Thad Pierce
April 05, 2012 2:19 PM
People Watching by Thad Pierce
Thad had gotten over the worst of his summer's dearth of good company. He had spoken at length with Derry on the wagon, and feasted with the Aladrens, and finally reconnected with Evan and their Sonora home away from home last night. Today, he had attended a full compliment of classes as well, meeting new first years and greeting returned second years, but he still hadn't quite shaken his irrational fear that if he headed back up to the solitude of his room before he knew that Evan would be there to meet him, that somehow the whole school population would vanish and leave him completely alone again.It was, of course, completely ridiculous, and he had half a mind to go back upstairs just to prove it false, but the tiny part of his brain that believed it was reluctant to provide fate the opportunity.
Deciding it wouldn't actually harm him any -as long as he didn't actually admit his fear to anybody- to spend a little time in the Commons before heading up, he settled into one of the plush blue chairs. They seemed specifically designed to curling up in with a good book (and since this was Aladren, maybe they were) and he did just that. It was still too early in the year to have much homework, and he had started The Remarkable Life of Fungus over the summer and he was almost done with it.
He wasn't entirely sold on the title's premise that fungi had remarkable lives, but it was a more engrossing page-turner than he had originally thought when his father had recommended it as a good read.
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Alicia Bauer
May 03, 2012 5:46 PM
Toadstool Observing. by Alicia Bauer
By the end of the summer, Alicia thought she had been on the very verge of sinking into a state of catatonic despair from which she would never rise again. Her family had always inspired her to feel more frustration and annoyance and even flat-out anger than anything else, and she had accepted furious resentment and shame as her basic feelings toward her sisters when they went off to school after experiencing it since birth, but never before had she had to endure them while remembering that she had once been somewhere else, somewhere she could spend an entire day without wanting to stab anyone to death. If not for her lessons and letters that reminded her that the summer had to end eventually, she thought she would have completely lost her mind before she got back to Sonora.A full day here had not been enough to completely cure her, but she was, after her first day of classes, already starting to feel much better. A glance at the other girls’ new wardrobes (or lack thereof) had assured her that she was still at least in the running for Most Stylish Girl, she had a sharp new haircut and shoes with heels that did something for how short she was, and she had yet to see evidence that she had somehow lost all that she’d worked to gain on the social scene last year. She could pick right up where she’d left off with having a sometimes almost reasonable life.
Once classes were over, she went upstairs to freshen up, then came back down to the common room, where she saw Thad looking very engrossed in a book. Naturally, she went over to see what book it was, and if it was really that interesting. This was, she had decided, what friends did in Aladren; it was one of the things that made her feel a moment of profound gratitude to be in her House whenever she thought of it. In Crotalus, she would have been in a possibly better social milieu (though that was more and more debatable, with the people who were in Aladren), but she would have had to play a much different game, and one that she didn’t think would have allowed such self-indulgent moments as part of its official program.
When she was close enough to see the cover, though, she broke with the Aladren program, too, with a surprised laugh. “The Remarkable Life of Fungus,” she read aloud from the outside of it, just to confirm what it said for herself, taking the chair next to her friend’s and crossing one knee over the other as she got comfortable, which wasn’t hard in these chairs. “I might have to not go read any book I see you reading for once.” Alicia had read herbology books before, it was important information to know, but there was just something about the title The Remarkable Life of Fungus which was somehow off-putting, at least to her.
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