"And then after freaking out at us for like fifteen minutes solid, she said if we can't get a grip and actually try to work together, she's going to fail us both on the project," Sweetie Belle groused, flipping her tail in frustration. "My grades aren't good enough to balance something like that out. I might actually fail the whole season if that happens." She sighed. "Anyway, we didn't really talk after that. DT just gave me a look and then left without saying anything. I dunno how I'm supposed to get her to help me with this stupid project if she won't even talk to me."

The three fillies glanced across the schoolyard to where Diamond Tiara was standing and talking with Silver Spoon. Even at this distance, Scootaloo knew she probably could have heard the conversation if not for the fact that the school day was minutes from starting, and everypony was starting to get restless and noisy, attempting to cram in as much aimless chatter and otherwise nonsensical cacophony as they could before they were forced into silence for the next several hours. The young stallions in particular were being especially rambunctious as the sudden rush of adolescent hormones left them energetic and agitated, leading to impromptu athletic challenges and ultimately pointless displays of strength and size. Despite repeated insistence that none of this interested them, many of the young mares--including, Scootaloo had noticed, Apple Bloom--occasionally cast curious glances in the direction of their showboating, surreptitiously eyeing the participants with ill-disguised interest.

On this occasion, Apple Bloom was not hiding her wandering interest very well. Her eyes paused only momentarily on the fillies across the yard before drifting back to watch Pipsqueak issue an open challenge to the stallions around him to a hoofrace. "I dunno, Sweetie. She wouldn't'a hooked you up with her if she didn' think you could do it, right?"

"Maybe she didn't think Tiara was going to be this bullheaded about it." Sweetie Belle waited for Apple Bloom to respond, but the earth pony's attention was long gone, wasted on watching Pipsqueak easily win a short sprint against Featherweight and Rumble. Sweetie Belle sighed theatrically and turned to Scootaloo. "What do you think?"

Scootaloo didn't respond immediately, her attention focused instead on trying to read Silver Spoon's lips from across the schoolyard. The silver filly was visibly upset, her lips taut and her brow furrowed as she muttered something at the ground at Diamond Tiara's hooves. The other pony was sitting primly nearby, disdainfully examining a hoof as she made a show of ignoring everything around her, including Silver Spoon.

"Scootaloo!" Sweetie Belle cried in exasperation, snapping the orange pegasus out of her puzzled musings.

"Huh, what?"

Sweetie Belle glared at her and huffed angrily. "Never mind."

Scootaloo ignored her melodramatic friend and nodded in Silver Spoon's direction. "Hey, what do you think they're talking about?"

"Who?" Apple Bloom said, her attention moderately more focused now that the stallions were all standing in small packs, talking and laughing loudly about inappropriate topics. She followed Scootaloo's gaze and said, "DT and Spoon? I dunno. Who cares, anyhow?"

"I care," Scootaloo grunted. "What if she's talking about me? What if she's telling DT all about my house and laughing about my parents and stuff?"

Apple Bloom shrugged. "Then she'd be doin' what she's always done, Scoot. It's not like she's suddenly turned mean now that she's got somethin' to tell DT about. She's been mean ferever."

"Yeah, but now she knows what she's saying is true." She frowned. "I just don't like the idea of DT knowing where I live and stuff, that's all."

"She's not a murderer," Sweetie Belle said, rolling her eyes.

"Not yet," Scootaloo retorted spitefully. Her friends just glanced at one another and shook their heads in unison.

"Anyway," Apple Bloom said, attempting to redirect the conversation, "how did that work out, by the way, havin' Silver Spoon come over to work on the project 'n' all?"

"Honestly?" Scootaloo shrugged. "It wasn't bad. At least, not as bad as I thought it was going to be."

"Really?"

The pegasus nodded. "Yeah. I mean, we did kinda get into it early on, just insults back and forth, but you know Mama Tavi told me to give her a chance, so I just said we should try and be, you know, civil to each other. She seemed real keen on that, actually." She shrugged again. "Anyway, after we set up a...I guess you could call it a truce, everything got a lot better. She was actually pretty easy to work with."

"Seriously?" Apple Bloom said, agog. "Silver Spoon?"

Scootaloo nodded. "I know, I was totally surprised, too. She's actually real quiet most of the time. Kinda nervous, not real confident..."

"The opposite of you," Sweetie Belle said, smirking.

