The Adventures of Augustina Ruiz, part un.

It all started when Rusty Hanson smiled at her.
Augustina had never found a boy particularly attractive before. They were sweaty and vulgar and liked to dangle mice in front of the school's pet boa constrictor, Abbie. None of those things tend to be sexually attractive to a sexually inactive fourteen year-old girl like Augustina.
However, when Rusty Hanson smiled at her from across the mess hall that dreary February morning in 1999, Augustina Ruiz felt something coagulate inside her stomach and explode somewhere a little lower than her stomach. Her knees felt tingly, her forehead began to sweat and before she knew it, she was smiling back at him.
“Did you get your hands on some Prozac this morning?” her best friend Peyton nudged.
“Huh?” Augustina replied. She blinked across the table at Peyton, who was glum and sarcastic as usual.
Peyton added, “You’re smiling…like you’re happy or something.”
“Oh…” Augustina’s mouth twisted itself into a coy grin. “No, St. John’s Wort.”
Peyton nodded. “Cool. Natural mood enhancers are so much cooler than the crap the fascist pharmaceutical companies manufacture.”
“Tell me about it.”
The girls grinned at each other, their eyes sharing a secret celebration of the absurd.
Augustina arched herself over the table in an effort to read whatever great work of literature Peyton was currently writing. It had been preordained that Peyton McLeod would one day be a great author, and if the rest of the world never recognized her work, then at least Augustina Ruiz would be her greatest fan. “So whatcha working on now?”
“Oh, I’m just finishing up a chapter of Newton’s Law,” Peyton replied. Newton’s Law was an ongoing serial about the exploits of a top-secret group of British gangsters and assassins. Though the head of the organization was a nicotine fueled Frenchman, Peyton’s hero was a witty young Englishman named William Newton, who went by the unlikely nickname of “Newt”. Though the series was steeped in violent escapades, the main drama (and comedy) came from Newt’s relationship with his brothers and his futile goal to break free of a life of crime.
It was also a work in progress.
“How close are you to finishing this chapter?” Augustina asked. She had been dying to find out what happened next in Peyton’s twisted literary world.
Peyton paused and flipped through her journal. “Uh…depends on whether or not Denton keeps the lights on during the movie today. I might be able to finish it during class. If not, probably by tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“Well keep me posted.”
“You know I always do.”
As Peyton went back to her writing, Augustina decided to scan the crowd for Rusty. Breakfast was a chaotic time at the Norman Vincent Peale School for the Positive Minded. Students were pretty much left to come and go as they pleased, eat what they could scrounge and talk as loud as they could—so long as they all reported to their first class on time. In many ways, Peale was an incredibly liberal school. The teachers invested less time in raising test scores than in attempting to raise the moral latitude of the student body. But Peale was still a boarding school, and a social hierarchy existed, as did a rigid set of rules. The rules at Peale were atypical, though. Students could dress in whatever attire they chose and speak whenever they wanted to in class. What they were not allowed to do was to be “negative-minded”. After all, the school had been established in honor of Norman Vincent Peale’s philosophies. Hard work and an optimistic outlook were valued over raw intelligence. So, naturally, the vastly intelligent Peyton and all of her sarcastic portents of doom were dismissed in favor of the sunny, yet vacant outlook of some other students.
The mess hall was divided into five rows of long, pinewood tables, but it was politically divided into territories based on coolness. The greater you were on the social hierarchy, the further away you sat from the gusts of chill winds that blew from the great glass doors that opened onto the deserted pavilion. The jocks, rich kids and “Papillons” (Peale code for “social butterflies and their male courtiers”) all sat around the two long tables furthest from the cold and closest to the hot tray table. Peyton and Augustina only had one table separating them from the pavilion, and that table was populated by squirmy kids under the age of ten. They didn’t really mind not being popular. They thought popularity was a reaction of a puerile mob. They didn’t even mind having to sit between the AV Club and the Chess Team, whose members smelled like tartar or armpits. However, Augustina resented the feeling of cold wind blasting her back during the long Ohio winter, and on this morning, when Rusty Hanson had just smiled at her, she was forced to consider the inequity of her life. Why couldn’t she be a Papillon and flirt and giggle with the boys like Rusty? She had the money they had, and the looks. She only lacked the inane sense of insensitivity that each of those girls possessed. Well, there was that, and Peyton. For as much as Peyton could be morose or sarcastic, she could also be equally as loyal and understanding. You don’t quit friends like that.
Just as Augustina was telling herself that she didn’t need the affection of a flippant boy to make her feel happy, her eyes met his from across the room. He smiled again, and almost seemed to blush when he saw her smiling back. Then, as soon as it had happened, he turned away and joined a group of Papillons in conversation.
Augustina couldn’t help it. The idea of Rusty Hanson simply made her smile.
“What are you smiling at, Teena?” Peyton asked. She had begun to crane her neck around to try to see what or whom Augustina was so pleased by.
“Peyton! Peyton! Please stop!” She grabbed her friend. “I’m sorry. Just promise not to tell anyone but…”
“Yeah?” Peyton leaned across the table in confidence.
Augustina swallowed, and then whispered, “Rusty Hanson smiled at me.”
Peyton narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure he hadn’t just told a joke about you?”
“No! Well, I don’t think so. It didn’t seem that way to me.”
Peyton shrugged. “Be careful.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t get pregnant?” Peyton shrugged again.
Teena yelped. “Peyton! What the heck is that supposed to mean? He smiled at me. That’s it.”
“Well, that’s how it always begins…”
“Who told you that?” she asked.
Peyton was trying to avoid eye contact now. “My mom.”
“Your mom’s Irish Catholic.”
“Yeah, and she said my grandfather used to get my grandmother pregnant just by shaking his pants at her.”
“What?”
“It’s true.” Peyton then nodded in complete faith.
Augustina shook her head. She said, “That’s crazy.”
“Well, it makes more sense that saying robots harvest babies for their energy.”
“I had just seen the Matrix!” Augustina exclaimed in fierce protestation.
Peyton returned her focus to her notebook, leaving Augustina feeling awkward and embarrassed. She had nothing better to do than tap her fingertips on the table and hope Peyton was wrong about the miracles of conception. Surely Peyton was joking, or perhaps she was jealous…
“Peyton…”
She was still scrawling sentences across the page. “Uh-huh?”
Augustina didn’t know how to say what she wanted to ask, so she struggled to express herself. “If you…I mean, what’s wrong with wanting…What do you think of Rusty Hanson?”
Peyton quickly turned to give the boy a glance and then looked at Augustina. “His hair fits his name.”
“I mean, do you think he’s cute?” Augustina asked.
“Like a puppy?”
“Like a boy.”
Peyton grimaced. “No. I already told you, I don’t like boys.”
It was true. Peyton often said she didn’t think she was heterosexual. She wasn’t homosexual, either. Peyton thought of herself as a graphosexual. She could only be attracted to comic book characters and literary representations of men. Flesh and blood seemed to let her down.
As Augustina’s friend, Peyton could sense that this wasn’t what she wanted to hear. So she said, “Though he is kind of cute like a puppy.”
“Really?” Augustina was surprised.
“Yeah,” said Peyton, “His hair is fluffy and I suppose it would be fun to pet.”
Augustina said nothing, but she did look at Rusty with a more discerning eye.
Peyton added, “And…I suppose if he was older, Cajun, had red eyes, wore a trench coat and was two dimensional, he might look like Gambit. And then I could see the attraction.”
“Oh.” Augustina felt better. She said, “Okay.”
Then the bell rang and it was time for the first class of the day, and that was the day that everything at the Norman Vincent Peale School for the Positive-Minded would change forever.