MRS HENDERSON'S PARTY GAME

4 MARCH, FRIDAY, CONTINUED

And then, as if realizing what happened, for just a moment, it was like the whole class just stopped. The students who had stood up, now just froze in place. The girls with their hands over their mouths stopped screaming, but their hands were still on their faces.

Only Terrance bumbled the few steps across the inside of the circle to look.

Fluffy was still splayed on the floor.

"Look. You killed him." Terrence turned to Henry, "Happy?"

And then someone screamed again.

EJ dropped down on his knees, "Oh Fluffy! Fluffy! How could you go and leave me behind?"

Fluffy wasn't dead. Either that or he died smiling.

Henry growl at me, "What the hell, Sam."

And then Mrs Henderson snapped out of her shock and admonished, "Oh my goodness! Henry!"

Yes. Muahahaha (Evil laughter). It was all Henry's fault.

Mrs Henderson threw her hands in the air and then clumsily tried to disentangle her chair's leg to move it.

Our good class watched our form teacher battle her chair politely from around our class circle. It took a full minute maybe, but she managed all on her own and got out of our circle to attend to the fallen Fluffy, "Oh my goodness, Alaric! Are you alright?"

Fluffy sat up from where he was playing dead, "Yes, but if pretty teacher kissed my booboo, I'd feel better."

"Like the booboo on your bumbum?" EJ asked cheekily. The redhead stood up and dusted off his knees now that Fluffy was no longer dead. Our classroom floor had left grey marks on his navy blue pants.

Marcus had a coughing fit over the booboo and bumbum talk, but he recovered enough to help put the chairs back in order, leaving EJ's chair on the side for everyone to return to the circle.

"They're just playing, Mrs Hen." I explained.

"What?" Mrs Henderson turned to me.

"Young male wolves like to play fight and clown around." Actually, I did too, but I've heard it being explained by the women in our pack, "Sometimes they do it when there are girls around to get their attention, sometimes they're just letting off steam. You don't have to mind it."

"Wha..." Marcus started coughing again, "We do not!"

"Yes, we do! We're just playing! Dun mind! Dun mind!" EJ bounced around waving off imaginary concerns.

"What the hell, Sam." Henry shook his head and accused, "Have you gone mad?"

Might I just point out that I wasn't the one who tipped Fluffy backward off his chair?

"We're just sleep-deprived, Scary Alpha." Fluffy got to his feet, "We had a dance party with the snow wolves last night. It lasted till dawn."

Yeah, we were sleep deprived. What was Henry's excuse?

"The snow wolves?" Henry was immediately piqued, "Like they came all the way over to your Packlands?"

When Henry put it like that, yeah, that was out of the ordinary. Snow wolves had holed up within the white stone walls of the Snow Moon Pack since the Great War eradicated half their population. Even though it was on the news that they were opening up to trade and new reforms had been announced with regard to the newly formed kingdom, nobody was expecting them to socialize, much less become party animals.

There were many theories behind this. Some believed that the Great War had depleted so much magic from the Blue Packlands that Snow Wolves who required magic in the air to grow and manifest their powers could no longer do so beyond the white stone walls of Snow Moon Town. Others believed the Snow Wolves were still licking their wounds from the ravages of the same Great War. Basically, the last we saw of Snow Wolf activity was during the Great War, so most of the theories blamed the Great War. Of course, there was that story about the ice alpha who lost his mate and created a forever winter world in that land.

When we had to discuss it one Lycan Study Group, we were asked to raise our hand for what we thought was the most likely reason. I put my hand up for the fact that the Snow Moon Pack was the only major wolf community in the Blue Packlands. Their territories were expansive but surrounded by human towns and populations. Even their extended territories still hosted human communities. Since everyone knew that wolves were superior to humans (and humans could not be trusted), it's not like they would be friends right? So the Snow Wolves lived like recluses because they just didn't have a lot of other equally strong packs to ally or hang out with around them.

This was years ago. I hadn't hung out with that many humans then, nor had I met Alpha Gunter. Now I would have raised my hand for the ice alpha story.

"You're kidding right?" Henry asked, "The snow wolves left their white walls to come to a dance party?"

