so, i wrote another story. this one will have multiple chapters (but no more than ten, from what i've written so far). hope you enjoy! author's note at the end!

Mr. Brunner is in the middle of a riveting game of digital solitaire when Annabeth Chase slams open his office door and drops a pile of neon pink flyers onto his keyboard.

"Four words," she says, leaning against the torn upholstery of his blue suede armchair, trying to steady her heavy breathing. "Battle of the bands."

Mr. Brunner blinks, adjusting his glasses. "I'm sorry?"

So, Annabeth Chase wasn't exactly sure at what point she had gone wrong enough to rope herself into the mess that was the Student Council fundraising committee.

(Okay, yes she did.

"You're the leader of the fundraising committee," Reyna said.

"Okay," Annabeth replied because Reyna Avila Ramirez Arellano was one scary ass bitch.)

But hindsight was twenty-twenty because if there hadn't been blood, sweat and tears shed this past month and half of coordinating a bunch of underclassmen and a dozen incompetent teachers, she doesn't know what exactly had been secreting from the pores that's made her break out so much. It was like herding sheep, except the sheep were either 14 or 45 and shared one brain cell. Annabeth's hair had started falling out at one point – if you looked close enough, you could see a bald spot at the top of her head.

She grasps the back of the chair so hard her knuckles turn white, and she tries not to succumb to her nerves as she says, "The world is in a steep decline towards an irreversible fate, and I want to do something to stop it."

Mr. Brunner shifts in his wheelchair, folding his hands over his stomach, furrowing his unruly eyebrows, his graying brown hair brushing against his cheeks. With the heavy, beige, paisley curtains blocking out all-natural sunlight, the harsh ceiling lights wash Brunner out and make him look more ghostly and weary than he already did – seeing as he barely filled out the seat of his wheelchair. This makes Annabeth hesitate, and she stands back straight, resuming a more polite tone.

"And fundraisers never work because, seriously, what high schooler would be willing to sell 20 buckets of popcorn for one of those sticky slappy hand things?"

Okay, that wasn't very polite. But he squints his eyes in thought, so she forges ahead.

"Well, I've come up with a solution." She displays her hands in front of her like she's underlining her words. "Battle of the Bands."

"Miss Chase, I'm not–"

"I already know what you're going to say," she interrupts, snatching a flyer from the top of her pile of paper flapping in the wind of the ceiling fan. "It's a really random and radical idea, but I've already come up with the plan and everything. Months, Mr. Brunner, sir, months of planning and setting times and dates and costs and shed tears because my God, Mr. Apollo doesn't know the first thing about sponsorships, but the whole thing is sorted and I just need your approval."

She holds the paper under his nose, which he takes, and she swings around the chair to take a seat. "I have a PowerPoint of everything you'd need to know. Apollo and Artemis gave the go-ahead for the music department to fund the production. I booked City Hall. Piper McLean's mother can provide all the instruments. I made flyers, Brunner, and it'd be a shame to have killed so many trees for no reason. That goes against the whole stance I'm taking, so you know how important this is."

She swallows and takes a deep breath, wringing her fingers. Mr. Brunner slides his glasses up his nose, holding the flyer in front of him. She chews her bottom lip – the neon pink wasn't her first choice, but it was the only paper in abundance left in the copy room. It would grab the students' attention violently, much like how violently her breath left her throat as she awaited Brunner's response. She wrings her fingers again, this time cracking several of them. She winces.

"I know this is abrupt and a mess," Annabeth says, teetering, "but this the most brilliant idea I've had in a long time, and we need to handle our world's crisis, and as senior class vice president, I feel as if it's my duty to do so. If the people with actual power won't do anything, I want to take it into my own hands."

So, maybe she'd been reading too many books on women's suffrage. But she could've definitely had worse influences.

Mr. Brunner reaches up to adjust his tie and clears his throat – whether or not that was a good sign, she didn't know. "It seems like you got everything figured out."

"Just the duty I took on when I was sworn in, sir," she says, her voice cracking, her cheeks reddening. Behind her, she could hear the voices of a few hall monitors that had chased her down the hall, but she knew they couldn't touch her in the principal's office. She had immunity here – she was on the honor roll, after all.

"You just have to find the bands, correct?"

"Correct. I don't think that will be a problem. Plenty of local bands would be willing to compete."

Brunner places the sheet of paper on his desk with a small smile before he holds out a hand to her. "Then I think we have a deal, Miss Chase."

She indulges herself with a smirk when the hall monitors glare at her on her way out. The minute she turns the corner, she does a dorky celebration dance that consists of too many fist pumps and hip gyrations.

Then she heads off to class, smoothing down the skirt of her uniform like the lady she is.

Later that night, she and Thalia are lounging in Piper's room, discussing the plan. Sleepovers at Piper's house was a tradition they held every Friday.

"I'm sorry," Piper says, shifting so she's facing the two girls on the bed and giving the flyer another once over. She raises one dark and freshly threaded eyebrow. "You promised a celebrity appearance?"

Annabeth shrugs, cleaning the dirt from under her nails. "I mean, yeah. How else would I get people to compete, let alone pay for a ticket?"

"But a celebrity judge? How are you gonna pull that off?"

"What if I told you I already have?"

Thalia, who's haphazardly flipping through an issue of Seventeen Magazine, clicks her tongue and hums in her version of touché. Annabeth had asked where she got the magazine, and Thalia said from the Corner Store. Annabeth took one glance at Jennifer Aniston's sultry gaze on the front cover and refrained from asking any further questions.

