First Year Boys' Dorm on Aladren Commons

Thad Pierce

November 17, 2011 12:10 PM

First Year Boys' Dorm by Thad Pierce

Thaddeus lay on his back on his bed. Beside him, the potions book lay open with the syllabus on top of it so as to prevent the loss of his page if his movement on the mattress jarred the book enough to make it close. A parchment, half covered in Thad's handwriting, lay just beyond the book and quill rested, forgotten, between Thad's fingers.

Atop the bedside table, a clock declared the time was a mere 8:30pm. Thad was sure it had to be two hours slow. He was already exhausted and ready to get some sleep. Beside the clock, his parents watched him solemnly, their uniformly gray hair the most obvious (but not the only) indication that they were probably closer in age to his classmates' grandparents than the other Sonora parents.

Thad turned his head to look at the photograph and wondered what they'd say if they were really here. Finish your essay and get some sleep, probably. Despite his guess, Thad made no move to resume his potions homework. He just kept looking at his parents and wished he could talk to them again. He missed them terribly and the formal portrait hadn't really captured any of the expressions he most wanted to see again.

Craving some kind of near-family-like presence in his everyday life at Sonora (Derry wasn't around enough to qualify, since his older cousin was in neither Aladren or the beginner level classes), Thaddeus spoke up, entirely out of the blue, and told Evan, "You can call me Thad."

Until this moment, they had been quietly doing their own things. Formal introductions had been made a few nights ago, when they'd both arrived in the room after Fawcett's HoH speech, and there had been other exchanges since then. All very curteous and polite, of course, but the encounters had lacked the easy familiarity that meant they were more than strangers forced to share the same space. Thad suspected that was mostly his own fault.

Looking away from his parents in favor of checking to see how his roommate was taking the offer of a nickname, Thad felt vaguely compelled to explain the invitation given that it had appeared with no warning. "We'll be living together for seven years and that's what my family calls me. We're practically family now." In truth, Thad was pretty sure they were distantly related, through the marriage of Wesley and Alicia, though he wasn't entirely sure how close the Culhanes and Brockerts were, just that his political lessons had claimed the families were linked.

"I'll go mad if I have to keep up my formal best even in the privacy of our room," he added confidentially. Madness or not, Thad wouldn't have mae the offer if Evan were a Carey or Preston Stratford. They seemed uptight enough that they would have taken offense or used the desire for a time to be himself against him somehow. He had not made this offer to Even on the first day because he hadn't yet taken a measure of the other boy. Now, though, Thad thought - hoped - Evan could be trusted to accept this as the offer of friendship that it was.

1 Thad Pierce First Year Boys' Dorm 213 Thad Pierce 1 5

Evan Brockert

November 22, 2011 10:51 AM

I can't think of a title. by Evan Brockert

So far, Evan rather liked Sonora. That wasn't all that surprising though. The Aladren was rather easy-going. However, classes were interesting and so were the people. Of course, people were more Nora's thing, in the sense of wanting to know what made them tick. Evan kind of thought this was insensitive and that his cousin often forgot about the human element. Not that she was like her grandfather, but Nora got so caught up in analyzing others that she forgot that they were people with feelings and whatnot.

Evan was more interested in getting to know others on a more personal level, making friends and stuff. He was also interested in going out exploring the Gardens. The first year wanted to look for items to use in his projects and finding bugs and butterflies to mount and add to his collection but had yet to make it out there.

At the moment,Evan was sitting on his bed, sticking pebbles together on a piece of cardboard with a strong adhesive. He had no real exact plan for them, just sort of a stick them together and see what emerged sort of thing, like everything the eleven year old did. The Aladren was not a planner, if he was, he wouldn't be an Aladren, he'd be a Crotalus.

He was currently making the pebbles into towers and trying to see how high he could stack them. He'd start with one and try to make it as tall as he could. It would just be one long tower of pebbles sticking out of a piece of cardboard. Evan would decide to do with the rest of the space later. Maybe he'd take rocks of different sizes and stack them from largest to smallest.

"You can call me Thad."

Evan looked up from his work. He'd been so concentrated on it that his roommate completely took him by surprise. "All right. You can call me Evan. There's not a lot you can do with a name like mine as far as nicknames." Some names were just like that. Like most of theirs, his and his siblings. Of course,he noticed for the first time, four out of the six-two-thirds-of them had names that were only four letters long;Adam, Nina, Hope and Evan.

He thought about what Thad said next. About being practically family. In a way, all purebloods were family due to connections and intermarriages. Evan had plenty of them here at school even without that more general way of thinking. He had two sisters, one second cousin, a first cousin once removed, and six third cousins here at school with him.

And, Evan realized for the first time, what Thad said was more accurate between than in most cases. Evan's cousin, Marshall's wife Harmony's half-sister Alicia was married to a Pierce and of course, she was married to a New Hampshire Pierce, because Alicia wouldn't dare connect herself with the ones from Boston or California from what Evan understood. He was pretty sure they were connected to Alicia in another way too, but this was the short simple way.

Still, that was pretty cool. Thad wanted to think of them as family. Evan wondered if his roommate felt that way about all the Aladrens or just him. Or just their yearmates. Or just the purebloods. Evan would rather not ask right now and spoil the moment though.

The first year nodded, giving his roommate a friendly smile. "Understandable." Formality was something Evan found highly overrated. It was one thing in party situations, or with those older than oneself but with a roommate or a classmate, it seemed ridiculous. Of course, he'd still keep it up with people he didn't know because he really didn't want to offend anyone.

11 Evan Brockert I can't think of a title. 212 Evan Brockert 0 5