Girl talk (tag Scarlett and Diana) on Pecari Commons

Joella Curtis

May 04, 2016 2:45 PM

Girl talk (tag Scarlett and Diana) by Joella Curtis

In some respects it was a shame when it was time to leave the hall after the Opening Feast as Joella had been having such fun chatting with Gia and eating more than her fill. She made her up to the fifth years girls’ dormitory, only slightly wishing she hadn’t stuffed her face quite so much (thank God she was able to eat whatever she liked and never put it on - admittedly being so active also helped) but she practically bounced up the stairs with excitement at finally getting the opportunity to catch up with her roommates.

What with getting distracted in Cascade Hall when she arrived and having the team bonding exercises with her Quidditch team after that, Joella hadn’t actually seen her roommates before the Opening Feast and was really looking forward to chatting with them now.

She burst into the dormitory and squealed “roomies!”, running at the two girls and hugging them tightly. An entire summer away from the roommates she was so used to waking up to every morning was a fair enough excuse for momentary lunacy, wasn’t it? It was funny how guilty she’d felt about not curtseying in greeting when she’d first met Scarlett and Diana all those years ago and now she was potentially squeezing all the air out of them both without a worry of what they thought. She felt blessed that she got to share a dorm with such great people.

After greeting them properly and asking how their summers went, she selected a pair of pyjamas shorts and matching short-sleeved shirt from her luggage pile (which she still probably wouldn’t have unpacked by the end of the week). From there she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, remove her makeup and change. Joella was nowhere near ready for sleeping but she had no plans to leave the dormitory and therefore took that as excuse to get changed in the satin sleepwear anyway. She returned to the room, doing up a couple of buttons on her pyjama shirt for modesty’s sake before she flopped onto her four-poster bed.

“So,” she grinned at her two roommates, lying on her stomach and propping herself up on her elbows. Her tanned legs waved in the air behind her, the tiny rhinestones at the edge of her pastel toe nails discreetly catching the light. “What did you get up to over the summer?” Joella’s blue eyes darted excitedly between her friends as she smiled mischievously. “Hang out with any cute boys?”

8 Joella Curtis Girl talk (tag Scarlett and Diana) 295 Joella Curtis 1 5

Diana Carey

May 06, 2016 11:31 PM

This should be fun by Diana Carey

Diana had listened up when she realized the headmaster was calling up the new prefects, but hadn’t really expected to hear her own name. For her, the most interesting part of the Feast had taken place before that, when her little sister had been Sorted.

After the Feast, Diana made a few lighthearted remarks to those she’d spoken with during the meal, then hurried as fast as a lady could back to the dorms. She had to be the first to get this news back to Jay. What he’d think of it, she didn’t know – on one hand, Fae and Effie were Crotali, but on the other hand, so was Henry – but he would want to know and Diana’s comforts might go away if she ever stopped being her oldest brother’s favorite. His and their cousin Arthur’s, of course, but she didn’t know if Arthur would really care about where Cecilia was Sorted since Cecilia’s status was only loosely tied to his. If Cecilia failed, Arthur just had another useless cousin. Cecilia would have to do something truly, unbelievably horrible to hurt Arthur’s position worse than their siblings Theresa or Henry had, and Terry and Henry hadn’t really affected his status at all. Jay, though, might lose some of Uncle Anthony’s trust and respect if Cecilia failed and that would be a major setback for Jay. He had worked so hard, and since Uncle Anthony’s heir had moved north so he could chase girls more conveniently and Anthony’s other sons worked on the road more often than not, Diana thought her brother had benefited a lot more from his hard work than the son of a second son normally ever would. Sticking with him was a good way to improve her own position, which was frankly not what she would have liked. Jay would know this tidbit soon anyway, but there was no harm in letting him know she was always thinking of his interests.

