John Umland
August 17, 2016 12:47 PM
Rolling out the welcome mat (4th/5th Year Boys' Dormitory). by John Umland
The laundry goblin who cleaned his room – or tried to, anyway – had never been partial to John for many reasons: his flat refusal to allow said goblin (a fellow called Obie or something that sounded like that, apparently) to put the room into a state conventionally regarded as tidy, the fact that he’d once, back in his first year, possibly caused the creature an existential crisis, and that one time with the dissection, the one where Obie had refused to collect the laundry for a solid week, all ranked prominently among them. John thought he had never seen Obie so affronted, though, as when he’d come in at one-thirty in the morning and found John wide awake and half the room completely clean while the other half was in a state of complete chaos.”Morning, Obie,” said John. “I’ve had to move the laundry. It’s – uh – “ He tried desperately to remember what he’d done with the laundry. He had always put it in a heap beside the dresser for Obie to collect, but everything was on its head today.
“John Umland! What is you doing?”
“I is making room for Donovan,” grumbled John, then he struck on a thought. The elves went everywhere. The elves knew everything. Obie was an elf. “You don’t ever happen to talk to him, do you? Come on, Obie – tell me something and – you can help me tidy some of this. And I promise, I won’t brew anything in here for a week.”
“Jax Donovan is a good boy,” said Obie morosely. “Not like you, John Umland. He is not confusing his dormitory with a dungeon.”
This had not been helpful enough for John to promise not to brew anything in his room for a week and he’d told Obie so, omitting the part where he had no idea if he was ever going to get to work again whether Obie snooped around and found out something more interesting for him or not. Joe would have thrown something at him if he’d tried to work in the same room as him, after all, and Joe was a Teppenpaw. Brotherly Prerogatives cancelled out some of the Teppenpaw-ness, of course, but still. There was a chance he was doomed to go slowly mad over the next two years, driven out of his wits by the degree of confinement he suspected was going to come with the New World Order. He could only hope Jax would either prove an unexpected kindred spirit (well, it had happened before; nobody he could think of offhand that he held in esteem was someone he had expected to hold in esteem when they'd met) or find even John's best behavior so disagreeable to live with that he would go away before John had some melodramatic interlude.
There was some hope of that. John was good at getting people to go away; it was, he thought, an innate talent, as sometimes it worked even on people he didn't deliberately set out to have it work on. For now, though, he was something resembling sane and there was another bed in his room. Studying it, John had a thought, which was why when Jax entered the room, his new roommate was standing barefoot on a bedside table.
“Hello,” said John, as brightly as he could manage. “Welcome.”
He let the tape measure he’d been using magic to extend across the ceiling snap back into its case and stepped from his table to his bed, ducking under the curtain rod and dropping into a sitting position with his legs folded up under him.
With the exception of leaving his small potted plants on their stand in front of the window more or less in the middle of the room, John had completely vacated half the room. He’d pushed his bed up against one wall and tied back the curtains on the wall-facing side so he could use the wall for storage space; there was only enough room for this year’s bird charts (both those generated by him and those he’d printed over the holidays, along with drawings and photographs he’d made of specimens and a number of pinned-up feathers), but the others were in a neat stack in the drawer of his bedside table, all in their proper order, until he could work out some arrangement with binders. His work station – an affair of odds and ends, prominently including branches gathered from around the Gardens, held together with Sticking Charms until it somewhat resembled a very fragile desk cluttered with beakers, small jars and boxes, mirrors, candles, Potions things, and a rather elderly, somewhat battered beginner's compound microscope he had bought off a friend who'd gotten an upgrade two summers ago - was jammed into the corner closest to the footboard of his bed; he knew he no doubt could have put his new roommate's mind more at ease had he acknowledged the inevitable, but he refused to give it up until he knew there was absolutely no way to avoid giving up doing any work here. His bed currently held him, his lapdesk, the things (minus a photograph of his family; that was now tucked safely into the ‘U’ section of the Latin half of his English-Latin dictionary, as he had gathered that such sentimentality was considered unmanly by some and he would rather not deal with it if Donovan was someone who thought that way) that normally covered the top of his bedside table, and a number of books, though not as many as usual; he had, after considerable angst, reluctantly lined most of the books he owned – a well-loved and heavily Spellotaped collection, for the most part – up on top of his trunk at the end of the bed so they could be borrowed without it being inordinately weird.
John had always thought of his dormitory as an extension of his brain; now, with everything crammed into a smaller space and his work station untidy because he hadn’t had time to sort that back out and his books mostly in one place, it resembled the real thing, period. He hoped he didn’t put his elbows in everything there was before the day was done.
“You can borrow my books when you want,” he said. Housekeeping was a much easier thing to discuss than…whatever it was people discussed when strangers moved in with them. He knew he ought to offer up the microscope too, but couldn't quite bring himself to do that until Jax asked; John had happily shown the Science Club his new toy when he'd gotten it and was happy to grant access to any regulars who wanted it, but Clark was the only person he'd given his blessing to borrow and use it at any time and without supervision. “If you need something and I'm reading, or if I start pacing and you want me to stop, just yell at me or throw something at me or something. Do you have strong feelings about…that side of the room, or sleep schedules, or anything?” he asked.
Most people did, he knew. This was going to be a complete disaster. The only good that could possibly come of this was John getting in a lot of extra Beater practice and it possibly becoming within the realm of reason that Jax would lend John his date for at most (John desperately hoped, if he did end up going to the Ball, that the rest of the school would come onto the floor before the end of the first song, allowing him to return whoever to her date and go get something to eat and find a corner where he and his book could pretend they weren't having one of those brief, gloomy spells they sometimes had where they came thisclose to almost wishing he could at least convincingly fake Being Like Folks better for non-practical reasons) the length of one song. As far as he was concerned, those potential benefits did not outweigh the costs of the venture, but unfortunately, this didn't matter. He had to do what was Right even when he wanted to do what was Wrong, and in this case, what he wanted to do and most of what he was likely to want to do in future was, more likely than not, all Wrong.
Emotions were irrelevant data. They were just chemicals, no different from physical urges, and because John was human, it was good for him to deny all of them at least occasionally and some of them more often than not. He knew this. He still wondered sometimes, though, in self-pitying moments he only rarely recognized as such, why, oh why, he couldn't find it just a little easier, or at least more consciously rewarding, to be good.
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John Umland
Rolling out the welcome mat (4th/5th Year Boys' Dormitory).
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