Topher Calhoun
August 03, 2012 6:57 PM
It just had to be birthday cards by Topher Calhoun
OOC: Fuzzytimed to IC April due to RL deciding to be unexpectedly crazy for me last month. Carry on. BIC:“This is exactly what I needed,” Topher muttered, putting the thing he was being sarcastic about back in its envelope and tossing it aside, only to pick it up again and glare at it some more so no one else could pick it up.
Birthday cards weren’t things he thought much about – when he did think of them, he thought of them mostly as a sort of girl thing, more than a guy thing – but they weren’t things he usually thought of as weird. His parents sent him one every year, as did his grandparents and a few other distant relatives. It was just something people did in their culture, to affirm that they remembered he existed even though he was here and didn’t see them that much when he was there – and, in the case of his dad’s family, to affirm that they did view him as part of their family, even if they had sort of skipped some usually-important steps in the becoming-family process. He even, technically, sent birthday cards, or at least his mom signed his name when she also signed hers and his dad’s on those which had to be sent to their different relatives. Birthday cards were not things which were usually problems, but they were, in his head at least, for family, which was why this one was kind of an issue for him.
He thought it was just typical of Caroline to be the one to take something very straightforward, something that was such a background event that he barely even noticed it normally, and twist it into something complicated enough that he didn’t even know what it was. What was her agenda here, anyway? What had inspired her thought processes? Overdosed on potions? Deep desire to be disinherited in his favor? The giggles she’d get from making him wonder about all this, plus be paranoid about how she even knew when his birthday was, considering she had convincingly said that she hadn’t even known there was a him until last summer?
Whatever it had been, it was hard to tell from the wording she’d used. He’d been trying to figure it out, but he could get absolutely nothing from it. It was as blandly cheerful as any card he’d ever seen directed to a relative someone didn’t know very well in his entire life, especially for something designed to be the death of optimism. He had thought they were finished with this business, that last summer had been an aberration that wasn’t going to be ever repeated, and that they’d never see or hear from each other again, never mind one of them trying to initiate correspondence.
If that was actually what she was trying to do, of course. She could just be trying to mess with him. Pureblood girls and all – Fae and Alice were all right, but most of them, they were like that, weren’t they? They’d mess with a guy just because it amused them, especially if he had the temerity to be their rich daddy’s illegitimate affair-of-boredom-and-convenience-child. But Fae and Alice proved the exception could exist, so now he had to wonder if he was supposed to reply, either in thanks or in kind when her birthday rolled around just before the end of the year.
Mom, he knew, would say yes, he should, because she had always seemed to sort of want them to be Christmas-card-exchange siblings. Dad, who seemed determined to stay objective through all this no matter what and was impressively good at it, would say it was up to him. Russell, who he might have considered asking normally, didn’t get a vote on Caroline-related things even if she wasn’t or hadn’t been actually his girlfriend. Alice would probably not understand the question. Fae seemed to be avoiding him, and plus there was how he’d explicitly disavowed siblings to her before. It looked like he was stuck figuring out an answer on his own.
He wondered if ‘I quit life’ was among the options he had available to him. He suspected that it really wasn’t.
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Topher Calhoun
It just had to be birthday cards
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Topher Calhoun
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