"Yeah, I guess so. We actually got a lot done. Nothing directly related to our project, of course," she said dryly. "She's still dumb as a fence post. We had to go all the way back to bucking algebra, and I spent all day tutoring her on stuff she should've learned ages ago. I just hope I don't have to teach it all to her again next time," she muttered.

"I just hope she doesn't have to teach it all to me again next time," Silver Spoon said glumly, glancing over to where Scootaloo and her friends were standing in a tight knot.

Diamond Tiara shrugged disdainfully. "I still say you should play dumb and just make her do it all. You know she will, too, the stupid teacher's pet. Celestia forbid she ever get anything less than an 'A' on anything."

"That wouldn't be fair," Silver Spoon said quietly. "And it probably wouldn't work anyway. You remember what Miss Cheerilee said about grading individually."

"Oh, fine!" Diamond Tiara sighed theatrically. "Do what you want. See if I bother trying to help you any more."

Silver Spoon winced and looked at the ground at Diamond Tiara's hooves. "I'm sorry, Tiara, it's just...I actually want to try this time. I want to actually do well, you know?"

"Do what you want," Diamond Tiara repeated, flipping her mane over her shoulder with a hoof. "I personally don't see the point in trying to help any of those bitches with anything, especially the way they keep talking about you, but if your dignity is less important than your grades, that's your business." Her lazily wandering attention suddenly fixated on one of the stallions across the lawn. "Hey, do you think Rumble would ask me out if I told him to?"

"Probably," Silver Spoon murmured absently, looking down at her hooves and wondering what sort of things Scootaloo and her friends could be saying now that Diamond Tiara thought was worth ruining her tenuous grip on a passing grade. "Um...so what did Miss Cheerilee want after class yesterday?"

"Same thing she always wants. To yell at me." Diamond Tiara sneered. "Of course she just let that ditz off easy, even after I told her what she said about you."

"What did she say about me?" Silver Spoon asked.

"That you were my fillyfriend," Diamond Tiara said, disdain and incredulity dripping from every word. "Can you imagine? The way she and her friends get on, and she has the audacity to suggest we're gay?" She laughed sharply, her normally musical voice audibly spiteful.

Silver Spoon forced herself to chuckle through the faint mortification rising in her throat. "Yeah...ridiculous."

"Anyway, I didn't even bother talking to her after that. If Miss Cheerilee honestly thinks I'm going to waste my time with her for some stupid project, she's out of her mind. My grades are fine; I'll gladly take a zero just to put her in her place. I just have to find some way to convince Miss Cheerilee to give her one, too." She pondered this for a moment before shrugging nonchalantly and abandoning it. "So, do you want to come over tonight, or do you want me to come by?"

"Oh, I'm...not sure. I need to check with Scootaloo and see if she had any plans for our next meeting."

"Ugh, already?" Diamond Tiara stuck her tongue out. "How can you even think of spending two evenings in a row dealing with her? It's hard enough just sitting across the classroom from her, watching her drawing stupid little pictures in her notebook, rolling her eyes at you when you ask a question...you're braver than I am, that's for sure."

"Still," Silver Spoon said, her cheeks pinkening slightly at the comments, "we've got a pretty tough project, and we've got a lot to do. I think we might have to meet pretty often to pull it off."

"Why, what are you actually doing? All you said earlier was that it required a lot of math, and you had to ask her for help to catch up. Which," she added, "I still think was a mistake. You should've just asked me. It's not a good idea to let a bully think you actually want their help. It's only a matter of time before they take advantage of you."

"Maybe," Silver Spoon said, suddenly concerned, "but she seemed really eager to help."

"Of course she did. That's how they lure you in. Then they make like you're their friend, maybe stand up for you a few times to other bullies to make it seem legitimate, and then BAM!" She stomped on the ground with both forehooves. "You're trapped. You feel like you owe them something, and you stick around."

Silver Spoon contemplated this for a moment. Scootaloo hadn't really made it seem like she owed her anything...she hadn't even really acted like she wanted anything to do with her beyond finishing the project. Hadn't she even given her mother a hard time for offering to give Silver Spoon cello lessons? Still, it seemed odd that somepony who had spent their entire acquaintance antagonizing her would suddenly switch tack so completely. Maybe there was an ulterior motive after all. Silver Spoon resolved to keep her defenses up whenever she was dealing with Scootaloo, just in case.

"So, project." Diamond Tiara looked expectantly at her. "You were about to explain what you're doing."

"Oh...I, uh...can't."

