Re: Shop until you drop? More like study until you break. on Library

Ava Fletcher

September 27, 2015 5:15 PM

Shop until you drop? More like study until you break. by Ava Fletcher

Ava’s head fell to the table heavily, clunking into the stacks of books she had barricaded herself in with, only jolting it upwards when she felt the prick of her pen on her forehead as which point she only lifted her head to move the offending object out of the way. Though things with her mother had her shaken up at the beginning of the year she had begun to pull herself together to the point where that stuff didn’t really bother her anymore. Certainly she knew that things could have been worse. Her mother hadn’t fallen back into drug addiction like Chloe’s had, she was just a non-present entity in Ava’s life just as she’d always been. There was really nothing for her to get worked up over, Ava reasoned, she had her grandfather and she knew he cared more about her than anyone.

Which, funnily enough, was why she was sitting in this library as that very moment, hating her life. She’d finished her homework what felt like ages ago but she’d still spent the majority of her Saturday studying for a test that she really didn’t think was going to have that much of an impact in her life anyway. On multiple occasions she had thought about just failing it, burying those prep books in the depths of her closet and then maybe even leaving them there when she went home for the summer. But the thought of her grandfather’s face when he saw her test results pushed her through it. Perhaps if she were a psychoanalyst she might realize that she wasn’t studying to please her grandfather (no sane person would put themselves through that much meaningless work purely based out of a desire to make someone else happy) and that it was actually some sort of self-punishment as though if she pushed herself that much harder her mom would come back, if she made high enough marks on her SATs maybe she would love her again.

But since Ava didn’t have the ability to psychoanalyze herself, she just sludged through her books, systematically finishing her Sonora homework in order of due date, reviewing her SAT vocabulary cards and math equations until her eyes nearly fell out of her head she was so tired. It was hard work, she was realizing, trying to fit six years of Muggle schooling into her extra free time was probably the hardest thing she’d ever done. As her sleep deprived brain attempted to make any sense of the “If x/3 = x², the value of x can be which of the following?” question that was sitting before her, she felt tears prickling at her eyes. She had no idea how x could be -1/3, 0, or 1/3 and didn’t even know how to begin checking to see if it was possible to have more than one answer.

Her hands reached up, initially to massage her aching head but she soon found herself pulling at her hair. “This just makes no sense,” she whimpered to herself, feeling utterly pathetic. She was beginning to feel like she should have gone up to her room to study hours ago. At least there if she cried it wouldn’t be in front of anyone, but she knew that wasn’t an option because the last time she had gone there to study she had fallen asleep, and nearly been late to class. When she’d arrived there at last, to her embarrassment Arnold had let her know that she had ink all over her face and when she’d excused herself to the bathroom she found that it was a backwards version of the very poorly written essay she had just turned in. She had thanked Arnold and offered him his pick of her art supplies to use for the day as a reward, just glad that it hadn’t been Chloe or Emery to see because she didn’t know what she would have done if they’d seen. Probably die of embarrassment, that’s what.

She closed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. She only had to get through another half hour of prep and then she could go to bed. She could already imagine the feel of her pillow against her face, the soft blanket tucked in around her chin and over her ears. Just thinking about it caused her tear ducts to prickle further and even though she squeezed her eyes shut tighter she felt three tiny droplets sneak out. And there it went, the dam broke.

OOC: Math problem pulled from the September 10, SAT Question of the Day.

Subthreads:

Re: Shop until you drop? More like study until you break. by Anonymous

I'd rather go shopping. by Julian Umland

10 Ava Fletcher Shop until you drop? More like study until you break. 258 Ava Fletcher 1 5

Anonymous

September 27, 2015 6:27 PM

Re: Shop until you drop? More like study until you break. by Anonymous

OOC: Oops forgot to say Arnold's author approved my use of him in this situation.