"We danced all night!" EJ said. He pulled his chair back into the circle but faced it the wrong way around so he could straddle it.

"I definitely drank too much." Fluffy confessed, "so I don't really remember anything."

Fluffy clearly didn't remember that he was below the legal drinking age too.

Henry looked at me. I guess it did sound like a stretch... not Fluffy getting imbibed. I mean the Snow Wolves.

Snow Wolves were not known for frivolous things like dance parties. They did have rather grand balls a few times a year...they were very cultured wolves with a long history (and the Great Teacher as their Alpha). Furthermore, I heard going to the Blue Packlands was like time traveling back to when most of the roads were still traveled on horseback, carriages, and donkey carts. Like seriously. They didn't have running water or electricity, most of Snow Moon Pack's was built on an arcane technology that ran on magic (which I now suspected was directly imported from the Colored Mountains).

After the Colored Mountains, and the Warlock Lands, Snow Moon's capital was my destination of choice for adventuring. Of course, this was also BEFORE I met Alpha Gunter, or actually visited the Colored Mountain and the Warlock Lands. I've long concluded that magic was overrated. I'd rather have the magic of science, and the boring technology of running water, metered electricity, and piped gas.

The first wolves who left the Colored Mountains to come here probably came here to retire from the thousand and one crazies.

Terrence lumbered back to his seat, "I knew he was just playing."

"No you didn't." Troy said too loudly when Terrence sat down next to him, "But I did. Everybody knows wolves don't die so easy."

"Then why did you scream?" One of the random girls, the one always standing around Abigail asked.

"Yuh. Why didya scream?" Terrence asked, "You scream like a girl."

"I was just...just... I didn't scream." Troy lied, "That wasn't me."

"Yeah, right." The girl muttered.

Mrs Henderson cleared her throat, "I said that is enough. There would be no fighting. Play fighting or otherwise, or clowning, or dancing..."

Halfway through listing the new bans, Mrs Henderson gave up, "Everyone just sit down."

And that was that. The rest of the class returned to their seats around the circle. Even EJ. He closed the gap in the circle of chairs so no one could escape. He slotted his chair the wrong way round and straddled it using the back of the chair to rest his arms and chin.

Mrs Henderson narrowed her eyes at the redhead next to her but I guess she decided to pick her battles, "Alright. Now, we are ready for some fun."

I wasn't sure how that was possible given the list of bans she was just listing, but I understood. "Fun" was a very relative thing when you were in school.

We only ever had one class party when I was in middle school, just like this one, we all brought food to share. After we ate, we clowned around and skipped out of class. I had wanted to stay in class and check if there were leftovers, but Madison insisted to follow the guys out for "a walk." Eventually, we were all rounded up by the discipline master and a few other teachers and sent back to class. First and last class party. Our form teacher followed us up and made sure we didn't have any class celebrations for the rest of our middle school life.

My other school class parties were all the way back in elementary school. In those, we all brought food, our teachers would distribute everything equally on paper plates and at no one time were we allowed to leave our seats... Or talk audibly. If we whispered, it was okay because it was a party.

After we ate, our teacher would distribute a small goodie pack. End of party time.

Wow, looking back, my class parties were really sad things. But I was such a dumb pup, when Mum or anyone asked about it, I always said, "It was fun!"

I liked eating all the different and weird foods everyone brought. I clearly remembered my first brownie was at a class party. It was the best thing I had ever put into my mouth. It had marshmallows and chocolate chips melted on top. Like seriously... I remembered raising my hand for seconds, but the brownies were ALL GONE! T.T I learned an important life lesson that day - good food finished first.

And there was this one party when our teacher played this cartoon about dinosaurs for us. I don't remember anything about it, but it had to be good because I remembered going home and telling my Mum I wanted to watch it again... but then again, I also always said class parties were fun. Maybe it wasn't so much the show than the experience. Like we just sat there at our desks like a normal lesson, but we got little paper plates with assorted bites of food and juice packs AND a cartoon. Best day ever.

No wonder the adults back home always said I was a happy pup. I was just too easy.