"Can't."

Silver Spoon nodded. "Yeah, I promised I wouldn't say anything about it until we were done."

"Promised who? Miss Cheerilee?"

"No, Scootaloo. It was her project idea, and she asked me to keep it private until we finished, just in case we couldn't pull it off."

"Uh, why?" Diamond Tiara raised a skeptical eyebrow to match the supremely derisive tone in her voice.

"I think it's because it's really, really hard, and she doesn't want anypony making fun of her for trying in the first place if we fail."

The pink filly snorted. "Right. Gosh, it would be awful if somepony were to make fun of her for trying and failing at something, right Spoon?"

The intent of the comment was clear. Silver Spoon dreaded being called upon in class to work a problem on the board for precisely this reason. Miss Cheerilee didn't allow her students to simply claim they couldn't do something; she demanded that they try their best, so she could catch their mistakes and correct them on the fly. This method would probably have been more effective if Silver Spoon didn't always have to hear the barely contained giggles of some of her classmates--easily identified--every time she made such an attempt. Miss Cheerilee would always turn to the offenders and scold them into silence, but the damage was done, and now Silver Spoon didn't even have to hear them laugh to know they were all watching her, criticizing every stroke of the chalk. It was mental torture.

Silver Spoon pursed her lips, moderately annoyed that Diamond Tiara kept giving her reasons to be mad at Scootaloo. She had just started to trust her project partner, but everything Tiara was saying made a certain dark, unpleasant sense. Scootaloo was certainly smart enough to be manipulative like that, and she had made no secret that she despised Silver Spoon over the years. Why should that have changed just because they were project partners now? Suddenly Silver Spoon felt betrayed. She had allowed herself to be sucked in by Scootaloo's show of friendship, had even allowed herself to believe that she really cared, however little, about her success. She'd let her guard down--even cried in front of her! Fortunately, she realized, Diamond Tiara was always there, looking out for her. It helped to have a third party to read the signs, somepony who wasn't invested at all in the relationship, who could see things the way they really were.

A wave of resentment washed over her and she suddenly felt the need to strike back, however minutely. Sneering, she turned to Diamond Tiara again. "Well, it turns out Scootaloo has this notebook at her house, and in--"

She was suddenly interrupted by the peals of Cheerilee's school bell echoing across the yard, signalling the beginning of the day. Unable to hear herself over the cacophony, she gestured towards the schoolhouse and mouthed 'after class' to her compatriot, who nodded and followed the rest of the class inside.

"I know it's going to be difficult keeping up with the rest of your studies while you're all working on your projects, but I promise you it is imperative that you learn how to prioritize and plan in order to succeed." Shortly after giving the class a quick glance to verify who was present and absent, Miss Cheerilee dove into the day's lesson, nosing the math book on her desk open to the desired page with practiced precision. "To that end, I'm going to continue assigning homework and tests, and in fact will begin to slowly increase your workload, to better prepare you for higher learning opportunities, should you choose that route. If not, it will still benefit you to learn how to manage your time--AND how to know when you need to ask for help." She swept her gaze across the class, pausing almost imperceptibly on a select few students, Silver Spoon included.

The young mare looked down at the book already lying open on her desk and the arcane symbols therein. A sense of foreboding stole over her at the prospect of trying to comprehend their meanings at a swifter pace than she was already failing to. She glanced at Diamond Tiara, who nodded reassuringly back at her. Oddly, this did not improve her outlook like she was used to. Diamond Tiara's recent ennui and failure to successfully help her had left Silver Spoon with a gnawing doubt in the efficacy of her friend's assistance. After a moment's hesitation, she stole a guilty look at Scootaloo instead. The pegasus had her class book lying closed on her desk, another book propped open on top of it. As she turned the page, Silver Spoon recognized some of the contents from the books she'd seen on Scootaloo's desk at home. Apparently Scootaloo was already well-versed in the topic at hoof. Silver Spoon begrudgingly reflected that regardless of her aims and intentions, Scootaloo had managed to teach her in a few hours what she had failed to really grasp in several weeks of study at Diamond Tiara's hoof.

"Now, before we move forward, I'd like to review our previous lessons in trigonometry to make sure everypony remembers what we learned. From this point on, every topic will build upon the last, so it is crucial that you continue to study and review as we go along. Pipsqueak, what defines a right triangle?"

"Um..." Nervousness intensified the pinto stallion's mild cockney accent. "One of the angles equals 90 degrees?"

