Art Club! [Room 4, obviously] on Magical Arts Room and Sports

Arnold Manger

February 17, 2016 4:14 PM

Art Club! [Room 4, obviously] by Arnold Manger

It had been a very weird year so far. Arnold had spent a lot of time feeling sorry for himself or else feeling bad for somebody else he was close to. The whole Emery thing and the deaths in his and Chloe’s family had done a number on his friendgroup’s seventh year. Plus his relationship with Ji-Eun, while great and wonderful in general, was still a fairly secret thing, something he didn’t get to tell his family about because she couldn’t tell hers. He wanted to bring her home to meet his mother because he knew his mom would adore her, but that wasn’t currently possible. And college preparations had him considerably stressed out. He had gotten into most of the schools he applied to, but he had no career path yet and was just going to go, hoping to figure it out along the way, so he had no idea where he wanted to be. Mostly, he just applied to the places his friends did.

But despite the negatives in his life, Arnold had to step back and admit that things were actually going pretty well. Secret or not, he did have a relationship with a great girl, one that he cared about very, very much. And while there had been some bumps, he had some pretty awesome friends. He was Head Boy, and his team for the challenges, with two out of three in the bag, was sitting in first place.

He was also the president of the art club. That was what he had to focus on today. The meeting took place at 11:00am on a Saturday, but he went down around 10:00 to get set up, inviting Ava, his de facto vice president, to join him any time between there. Arnold had to admit, it was pretty nice having help. They were making clay pots today, so setup was mostly positioning the potter’s wheels like he wanted them, a table with bowls of moist clay and some shaping tools off to the side. “Looks pretty good,” he commented lightly to Ava.

Soon enough, 11:00 rolled around, and the rest of the club arrived. “Hey guys. We’re making clay pots today,” Arnold said cheerfully. “I always find playing around on a potter’s wheel pretty fun, so I thought you might too. It’s pretty easy to use: just toss a lump of clay on the wheel and shape it with your hands. When we’re done, we’ll throw them in the kiln to set, I’ll get them out when they’re done, and we can paint them next week. Sound good to everybody?”

“Let me know if you need help using the potter’s wheel,” he added almost as an afterthought. “Otherwise, just grab your materials, pick a spot, and let’s go!”

Subthreads:

Trying something new. by Lionel Layne

12 Arnold Manger Art Club! [Room 4, obviously] 261 Arnold Manger 1 5

Lionel Layne

March 01, 2016 1:22 PM

Trying something new. by Lionel Layne

When Lionel wrote home, he addressed his letters to both of his grandparents and his sister, but he always mentioned Grandmother’s name first and in his head he was always talking primarily to her when he recounted what he’d been doing for the week or so which passed between letters. He loved Granddad and his sister, of course, but talking to Grandmother had always – or at least had for a long time – been easier. He didn’t suspect he was either boring or disappointing her with every word he said.

He was particularly concerned with not disappointing Granddad at the moment because he honestly didn’t know how well Granddad would take it if he did. His grandfather had hardly spoken – to anyone – at all over midterm, and when he had, he’d been distracted and abrupt most of the times that weren’t Aunt Emily’s big family party, where his cheer had been obviously tired and faked. It had taken Lionel a while to figure out exactly what was going on, but there had evidently been some position-shuffling in his office in the fall, shuffling which had led to young favorites of some senior secretary of something rising and old hands who had spent their whole lives doing everything – everything at work, anyway – right getting either shunted into less influential, poorer-paying jobs or, if they made a fuss or had no useful connections at all to support them, just pushed out. Granddad was one of those old hands; Lionel suspected his relationship to Lionel’s uncles was the only reason he hadn’t been forced out altogether, and as it was, his pension was going to feel the demotion like a punch in the gut. And there was no coming back from it. Granddad had risen to a decent management position because he was good at his job and good enough at playing the game of office politics. At some point, though, his hair had turned grey, he had stopped having the money to keep his house sharp, and now he was an old man and most of his real friends and lovers were either dead, long since moved past him, or as badly off as he was. He had four children, but two of them tolerated him at best, one was a mess who only used him for money half the time, and the last one had all but disowned him. He had nine grandkids, but only the two without any social standing whatsoever really gave a damn about him and Aunt Helena’s kids probably wouldn’t know him in the street. He was going to sink into obscurity unhonored and very nearly unwept and it was obvious that he knew it now. If he hadn’t still had Amelia’s future to dream about, Lionel would have been worried for him, because he knew the old man didn’t expect anything from him.

That didn’t mean, though, that he couldn’t still make things worse, which was why he had not even told Grandmother about the letter his mother had written him on his birthday. Lionel couldn’t say for sure if Mom had been messed up when she wrote it or not – he thought not, but sometimes it was hard to tell – but she had evidently been relatively okay at some point in the recent past, because she had also sent him a gift, a painting she had made. Lionel didn’t know much about such things, but he thought it was pretty good and knew the reason why – as disappointed as his grandparents had been when Mom had turned out not to have magical abilities, they had still treated her as their daughter for a long time and encouraged her to do what she could, and she had taken classes and even won a few small awards for painting before she’d gotten pregnant with Lionel and everything had started drifting gradually downward.

Never turn out like your mother was the First Commandment in Lionel’s house. Granddad accepted that Lionel wasn’t smart or ambitious enough to do what Uncle Geoff had, but he could at least not be like Mom. That was a hard minimum. And yet, here Lionel was, not at his first art club meeting. Logically he knew that even Granddad probably wasn’t going to read too much into that – he’d probably just be glad to see Lionel involved in something – but he wasn’t in Aladren for a lot of reasons and still felt uneasy at the prospect of his grandfather finding out what he was doing with his free time. Still felt somehow a little disloyal for doing it.

He smiled, though, as Arnold announced what they were going to work on for the next two weeks. Here was something he’d never done before, though he had seen pictures. Tentatively, he put the clay on the wheel and started trying to even the clay with his hands as it began to spin.

“I don’t know how this is going to work out, but this part is kind of fun,” he remarked to a neighbor as he pressed his thumb in in the middle. “Have you ever thrown a pot before?"

16 Lionel Layne Trying something new. 283 Lionel Layne 0 5