A letter for Ginger. (Before Midterm) on Teppenpaw Commons

Alistair Johnson

December 14, 2016 4:49 PM

A letter for Ginger. (Before Midterm) by Alistair Johnson

It took Alistair a while to come to terms with the whole Ginger fiasco, because really it was quite a lot to take in. It was hurtful to think that Ginger, who he’d been friends with for so long, hadn’t been able to come to him with her problem in the first place. But even so, the Crotalus knew he didn’t want to leave things the way they were. Thus he sat down at his desk one evening to write her a letter.

Dear Ginger,

I am truly sorry if my words hurt you. That was never my intention, as I know you never intended to hurt anyone with your actions.

It was very disappointing to learn that despite having two captains in the past, you didn’t feel that you were getting the support you needed. I think it’s fair enough to wish you would have spoken up.

Therefore, don’t you think speaking up when you first organised this group would have been a good idea? If there is an issue with the relationship between captains and their players across all teams, it is one that should directly be addressed, otherwise nothing can be fixed.

Perhaps you genuinely didn’t think consulting the captains first was necessary but I still fail to see how swearing people to secrecy benefits anyone. Keeping secrets is not far removed from lying, so it’s not fair to ask that of people.

I only write this in the hope that you can at least see where I am coming from and why I said what I did. Personally I hope that we can move on from this and that you will accept my apology if I have in any way upset you.

Your friend,

Alistair

8 Alistair Johnson A letter for Ginger. (Before Midterm) 306 Alistair Johnson 1 5

Ginger

December 14, 2016 11:57 PM

A reply by Ginger

Ginger opened the letter with trepidation, recognizing the handwriting. She hadn't exactly been on the best terms with Alistair since the whole Keeper Cabal fiasco went down. She honestly wasn't sure if she was avoiding him or he her or both, but no further words had been exchanged since then and it was kind of eating her up inside.

In that respect, she was glad for the letter and break in the stalemate it represented. With that though, she tore it open and read the contents.

Yeah, it was probably the secrecy thing that was blowing the whole thing entirely out of proportion. Both then, when she'd been tiny and insecure, and now when she had treated something he cared about a little too cavalierly.

Dear Alistair, she wrote back, pausing only to tell the owl to wait and she'd have a reply in just a minute. While she tried to pull her thoughts together into something maybe a little more coherent than what she'd offered That Day, she absently pulled a handful of owl treats out of her trunk for the bird to enjoy while it waited.

I'm sorry that I upset you. That was never my intent, and I feel like we are still misunderstanding each other. I see now I should have mentioned something earlier, probably when I was eleven, but failing that certainly before I sent out letters to the other Keepers. I am sorry about not including you all in the loop but I never in my wildest nightmares dreamed you and Joella would see it as any kind of bad thing. I thought *maybe* Liac might object that I wanted to help the other teams' Keepers, but he was really the only one I actively wanted to avoid telling. It was never meant to be secret in a bad way, and if I'd known Luke was Joella's cousin I wouldn't have been so surprised he told her. And 'tattle' was maybe a poor choice of words on my part. It sounded childish BECAUSE the whole secret thing wasn't actually supposed to be anything but childish fun. If pressed between lying and telling the truth about where they went I hadn't expected or wanted ANYONE to lie, particularly not to a cousin (had I known that) or a boyfriend in Lena's case.

It was just a bad call. I trying to have a little fun with an overly dramatic group name. The only time I asked for discretion was by asking them not to tell about their invitation. I was being dramatic and mysterious. I'm an actor at home, I do things like be dramatic for effect sometimes. That's all that was supposed to be. Both on the invite and in saying Luke tattled.

I am a terrible liar and hate the idea of it and would never have condoned lying about any of this. All I ever expected of people was that they not to volunteer the information if they didn't have to, and as I have no close ties to any of the people involved, I absolutely expected them to understand their relationships to their teams come first over some request some random girl made. I am not in any way upset at Luke nor do I blame him for what was clearly a terrible miscalculation on my part.