"Correct." Miss Cheerilee nodded. "Diamond Tiara, what is the longest leg of a right triangle called?"

"The hypotenuse," Diamond Tiara answered without looking up from carefully shaping her hoof with an emery board.

"Good. And what is the Ponythagorean theorem...Silver Spoon?"

Silver Spoon's blood froze as Miss Cheerilee smiled at her, waiting for an answer. The silver filly prepared to hem and haw for several seconds before admitting she didn't know, as she usually did, but suddenly she realized she didn't have to. The answer leapt unbidden to her tongue, and she heard herself saying, "A squared plus B squared equals C squared."

Miss Cheerilee's eyes lit up and she smiled broadly. "Excellent! And could you explain exactly what that means?"

To her astonishment, Silver Spoon realized she could. "That the sum of the squares of the two shorter legs of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse."

"Exactly right, Silver Spoon. Well spoken." She nodded approvingly at the young mare, who smiled faintly, heart racing as the adrenaline of being called on coursed through her veins, leaving her trembling slightly. Mercifully, Miss Cheerilee quickly moved on, turning now to Scootaloo. "Scootaloo, could you list the trigonometric functions we learned for me?"

Scootaloo smirked at her book, not lifting her eyes from the page. "Sine, cosine, tangent."

"Thank you, now--" Miss Cheerilee started, but Scootaloo was still listing answers, using words Silver Spoon had never heard before.

"--secant, cosecant, cotangent, arcsine, arccosine, arctan--"

"Yes, thank you Scootaloo," the teacher interrupted her firmly, narrowing her eyes at the younger mare. Scootaloo glanced up long enough to shrug impudently before returning to her book. Cheerilee sighed and continued. "Anyway, as Scootaloo was so kind enough to start with, the three trigonometric functions we learned yesterday are sine, cosine, and tangent. Today we'll continue working with those and start learning about the the unit circle and how they relate..."

The magenta mare continued speaking, turning to the board and starting to write on it. Buoyed by her success with the oral quiz, Silver Spoon focused intently on the teacher's words, carefully copying everything scrawled on the chalkboard into her notes. Less than an hour later, however, Silver Spoon was dismayed to discover she was utterly lost. Again. She had barely managed to keep up through the introduction of the so-called 'unit circle' (although why they were talking about circles again when they'd just started with triangles was beyond her), but now Miss Cheerilee was starting to explain things in terms of 'radians' instead of degrees, and introducing the concept of 'pie' and throwing all manner of vaguely impossible fractions at them. Frantically, Silver Spoon read through her notes again, trying to catch herself back up before the teacher lost her completely and she had to spend the rest of the class staring blankly at the front of the class, not understanding a word being said.

Suddenly, Miss Cheerilee looked straight at her and compounded the problem exponentially. "Silver Spoon, could you come up here and draw a unit circle for me, complete with common radian values?"

"Uh..." Silver Spoon grimaced, her face heating as she blushed in anticipatory shame. "No, probably not," she admitted.

The class tittered quietly. Cheerilee sighed and smiled lightly. "Could you come up and try, please?"

The blush deepened as Silver Spoon slowly stood up, heart racing again as panic tore at her. Frantically, she scanned the board and the notebooks around her for any clues to what she should do. She saw several circles drawn, all with odd fractions written at regular intervals. Committing the rough image to memory, she slowly trudged to the front of the classroom and took a piece of chalk in her mouth. Casting one last pleading glance at the teacher, who simply smiled and nodded reassuringly, she slowly drew a circle on the board. Then she drew a cross through it, and added six more lines through the middle at more or less the same locations as the ones she'd seen in the notebooks she'd scanned on her way up.

Once this was complete, though, she ran out of things to copy and ways to pretend she knew what she was doing. She stood silently in front of the class, staring blankly at the circle and struggling to ignore the piercing stares of her classmates while she cast about for what to do next, silently begging Miss Cheerilee to say something--anything--to put her out of her misery.

Finally, mercifully, the magenta mare said, "Well, that's a good start. Could you label the angles with their radian equivalents for us?"

