Jane Carey
September 03, 2012 12:59 PM
We're Head students. So now what? by Jane Carey
The morning after the Opening Feast was one of those occasions which always gave her a jolt, when she woke up in a much more elaborate bed than the one she had at home, surrounded by a color she didn’t especially like, and didn’t know where she was for a moment. Jane had never liked that, but it seemed a bit less offensive than normal, now that it was the last time she’d ever have that exact experience, anyway. The knowledge that she was a seventh year now was making her feel strangely sentimental about the littlest things at Sonora, even though she knew it was ridiculous anyway and especially silly this early in the year. She still had all but a full year here. There was no reason to start wondering if she’d miss it once she was gone just yet, especially when, overall, she thought that if she did miss it, it wouldn’t be very much. The only consistently good memories she had here were in the painting room, and she was sure she could find a room somewhere in whatever the Smythes considered an appropriate home to make into something very like that.She had found, since she was betrothed, that she enjoyed thinking of how she’d decorate her home once she was married in general, but that was even further in the future than graduation was. Far more immediate were the privileges and responsibilities of being Head Girl. With that thought in mind, Jane carefully selected her clothes for the day, aiming to look both pretty and like someone to be taken seriously, and went down to the Cascade Hall to search for the Head Boy.
Jane had expected Samantha Hamilton, who had been in the previous Head Girl’s confidence, to receive the badge fastened to her outfit now, and she was guessing Miss Bauer had, too, since Jane didn’t think they had ever had much of a conversation in six years of overlap at the school. As a result, Jane didn’t think she really knew everything there was to know about being Head Girl – what she should really be doing, how she should do it, with whom she should do it, the sorts of things they just didn’t put in the letter. As far as she was concerned, then, she had some leeway to do things her way. Talking to Mr. Bauer might reveal some information about these things – he was Rachel’s cousin, somehow or the other, though the way they resembled each other as little as she and Edmond did made Jane suspect that the relationship wasn't close – but she was really just curious to see what his opinions were, what he had in mind for their seventh year. They had been in school together six years, but she didn’t really know Sam Bauer at all. They had just always run with different crowds – hers mostly graduated, which was why it had been such a surprise to her to be elected.
Once she spotted him, she went over to where he was with a polite smile. “Good morning,” she said. “Do you have time to talk for a few minutes?”
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Jane Carey
We're Head students. So now what?
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Jane Carey
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Sam Bauer
September 03, 2012 9:48 PM
Er...party? by Sam Bauer
On the morning of his first full day as Head Boy, Sam had overslept. After that, he had discovered that his mother had packed his trunk again after he thought he was finished with it, and so he had been compelled to spend a full ten minutes digging through the businessy-looking clothes she had stacked on top in a not-quite-discreet attempt to encourage him to wear them to find his jeans and t-shirts. Once that mission had been completed satisfactorily, he had left the dislodged khakis and button-down shirts and one lonely, freakish pair of dress pants where they had landed on his bed and, locating his sneakers, went downstairs in search of breakfast.It was, he thought, going to be a pretty good year.
In the Hall, he loaded his plate with waffles, which he began to smother immediately in syrup and then doled out a healthy amount of applesauce and raspberry jam onto before cutting into. It was a big day, the first day of seventh-year classes; he was going to need lots of sugar to get ready for it. That would have been true even if he hadn’t been feeling groggy already, but since he was, it was extra-true. Couldn’t get to those duties without a healthy amount of blood sugar to tide him over until lunch, and he thought this would just about hit the spot.
He saw, during a glance up from his plate, Jane Carey walking toward his table, but agreeably failed to register this information as anything worth remembering, as plenty of people walked around the hall for all manner of reasons, and she probably had family in Crotalus, anyway. Didn’t she everywhere? The Careys were like little points on a gigantic, huge spiderweb that spanned the whole school, sticking their noses everywhere, watching everybody’s business, which was why it was good to be someone with nothing to interest them about him. Or so he thought, anyway, until another glance up revealed Jane in front of him.
“Uh, sure,” he said, once he processed her request, which he thought it was not strange that he was surprised by. He was Head Boy, she was Head Girl, but all he knew about her was that she was a Carey, his cousin had been mad when she won last year, she was one of those girls who already knew who she was marrying, and that he really thought that, having three badges, he ought to feel a bit shinier next to her two no matter how each of them was dressed this fine September morning. “What’s up?” he asked, since he was pretty sure there was no urgent Headly business that he was supposed to have been up at two in the morning helping her with that she’d want to lay into him about yet. It had been the first night back. Nothing had had time to happen around the school yet, but he really doubted she cared about his summer, so he was confused about what she was doing here.
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Sam Bauer
Er...party?
