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 Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 7:18 pm
You could always tell what day of the week it was by the smell in the lunch room. As many vast and varied options as the cafeteria provided to accommodate the vast and varied dietary requirements of the many students and employees of the Liberty Center, Friday was pizza day.
There was posted a schedule of what the specials were for any given day of the month and Friday by popular demand was always pizza day. You could get pizza any other day of the week, but on Friday it was a whole occasion and the pizza was fresh-baked and there was plenty of it and most everyone grabbed a slice.
Not Ylaine, though. She walked into the lunchroom as she always did and picked a small table in the far corner to eat her lunch, which she had brought with her, as she did every day, in three stacked plastic Tupperware containers. They were microwavable, but since the school did not provide students a microwave, it was meal eaten at room temperature.
Taking care not to make any friendly eye contact with anyone, Ylaine patted down her dress, laid out her lace napkin across her lap, and prepared to eat her lunch alone as usual.
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Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 7:30 pm
It was Friday, and it was pizza day, and to top it all off, it was raining. As a result, many of the students who usually ate their lunches outside were eating their lunches inside, and among this number was Orli Cooper. Orli usually brought her lunch from home, because it was free and she preferred to spend what pocket money she got on things like model kits and holonet news subscriptions, but this morning there simply hadn't been time to make a sandwich or to grab some leftovers.
Which was why she had, with much grumbling and frustration, turned some of her pocket money into lunch money and spent that on a slice of cheese pizza and a can of cola.
Turning away from the line, she carefully picked her way through the lunch room. The unfamiliar territory of cliques and children she only half-recognized, combined with the fact that she was a good six inches shorter than the next shortest of her classmates, made this a rather dangerous endeavor. She didn't know any of the lunch table assignments, and most of them were full, anyway, so when she finally found one with only a single occupant, it came as a relief.
"Can I sit here?" she asked the girl who was already present, and moved to put down her tray regardless of the answer.
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Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 11:35 am
The answer was, of course, "No," but it was too late. Ylaine put her hands on her lap and narrowed her eyes at Orli. Even if she did not have the right to claim a whole four-top table to herself, it had been her intention. She sat there, glaring, hoping Orli Cooper would take a hint and go.
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Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 2:45 pm
Orli sat down and shrugged apologetically. "Everywhere else is full," she explained, "So I guess we're stuck with each other."
She blotted the top of her pizza with a napkin, which was something she'd seen her mother do on occasion, and popped the lid off her cola. "Do we have any classes together?" she asked. The girl looked to be about her age, but she didn't think they were ever occupants of the same room at once.
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 6:52 pm
It seemed this fate was an unavoidable one. Ylaine brought her hands back up and resumed opening the first of her Tupperware pieces. It was a tabouli salad with extra tomato, the way Ylaine had discovered she liked it after trying several variations. "I am in level three," she said, with the patience of someone explaining a concept to a perceived metal inferior. Given that Ylaine considered all the children at school to be her inferiors, and a few of the teachers, this was not a personal insult towards Orli.
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 7:05 pm
"I thought only teenagers were in level three," said Orli. It wasn't an objection, just an observation. She wasn't accusing Ylaine of lying, she was just, well, noticing. Orli tended to do things like that.
"You've got to be some kind of super-genius," she added, and then turned her focus back to her food. Clearly the other girl didn't want to talk, and that suited Orli fine. Orli wasn't a particularly talkative person, either. She took a few bites of pizza, and then reached into her bag and pulled out a thick book with the words 'INTRO TO STELLAR NAVIGATION' stamped on the side. She propped it open on the table and appeared to forget the other girl was there. Which probably suited the other girl just fine.
At that moment, Fish made his way slowly across the lunch room, trying to balance his tray with the aide of a thoroughly useless left arm. He had not actually eaten lunch in the cafeteria since beginning school, and was now at a loss for where to sit.
He spotted a familiar sparkly-haired girl and made his way towards the table where Orli sat with an unfamiliar dark-haired girl.
"Hi, Orli," he said. Orli looked briefly up from her book to nod to him in greeting. "Who's your friend?"
Orli blinked and said, "I don't really know."
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 7:24 pm
"She is no friend of mine," said Ylaine in a voice familiar to Fish despite the change in wigs since their last encounter. She did not dignify the lunacy of Orli's supposition of "super-genius" with a reply. She was no genius and did not pretend to be, as she was aware of only two supposed super-geniuses at the school, one of whom was clearly an over-indulged narcissist who did not deserve such a classification and the other being enrolled in "age-appropriate" classes. Ylaine did not belong grouped with either of them. She was an adult, nothing more. And certainly nothing less despite the forces that seemed so desperate to claim otherwise.
