Quentin Melcher
February 20, 2011 5:50 PM
Oranges by Quentin Melcher
Quentin sat down at the table for lunch. He scanned the table for what he wanted to eat and his attention settled on a bowl of oranges. He grabbed one, withdrawing it from the bowl.He gazed down at the orange in his hand, beginning to wonder about it. Lunchtime often had this affect on Quentin. The sixth year had long wondered about hot dogs, for example and their blatant false advertising. Whether or not they were made from dogs or whether they were made from raccoons and pigeons and rats, they didn't sound appealing to Quentin.
Not to mention all the weird stuff his cousin thought was so delicious. How Kirstenna could eat non-food items was beyond him. Quentin had read about pica and wanted to get the young Teppenpaw help for her problem, but when he'd tried to talk to her about him, she'd given him a strange look. He got those a lot for some reason. Quentin didn't really understand why. Maybe it was because others just didn't think deeply enough about things, or at least not as deeply as he did.
The sixth year hated to think that way. It made him feel like he was judging others and he didn't want to do that. Quentin didn't want to be like his parents or grandparents. He had to take over his family's school someday, run it. (Another seriously contradictory phrase, the same word meant to move fast and to manage something) Quentin didn't want to be the same kind of administrator his father and grandfather were. He wanted to be the kind who was well, pleasant to students. Still, the fact remained that he did indeed think about these things more than other people did.
As for oranges, the Aladren wasn't really worried about what they were made out of or that they weren't even really food. Oranges were a fruit, grown the way fruits were grown. They were indisputably something to eat.
That wasn't what Quentin was wondering about. It was their color . Oranges were orange and that naturally made perfect sense. What he wondered however, was which came first, the color orange or the fruit orange? Was the fruit named for the color or vice versa? Other fruits provided him no clue. Apples were not called 'reds' and the color red was not called the color apple. Nor were bananas or lemons called yellows and the color yellow called banana. Quentin had never heard of color called pear or pomegranate.
It was one of life's great mysteries and he was dying to know. So deep in contemplation was Quentin that he did not realize when someone sat down beside him.
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Quentin Melcher
Oranges
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Marissa Stephenson
March 02, 2011 12:10 PM
Apples. by Marissa Stephenson
If Marissa’s life had been even less perpetually guided by the forces of habit and fear of parental sanctions, lunch might have fallen completely out of her schedule, but she had been attending lunch religiously for fifteen years and had her doctor father’s voice in her head, so she only skipped meals when she somehow mistimed something badly and ended up in a fix so she had the choice of rushing to finish something or the something not getting done and her getting a failing mark for it.Today was not one of those days. Nothing urgent was waiting for her to do. It wasn’t that she didn’t need to study in general – with half her classes being held with the sixth years, she was having to work double time just to keep up with her usual level – but at some point, she thought she had started going numb to that. When she thought about putting in extra work, at least at the cost of eating or being up another hour past the one she’d adjusted to once she realized just how back-breaking keeping up at Sonora would be in her first year, her brain went fuzzy and she couldn’t bring herself to care that much. It felt like it was worth more to go eat her potato soup and enjoy it than it was to spend a few extra minutes in her room practicing some spell for the fifteenth-hundredth time and then having to run to class and turn up in a mess.
That scared her, because it reminded her of what had happened to her older sister after her third semester of college. Sometime in the middle of that fourth semester, Paige had told her, she’d started to lose interest. By the end, she’d stopped handing in minor assignments and started cutting class and not been able to care at all; if she hadn’t had nearly perfect grades before, and an almost preternatural talent for bluffing her way through major papers, her GPA would have been ruined. She’d snapped out of it over the summer, and was doing fine again as far as Marissa knew, but that was where the having nearly perfect grades before came in. If Marissa burned out, or whatever it was Paige had done, she’d end up repeating fifth year, and she seriously doubted they would let her keep her badges if that happened.
She could not let that happen. They didn’t fully grasp prefects, or Quidditch as itself, but her parents did understand that these were honors – that she was considered the most responsible sophomore in her dormitory (she had not told them the sophomore class was composed entirely of her and Jethro), and that she was guaranteed to become captain of a sports team once another girl graduated. Still not quite as good as Paige, because she was never quite as good as Paige and Sonora didn’t have multiple things for her to be captain or president of anyway, but still – not bad. If she lost that, though, then they wouldn’t have anything to be proud of anymore, and she didn’t know if she could stand that.
Evidently, though, she believed she could more than she thought she did, because she was still taking time to enjoy lunch instead of at least having her books open around her while she ate it on most days. She tried not to think too much about that.
