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Chapter 9

“Gem, you’re crazy amazing! Why in the name of delicious Mexican food can you draw and be artsy so well?”
“Marcie, why do you always refer to Mexican food?” Gem shook with laughter as her best friend, Marcie Grey, came up beside her holding a somewhat misshapen pot.
“I’m Mexican,” Marcie shrugged, tossing her glossy black hair. “A good-looking, completely bias Mexican!”
“Stop, stop, you’re making me mess up!” Gem choked, still shaking as she laughed again. When she finally stopped, she picked up her paintbrush once more and dipped it into a blue-green paint before running the brush over her own, carefully crafted pot.
“No, you stop it. Stop being so artsy,” Marcie ordered cheerfully, sitting down beside her best friend. “I know, I know, you’ll say that we’re all born for something good! But no. Not Marcie Grey. And you know it. I trip over everything, I mess a lot of things up, and I do, in fact, have a tendency to break things.” As Marcie finished her lecture with a twirl of her brush, the brush flew out of her grip and landed in the bowl of water, soaking the newspaper laid out on their art table.
“Exhibit A!” Marcie announced grandly, sweeping her arm through the air above the table to show the ironic proof.
“Wooow. Clumsy much?”
Gem and Marcie turned to see Veronica Peri, a snobby popular girl, standing beside their table with a petite yellow pot.
“You two are going to be in so much trouble,” she drawled. “But anyway, your pots look okay!” Although the girls could already tell Veronica was just mocking them, the look in her eyes was cold enough to freeze ice.
Gem stopped her painting and met Veronica’s gaze.
“Why don’t you just take your poorly crafted, blandly painted pot and throw it out the window?” she asked, her temper firing up. “Oh, and maybe you should go out the window, too.”
Veronica’s jaw dropped in disgust at first, but then she smirked and flounced away, mouthing something over her shoulder.
“I’m just going to assume what she just mouthed was “snitch”, instead of that word that rhymes with it,” Marcie told Gem in a still cheery manner. “Although I doubt Veronica reads Harry Potter.”
Picking up her brush again, Gem added more blue-green pain to the mosaic pattern on her pot. Every color possible that she could have blended together was on the pot, twisting into swirls all around the clay. Marcie, seemingly unscathed by the previous encounter with Veronica, smiled as she brushed a rainbow of colors onto her pot.
“Why are you so awesome?” Gem asked Marcie, grinning. “It takes so much to upset you!”
“I know. But you know what?”
“What?”
“It’s all because I’m-”
“Right. Mexican.”