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 7:56 pm
Fish blinked at the girl, who it suddenly dawned on him he actually did know, despite the change in appearance. "Ylaine?" he asked. He looked at Orli. "You guys know each other?" He looked back at Ylaine, narrowed his eyes, and in a textbook case of stating the obvious declared, "Your hair's different today."
"We don't know each other," corrected Orli, not looking up from her book. "I'm sitting here because everywhere else is full," she explained impatiently, turning the page and beginning a chapter on red-shift/blue-shift phenomena.
"I didn't even know her name until you said it just now," she continued, sighing. Fish was fun in that dumb puppy sort of way, but he definitely had a tendency to get ahead of himself.
She looked over at Ylaine. "But clearly you two have met," she said.
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Posted: Sat May 23, 2009 1:15 pm
"Hmf," was all Ylaine said, daintily picking at her tabouli, before she exploded into, "You have dark hair, your eyes are blue, today is Friday, there are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen in a molecule of water, the capitol of the state of Virginia is Richmond, the war of 1812 began in 1812, I'm eating lunch, oh I'm sorry, was this not the point in the conversation when we all began to state things which are ridiculously and utterly obvious!?"
"Hi, Orli!" said an entirely different and more cheerful voice. Grayson Niela, resident penguin boy, stepped up to the table with his lunch tray in hand and a big smile on his face and asked, "Can I sit here or is the last seat taken?"
There were no words to express Ylaine's anger, so she bit down on a forkful of tabouli so hard it hurt her teeth.
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Posted: Sat May 23, 2009 2:16 pm
Orli chose not to reply to Ylaine's outburst, and was happily distracted by the newly-arrived Grayson. "Hi!" she exclaimed, and motioned for him to sit in the empty chair next to her. "I don't think it is," she added, almost an afterthought. "Though Ylaine here doesn't seem too happy that we've usurped her table."
She'd found the word 'usurped' in a history textbook chapter about the ancient Gambino-Von Helson rivalry, and it was one of her favorite phrases this week.
She motioned to the boy next to her. "Have you guys met?" she asked. "This is Fish. He's kinda rad. Fish, he's Grayson. He's kinda rad, too."
Rad, on the other hand, she had overheard one of the older students using, and it had stuck.
Fish gave the newly-arrived older boy a slight wave, just as grateful as Orli for the interruption. "Hi," he said, and fell silent again, trying to avoid Ylaine's angry gaze. He looked down at the table, and then gradually tried working up to eye contact with Grayson. He got as far as noticing that the other boy also had webbed hands, though that was where the similarities ended.
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 2:46 am
"Hi, Fish, it's very nice to meet you!" bubbled Grayson, tactfully not mentioning the fact that fish was his favorite food to eat, because that might be awkward. Grayson dropped his lunch tray in the open spot and sat down. He had only taken one slice of pizza; as usual he had a brown paper lunch bag with him, sitting proudly in the middle of his tray and marked with the funny symbols of the Tinatian language. "What does rad mean?"
Ylaine couldn't help herself. It was like a switch being turned on in her head that she was powerless to dismantle. "Rad. Abbreviation for the word radical, main entry 'fabulous,' defined as amazing or wonderful." She hated herself for responding like that, but the truth was when people asked her questions, the information sometimes just demanded to be let out. She clenched her jaw tightly shut and glared at her food, trying to block out everyone else and refusing to admit that she was more angry at herself than she was them.
"Thank you!" said Grayson, happy, and continued to Fish, "Are you in level one?" He didn't think they had any classes together, but sometimes it was hard to be sure. The school was pretty big, and getting bigger all the time!
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Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 8:50 pm
"Huh," nodded Orli to Ylaine. "I kinda like that!" she said, and then, for emphasis, "Rad."
She took a bite out of her pizza to keep herself from saying anything else. It would have certainly been easy to say something snide to Ylaine, but she wasn't sure if now was the place, or if the other girl had done anything to deserve it. Well, besides being an utter know-it-all.
"Yeah," nodded Fish. "I just started a few days ago, and, uh..."
He held up his cast-covered arm in demonstration.
"I already broke myself," he said sheepishly. "You and Orli are both in level two?" he added. He figured they were. At least, he knew Orli was, and Orli seemed to know Grayson.
As for Ylaine, it was easiest just to ignore her.
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