Exactly who she sat with tended to vary from day to day, since she wasn’t really on bad terms with anyone as far as she knew, but it wasn’t uncommon for it to be Quentin. He had, after all, been maybe the first friend she’d ever made here, and definitely the first one who’d had some clue how the magical world worked and been willing to explain some of it to her. She still missed many of the finer nuances, and the way she thought went first to places other than the ones that worked for this world, but she’d appreciated the effort. So when she saw him sitting on his own, she decided to go join him.
“Hi, Quentin,” she said, then noticed that he was off in his own little world. This wasn’t exactly an unusual occurrence, either, so Marissa just sat down, assuming he wouldn’t object too much to her presence, and served herself some of the excellent soup they had here and started in on it. If he stayed absent too long, she’d say something so he didn’t forget to eat, but otherwise she’d let him finish thinking through whatever was on his mind.
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Marissa Stephenson
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Quentin
March 10, 2011 6:41 AM
Lemons by Quentin
Although he had been lost in thought, Quentin snapped to attention at Marissa's greeting and returned it. "Hi Marissa." He smiled. The Crotalus was probably Quentin's best friend at Sonora. Well, anywhere really. It wasn't as if he had friends outside of this school. There was his family, of course but other than Kirstenna, he wasn't technically that good of friends with the others, though he felt more of a bond with Pippa being in the same year and Alessa being members of the same house than with the others. And Alessa didn't really talk to him much.Then there were the children of other Iowa purebloods and some Wisconsin purebloods, as Quentin lived in Dubuque which was just on the border between the two states but it wasn't as if the Aladren was really close with any of them-after all, he was in Arizona, they were...not. Technically, at this moment Quentin was not close to anyone but Marissa because she was sitting at the same table as him and they were not. However, the sixth year was not friends with them, really. Nor was he friends with the children at his family's school. All of those people were more like accquaintances, though barely.
Then there were his roommates, but while Quentin might not have been on bad terms with any of them-and better terms than they seemed to be with each other-he still considered Marissa a better friend than the other three male Aladren sixth years.
And there was Cassie, but she was his fiance, not really a friend, though (fortunately) they had gotten on pretty well. Quentin felt lucky in that way since he was going to have to marry her. He would hate to spend the rest of his life with someone that he disliked, or had little in common with. The one bit of credit that Quentin had to give his parents was that they wanted someone intelligent for him. Granted, the sixth year thought it might be because they wanted intelligent grandchildren, not because they wanted him to be happy.
But that was the pureblood life it seemed. It was not uncommon for pureblood parents to want what they thought was best for the whole family. And truthfully, Quentin thought his children would have an easier time of it if they were smart. They would get along better in the world for one thing and more importantly, they were far more likely to be accepted by the family if they were. Quentin would love his kids no matter what, even if they were about as intellectually gifted as Jethro Smythe and sincerely wanted to believe Cassie would too but he knew how his grandparents and father treated his uncle and Kirstenna.
He turned back to his friend and smiled genuinely, trying to forget about his family and oranges. "So, Marissa, how are you doing? Are classes going well for you?" Trust an Aladren to think of choosing that as a conversation starter.
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Marissa
March 10, 2011 1:54 PM
Pears. by Marissa
Quentin perceived her greeting, but he was smiling and initiating further conversation, so Marissa decided to assume he didn’t mind being interrupted from whatever he’d been thinking about. That was good. She knew sometimes it irritated people to be brought out of their own heads; Mama was especially prone to snapping if people even talked to each other in the same room when she was.Marissa really wished she wouldn’t do that, because it never ended well. She would fold, and then just forget about it by the next day, the way she did with unpleasant things that lacked lasting consequences, but it made Paige lash out. Quietly, sometimes days later, and Mama never appeared to notice what had happened, but Marissa hated when Paige described all the details of her revenge to her and then she had to keep it secret and feel paranoid all the time that Mama knew she was keeping something secret just by looking at her. Really, everything was much simpler when everyone just bit their tongues about little things and got along.
About bigger things…Well, she didn’t know about that. There were some things that needed to be said, and she knew it was stupid to think that people were going to be reasonable and try to come to reasonable, mutually beneficial compromises, but she wished they would anyway. Noise and strong emotion bothered her, and violence went without saying. She also knew, intellectually, that it was stupid to not take all that was on the news with a grain of salt, or even in many books, but she had too many bad images of governments deciding to go all nuclear war in her head to completely shake.
But that had nothing to do with her classes at Sonora, where more than half the student body wouldn't even know what the six o'clock news was, and where most people were taught what to think about the Big Issues Of Life from birth. Her parents had stated their views, too, but Marissa was more worried about being rejected because she was a failure than because she didn't hold exactly the same views as they did once she sorted out what her views were. “I’m getting by,” she replied with a smile. “They’re keeping me busy, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.” She blew on a spoonful of her soup to cool it before continuing. “What about you? How’re the sixth-year-only classes going?”
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Marissa
Pears.
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