Silver Spoon sighed heavily, looking down at the floor in front of her. She shook her head and closed her eyes against the all-too-familiar burning of shameful tears starting to collect in them. Once again, she was trapped. Alone and on display, a laughingstock for the rest of the class to point and whisper at, to ridicule and compare themselves against, to go home and belittle to their parents, holding her up as an example of why their sub-par grades were acceptable, because no matter how bad they were doing, they couldn't possibly be doing as bad as Silver Spoon. She waited, a sickening tightness in her throat, for the inevitable barking laugh of the ringleader of the class, the one shameless filly for whom this came so easily it must have seemed impossible that somepony could find it difficult. That short, sharp laugh that had plagued her for years, and was surely only moments away now.

It didn't come. Not only that, but no one laughed. Silver Spoon's eyes slowly opened, blurred slightly by the tears that were still clinging to her eyelids, unshed but still there, waiting for a reason to break free. Cautiously, Silver Spoon peered over her shoulder, scanning the students behind her. They were are watching quietly, benignly. A few glanced across the room at Scootaloo, but the orange Pegasus was sitting silently in her chair, still reading her book. She hadn't made a sound, and even her own friends seemed surprised, as they both cast wide-eyed looks in her direction. She ignored them.

Before Silver Spoon could even begin to try to understand why Scootaloo was letting an opportunity to tear her down slip away, Miss Cheerilee spoke again. "Okay, it's not a problem. Scootaloo, could you please come up and finish the circle for us?"

Scootaloo grunted her assent, laying her book down on her desk. She plodded up to the front of the class, taking a piece of chalk in her mouth and swiftly, expertly putting all the relevant fractions in place. Silver Spoon marveled silently at the speed and effortlessness of Scootaloo's work. What must it be like, she wondered, to simply know what all those numbers and symbols meant? To not only understand where they went, but why, as well? Finally, Scootaloo finished writing and started back to her seat. Scanning the figure on the board, Silver Spoon noticed something that seemed slightly off. "Um...Miss Cheerilee, shouldn't that be...whatever that squiggly thing is--"

"Pi," Miss Cheerilee answered.

"Yeah. Shouldn't that--" she pointed at the top of the circle where Scootaloo had written 'π' "--be 'π/2'?"

Miss Cheerilee examined the circle with bemusement. "Why...yes, it should be. Good catch, Silver Spoon!" She beamed. "Could you fix it for me?"

Silver Spoon smiled faintly and did so before trotting back to her desk, her hooves oddly light and her heart, still racing, no longer heavy with shame and frustration.

"Guess she's not so perfect after all," Diamond Tiara stage whispered, eliciting titters from the other ponies in the class. She looked at Silver Spoon with a smirk, but the silver filly discovered that for once she was unamused by her friend's spiteful jab.

"It was just a mistake," she muttered, drawing a narrowed look of alarm from the pink pony beside her. Under Diamond Tiara's fierce glower, Silver Spoon's confidence evaporated in an instant, and she looked away, across the room, feigning indifference even as she felt the other filly's stare on the back of her head. As she turned away, her gaze fell on Scootaloo, now back in her seat and reading her textbook again. Though her face was lazily expressionless, her half-lidded violet eyes darted across the page with remarkable speed. The pegasus wasn't taking any notes, and didn't seem to reread anything. Every half-minute or so, she would turn the page and continue reading, a faint smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

As Silver Spoon watched her, Scootaloo seemed to sense she was being surveyed, and looked back at her with mild interest. Silver Spoon smiled sheepishly and mouthed the phrase, 'Thank you.' The pegasus shrugged nonchalantly and went back to her book. Silver Spoon turned back to the board where Miss Cheerilee was now adding more details to Scootaloo's labels. As she copied the additional information into her notebook, Silver Spoon mulled over Diamond Tiara's comment. She was right; it was highly unusual for Scootaloo to make an error of any variety, let alone one so obvious that Silver Spoon of all ponies could catch it. It was possible, she supposed, that Scootaloo simply wasn't paying attention and just wrote so quickly that she forgot to add the denominator to her label, but even this seemed unlikely. She had added the notes in counter-clockwise order, and the values increased as she went. This was part of why Silver Spoon had managed to catch the mistake in the first place. If Scootaloo had memorized the values--as she very clearly had, given the speed with which she'd written them--then why make such an error, unless...

An icy sensation suddenly sank into Silver Spoon's stomach, taking her confidence and pride with it. It was a setup. Scootaloo was too smart to make a mistake that rudimentary. She had written the label wrong on purpose. Moreover, she'd done it to the most obvious label, the one that would be the easiest to spot and correct. She had to have known somepony was going to call her out, but who else was going to be looking at her drawing when they all had copies in their texts and their notes already? Only Silver Spoon, standing at the front of the classroom with her, watching her write, was going to be assessing each value as she wrote it. Only she would notice immediately the mistake, and only she would already be at the front, able to speak without raising a hoof, already prepared to fix the error.