She got to the room and pulled out parchment to begin writing, but didn’t have time to get anything done before her roommates arrived. Joella’s squeal of ”roomies!” gave her just enough warning to brace herself before the other girl hugged her. Diana returned the gesture, though without as much squeezing. “It’s good to see you, too, Joella,” she said, only a little breathlessly.

She put her parchment inside one of her textbooks, regretfully putting it aside until the other girls were asleep or until the next morning, and unpacked the things she would need for the first morning of classes while Joella changed. Joella’s question on her return made her laugh. “I guess that depends on whether or not you think Brandon is cute,” she said. “I wouldn’t know. We spent half the summer making up horror stories about school to terrify our littlest sister with since it was her last summer at home, though. I did talk with a few specimens who weren’t my brothers at parties, but none of them were very good-looking. Did you have better luck?”

0 Diana Carey This should be fun 294 Diana Carey 0 5

Scarlett Brockert

May 27, 2016 4:39 PM

Of men and other matters by Scarlett Brockert

Part of Scarlett had felt a little disappointed to not get prefect. It would have given her a perfectly legitimate reason to sneak around the school. On the other hand, responsibility wasn't really her thing so she supposed she'd just be happy for Joella. And still sneak around the school.

Of course, she was even more disappointed that Savannah hadn't gotten the honor for Teppenpaw. There was nothing at all wrong with Aiden but to Scarlett, her sister was just ideal for the position. And of course, then if Scarlett got caught sneaking, she could save face by letting people think she was Savannah. They might not have been like Amity's friends Annabelle and Annette Pierce who her cousin didn't have the slightest clue how to tell apart until her sixth year but they were still identical and could probably fool anyone who didn't know them well.

Oh well, there was always Head Girl. Though the Pecari supposed it was more important that Chaslyn got it next year than either of the twins getting it the year after. Leon Beausang or no Leon Beausang, it would be a few years before Chaslyn could escape for good and Aunt Jillian would surely make her displeasure known, possibly in the form of a Howler. Amity had gotten a few of those.

Unfortunately, Scarlett wasn't so sure the Crotalus could make the same break her sister had. She seemed...totally brainwashed. Like when she left and got married, she'd still fill her time doing all the many things Aunt Jillian wanted her to do. She needed to be like deprogrammed or something. It wasn't going to be like with Amity where they just sort of had super awkward tension at holidays where Aunt Jillian got in her little jabs and Phillip bit her head off in defense of Amity while they ignored each other the rest of the year. Chaslyn would never ever escape the spectre of her mother's presence leaning over her in all she did. She was like that now and Scarlett didn't see how anything would change it.

So Scarlett wanted her to get Head Girl for her own good. She was a little afraid to see what would happen if Chaslyn didn't. Maybe the Pecari could start campaigning for her now. And Savannah next year.

As Joella greeted her with a hug, Scarlett wondered for just a second if the person before her was really her roommate or if one of the Teppenpaw fourth years polyjuiced themselves into her. They seemed more the huggy type. Of course, Scarlett couldn't fathom for the life of her why they would do that. Unlike the hugging, that didn't seem their thing. Besides, they'd all had that polyjuice lesson last year in Defense and Scarlett was pretty sure that the only people who didn't leave feeling somehow violated were her and Savannah.

Or Joella was on something. Something made her act like the fourth year Teppenpaws did normally, but...bouncier. Of course, she didn't smell like the older people usually did at family reunions so that eliminated a few options but there was other stuff out there. Or maybe it was just the intoxication of power that came with the prefect badge? All she remembered about Chaslyn getting hers was that Chaslyn had been tremendously relieved and Aunt Jillian just acted like it Chaslyn hadn't done anything more than what she was expected to do while everyone else was proud.

Of course, if a prefect badge could get one drunk on power, she could only imagine what Head Student badges did. Serena and Duncan must have been bouncing off the walls! Especially considering they were already Brockerts and Serena was engaged to a prince.