Based on past experience, I naturally felt whatever happened next was PERFECTLY NORMAL when it happened. (Now that I'm writing this, I do think maybe my entire history of class parties might just have been PERFECTLY LAME. I don't know. Maybe I'll ask Savy or Lizzy and Ben, or Dean and Jessica about what kind of class parties New Leaf Academy teachers organized for them. Bet it would be cool. Everything at New Leaf was cool. No uniforms, no textbooks (that I had ever seen). 20 minutes from the Alpha House, 10 minutes if you drove. WHY....

Because I was the Alpha. Therefore, for reasons I had yet to grasp, my mad maverick dad decided to put me anywhere BUT the school he had founded.

Maybe he was using me to spy on the other schools.

If that's the case, I can report that other schools had lame parties.

But it was still fun - Mrs Henderson really upped the game, she actually planned a game for us to play. It was something she did at her counseling course last week and she thought it was a very affirming exercise. Okay, so it was more of a counseling training exercise than a party game, but we were at a class party so even before the game started, Mrs Henderson was already throwing the second most fun party I'd ever been to. (Dinosaur cartoon was still number one.)

"You know how educators are often told not to label a student?" Mrs Henderson began.

No. How would I know what educators were told?

"Today, we will be labeling each other!" Mrs Henderson beamed as she held out a sheet of label stickers. The rectangular white paper ones, like the kind of writing your name and sticking on the front of your shirt. Ooooh, Mrs Henderson was a rebel! Lol.

"BUT," Mrs Henderson proudly gave us the twist to the game, "We will only write good things on the label."

Everyone would get a sheet of paper and a marker. We were supposed to remain seated in our circle and write a label for any of our classmates. We should use the whole sheet of labels and we were only allowed to label each person once. On each label, we should write one thing about our classmates that we like or appreciate about them.

"For example," Mrs Henderson popped off the cap of her marker to write, "I'm going to write a label for EJ."

Mrs Henderson wrote, "Cheerful."

She showed all of us, "This is what I think of EJ."

I'm sure she had thought of many other things about EJ, I definitely would have thought of other words, but "cheerful" was positive and true too I guess.

And then she asked EJ, "May I stick this on you?"

EJ grinned, "Sure pretty teacher."

And then he leaned closer and pulled his tie down so that his collar opened up, "Where would you like to stick it?"

Mrs Henderson slapped the sticker on his arm quickly and stood up, "There, like that. I'm going to pass out the labels and stickers now for all of you to do the same. Remember to ask for permission to stick on your label. Your friend has to accept the label you want to give them. We all have a choice on which labels we want to keep, and which we should peel off and throw away."

The moment I got the sheet of labels, I counted 20 labels. This would've been enough to label all the boys in the class "idiot." Hahahaha

But no. We were only allowed to write positive things so I had to get to work on them in earnest. Let's see...

Jasmine was "Friendly." No, wait. I changed my mind. I mean, yes, Jasmine was friendly, but she was a lot more than that too. Unfortunately, I already wrote "Friend" on the label and didn't want to cancel it. Hmmm... I wrote above it, "Good" because she was a good friend to me. Sigh... I s***ed at this.

It only got harder after that. For Krystal I thought "Fashionable?" Without the question mark at the end. Zara... was "hamster lover" but that was more neutral than positive. It got even harder when I got to Leia. I ended up writing "Good Friend" for all the cool girls because they had all been good friends to me in their own ways. That's 4 labels down and... 16 more to go... T.T

"I'll give you five more minutes to finish up before I let you go around exchanging your labels." Mrs Henderson announced.

WTH? These things didn't write themselves, Mrs Hen! And 10 minutes was just too short - were we supposed to write a label every half a minute? Gah! I decided to just write the easy ones after that.

Janice was "nice."

Pearl had "nice smile."

Marcus had "helpful" because "good initiative" was too long to write.

I know, I know... I was making a hash out of it all. My one chance to stick a label on my friends and I couldn't for the life of me think up anything amazing.

Henry's had "BOSSY" in full caps because I couldn't think of anything else.

"I mean this in the most positive way." I explained to Henry and stuck it on his arm during the exchange.

"Ditto." He smirked and stuck one back on me. He didn't even show me what it was before slapping it on my arm.

"Monster?" I tilted my head to read off my arm.

Awww.... 🙂