Quad Squad

  Challenges

  Andrea said, “Look at this, this is so stupid, oh my God, we have to do this.”

  She showed Maya and Rachel her phone as she unlocked the front door. Andrea hurled her backpack in the direction of the couch, and Maya tossed hers in the same direction as they came in. Rachel set hers down, not wanting to harm the textbooks inside, then felt like a loser for worrying about it and rushed over to look at Andrea’s phone as a way of preventing the others from noticing.

  Online challenges were the thing now for their favorite YouTubers and also just cool people. Stuff like the condom challenge, the not my arms challenge, or the dumbass running man challenge.

  Rachel and Maya had ended up at Andrea’s house after school in one of those talk-walk-bike fests that had led them from school to her house without a clear plan or even any discussion of any plan needing to be formulated.

  Rachel was thinking about Physics B, which was next semester. She was ditching a pretest at the Academy right now, which was supposed to help her “be ready.” She had a feeling it probably wouldn’t, and a fear that it would. The worry about this led her to pick with her tongue at her braces in a way that made other people looking at her wonder if she was chewing gum.

  Maya said, “If it’s stupid, why would I want to do it?”

  Rachel agreed, but said, “I want to try it,” because she worried that she had a reputation for putting herself above others, thinking she was smarter, or better somehow, and this was an opportunity to show that she wasn’t above doing whatever the others did.

  She filled the spoon with cinnamon.

  “I’ll video you,” Andrea said, with growing enthusiasm. “Here, hold on.” She grabbed her phone to pull up the camera, but in the instant before she tapped the app, she noticed that she had a notification. It was from Malik. He had commented on her--

  “Do I start?” Rachel said.

  “Hold on,” Andrea said, thumbing over to her snapchat. “Maya, you have to hold it for her.”

  “Why? Can’t she hold her own spoon?”

  “No,” Andrea said. “It’s part of the thing. Okay, go.”

  Maya frowned briefly, then said, “Your funeral,” and set the spoonful of cinnamon in Rachel’s mouth. Rachel, not sure what was supposed to happen, started chewing, which even in the instant she was doing it made no sense to her.

  She gagged briefly, then shot out an explosion of cinnamon into the air, gasping for breath, eyes tearing badly. Andrea tried to dodge, but some of the cinnamon landed on her and on Maya.

  “Oh, my God!” Andrea shrieked. “You freak!”

  Maya was laughing so hard she was bent at the waist, shaking. Rachel raced over to the sink and rinsed her mouth out, still gagging a bit, then raced back over to Andrea’s phone, saying “Show me!”

  “Hold ... on!” Maya said, still trying to stop laughing.

  Andrea said, “You got cinnamon shit all over my Brandy shirt, bitch!”

  “She was like …” Maya said, and did an impression of Rachel, bug-eyed, mouth puffed out.

  “I didn’t do -- here, let’s see it!” Rachel said.

  They huddled around as Andrea replayed it and this got them all laughing again, and then Andrea put the video in the slowed down filter which showed the exact moment when the geyser of cinnamon plumed out of Rachel’s mouth, her eyes wide with fear. All three girls were now laughing so hard that they could barely speak. Every few seconds they would almost recover, look back at the phone, and then lose it again.

  After several minutes of this, Andrea finally gasped herself to a standing position, then ran off to change her cinnamon-dusted shirt. The other two followed into her room, talking, but Rachel got a bit quieter as Andrea pulled her T-shirt into place, because there was just no denying that Andrea had gigantic boobs and she, Rachel, would never have just torn off her shirt for others to see what wasn’t there.

  Andrea put on some Drake, which Maya and Rachel pretended to enjoy as Andrea checked her phone.

  Malik had said, “Fine,” about her post, and this could either mean that everything was fine, or that she was fine, and there was a great deal of difference between the two, and she was thinking about bringing this up and asking the two other girls their opinion and what she should do next when she realized that they might be either jealous or give bad advice, or, worst of all, accuse her of racism because it was true that lately she had been more into black guys and she didn’t know if this was starting to become a Thing, or if it was just that Malik was cute and so was Michael B. Jordan, the actor guy, which could be a coincidence.

  But before she could bring the whole thing up, Maya pulled up some Rihanna and said, “I’m next,” as she filled a spoon with cinnamon.