0 Anonymous Re: Shop until you drop? More like study until you break. 0 Anonymous 0 5

Julian Umland

October 09, 2015 12:20 PM

I'd rather go shopping. by Julian Umland

She had not pursued a RATS certification in either subject, but the Defense Against the Dark Arts and Care of Magical Creatures sections of the library were still places Julian knew nobody would find it strange to see her. If she wasn’t making rounds or checking in on an Assistant, she often needed to look things up in one or the other for Potions and Transfiguration papers, and if she wasn’t doing that, she was looking for her younger brother, who, though he had a well-established seat in the Transfiguration section, could often be found buried in the Creatures books and was in all the classes the school would let him take. Those were all legitimate reasons for her to be anywhere she wanted to be in the library, and as a seventh year and library monitor of many years’ standing, Julian doubted it would even occur to most people to go through the effort of justifying her presence in any section to themselves with all of those facts. She could probably look at any book in here without anyone presuming to question her.

She knew all of this, but she still hesitated before she walked into the stacks and hesitated again before she looked over the options and took down the book she thought was most likely to have what she needed in it. Once she had it, though, she opened it as quickly as possible, fumbling and nearly dropping it in her hurry to find what she was looking for and get it over with. By the time she found it, she was so flustered she could barely read, but isolated phrases in the short entry for "satori" stuck out.

Minor telepathic abilities.

Speaks thoughts out loud.

Deep secrets.

After that part, her hands began to shake too much for her to even make out phrases and she closed the book. She meant to put it back on the shelf, but she realized when she felt something hard pushing into her abdomen that she had hugged it to her when she wrapped her arms around herself instead.

Nothing remarkable. Just confirmation of one thing - all the secrets had been real. All of it had come from the minds of students and, she supposed, teachers.

On one level it made no sense to be upset. She had known this before now, after all. She had known it for months. In January Charlie had confessed his sins to her, and her own had been scrawled across a blackboard for all to see even before that. But…On some level, she guessed, she had still hoped that it wasn’t real, or that it was all just a guess, or something. But it wasn’t. They had gotten it all out of her head. It was more than just her fears which made her a traitor.

She felt the urgent need to claw all her skin off even though she knew it wouldn’t actually make her feel any cleaner, and a near-equal impulse to go burn the family’s collected works of Plato before Mom could use them to instill the idea that looking for Truth and Answers was a good thing too firmly in her little brothers’ heads, even though she knew it was probably too late for John, too. Truth, as the book in her hands had just helpfully demonstrated, wasn’t a good thing. Truth was messy and painful and everyone got hurt in its service. Oblivion was bliss. She should have never looked, never given in to the morbid need to Know. It was easier to wonder than to know….

She lost the train of her thought. Everyone knew it was real. All of it had been real. Someone had thought or done all of those things, and while some were no doubt relatively innocuous, hurtful only to the person who they belonged to, some of them were -

At least nobody would think of her. They were all far more interested in school romances and petty rivalries. All except John. She wished she could talk him out of that science club and into trusting her again. She wished she could….

Well, no matter. What she wished she could do didn’t matter. What she could and had to do was what mattered, and she had to get out of here, before one more thing went wrong and someone did take an interest in what she was doing and figured out what she had looked up and wondered why she had done that. The second-to-last thing she wanted to happen was for someone to think she was debating whether or not to confess to a fairly unpopular crime. She shoved the book back onto the shelf, strode in what she thought was the way out, and, with all her attention on trying not to cry right here, jumped at the mere sight of another human being.

It was Ava Fletcher, apparently in distress. Julian, her cheeks still flushed, walked toward her almost automatically. They weren’t precisely close, the last thing Ava had done which had really made a strong impression on her had made her seriously question the virtues of democracy, but they had been in the same groups for years and Julian was a Prefect and a Monitor. Besides, being nice to other people made her feel better about herself, which sounded just swell at the moment.

“Hey,” she said gently. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

16 Julian Umland I'd rather go shopping. 254 Julian Umland 0 5