’m the best in the world, but I’m shockingly average. Sorry, back to this actual period. She made us open the window for the “Song of the Wind,” but it was really windy. I guess that was her idea of inspiration. All the music kept blowing off our stands, but did Ms. Coleman care? Maybe she is just immune to wind or something, I thought. Also, watch your tense, you slip between present and past. Good though! During English class we went to the library and worked on our “Human Suffering and the Individual Triumph” Power points, where mostly what we did was talk and check our e-mail instead of working. The idiots who had used the library last period had opened the windows. Ms. Coleman must be rubbing off on them, I thought to myself. It makes me furious when they do that because they can’t just freeze off their behinds but they have to freeze off ours, too. The wind was howling. “Hey, Hannah, could you close the window?” I said, trying to sound unconcerned at the librarian’s huge stack of papers that blew all over the library with a large gust. “What? Sure.” I could tell she wasn’t really listening, but she seemed a little more concerned, like she was pondering wise thoughts or something that sounds intelligent. ************ When we were finally freed from the library, Olivia, Hannah, Angelina and I got in the lunch line to wait for the entrée; corn dogs. Hannah seemed to have snapped out of her wise thoughts trance. Olivia shared with us a horror story she’d read about a girl who had had to eat nothing but corn dogs for a week. The thought chilled us to the bone. I mean, corn dogs are just plain gross. After lunch, we went to Math, where we learned about FOIL. Our teacher, Ms. Lang, is really nice, but that still didn’t change the fact that FOIL is just about as exciting as videos about Colorado miners. At the very end of class, the power went out. It was freezing, and the rain had turned to snow. All four of us were on one chair to keep from freezing; me at the bottom. We got a “stay in your seats and don’t panic” speech from the Ms. Lang, but luckily, the power came back on a few minutes later and soon we heard the sixth period bell. During Spanish, while Señor was showing us a picture of his wife’s ultrasound (he does things like that), there was an announcement on the intercom from the Principal: “Pardon the interruption. I will give everyone 20 seconds to get quiet.” Normally, those words mean we’re going to hear about some stupid pep rally or a bake sale, but this was different. Ms. Gower had a “panicked-adult-trying-to-sound-calm-for-the-kids’-sake” voice. Everyone froze. Correction: Everyone looked mildly interested, which is bad news. The last time we had an unplanned announcement was the lockdown when some crazy kidnapper with a gun tried to come on campus. A couple kids started getting under their desks even before the 20 seconds was up. “We’ve just learned that the snow in Meadowland to the west has already reached over 20 inches deep and the storm has suddenly become a dangerous blizzard.” “That’s weird,” I said to Olivia. “Today there were only supposed to be intermittent showers.” Ms. Gower continued, “There isn’t time to finish the school day, so the buses are coming immediately to pick up students and return them safely to their homes. For those whose parents usually pick them up, the local police have issued a ‘do not drive’ order for private vehicles because of the danger involved. Your parents can not come to the school to pick you up. Every student must travel home on a bus, no exceptions! And there will be school on Monday unless further notice is given otherwise. Classes are dismissed.” Everybody in Spanish exploded, more with glee than fear, rushing to the classroom door. The entire school was milling around in the gym waiting for the buses. We found a free spot on the floor and Hannah got out a deck of cards so we played Undo with Olivia and Angelina. After half an hour, Ms. Gower announced that the buses wouldn’t be coming because they were stranded in the storm and couldn’t get out until possibly the next morning. “OMG,” I muttered. “We’re spending the night at school. This will be a wonderful story to tell the grandchildren.” *********** My parents were in Kenya on a business trip for my Dad’s telecom business, so my 18 year-old cousin Laura was staying with me at home. She was a senior, and she was probably trapped at her high school across town. Even if she wasn’t trapped, she couldn’t drive here to pick me up anyway. I was stuck. Some teachers, “Simon” Saize included, wanted to resume classes for the rest of the day, but others thought it was futile and a discussion with the Principal ensued. The principal said, “It is officially the weekend, and despite this emergency situation, they would normally be having fun by now.” So the pro-class teachers gave up and just let us play games. Hannah, Angelina, Olivia and I all had a full-fledged Undo tournament. It’s our favorite game, even though none of us is that good. Angelina started singing Wicked in the middle, which always makes it more interesting. After that, we played truth or dare. On my last dare, I had to scream, “LEO ROBERTSON IS A HOTTIE!” which, of course, got me plenty of stares. Leo Robertson is a science nerd/social recluse from my grade and my archenemy. At 5:30, they announced we could go to the cafeteria for dinner, which is good because we were getting really hungry. Thank goodness our school was all one building, because I didn’t want to have to think about getting through the snow. Dinner turned out to be a corn dog, a bottle of water and a cookie. Not very satisfying, but pretty good considering there was no way to import food. After we had eaten and were back in the gym, the teachers announced that we had three more hours before lights out. Everybody wondered how they were going to sleep with a 9:00 pm bedtime and no beds. We were sick of cards for the day, so we begged Ms. Lang to let us watch TV in her classroom because “NUMB3RS” was on then and we wanted to get away from the crowd in the gym. She agreed and we watched the show, this one about a chemical bomber. We watched more TV until 9:00, when there was another Principal announcement on the school intercom. Boys would be sleeping in the gym and girls would sleep in the classrooms of their choice—no exceptions! The four of us made our way to the orchestra room because it’s spacious. We were going to sleep on our backpacks when Hannah said, “Wait! I just remembered! I have a pillow in my backpack! It’ll be cramped, but we can all fit on it.” “We should have known,” Olivia jeered, trying not to sound too relieved. “You always have enough supplies in your backpack to, like, build a wilderness home.” We settled into our “bed” and took several minutes to get comfortable as we formed a plus sign with our bodies and used our coats as blankets. Angelina’s long brown hair was in my face. At a normal sleepover, we would have had at least three hours of talking, but we were exhausted and all soon fell asleep. I had a weird dream. I was breaking into the gym to blow up the school, but somebody threw a pan of cheesy radishes at me. I woke up earlier than I like to on weekends, seeing as I bonked heads with Angelina at about five in the morning. