Week 7 Story: What Goes Around

Illustration of a dance by Margaret Flatley. Source: Link.

As the first half of junior year came to a close at Central High School, the day of the Sadie Hawkins dance grew closer and closer and students were becoming concerned with finding a date. Two students, Katie and Piper, were among those who did not have a date yet and they both had their sights on one person: Brian Vance.
Now Piper was known by her peers as the sweet, easy-going girl who got along with almost everybody, but Katie was a vengeful, bitter girl who would do anything to get her way. As both girls though of ways to ask Brian to the dance, Katie called upon her younger friends to make sure nobody else was planning on asking him. 
In compliance with her wishes, Katie's friends reached out and talked to people in their classes to find out who already had dates and who girls without dates were planning on asking. Eventually they confronted Piper and asked who she was planning on asking, so not thinking much of the question she told them about her plans to ask Brian. Upon hearing this, the girls immediately let Katie know and they devised a plan to prevent Piper from being able to ask Brian to the dance.
One week before the day of the dance, Katie and Piper prepared their signs to ask Brian and planned on doing it after school, so they both brought the signs rolled up with them and kept them in the school's gym where Brian would be. Since Katie knew about Piper's plan, she pretended to use the bathroom during class and snuck into the gym to destroy Piper's sign. In order to prevent being caught, she quickly tore up the sign and then returned to class feeling accomplished.
Once the end of the day arrived, Piper and Katie both walked to the gym to get their signs and asked Brian to the dance, but there was only one sign there with a pile of shreds sitting next to it. Katie smirked when she saw Piper's look of confusion and condescendingly grabbed the sign still intact, but when she unrolled it she did not recognize the sign. She had torn up her own sign and left Piper's unharmed!
Piper kindly asked Katie for her sign back and happily strolled over to Brian to ask him to the dance, and he said yes! Katie left the gym embarrassed and in tears and Piper stayed with Brian to talk about what they would wear to the dance.

Author's note: This retelling was inspired by "The Jealous Wife", a story in Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort by Richard Edward Dennett which describes two wives who bear children to the same man. The younger wife's child is much more intelligent than the older wife's child, so she gets jealous and decides to kill the child, but the next morning she finds that she killed her own child and is put to death for it. I decided to put a lighter twist on it where two girls are planning on asking the same boy to a dance, so when the mean girl tries to sabotage the other's sign, she destroys her own and is embarrassed in front of the boy she wanted to ask.