Theresa Carey
January 23, 2012 6:26 PM
Practice (Art Room) by Theresa Carey
“Drat,” Theresa said, sitting back on her little cushion to scowl at the misplaced spot of paint on her latest attempt at a vase. Not only was that color not supposed to go there, but it had added insult to injury by, once she noticed it and started to jerk her brush away a second too late, smudging on top of just being there. Shaking her head after a moment, she took out her wand and cleaned it away before it could dry. She had looked up a spell for that exact purpose and had, over the week she’d been practicing for her Fair submission, gotten very good at using it.Still, though, she wondered crossly, why did all the things a lady could do have to be dull or finicky or dull and finicky? Or why, at least, couldn’t she have had more sisters, and sisters closer to her age than the two she actually had, than male relatives all around? A few girl cousins? There were plenty of things she could do perfectly well, and plenty of others she thought the things she knew would equip her to learn easily, but they were all either completely irrelevant to this or the results of spending all her life surrounded by boys.
Never in her life had she really minded that, since she did not have a great deal of admiration for most of the other girls she’d met, or even a good number of the grown women, but then, after she’d spent a whole half of a year thinking she’d been doing very well, midterm had been a whole series of speeches about everything she’d done wrong, been unladylike in. She didn’t even know where they had gotten all of that, things she didn’t even remember herself, because a good deal of her time had been spent far away from anywhere Arthur could reasonably be, though unfortunately, she hadn’t thought of that until after she finished throwing him in the raging manticore’s path in her place. She’d thought at the time that she was just playing the game, but later, she’d realized that he couldn’t have known most of what they were annoyed with her for, because he hadn’t been in her classes and had been in his own.
She felt a little bad about that, even though she knew she was going to pay for it if Arthur figured it out and pretty sure that her cousin would, eventually, figure it out. Surely he knew someone had told something, because they must have said something to him about it. That was…well, they weren’t to be too uncivil to anyone, but that was a major thing, something she never would have considered saying in case she got him in real trouble if she’d been thinking straight and not in such a temper at the time. Not least because it would be the stupidest thing in the world to get him in trouble over, since she was almost sure that Arthur was about as capable of being involved in a romance – or possibly even a genuine friendship – as he was of walking on the Moon.
Still, what had been done, was done, and Arthur wasn’t seeking vengeance against her for whatever had happened because of it right this moment, which left her with a display of dishes to make and paint. She started over again, determined this time to get it right.
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Theresa Carey
Practice (Art Room)
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Theresa Carey
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