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. I kept thinking about the dreams I’d had. I remembered now that there was a voice in my dream, calling me. At 6:30, I finally came around for good. I tried to wake up Angelina or Olivia, but they have been known to sleep in till 11:30 when they’ve gone to bed at a reasonable hour. Hannah wasn’t on our makeshift pillow, I just realized. She was staring out the window and I joined her there. I looked out and my jaw dropped. I saw the biggest snowfall about, ever. Hannah said, “The snow has stopped. Do you want to go wake up Olivia and Angelina and we can have a snowball fight?” “You help me,” I replied. “You know how hard it is to pull them out of dreamland.” We walked over to them, nodded, and at the same time, I grabbed the coat off of Angelina while Hannah did the same to Olivia. They grunted sleepily, while we coaxed them up. “Come on, we’re going to have a snowball fight. Put those coats on,” we said to each of them. Once everyone had fully awoken and put on fresh clothes (provided by Hannah, the Boy Scout girl), we trudged out into the snow. If you have never tried to walk through waist deep snow you don’t know what exhaustion feels like. I was ready to jump into a large snow drift and take a nap by the time we got to the courtyard. I jumped in the drift… and got a surprise. I hit grass and got a bad scrape on my chin. Angelina rushed to where I had face-planted, going as fast as she could in the snow to see what had happened. When she saw me, she said, seriously, “Mackenzie, what happened?” “I jumped into this drift, and I hit grass.” I said, nonplussed. “Hannah, Olivia! Get over here now,” she said in that same tone. When they had made their way over through the deep snow, they gasped. “We are going inside, now,” Hannah said, as if our lives depended on it. “Guys, my chin feels fine; we haven’t even started the fight yet…” I protested, but all three of my friends were dragging me to my feet and forcing their way through the snow back to the building. No matter how much I asked them what was wrong, they looked as if they were preparing my eulogy but they wouldn’t answer me. I freaked out and decided to stay quiet until they snapped out of it, like they had earlier yesterday. ************ When we got in, the rest of the school seemed to have awoken. Some girls were filing out of Ms. Coleman’s room, apparently to go to breakfast. We followed. Breakfast was a bagel of our choice and cream cheese. Lucky the school had extras on hand! Afterwards, Olivia, Angelina and Hannah all hurried off to the bathroom, without even asking me if I wanted to come. I slowly followed after. In the bathroom, I heard their voices sounding urgent and annoyed. “We have to alert her immediately,” Olivia said. “I mean, now that we are sure it’s her.” I had had enough. They were talking about me behind my back. I walked in casually, trying to pretend I hadn’t heard anything. When they saw me, they changed their expression in an instant from worried to friendly. “Hey, the buses are coming this afternoon!” Angelina told me brightly. “We’re getting out of The Pit! I heard it from Ms. Gower.” “Coolio,” I said, in a daze. I wondered what was going on and what was making my friends act so strangely. We all filed out of the bathroom. Trying to keep them normal, I said “Hey, why don’t we go watch some more TV in Ms. Lang’s room?” They agreed, and we scooted over to her room. Unfortunately, some other people had already had the same idea. There were about twenty people crammed into that room watching the cable TV. I finally thought about the fact that a teacher had cable in her classroom. What a waste! I mean, when does she ever get to watch it? If you’ve never watched TV with a lot of other people, don’t. Don’t even think about trying to change the channel. The bad news was that Leo Robertson had gotten hold of the TV first. Watching “Naruto,” the stupid anime show, for an hour was not my idea of fun. We left pretty quickly. After roaming the halls for another hour, another announcement crackled onto the intercom: “The buses have arrived. All students and faculty are to assemble in the gym immediately.” All four of us dashed to the gym. There were three dead bus drivers lying on the floor in an empty space. Some of the girls, me included, screamed. “Everyone, please calm down!” Ms. Gower pleaded with a calm that was almost sickening because it was so out of place. “They’re not dead. They have spent all night and this morning trying to get to us. When they arrived, they immediately passed out from exhaustion and cold.” There was a collective gasp from the crowd. That woman could increase the tension just by standing there. Ms. Gower continued, “We can’t get them to a hospital, because of the snow. However, we can send the students home in the buses with new drivers. Therefore, six of the faculty will have to drive the buses, three driving and three assisting in case of emergency. The rest of the staff will stay here and help to care for the drivers until they are ready to leave.” Mr. Saize immediately volunteered to drive, and then Ms. Coleman agreed to assist him. Then Ms. Lang, Ms. Gower, and the Vice-Principal, Mr. Gruele, and the band teacher, Mr. Gessel, decided to drive the other buses. We all got assigned to buses based on where we live and I got put with “Simon” Saize. The whole school trudged out to the buses. Inside, there wasn’t room to move a muscle. Everyone sat four to a seat, and we got the very back. I sighed a sigh of relief because we were going home and we were safe. Or so I thought. -End of Chapter 1-

