Eliza Bennett
October 17, 2010 10:59 PM
Finding something to do by Eliza Bennett
There was nothing to do. Since that just wasn't acceptable, Eliza was working on finding something.She had already done all her homework, and she'd finished it so thoroughly that she had even practiced her wandwork extra just to fill the time. She had written home elegant and essentially false letters to her mother and Paul, her little brat of a brother who she nevertheless missed more than anything else about that deathtrap of a life Parents existed to preside over. She had even tried, alone in the dorm, to practice her singing, but had quickly gotten the idea that the older girls in Crotalus found her offerings less than stage quality and had then stopped. Deciding it would give her a headache to try to read, she'd gone down to the common room instead, thinking she might socialize.
So far, that wasn't working out. It was making her feel a little paranoid. Where were the other girls? She had been sure they were all friends, but she had heard stories, an awful lot of stories, about how Crotalus girls were known for scheming amongst themselves and starting little wars, turning on each other so suddenly, or at least after long enough a period of lying, that the backstabbed one never, ever saw it coming. Eliza didn't want that to happen. She would have trouble outside, for one thing, and her mother would flip, and...and she would be lonely.
Again.
One of the reasons she had been so eager to come to school was to escape feeling lonely in a city that was, in every real way, nothing to her. Where everything she heard sounded different, where everyone dressed differently, and thought differently, and the society setup was just far enough off from what she knew to throw her off. It had been awful. Her parents were happy in Chicago, and all the other people invovled were adjusting, but Eliza expected a trip home in December would end with everyone knowing that she still hadn't.
Since she couldn't do anything to get her uncle out of his mental institution so he could kick his little brother out of his house, though, and couldn't think of anything to do to make sure she wasn't about to be ostracized, she had to find something else to work on. So she was looking over an old list, compiled in the first week of school, of all the people in the lower few years whose name she had been able to pick up.
They had, at the beginning of the year, been planning for a party, but then it had just...not happened. She wasn't sure why. Maybe, like her, the others had really been at least a little scared of finding out what would happen if they went public with ambition. It was easy to be all confident right on the first night, when they were still giddy with feeling like part of a House and like anything could happen; it was something else to really do something that other people, an awful lot of people who were older, might take as a threat. It was easier to let things just...not happen.
For lack of any better ideas, though, she was looking back at the idea, and ahead, past an unfamiliar Christmas round of parties, to when they came back to school in January. A whole half year since their arrival would have passed then and they wouldn't be outsiders. Surely everyone in the two years they had classes with would know at least the shapes of their personalities now, if not the details. It was not nearly as audacious to have a gathering then as having the same one in September would have been.
Of course, nothing was likely to actually happen in the new year, either, but it was something to do until either she'd had enough and drifted off, she spotted someone to talk to, or someone sat with her. Which, after a while, someone did. Eliza tossed back her hair and tucked her papers into their folder, looking up with a smile. "Hey," she said brightly.
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Eliza Bennett
Finding something to do
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