All that said, that's just trying to clear the air and explain a thing I think you misunderstood about the Cabal. The bigger issue between us two specifically was what happened over four years ago and why I didn't think I could go to you for moral support.

I am deeply adverse to conflict. I don't handle it well. I cry. You saw. It's why I'm in Teppenpaw. I want to be liked and get along with everyone. I did not feel liked in my first game against Pecari. I felt attacked. That game was a massacre. Pecari showed me no mercy. I took it too personally. For the first time in my life, I thought I knew what it must be like to have an enemy who hated me. It was devastating.

What could you have told tiny me? "It was a game?" To me, it had felt like a battle and we had sorely lost. Looking at the faces of the rest of our team, I didn't think I was the only one who thought so. Calling that a game is a gross misservice to games. It was slaughter. "They don't hate you?" That's not something that can be told. That is on them to prove, not you. Liliana did. And I want to as well. Granted, Teppenpaw hardly goes looking for blood the way Pecari did that day, so I don't have near as much need or cause to, but friends are always nice to make and having friends with similar interests and experiences like, say, KEEPING, is a wonderful common bond.

So, with your permission, Captain Johnson, I want to be friends with Makenzie Newell, and sometimes talk shop about Keeping and playing Quidditch, obviously without revealing any proprietary information about our respective teams. Is that okay with you?

That's really all I ever wanted from the start. It just got wildly blown out of proportion because I wanted to give it a dramatic name and tried to be too inclusive with a first year boy who met one prerequisite of my interest circle but who in retrospect obviously doesn't share many other similarities or interests with a group of older class girls.

All those other lofty goals I purported to have with this group? That's all what friendship does. Friends support one another. They help you vent when you get frustrated. They talk about common interests and do things you all enjoy together. Keeping was just the excuse I was using to bring us together in the first place. When you boil it all down to its most basic level, I wanted to make new friends because one of my favorite ones just graduated. And I met her through Keeping.

I hope we can still be friends,
Ginger

"Sorry," she told the owl as she tied the letter to its leg, "That took longer than I thought it would."

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Ginger

December 15, 2016 10:00 AM

Coming Clean to Liac by Ginger

Having reached a breakthrough in understanding her own motivation for initiating the Keeper Cabal while replying to Alistair, Ginger finally felt she could explain the whole thing to Liac in a satisfactory way. Until now, she had avoided telling him about it because there were parts of it she couldn't entirely understand herself nevermind make Liac understand that she wasn't trying to undermine him, but now those pieces had fallen into place and she had a much clearer idea of why she had felt the whole thing was a good idea in the first place.

So she headed down to the common room to ambush Teppenpaw's captain when next he passed through. She'd already written to Clark who had replied much more in line with how she had expected everyone else to react. Maybe it was that she had told him with no prompting, or maybe after explaining it all twice before she had found the right balance that didn't inadvertently insult people, or maybe it was because he was an Aladren who believed in gathering information from multiple sources (you didn't need to go to too many Science Club meetings to learn Research was a Key Feature Of Science) but he'd just written back, "Awesome. I'm glad you invited Lena to that!"

But as she had told Alistair, Liac was the one person she had really wanted to hide her Cabal from, and he had been the hardest to convince herself to come clean with. But now she was ready. Now she understood what she herself had wanted out of it, and wasn't distracted by the reasons she had tried to use to convince the others to try out being her friend.

"Hey, Liac," she greeted when she saw him, "Do you have a minute?"

"I don't know if you heard," she wasn't sure that Alistair or Joella or Clark had many people in common with Liac, but it was possible and this whole disaster had more legs than a centipede for getting around, so she wasn't excluding the possibility. "But I met with the other keepers a little while back now. I just wanted to get to know them a bit, make friends. You don't have a problem with that, do you? Some of the other captains expressed concerns and I don't want it to cause problems with our team either. Luke from Pecari wasn't interested, but Makenzie and Lena were both glad to spend some time together, not very often, just occasionally. We can all promise not to share team strategies and weaknesses if that makes people feel more comfortable with it."

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