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Sam Bauer
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Jane
September 07, 2012 5:58 PM
Tea or birthday? by Jane
“The ceiling,” Jane replied when Sam asked her what was up – she had always found that saying funny; technically, she guessed her thoughts were ‘up,’ since they were in her head, which was currently oriented toward the ‘up’ of the space she was, but what if she’d been, say, lying upside-down or something? Not that she was likely to ever speak to Sam like that, but she might to Kirstenna – and then laughed, a little embarrassed, when she realized what she had said. “Sorry – it’s a family in-joke.”She knew Edmond would find it amusing, anyway. They didn’t have as much in common as they once had – she couldn’t say for sure what he would think or feel about any given situation, sometimes the things he said or did now almost made her feel like she was interacting with a stranger, the same way some of her own thoughts did – but they still had nearly the same sense of humor. She sometimes thought in what she suspected were rather dark jokes about things that she knew he couldn’t begin to see that way, but by and large, they still did. That happened when they were raised all but identically from the time he was six and she was almost four, almost always sharing exactly the same experiences until he went to school….
Jane decided not to think about that. She missed her brother, but that was life. She would see him even less than she did now when she got married, especially if he stayed in Asia for a time after that, so she had to just get used to it. She should have already.
“I thought we should talk about this year,” she continued. “Is there anything you especially think we should do, or you want to see happen?”
She had a few ideas of her own, mostly vague, but she knew she needed to hear what Sam was thinking first, so she didn’t have the fun of finding out that they wanted things which were completely incompatible when it was too late to work through it or around it or over it or under it or whatever. Jane had never really been in a situation like that, but she understood from what she had read over the summer in particular that she didn’t want to be, either. It would just be a complete mess, something much better avoided.
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Jane
Tea or birthday?
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Jane
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Sam
September 13, 2012 11:50 PM
Can I take a third option? by Sam
Dumb family in-jokes were something that Sam understood – the number he and his mother had concerning Healer Herb was probably excessive – so he nodded when Jane explained her strange comment. “Yeah,” he said, attempting a smile to be nice. Jane Carey having conversations seemed strange to him somehow, but he guessed even the most strictly brought up purebloods had to have a drop or two of human in there somewhere, and she had been in school with the commoners for six years. Since she wasn’t, from what he’d gathered, the completely indecent sort, he guessed some skills of the populace must have rubbed off on her. “What do you want to talk about, is that better?”Hearing what was up, in the end, made him wonder if he might have done better to derail the conversation into family in-jokes. Jane sounded like she actually meant to take the ideas that they were the elected representatives of their fellow students and actual authority figures, ideas Sam had always viewed as subject to interpretation at best and kind of funny at worst. That meant she might try to bully him into helping her along with stuff, since he doubted she’d bring it up at all if she was as planless as he was. That was not something Sam had anticipated.
For a few seconds, he contemplated actually telling her what he would really like to see happen, but considered that the Teppenpaw traits didn’t change the fact that she was a Carey. ‘Friendly cooperation’ didn’t necessarily equal a good thing; the complainer could just get cursed in the back, putting him in the hospital wing long enough that the people who cooperated in a friendly way could get whatever it was they wanted done without him getting in the way. Sam knew this was probably overly cynical of him and had something to do with him being in a House that had a snake for a mascot (even if, as far as snake mascots went, a rattler wasn’t too bad; at least they gave some warning before killing someone, rather than going wholly along with the ‘snake in the grass’ idea, maybe), but still. The idea of reforming society was not one to just throw out to someone neck-deep in the system, who he didn’t know, over breakfast; honestly, sometimes he didn’t know if there was a way to do it at all, considering that most of the money in the country was held by the purebloods and they had no reason to want to use it to help work toward a future where they were no longer a perceived elite with a dangerous image.
“World peace,” he said. “And passing RATS, and the Quidditch Cup. Though honestly, I’ll settle for the RATS.”
Those, after all, were what he needed, what his mother would not allow him to be without. His mom had made her choices, and she said she didn’t regret them, but he’d been hearing since he was little about how he had to do better for himself than she did – sometimes jokingly, with remarks about how someone would have to take care of her as an old woman, sometimes dead seriously, but continuously. He thought he might have felt like a hypocrite if their starting places hadn’t been so different, but since they definitely did not and never had, he found it blackly humourous that in a way, it was the exact same thing that Aunt Emily had fed to his messed-up cousins almost from the day she had left his uncle for her pretty rich Californian toy boy.
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Sam
Can I take a third option?
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Jane
September 14, 2012 9:46 PM
If you run fast enough by Jane
Jane decided to assume that the remark about world peace was a joke, though she didn’t see what about the subject was funny. She couldn’t even imagine a world without any conflict; there were little patches of calm, like her home had been, once, but in general, well, she thought most people wouldn’t be able to handle a peaceful world. Her family had only obtained it through reading, and she knew most people didn’t enjoy the kind of structured, book-centered life they had led when she was small.“I see,” she said, smiling pleasantly, after the slightest pause. “Well, I don’t think I can really help you with any of those.” Even if she could have predicted the questions, the Hall would be so charmed against cheaters on RATS day that she couldn’t have communicated answers to him, even if she wanted to, and Jane knew almost nothing about Quidditch. She hadn’t been to a game since the first half of her third year, and she had spent most of the games she attended before that thanking Merlin that her brother was a Beater, not one of the people getting hurt. Even when it was just a game, and before she’d ever had a reason to think that he might somehow get hurt for real, Jane had not liked the thought of anything happening to her brother.
