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 Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 10:41 am
Over the course of her life, Tate had grown very talented at waiting. Which didn't mean she actually appreciated the shortish line to talk to Mr. Gordon--doubtless people panicking about the entrance exams to Sovereign Heights, a problem that she distinctly lacked--it just meant she wasn't dancing from foot to foot like the girl who had gone in directly before her. Instead she had been standing next to his door, the latest volume of Skip Beat! in one hand and a DVD case in the other.
It wasn't that she was the anime club's first choice for teacher relations. They depended on her fairly heavily for talking to the club mentor, so she talked to the club mentor, and that was supposed to be where that sort of s**t ended. If she wanted to negotiate terms with teachers, she would have joined Student Council or never dropped the presidency of the club in the first place. But facts remained that the standing President thought Mr. Gordon had something against him, and so it was Tate who was sent out.
She closed her book and watched the last girl go, took her dear sweet time putting her book away. Then she steeled herself and knocked twice on the door, waiting a moment before opening it and peering in at Mr. Gordon. "Hi," she said, "Can I talk to you for a minute?"
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Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 11:08 am
Mr. Gordon glanced up and promptly died in the pink-and-lavender world of Robot Unicorn Attack. He looked used to it, just double-clicking twice to start a new game: which meant he'd probably been playing it nonstop for a while. Which meant he'd probably been playing it through all the rest of his student conferences. Which meant he would probably play it the whole time he was talking to Tate, unless she particularly demanded his attention.
Well, this was Mr. Gordon. None of this was surprising.
"S'what I'm here for," he said. "To help unfortunate merfolk like yourself. What's up, Tater Tot?"
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Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 11:49 am
True to form, she scowled at the nickname. Tate was nickname enough, wasn't it? She did not want to imagine what he might have come up with if she actually called herself Tatiana. She would not imagine it, and she forcibly steered herself away from that train of thought. It would be nothing so flattering as From Russia, With Love, she was sure.
"You do that theater thing," she said, entering the office and dropping her bag next to her. "The play?" It was kind of obvious that she wasn't about to ask about crew or casting opportunities, because there'd been flyers up around the school for two weeks. She kept staring at his laptop, distracted by the clacking of keys.
Whatever. She knew he ran theater, so she just had to get it over with. "The anime club would like to borrow the theater. We checked, and something theater-club related is going on almost every Friday. Is there any way that can change?" Her recent experiences in apartment rental had taught her she wasn't good at haggling. The anime club, she was pretty sure, was completely screwed.
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Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 3:54 pm
He was on his third "wish" in the game. Dolphins were flying by at the bottom of the screen. Tate's English teacher tapped Z to double-jump and motioned vaguely, with his free hand, to one of his office chairs. "Go ahead and have a seat," he said. On his desk next to him was a brown paper Starbucks bag with a half-eaten toffee bar sitting on top of it. Mr. Gordon was always snacking or eating lunch in his office: there was a rumored minifridge and microwave in the staff lounge, which would explain all the snacking, but sources were uncertain.
"The anime club?" he asked without looking up. "Didn't know there was an anime club at Meadowview. You know, back when I was in school," Mr. Gordon dashed through an obstacle and double-jumped to the next cliff, "no one at my high school watched anime, and the anime club at college screened Gundam Wing subs. Lower on the nerd pecking order than us, even. Would've stuffed them into figurative lockers if we had lockers." He smiled faintly. "So who's in your little anime club, T-Bird?"
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Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2010 9:41 pm
Tate dropped her bag, wincing at the crackling noise the new canvas made. Would that she had encountered the giant centipede in June; then she would have just thrown her hands in the air and declared the backpack a lost cause. As it was, she still had three textbooks to transport, so. She sat down, straight-backed and uncomfortable-looking. Tate tended to avoid offices if she could.
Her smile was a little thin. Couldn't he ever give a straight 'yes' or 'no'? "I'm too tall to fit into the lockers here," and she was, kind of gangly and storklike. Presumably she would grow into her height, if she didn't just get even taller. Like a weed. She made a face at the question as to numbers.
