Alicia Bauer
June 01, 2012 4:02 PM
Alone. by Alicia Bauer
The common room, as Alicia stepped into it, was deserted, but that didn’t bother her – or at least, she told herself firmly that it didn’t. It was still a little disconcerting, to see Aladren House all but empty, but she had had almost two weeks to get used to it – and anything, she reminded herself, was better than the constant presence of people, the noise and clamor and realization that not one of them had a clue who she was and barely even knew what they wanted her to be, that she would have had to deal with if she had gone home again for the holidays. That was why she was here, to avoid having to be with her family. She wasn’t sure when, exactly, she had realized she could not think of a single reasonably close blood relative she had whom she did not despise, but it had been easier to accept than she thought she had expected it to be.Taking her pick of the best tables (in terms of proximity to both the fireplace, since to her surprise and delight it had turned out that Sonora did have something which, if it was not quite what she had read about, was closer to winter than anything she’d ever experienced in Arizona or California, and the bookshelves, with an additional note for the comfort of the associated chairs), she found one finally that was to her liking and put her bag on it, then began to spread out her Latin books and her notes and all her other papers over it to work. She had real homework to look at, but that wasn’t her objective today; Anne didn’t think she was up to it yet, but Alicia was determined to write out something original in such Latin as she knew just to prove she could compose more than simple answers to questions.
It proved slow going. She could read what she was given, mostly little stories which had been written according to the level she was at, if not with ease at least without serious difficulty, but even translating Latin to English to write it out took concentration; to think in Latin was something she’d been trying every now and then since she learned it was supposed to be the hardest thing to learn to do, but it was hard even so. Plus, she knew there were major gaps in her knowledge still. But she had to start somewhere, and she had nothing better to do to while away an hour while she worked up the enthusiasm for the language to work on some case exercises she had already done twice before without getting completely right, so she kept on, her head gradually inching closer and closer to the page as her concentration narrowed and she didn’t think about her posture anymore.
Her step-grandmother, she knew, was disappointed, as were her mother and father, and she supposed Granddad and Gramma Nadia might notice her absence when they appeared, as punctual as the cuckoo in the clock, on Christmas morning for breakfast and to watch Isaac and her sisters open their presents, but that all seemed far away as she worked. Her presents would arrive the same day, so she was losing nothing but the intolerable strain of the pretenses of idiocy, the petting, the thousand petty humiliations it was her lot to bear because she was the youngest, and she had found that, once the slight creepiness of the usually full school being nearly empty had been largely gotten past for her, that she liked to be alone.
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Alicia Bauer
Alone.
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