Just an ordinary day on Alumni

Nicholas Pierce

April 27, 2022 4:51 PM

Just an ordinary day by Nicholas Pierce

Some days, Greek letters made as much sense as anything else, and Nicholas could sort of sound out a word even if he didn't know what it meant. Other days, though, the symbols lost all connection to sounds and were just strange little shapes, like someone had decided to make tiny slashes and hooks of ink on the paper almost at random. Today was one of the meaningless-little-lines days, and he took off his reading glasses and looked around the room as stealthily as possible, trying to spot literally anything else besides his work to pay attention to.

Unfortunately, the room - like the Greek alphabet and, it seemed, the universe itself - refused to really cooperate with him today, and there was nothing really entertaining to look at. His brother, he knew, was in another room with May, taking...a mathematics exam, he thought? Something. Cornelia and the Gracchi blinked stupidly at him from their painting on the wall - one of his mother's favorite pictures, and better than most of the paintings his mother liked (it always made him feel...weird, as if he should expect something bad to happen even though he didn't know what it could possibly be, when Mama pulled out Agrippina or Cleopatra VII or Eleanor Cobham or anything like that), but he'd been looking at that all his life, and had even tried to copy it once, though he hadn't done very well. The bookcases were as familiar as his own reflection in the mirror, and his mother -

Well, Mama could be fun, sometimes, but he was pretty sure that she wouldn't be happy to provide a distraction right now. It was pretty hard to get her to be fun when there was work that needed doing, or at least that she said needed doing - Nicholas, personally, was not really sure what the point of spending the past year of his life hacking away at Aesop really had been, but he knew better than to say that to her. If he did, then he and Alexander would both have to listen to the usual speech about how they had been given great names and had to live up to them and how the purpose of life was to excel in all things and so on, and then his brother would be mad at him, too, and that wouldn't be any good. Plus, she was sewing, which meant she was probably in a serious mood; she hated sewing, so if she was doing that....

"Have you run into a problem, mirus meus?"

He sat up quickly from where he had been lying on the rug, startled by the sudden question. She had definitely not actually looked up. She still wasn't looking up. She'd definitely asked the question, though; it had been her voice, Cornelia couldn't talk, and there was nobody else in the room.

"I was just resting my eyes for a second," he said, guessing it was close enough to true.

She did look up then, and he wondered if she'd ever had to do that, ever. It was sort of hard to picture. "You're not wearing your glasses," she observed.

"I was," Nicholas protested, waving them around as though this would illustrate that he'd had them on before. Which he had - he still didn't like having to wear them, and really did forget them sometimes, but this time wasn't one of those times. "Why are you sewing on that with that?" he asked, noticing that the cloth and the thread it looked like she was using to embroider on it were, as far as he could tell, identical. "They're the same color."

The question had just popped out without him thinking about it, but he considered for a moment: she wouldn't use pet names like 'mirus' (something like 'pleasant surprise;' that, like the 'carus,' or 'dear one', epithet stuck on his brother, was one of those Latin words that meant like five things at once and that he always messed up translations with) if she was really in a bad mood, so maybe he could push his luck....

"Are you trying to put everybody's initials on clothes in secret now?" he asked as a joke, because she was really bad about wanting to stick monograms and ciphers on things. He'd even heard Aunt Rachel and especially Uncle Isaac make fun of her about it before, saying she'd got married and turned into her own mom. He was pretty sure it must have gotten worse about nine years earlier, though, because while he knew she had two or three with some version of her own initials on them, she mostly wore the necklace she had on now - something that just looked like a rhombus with fancy bits of metal in it, but if you knew what to look for, it turned into a mash-up of the letters A and N - his and his brother's first initials. And she had a bracelet where sapphires were mixed with aquamarines and peridots, and she wore that a lot even if it didn't really go with something - those were the family birthstones. Uncle Isaac said this was all 'sentimental' (a word Nicholas wasn't too sure about the definition of, just as he wasn't sure what his uncle had meant that time he'd heard him tell her he doubted anyone was going to notice and somehow be convinced she wasn't 'basically a reptile' - that didn't even make sense even though he understood all the words, because people...weren't really much like reptiles? He and Alexander had learned about different things that lived outside, and turtles and snakes were possible if they went off into the woods, maybe, but those...weren't at all like people?) and 'so tasteless that Mom's whole family would approve,' but if that bothered her, she hadn't let it stop her yet.

If he'd pushed his luck too far, then the speech about family might have happened (again), but she chuckled instead, this time. "If you have time to pay attention to something like that," she informed him, "then I might have to try to find you more lessons...."

"No, it's fine, I have plenty!" he hurried to assure her. The threat was probably a joke, but...He liked learning things, he did. If he hadn't, it would have been really, really hard to live in this household. It just seemed sometimes like...like he and Alexander were supposed to know everything in the world before they went to school. They could read, but had been read to even before they could read, and they had to learn mathematics and about history and geography (which would, he thought, have been a lot more interesting if he'd ever seen much of anything other than Mt. Pierce; the world seemed like it might just be made up for all he knew, so why learn dates and words for different kinds of landmarks instead of just reading the story?) and all this grammar...and that was besides how Madame Carpenter the Evil persisted in trying (he was pretty sure) to make him really dislike drawing things every week, and how they were obviously supposed to know about different things in the garden, even if that wasn't really a lesson like the others, and....

"Do other people have more lessons than we do?" he asked, curious and prepared to feel really sorry for anyone who did. He was confident that he and Alexander were not idiots. Their parents seemed to like them most of the time and he really doubted either of his parents would have put up with idiots at all for this long, much less acted like they liked said idiots. How many more lessons could there be, though, before someone never got to go outside just to play? And where did more topics come from?!

"Most of them probably don't. You and your brother will be the best in your year I'm sure," she said, sounding satisfied. That last part was good, but he thought he'd probably better stop trying to get her to talk instead of working before he got a lecture about excellence. Again. He put his glasses back on and returned to trying to force the letters to be meaningful representations of sounds instead of just so many tiny doodles.

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