"A bunch of freshmen, I don't know their names." After Giselle had, um, vanished, she had given up on the anime club for a while. "Ignacio something-whatever." She set her hands on her knees, DVD case still in hand.
After shrugging, she elaborated: "The president of the club wants to attract people who aren't freshmen and don't think Naruto is the best thing to ever happen to Japanese animation."
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Posted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 2:04 pm
"But Naruto is the best thing to happen to Japanese animation, niichan." Hold on to the niiiight, there will be noooo shaaaame. "Wai wai neko-chan. Sugoi. Yamete. Sayonara. Gomennasai. Okonomiyaki. Ne ne, Masamune."
Tate really shouldn't've expected to escape this with the anime club's dignity intact.
"All right, Tatiana," said Mr. Gordon suddenly, dashing through an iridescent block of rock and avoiding a short wall which would've sent his robot unicorn head crashing lifeless to the ground. "Here's the thing. The semester extracurric schedule's already set in place, and the po-po don't like changes to when we say we're going to do something. Neither do the parental units, for that matter, when they're juggling their kids' theater and swimming and violin and Odyssey of the Mind and all that jazz. As it stands I could tell you to go take your chances with the film club," he closed Robot Unicorn Attack and opened an Outlook calendar, "which, if memory serves me correct, serves essentially the same purpose as your a-ni-me curubbu. Which is screening student-chosen media in the auditorium for discussion."
Mr. Gordon checked his watch. "And as memory serves, none of y'all ever completed all the registration for Anime Club as an official school organization, either. So you want to convince me of why exactly you don't deserve to get shoved in with the glut of French indie films like I'm pretty sure the rules rightly set out?" He opened up Robot Unicorn Attack again. "Use the magic word." The loading screen popped up again. "Not just the magic word, mind you. Ain't that magical."
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Posted: Wed May 05, 2010 2:56 pm
Impatient, she leaned forward, hands on her knees, and brushed her ponytail out of the way. It sounded more like her English teacher was reading off the contents of some half-retarded fangirl's post than actually listening to her. Still, she waited it out (even if you could completely tell she was working her way slowly towards pissed off; her jaw was clenched and the grinding of her teeth might have been audible). Naruto was an abomination that should have ended two hundred chapters ago, and the manga was not much better. At least the amount of talking he was doing gave her time to talk herself down from doing something she would regret (like shoving his computer off the desk).
She took a deep breath. "In my freshman and sophomore years, I completed registration. I won't speak for years since then." So it wasn't that it had never ever been registered, it just meant the idiot in charge was stupider than she'd assumed. Which, really, was about as much as she could say against the very valid point the teacher was making. She tapped her fingernails against her kneecaps for a moment, not seeming quite so pissed as thoughtful.
"There are days when you'd want to make sure costumes and sets fit, right?" Now would have been a good time to know something, anything, about the functioning of Meadowview's theater program. "And the sewing room is across the school. It would be much more economical--" word choice she thought Giselle would have approved of "--energy- and time-wise, to have one day devoted to ensuring all the costumes fit. Right?"
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Posted: Thu May 13, 2010 6:40 pm
He'd gone back to the adventures of himself, a robot unicorn, and Erasure, which only made it all the more tempting to push his laptop off the desk. He'd probably catch it, though. Jerk had some of the best reflexes for catching things outside the school baseball team, once discovered when an overexcited Jenny Prideux had accidentally knocked his coffee cup off his desk with the corner of her Lisa Frank binder and he'd caught it in the crook of his arm before it splashed more than a quarter of its contents onto the floor and his button-down. (Don't sweat it, Jenny-V, that carpet's fug.) So laptop-shoving would be be thoroughly unsatisfying and get her in just as much trouble.
The whole thing was all the more dignity-assaulting that Mr. Gordon wasn't always like this; he had a reputation for being crystal-clear and snappily helpful to most of the students. He cleared away administrative paperwork with a wave of his hand when he felt like it. Clearly he didn't feel like it. Clearly she, Tate Konstantin, had done something to offend him, Ray Gordon, and he was underlining it in red marker now.
"That doesn't sound like the magic word," he said, and raised his eyebrows with his mouth to one side as if to say, oh well.
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