The subject turned to boys and Scarlett nodded. "I met a few guys at parties and some were attractive enough to look at." Though none quite measured up to Professor Pye especially from the back. Not that she was going to hold out for her teacher, that was just not appropriate all, even though she could-and would-look all she wanted. Still she didn't want someone boring. "But guys our age just seem so...dull. Not like I want to marry an old man but they haven't really done anything interesting yet so while they're fun to look at and dance with, the conversations are sorely lacking."

11 Scarlett Brockert Of men and other matters 293 Scarlett Brockert 0 5

Joella

May 29, 2016 6:47 AM

But mostly just men. by Joella

Joella wiggled her eyebrows teasingly when Diana mentioned her older brother Brandon. She had never been sure what the rules were on friend’s brothers but Diana seemed all for her admitting appreciation and Gia too had even gone so far as to offer Jax as her ball date at dinner. “Well, you know me, I’ve always had a thing for older guys,” she grinned, the statement largely false because the only boy she’d ever officially dated was actually younger than her (although only by two months). “You may slip my name into conversation if you ever find yourselves talking about the midsummer ball.” Joella was definitely joking now, but in all honesty she wouldn’t have a problem turning up to the midsummer event with a cute seventh year on her arm.

She laughed about the horror stories, not quite able to feel sorry for the little sister but hoping she wasn’t traumatized all the same. “So your sister’s here now,” Joella nodded, wondering what it would’ve been like if some of her siblings had still been at school when she started. “Are we being supportive older students and looking out for her or are we finding ways to make sure she still believes those horror stories?” Joella would have preferred the latter, although perhaps too cruel when the victim was one of those cute little firsties she had seen just hours earlier, but she was aware that her new prefect status probably meant she didn’t have a choice but to be the former.

“Oh that’s disappointing,” Joella remarked about Diana’s unattractive boys and Scarlett’s dull ones. Neither sounded much fun, although Scarlett had the better deal in that she could enjoy the aesthetics at least. “But I hope you aren’t looking for a husband already, Scarlett!” She hoped the girls wouldn’t take that the wrong way or think she didn’t value marriage but Joella was of the opinion that her friends seriously needed to live a little and love a little before they found someone they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with. After all, they were only fifteen and, whilst Joella wasn’t going to go so far as to encourage scandalous behaviour, she did think that there was a lot of fun to be had regarding the male species.

“I don’t suppose you were too worried about boys yourself, Diana,” the Pecari’s impish grin reappeared, “since you have your own good-looking man here already.” She knew full well that Diana did not technically have her ‘own man’ at school but she’d voted her roommate and Jake Manger for Best Couple in the yearbook anyway. They hadn’t made the cut but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t this year, once the ball told everyone they existed as a ‘they’.

“As for the cute boys in my summer, yes there were plenty,” Joella smiled and sucked in her lips for a moment, as though deciding whether to be mysterious and leave it at that but then her true nature got the better of her and she had to blab. “I hung out with my friend Audrey a lot,” her roommates would’ve heard her talk enough about her close friend by now to know that Audrey Montague was a girl and not one of the ‘plenty’ boys who’d been part of her summer, “and I got to know a lot of her friends. We spent a lot of time hanging out at lakes and stuff, like the one near my house in L.A and, you know, when there’s a lake involved, there’s wet shirts and no shirts so basically lots of nice abs to look at.” She nodded slowly, dreamily even, her eyes glancing off in no particularly direction as though she were reminiscing (mostly just for show).

