Young Writers Society

I've been trying to do the post-NaNo hack-and-slash to cut out what I have started calling "NaNo fluff" in this story, but I'm in the nascent stages of developing my editing skills. I have the same concerns as always: whether or not the character's voice is consistent and unnecessary NaNo fluff that I left in.

---

“Anyway, I got to lab too late. Usually the news is more or less background noise, but…did you watch the news this morning?”

Nia shook her head. “I’ve started listening to music while I get ready. I’ve been going through a Puffy AmiYumi renaissance.”

Sienna was given an opportunity to think about why that sounded familiar; her name was called and the barista handed over her the breakfast and drink. She blew on the latte’s surface for a moment and took a long sip of it, letting herself enjoy the unusual jangle of flavors. “Puffy AmiYumi…why does that sound so familiar?”

“Teen Titans.”

Sienna tried and failed to make sense of that remark. “I don’t get it.”

“They sang the theme song!”

Oh!” Sienna’s eyes widened. “Those two Japanese ladies who look like they’re permanently teenagers and all of their songs sound like they just chugged six Red Bulls?”

“Oh, come on. They aren’t that hyper,” Nia insisted. “Especially for J-pop.”

“I did like ‘Call Me What You Like (If You Like Rock and Roll)’.”

“You would. That’s the least Puffy AmiYumi of all their songs.”

Sienna made a moue. “The rest of their stuff is all so…peppy.”

Nia shook her head. “Sienna Kaye Meducci, I swear…do you like anything happy?”

“I do, sometimes!” Sienna protested. “I like you!”

Nia burst out laughing. “You realize this is why people think we’re dating.”

Sienna eyed the clock on the far wall of the café. “Right now, I don’t care. I care way more about being late for the second thing today, and this time it’s class. With Rabinowitz.” She had been eating her muffin and bacon during their conversation; now she crammed her remaining bacon into her mouth.

“Neuropharm?”

“Yeah.” Sienna shouldered her backpack. “Good thing I have my bike or I’d be screwed.”

“I had that class last year,” said Nia as they headed out of the café. “Rabinowitz is a stickler for time, and takes a lot of his test questions from the captions of the figures in the textbook.”

Sienna groaned as she tossed her paper plate into a nearby trashcan. “Right. Because that’s a great way to teach us.”

“I still remember a lot from that class. Anyway, you aren’t going into neuropharm, you’re going into neuropsych. And you’ve autodidact-ed a ton of neuropharm with that pet project of yours.”

“I can’t believe you just turned ‘autodidact’ into a verb, but aside from that questionable bit of grammar, you’re right.” Sienna shivered as she slid the latte into one of the backpack’s side pockets.

“You cold, my wahine?”

“Yeah…I was a loser this morning and forgot my jacket. And what would your family think if they heard you call me that? I’m not Hawai’ian, just Mediterranean as hell. Ischia. Very different island from Kauai.”

“They named my sisters Chenguan and Puanani and then gave up for my name, remember? I think they’ve stopped caring.”

Sienna was still kneeling beside her bike. Nia laid the fingertips of both hands on her friend's head and closed her eyes, focusing intently. A few seconds later, pleasant warmth spread throughout Sienna’s body. “Ahhh. Thanks, Nia.”

“He mea iki. Montana is cold. I don’t know how you mainlanders stand it.” Nia zipped up her bright pink ski jacket.

“I wonder,” Sienna mused aloud as she strapped on her helmet and mounted her bike, “if you actually increase my core temperature or just change my thermoreception.”

“Maybe you should do your special studies on that,” Nia joked.

Sienna paused. “That. Would be. Amazing. But a result from a single subject would be useless, so we’d have to get a bunch of other students to participate…and then we’d have to get the IRB involved, and I’m pretty sure the university would collectively shit itself if I asked to let you Psych students.”

“It was a joke!”

“It was a joke with a really good idea embedded in it.”

“If it weren’t unethical. Or at least, unethical according to a lot of people.” Nia wrinkled her nose.

Another tardy for neuropharm would mean a reduction in Sienna’s grade, but she wasn’t about to cycle off after accidentally hurting her friend’s feelings. “I didn’t mean to say I thought it was unethical,” she blurted out. “I think it would be totally fine as long as we get consent. But I think Emberdale might, um, disagree.”

Nia raised her eyebrows. “Sienna, I wasn’t talking about you. You just let me warm you up. Me ke aloha pumehana.”