“Well, it did seem like something I should at least see about,” she added abruptly, deciding she was done here. “Let me know if you do think of anything. Would you be in favor of co-hosting a picnic for the prefects? We need to make the new ones feel welcome, I think.” Plus, groups had leaders, and this was the one time in her life she might get to have minions who weren’t house-elves. Jane really hoped she got to enjoy it at least a little in addition to gaining useful skills in organization and management, things she would definitely be able to apply to her future. She planned to establish herself very firmly as Jane Smythe in as little time as possible, and that was going to take a level of skill in areas her careful education hadn’t really touched on as much as it might have if her parents had been different people, ones further up in the ranks, or at least ones without a highly kidnappable son to worry about.
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Jane
If you run fast enough
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Sam
September 19, 2012 5:34 PM
*Runs very, very fast* by Sam
Somehow, Sam found himself entertaining the radical and no doubt completely false notion that the Head Girl had not been terribly impressed with how he’d answered her question. His heart broke at the very thought, really – that the good, nay, the great Jane Carey though him dim and immature due to a confusion of cultural references and, very possibly, a lack of any sense of humor on her part – but he knew he was just going to have to go on somehow if that was the case, and get by as well as he could.He blinked in surprise when she proposed that they co-host an event, though. He wouldn’t have thought that she’d want to be seen with him any time she could avoid it – couldn’t have those future in-laws with Sonora Board connections seeing her associate with illegitimate half-bloods – or with half the other prefects, for that matter. Sam had noticed, during this year’s roll call, that a certain kind of family seemed to have been all but excluded from the ranks, and that as long as the universe outside and its implications were completely ignored, the school’s most prominent family at the moment might very well be…well, his, actually.
It wouldn’t last, of course. He had gotten Head Boy and prefect by luck after Rachel had gotten them through sheer ambition and determination, all of which were traits he didn’t really think Kate possessed in useful enough quantities to beat out Bennett, much less the annoyingly perfect and very well-connected Sara Raines. Memories faded fast in a school, too, so if Alicia ever saw the top, she’d have to either politic or flirt her own way there. But for now, he was the Head Boy, right after his cousin was Head Girl, and he and his other cousin were both prefects, so he was going to enjoy the feeling of prominence while it lasted.
“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “Got to teach the new ones about our glorious traditions sometime, right?” He immediately regretted that remark, worrying that Jane might want him to help her come up with some, since he was pretty sure they didn’t actually have any, but oh, well. “Say – what are your plans for this year, anyway?” he asked, giving into curiosity despite the feeling that it was shooting himself in the foot and deciding that turnabout was fair play and he had the right after he’d been caught off-guard like that. Presumably, she had an answer.
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Sam
*Runs very, very fast*
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Jane
September 19, 2012 7:41 PM
Bye! by Jane
Jane smiled, pleased, when Sam went along with her idea. She hadn’t been sure that he would. It was a good idea, of course, so there was no reason in the world why he shouldn’t have, but Jane wasn’t used to proposing ideas. That wasn’t really the place of a girl in her household – or, she thought fairly, reflecting on her brother, just of a child in her parents’ house. She and Edmond were both over seventeen now, they were legally adults, but while they were under their father’s roof, they were his children, and were aware of that. The greatest responsibility they could openly lay claim to was writing lists of books they wanted to read during the summer, and then those had to be approved.Not openly…well, that was their business, and if Father knew and disapproved, then he wasn’t being very clear about his objections, so Jane thought they could continue on. As they would anyway – Edmond had sworn to her that he would take her place, and she trusted him to make good on that, whether Father liked it or not – but it was all easier and more pleasant, if pleasantness could be attributed to the situation at all, if there were no objections.
She laughed at the remark about the glorious traditions of the prefects. “Something like that,” she said agreeably, and started to rise, only to pause when Sam asked her about her ambitions for the year. She smiled pleasantly, utilizing the composed mask of the Teppenpaw prefect without difficulty.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe just to have an office.” She shook her head sadly. “I have to admit, I got very attached to the idea when we didn’t know who Professor Brockert’s replacement would be…I’d already started redecorating our Head of House office in my mind when we got back and heard that Medic Bailey was going to step in.”
Jane said it all lightly, but it was the truth. As unlikely as she’d known the idea was, she had rather liked thinking of essentially taking over as the Teppenpaw Head of House for a year. Certainly she would have found the experience more profitable than she ever intended to find any other experiences she had or things she learned this year. It was almost ridiculous, she had never thought of herself as power-hungry or overly invested in the trappings of status – or, really, in status itself – but the notion of having an office, of having people approach her, had grown in her mind over the summer, until she had really been just a little disappointed to have one of the staff take over.
However, that book was closed, and Sam wasn’t planning on trying to organize the students, so she was content. She could worry about an office and whether or not she wanted to try rallying anyone for anything later. “Excuse me,” she said politely, with another smile, and then went to go review some notes from last year before her first class.
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Jane
Bye!
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