After a pause she decided to expand. “Darius was there,” she added in a way that she hadn’t expected. Even though she’d bottled up her emotions a lot at the time, she’d still told Scarlett and Diana about her break-up with Alistair not long after it had happened. The only part she’d refrained from giving away, or so she hoped, was how she felt about the situation. As far as she was aware, Jake was the only person who knew that she’d been really hurt by it all. “Darius is the guy I told you about when I broke up with Ali,” she explained further, in case her friends had forgotten who he was. She’d talked about him a lot at the time because it had been fairly obvious that Ali had thought there was something going on between them, but Joella had been adamant that there wasn’t when she told her side of the story to Scarlett and Diana. She’d actually been so adamant that it had led her to wonder whether she was trying to convince herself more than anyone. Since that episode had passed, however, she hadn’t mentioned Darius again. They hadn’t kept in contact - it wasn’t that kind of friendship - and Joella had doubted they’d see much of each other again (apart from when their families brought them together). But as it turned out, she’d happened to see him a lot over the summer, mainly because Darius seemed to run in much the same social circles as Audrey.

Before she had chance to review the way she had been drawn to him all summer and whether it meant anything, Joella moved the conversation on swiftly by turning to the subject of Sonora boys, which was a far more interesting topic anyway.

“So, since it’s pretty obvious who Diana is hoping to go to the ball with, have you had any ideas Scarlett?” Joella cast a sly glance Diana’s way, wanting to see her fellow Pecari’s reaction to her unclarified assumption, before focusing her attention on Scarlett. They’d gone together when the midsummer event had last been a ball in their first year which had been fun but they were older now and Joella had to have a date for the prefect’s dance and Scarlett had to have a date because Joella believed her friends didn’t have enough romance in their lives. Before they knew it they’d be married off to some stuffy rich man and they’d miss out on the fun that the freedom of youth allowed - Scarlett’s comment about marrying an old man basically proving her point. Joella hardly expected them to get up to the kind of things that Liliana did, something Joella was growing mildly jealous of (not negatively so), but as far as she was aware neither of them had even had a boyfriend. Not that she was one to give boy advice and she didn’t definitely didn’t recommend a broken heart for a good time but everyone (or rather, every girl) deserved the opportunity to sneak out into the Labyrinth Gardens to makeout with a cute boy.

8 Joella But mostly just men. 295 Joella 0 5

Diana

June 02, 2016 9:30 PM

The awful things by Diana

It always surprised Diana a little when people mentioned that Brandon was older than her. She never really thought of him that way. She smiled at Joella’s teasing, though. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. She didn’t think Brandon and Joella would do well together long term, they would be in trouble with Jay every other week, the way she and Bran had been before Brandon went to school except that they had been little kids at the time and so immune from any real consequences, but she didn’t think that was the kind of thing Joella was interested in anyway and she really couldn’t let the poor thing go to the Ball alone – or worse, with one of the boy prefects – if it came to that.

“I’m not planning to coddle her,” she said when Joella asked how they should treat her sister. “I’m sure Cecilia can take care of herself.” Ceci was, after all, a Carey. If someone in the upper years bothered her, Diana and Brandon might have to step in, but Cecilia was expected to handle her own problems with her own classmates. “You can tease her a little if you want - just a little, or I’ll get in trouble – but…” she considered Joella’s position. “If you hear any Beginners making plans to humiliate her in public while you’re being a prefect, could you tell me? And congratulations, by the way,” she added.

Diana thought for a moment when Scarlett mentioned that she liked interesting older guys, but decided her brothers and cousins weren’t suitable at all. For one thing, none of them was really interesting, at least once you got to know them; the best of them were Arthur, who was a little too old and who didn’t even seem to like women, and Bran, who was going to be boring this year because he was determined to pass his RATS – Professor Skies, Diana thought disapprovingly, had given him ideas above his station, her and her special reading teachers, and now he thought that how he did on the tests actually mattered. Even if Bran hadn’t been a little delusional, though, there would have been an even bigger obstacle to Scarlett dating him, which was that the Careys and the Brockerts had already intermarried.

“Oh, the conversation can be lacking with older ones, too,” she said. “Believe me.”