Silver Spoon felt sick. She was used to being coddled and pitied by Diamond Tiara because they'd been together long enough for Diamond Tiara to have cause to protect Silver Spoon's feelings. She had grown accustomed to it, and so could usually shrug it off, but to have Scootaloo do the same thing stung in a way she couldn't really explain. It was one thing to be offered a leg up by a friend, but to have a former--or at least temporarily former--enemy take mercy on her like this was simply insulting. Incensed, she glared at the self-satisfied pegasus, who was now pointedly ignoring her and sketching idly in her notebook. Silver Spoon spent the rest of the class fuming to herself, her notes and the teacher's lecture utterly forgotten.

"Who do you think you are?"

Scootaloo stopped short on her way to meet her friends in the yard as Silver Spoon stepped in front of her just outside the schoolhouse. The silver earth pony's face was contorted into an unmistakable expression of indignant fury. Puzzled, she said, "I...what? What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean!" Silver Spoon spat, nodding firmly towards the classroom behind her. "Who do you think you are, screwing up on purpose like that?"

Scootaloo's eyes widened. "The buck? Screwing up on purpose? Spoon, do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound right now?"

"Don't play coy with me, Scootaloo, I know you messed up so I could see it and fix it and look good in front of everypony. Then you could tell me about it later and then I'd owe you and you'd just hold it over me and use it as an excuse to--"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Scootaloo interrupted her with a raised hoof and a barking laugh. "You seriously think I'd do that for you? Silver Spoon, I couldn't care less how you look in front of everypony else. Hell, I don't even care how I look, and you think I'm going to risk writing something wrong on the board that my friends might copy down and then get wrong later?" She shook her head and smirked. "That's pretty narcissistic, Spoon."

"But..." Silver Spoon faltered. "But that was such an easy thing to do right...you wrote the same thing in two places on the circle."

Scootaloo scoffed. "If it's so easy, why didn't you just do it yourself in the first place?"

Silver Spoon looked away, her face suddenly confused and upset. "I didn't...I wasn't sure...but you went so fast, I though for sure you--"

"That's just it. I was going too fast." She sneered. "That happens when you're being forced to relearn stuff this rudimentary while the rest of the class is catching up. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm just not that invested in your feelings."

There was a long silence during which Silver Spoon's eyes darted from the ground to Scootaloo's face, scanned it for a moment, and then fell again as she stepped back, her head hanging. "I'm sorry, Scootaloo. I guess I was just...surprised, that's all. You don't usually make mistakes like that, and I thought...I'm sorry," she repeated, turning away and trudging across the schoolyard.

For a moment, Scootaloo contemplated stopping her and taking back everything she'd just said, admitting she'd mislabeled the circle on purpose, even waiting and making certain that she'd written the incorrect value larger and darker than the others just so it would catch her eye. She wanted to admit she had warned Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom off of snickering at Silver Spoon's failure at drawing the circle, and had intentionally caught Miss Cheerilee's eye so she would be called on to fill it in. She had hoped Silver Spoon wouldn't cotton on, mostly because it was the sort of charity Scootaloo wasn't particularly interested in being noted for, but when she'd caught Scootaloo's eye and mouthed her thanks, the pegasus had sort of assumed she'd been caught but that Silver Spoon was grateful.

Now, though, being accosted in the yard and accused of doing it for her own personal gain had alarmed her enough that she'd fallen back on her old standby of drudging up whatever vicious insult she thought would deflect the attack. It had been completely unintentional, a purely reflexive response that she had regretted almost instantly. But there were other ponies around, some potentially within earshot, and although she was fine with being cordial--even friendly--in the safe confines of her house, she was a long way from being comfortable letting the other students think she had surrendered in the war she and her friends had been waging against Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara since the five of them had met at Tiara's Cuteceañera years ago. Of course even thinking about it in those terms made Scootaloo wince shamefully at her own spitefulness. Still, despite the admitted petty nature of the conflict, it was a deep-seated and very real contest, and Scootaloo hated losing.

But as she took off across the yard towards her friends, she couldn't ignore the pang of guilt settling into her midsection as the hunched, defeated form of Silver Spoon slowly shrank away into the distance.