Coming soon to a particular blog...

I haven't been posting becuase I've been working on a story I'm writing. I'll put up part of it in a bit.

PLEEASE!!!

SOMEBODY PLEASE COMMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I like animals...

...They either hate me or love me a bit too much. Here are some pictures proving it.

YEEAAAHH!

Even better party in the streets! I'VE GOT CONTACTS!!! *does a short victory dance* I love them! They help me see even better than glasses, but they are a pain in the butt to get in and out. All you contacts people, how long did it take you before you could get them in/out yourself? They are cool on a stick.

Party in the Streets!!!!!

YESSSSSSS!!!!!!!! I'm finally getting new glasses today!!! My old ones are really crooked from too many times at the tetherball court. I love going to my eye doctor (call me a freak), becaause the worst thing that happens is they blow air in your eye when you're not expecting it. I have wanted new glasses for like six months, but something with insurance we couldn't go until today. Yay for new glasses!

My Secret Passion

Ok, here's a chance for me to have more issues: I love cake decorating. Here is a picture of a cake I made for my aunt's birthday. I know I sound really stupid when I say this, but I think it would be really fun to be a wedding cake baker. More of my issues later.

Geek to Freak

I have many issues. No, more than most. For example, I go to Geek to Freak (otherwise known as Peak to Peak). If you haven't heard about it, here is a (very short) list of it's great qualities:

• "Math is Sexy" is a popular phrase
• The teacher dropout rate is is higher than the student dropout rate.
• Teachers confiscate Rubik's cubes, not cell phones

Anyway, as you can see, it's a great school and is always worth a visit!

Summer Angst

AM I the only one who is bored out of her skull, loses sleep, and is very grumpy every morning because it is too hot to exist???! Summer should be warm, not boiling hot so that you could burn your foot walking barefoot on the sidewalk! Everybody should have a pool in their backyard, not just the grumpy neighbors who make too much noise and never share! Hmmph.

Welcome!

*trumpet sounds* I know nobody reads these posts, but they help me feel accomplished. My first post! Yay to me! So, I have extracted the dust, lint, and old socks from my mind and now I might be able to come up with something worth reading if I try. NOt a chance, but have a good time at my blog.