Saturday morning and Gemma calls on Maddie, and the two friends sit on Maddie's bedroom floor, occasionally tending to their Lemur Sanctuary lemurs, reading the latest posts on Lemur Lounge, and generally talking about how there is only one more week of school before Summer Break starts. Neither girl has anything definite planned for the month and a half off from St Tibb's, so they are both very excited to think about so much free time to do whatever they please. And even though it is not a great thing to think about at the start of Summer Break, they also discuss how awesome it will be advancing up to Year 9 when they go back in September. Acquiring more lemurs is definitely on the vague list of things they must do, and Gemma has an idea that she will begin looking for someone else nearby who has a silky sifaka in his/her Sanctuary, arrange a meet-up, and create a litter of babies so that Maddie can pick up one of these rare lemurs. It will take some sorting: posting something on Lemur Lounge to find players who already have an adult silky sifaka who are also close to Mettleham, hoping someone sees her request and responds, arranging an actual place and time to get together, and then having the actual meeting. Gemma knows she will certainly need to have an adult accompany her, too, as she is aware that meeting random strangers from the internet on your own is not advisable for anyone, never mind a 13-year-old girl. Maddie is not quite as full of herself as she usually is and this. Short story is that there was a boy she bumped into by accident a few months ago, fancied madly, got into a heavy exchange of emails and texts, and arranged to meet again for lots of fun during the next school break, but he mysteriously stopped replying to anything she sent him. Since his responses to her emails and texts have stopped, she is now wondering if she will ever meet him again. It could be that something drastic has happened in his life, but even worse for Maddie is the possibility that he is fine but has decided to ghost her for some reason she cannot even begin to think of. Why would he not want to contact her anymore? She behaved flawlessly with him, acting precisely in the way the perfect girlfriend should in the early stages of a relationship! (Or so she very adamantly tells herself time after time.) They had only met once, and for a very brief time before a deep connection had been established, but the amount of communication that had occurred since then made Maddie consider the two of them a strong boyfriend/girlfriend pairing. But he has not replied to her dozens of texts and emails, and now? Now she is slowly coming to accept that she might never hear from him again. If any blame is to be handed out, it should be entirely on his side of the aborted relationship, of course; how could it be Maddie's fault that it foundered so suddenly? Everyone knows that she only ever deals in 100% facts and truth! She sighs and hugs her teddy bear[*] tighter for comfort as she listens to Gemma describe the outfit she intends to wear for No Uniform Friday taking place on the last day of Summer Term. However, Maddie's mind is not entirely focused fully on what Gemma is saying, and the other half of her attention is lost in imagining her idea of Liverpool (which is where the mystery boy lives) and what it could have been like to be there, holding his hand and feeling his lips on hers. [** Full story of their meeting and exchange of messages on my account at DeviantArt. Same username as here. **] "What?" she says as something which Gemma has just said registers and brings Maddie back to the present moment and her current location. "I said... do you reckon anyone will dare turn up to No Uniform Friday in a bikini?" Gemma repeats. "They were saying at the fountains last week if you read the announcement about the No Uniform day, someone could wear only a bikini and it wouldn't be against any of the rules listed. And if this hot weather keeps up... ? Someone might do it for a laugh!" Gemma giggles as she envisions herself walking about the corridors of St Tibb's in a skimpy bikini and the embarrassment she would probably be feeling. "Or just cos she's a flirt. You'd have to be to do that sort of thing." Maddie frowns as she thinks about the question Gemma has posed. "You're asking who I think would do something like that? From the girls in our form? I reckon... ummm... maybe Claire Brompton would do it." She stops to see Gemma's reaction before continuing. "In fact, she'd probably do it anyway, without it being No Uniform Friday! I mean, did you see when she turned up in that gash swimsuit for one of Miss Bryson's lessons last year?" Gemma laughs loudly. "Oh God, yes! I remember that!" "Yeah, she's always up for a silly dare, Claire is, especially if it winds the teachers up." Maddie chuckles. "So come on then... who would you say wouldn't care walking about Tibb's in nothing but a bikini?" she asks. Gemma screws her face up in deep thought. "Hmmmmm..." she hmmmmms intently. "If I had to pick someone out of our form? Well... Héloïse is French and all very Euro, and you know what they're like about not caring less who sees them naked. Yeah, Héloïse would be my choice." Maddie nods as she considers Gemma's nominee and the reason for picking her. Before Maddie can respond, Gemma speaks again: "Or maybe if Claire's already doing it then I'd say Holly might. They've been best friends since ages ago and I'd say she'd do it just cos Claire was." Maddie splutters and spits out some of the mouthful of fruit cocktail she is drinking. "Hewson?! The Tiny Metal-Mouthed Princess?!?" she snorts. "Why the hell would she want to wear a bikini? She's got no hips, no arse to speak of, and her tits are as flat as an ironing board! Little child should still be in Year 7." "Oh, Maddie, no! Don't talk like that about her, please!" Gemma protests. She has been aware of the coldness between her friend and Holly Hewson ever since it started the very first day back in Year 7, and she has accepted that the two will probably never be friends but she still hates to see Maddie reinforcing the fact it exists. "She's lovely when you get to know her." "Don't care," Maddie says with a sneer. "She's a Know-It-All and I don't like her, never will. Now..." her expression changes from a look of contempt to a more pleasant one as she places her teddy bear on the bed and pulls the laptop toward her. "Let's see if we can find someone with a silky sifaka for you and create some babies!" The two girls focus on the computer and any more talk of Holly Hewson, bikinis, and No Uniform Friday is forgotten as their attention turns to rare lemurs and requests to find local owners of such. ============================================================================ [*] Who goes by the name of "Beddy" because he lives on Maddie's bed and has been her sleeping companion for as long as she can remember. The name "Beddy" is from when she was very young, only just able to talk, and had trouble tackling the phrase "Teddy Bear". ============================================================================ (Posed and rendered in PoserPro 11, clothes---worn and discarded---created in Marvelous Designer 9.5, postwork in PSP 2022.)