She left them to interpret that as they would. She was thinking again of her older cousins and brothers, but she had not seen many wizards who weren’t related to her who had seemed very interesting, either. Not nearly as interesting, anyway, as Joella’s comment. She stared at the other girl in complete confusion when Joella said Diana had a man at all, never mind at Sonora. She glanced at Scarlett, wondering if the third fifth year knew what on earth Joella was talking about and whether she could press the idea that they were technically related by marriage far enough to get Scarlett to tell her in confidence if her reputation was in any danger instead of using that kind of information against her. Malcolm, who was a lot more closely related to Scarlett by marriage than Diana was, ran to Diana’s uncle every week for advice, so Diana thought she had a chance of at least upsetting Scarlett if the other girl did betray her, but Diana honestly didn’t know if she could do anything to Scarlett that would be worse than what Scarlett could do to her if there were rumors going around that Diana didn’t know about and couldn’t disprove if she found them out….

For now, she listened to Joella’s tangled love life and tried to look sympathetic. It was all, she thought, more evidence that getting into these relationships, mixing up the physical and emotional, was a bad idea. Her mother, Theresa, Joella…nobody she knew had ever benefited from one of those, and while it hadn’t blown up in Jay and Francesca’s faces yet, she had no doubt that it would someday, because it was obvious that thy weren't just friends and that politics and alliances were not the subjects they had on their minds when they were together. She frowned again, moving further from confused and more toward annoyed now, when Joella mentioned the man she supposedly had again and asked Scarlett who she had in mind for the Ball. There weren’t exactly a lot of options who were worth mentioning…if Diana had still had any family in Aladren, she would have considered telling it to persuade Leonidas Bennett to ask one of them, but the closest she got was Theodore Wolseithcrafte, whose sister was just a girlfriend. You could lean on wives’ families – her father was most likely not in prison because the family had pressured her mother’s family – but girlfriends were a strange gray area she didn’t think that would work with.

“Don’t forget about you, Joella,” she said lightly. “You must have someone in mind.”

0 Diana The awful things 0 Diana 0 5

Scarlett

June 21, 2016 10:07 AM

Not all of them. by Scarlett

Scarlett was deeply puzzled by Joella's reaction. "Of course I am. Why wouldn't I be? My cousin got betrothed over the summer. Most of my cousins have been before graduating." As far as she could tell, this was the age when society girls started to look-and Joella's family was part of society! It wasn't as if she was a Muggleborn who genuinely wouldn't understand, who'd grown up differently. To date around could damage a girl's reputation and then when time came, nobody would want to marry her and she'd end up an old maid. It could also possibly hurt her family name. Even though Scarlett was a Pecari, that wasn't a risk she wanted to take.

"Sounds nice." She replied to Joella's mention of what her summer was like. "Nothing wrong with looking ."

She was further confused by the mentions of Diana having a man at Sonora. Who? When did that happen? Scarlett knew her roommate was friends with Jake Manger but that didn't make them an item, so when Diana looked at her, all Scarlett could do was shrug.

Honestly, the Pecari was starting to think Joella had lost her mind. Or maybe she wasn't really Joella. Or she was on something. The other girls was acting completely bizarre. Should Scarlett be concerned? If the other fifth year was taking something, Scarlett didn't want to get her in trouble. Of course, she could have been drugged at the feast. This was Pecari so pranks were always a possibility.

Or she was playing a prank on them? Was another Pecari playing a prank on them and pretending to be Joella using polyjuice? That was possible. Especially when she was asking all these questions about guys and stuff. That was normal girl talk, yes, but it could also be espionage. She imagined the real Joella bound and gagged in a broom closet somewhere. Perhaps Scarlett should be a little more guarded about what she said.

However, there was no reason to censor her next answer. "No. Who is there to want to go with?" Scarlett asked. "Besides, when I said older men, I meant like five years older or so, not sixth or seventh years. Someone whose been out of school and done things. " Maybe Phillip had some interesting unattached former classmates or something that she could ask Amity about but that would be more a betrothal prospect rather than a date for the dance.

11 Scarlett Not all of them. 293 Scarlett 0 5