Sienna could have kicked herself, but she laughed; ordinarily, only romantic partners uttered the Hawai’ian phrase Nia had just used. But as its literal translation was “with the warmth of my love”, Nia enjoyed employing that phrase with Sienna half the times she made her friend feel warm.

“Okay. Sorry. Thanks. I, um. Yeah, I have to go.” Sienna mentally cursed her clumsy tongue. “Don’t want to be late for Rabinowitz’s class.”

Nia laughed. Had it been anyone but Nia, Sienna would have thought she was being mocking. “Aloha ‘oe.”

“Aloha ‘oe,” echoed Sienna, resisting the urge to sing the words to the tune she had known from Lilo and Stitch for years before meeting Nia. She cycled off at full speed, hoping the liquid level in her latte was low enough that it wouldn’t splash everywhere.

She made it to class barely on time, where she pretended to gaze attentively at the PowerPoint on her laptop screen while thoroughly scrubbing her coffee-stained backpack with a portable detergent pen. She was recording the lecture using an app on her phone anyway; she would listen to it later, having figured out in her first year that focusing on a lecture for 90 minutes solid before 11 AM was simply not going to happen. She had concerns about dealing with morning classes in graduate school, but if she tried to get a job working in Psych neurochemistry with only a bachelor’s, she would have slim pickings; she might end up working for a Psychphobe who treated people like Nia as a plague on society.

Or a Psychphobe who would engage in Psych-bashing, like the assholes on the news this morning. The thought pulled Sienna’s focus back to the Psych Squad. Who the hell were they? She couldn’t help but wonder how they had found each other. Had they been part of a Psych support group? Or had they met online? Could one go on Craigslist and put up an ad for powerful Psychs in order to form a vigilante squad that protected other Psychs from violent bigots? Or had they met on some kind of forum? She knew that those sites existed—Nia belonged to a few of them—but she had never visited one herself. She wasn’t a Psych; it felt like spying.

For the rest of the lecture, Sienna mused on the Psych Squad. It had been beyond refreshing to see someone standing up for Psychs, especially after a few Psych stories on the news that had made her rage aloud until Wendy had snapped at her to shut up. About a month ago, she had missed lab to watch an SWBC report detailing several cases of “accidental” head injury that had occurred when police arrested people they knew to be Psychs. There had been another story, this one close to the beginning of the school year, about Psychphobia from a legal standpoint; she recalled interviews with Psychs who had been petitioning for the hate crimes statute in Montana to cover crimes motivated by the fact that the victim had Psychic Ability Syndrome.

By the end of the class period, Sienna was thinking of how the Psych Squad’s outfits were much more practical than what the costuming departments for Watchmen and Kickass had dreamed up, and she startled when she noticed her classmates closing their laptops and packing their backpacks. She hastily followed, her mind still swimming with thoughts of the Psych Squad’s choice of their apparel.

Sienna ordinarily had to return to lab after neuropharm, but today she tapped out a quick email on her phone saying she wasn’t feeling well and sent it off to her lab mentor. There was no doubt in her mind that if she tried to do yet another one of her mentor’s doomed-to-fail experiments with this much on her mind, she would make mistakes and have to repeat the experiments anyway. Instead of wasting her time on that, she headed back to her dorm, engaged in the perennial struggle to connect to the school’s patchy wireless network, and tried to find more reports on the morning’s anti-Psych protest and the intervention of the Psych Squad.

In her quest to learn more, Sienna scoured the reports from multiple news stations that had obtained footage of the event. After a thorough perusal of the YouTube channels belonging to every news station she could think of, she had found about a dozen amateur videos of the Psych Squad.

“Really?” she muttered as she closed the browser. “SWBC got the best videos? All that for nothing.” She sat back in her chair and tilted her head to the side. “Well…maybe not nothing.” Her jaw set, she leaned forward and re-opened YouTube.

Twenty minutes later, Sienna opened a Microsoft Word document and typed out:

-no pro videos of Squad

-all videos taken from far away

-all stations cut video short at same time

          *all videos stop as Squad takes off

          *why???

Sienna had no answer for that “why”. Could it have been a journalistic decision? She debated whether or not to contact Leroy, the wannabe journalist from First Year Composition, seeing as he might perceive her question as romantic interest in him. She repressed a shudder of disgust at that thought, but eventually curiosity won out.