"Then I'd say I will never doubt my best friend ever again." Piper's canine teeth stick out of her mouth as she smiles.

Annabeth grins and rolls onto her stomach, and Thalia shifts a little. "Listen," Annabeth says, splaying her hands in front of her. "I'm 90% sure I can do it."

"That's a ten percent margin of error. Brunner thinks you've got it on lock, Beth. Tell me I'm not crazy, Thals."

Thalia doesn't glance up from her magazine flipping. The next title reads "Is He the One? Find Your Perfect Guy Using Our Foolproof Quiz!" Annabeth doesn't understand how that would even work; magazine quizzes were full of crap the editors throw on a few pages to get sales from teenage girls and forty-year-old women who wish they were still teenage girls. And maybe it was the pessimist in her, but there was no quiz in the world accurate enough to determine your perfect guy.

And she may have been a little upset because wishing for Brad Pitt's character in Interview with a Vampire wasn't exactly realistic.

"Thalia," Piper whines. She tosses one of the throw pillows in her direction. "Answer me."

The pillow lands with a thump at Thalia's side, and she finally puts down the magazine, rolling her eyes. "The only thing I know for sure is that I'm too gay for this type of literature." She rolls onto her stomach and examines her freshly painted black nails. "But Piper's right. Are you sure about this?"

"I am," Annabeth says, puffing her chest. "90% is my realistic chance, but Brunner wouldn't have agreed with that ten percent uncertainty."

"So you're lying?"

"Fudging the truth. All good businesswomen have to do it every so often."

After a moment, Piper sighs, stands, and goes to her backpack resting in Annabeth's doorway. She pulls out a fuzzy purple notebook and a collection of her rainbow gel pens before crashing into the bed beside Annabeth.

"How much do you wanna bet it has at least one list of everyone she's ever been with?" Thalia stage whispers in Annabeth's direction. She has to swallow the giggle bubbling up in her throat when Piper sends a pointed glare at the two.

"First of all," Piper says, opening the notebook, "I'm still, like, a half virgin. And second of all, this isn't that type of notebook. It's… a planner, more or less."

Annabeth can't help her curiosity. Annabeth knew about planners; she had more planners than she could count on two hands; organization (or, really, the lack thereof) was her thing. But she wouldn't exactly call the little frilly thing between Piper's manicured fingers a planner. A diary, sure. Annabeth knew diaries, and that wasn't too far off in terms of ones you'd find in the kids' section of a dollar store.

But Piper McLean didn't write her feelings out so much as she expressed them loudly as soon as they hit her.

"A planner?" Thalia says, arching one thin black brow. The piercing through the middle was still freshly red from when she got it done the day before. "For what, may I ask?"

"Well, out of everyone in this room," she gestures with her pen. "I'm the one with like, connections." Piper's dad was an actor, and while she didn't bring it up often, it would never go unknown. "So, you need me."

"I'm assuming you're on board?" Annabeth asks, scribbling a title onto the page. Piper nods her head, and Annabeth's stomach fills with joy she hadn't felt in a while.

"Yeah. And with my help, you can decrease the margin of error to almost zero percent."

"I really do have the greatest two best friends in the world."

Piper shrugs her narrow shoulders. "You do, huh? Now, who did you have in mind?"

The next day – Friday – Annabeth recruits a few kids to staple flyers on any wall space available, and by the end of it, the halls are covered in as much pink as her uterine lining before her menstrual cycle.

Which… was gross but weirdly true.

Buzz flutters about the school like a swarm of bees at a baseball game, every time she passes a student with a slip of pink in their hands, she feels as warm as honey on a buttered biscuit, and she's been weirdly into similes lately so she made it a point to incorporate as many as she could in everyday conversation.

Flyers are stuck on teacher's whiteboards, in the bathrooms, on the stair rails, plastered on lockers, and Annabeth even commissions a few freshmen in the art club to paint a poster that'd hang over the entrance of the school (they nearly spelled "Battle" wrong, and she nearly had an aneurysm). Goode High drowns in her bright hue. She'd even convinced one of the assistant principals to let her make an announcement about the fundraiser every day for the next two weeks in exchange for her promise to stay and tutor some Algebra students after school.

Then, after school, she sends a few (dozen) more home with her little worker bees to put over their corners of the city. Word needed to spread, and it needed to spread like wildfire. If this went well, it could save their dying turtles, stop the fish from floating up in the Hudson, and end the build-up of trash in their corner of the Atlantic Ocean. If she could pull this off, it would be her legacy, her final shout into the void, the final hurrah before she hauled ass off to California knowing she tried to do something.

Plus, she could rub it in Reyna's face when things went off without a hitch.

When she gets home, she even shoves a flyer under a refrigerator magnet her dad got in Vegas.

She would paint this town pink if it killed her.

so uh, yeah! hope you liked chapter one. i already have chapters 2 and 3 written, so i'll update again later this week, depending on yall's response. also, i know this was super random! this was originally going to be a one-shot, but i wanted to post it so badly, so it's gonna be another multi-chap. those kinds of stories aren't my strong suit, so bear with me!

also, yes: the title is from "we don't believe what's on tv" by twenty-one pilots. i thought it fit. and yes again: this is a 90s fic. don't know why, but i just liked the vibe, i guess.

until next time my lovely readers! ~ Aja

p.s. thanks so much for the support! i've been getting a lot of interaction lately, and i appreciate it all! i read all of your reviews and adore each and every one of them. you guys are the reason i write :)