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 Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 9:04 am
The handed down books were neatly stacked on the table, Arian making a slight attempt to sort them – which pretty much translated into the bigger thicker books being stacked into one set of piles and the smaller books being given a pile of their own.
Arian then grabbed his rucksack and fished around in it for a few moments before withdrawing a simple grey pencil case with a beaded frog-charm hanging off the zip and an A4 notepad with a somewhat battered cover covered in doodles of different pendants (it had been the nearest piece of paper available at the time) and flipped through to a set of slightly messy, if still readable notes. “That’s a good idea” the notepad was extended to Gigi. “Here’s the list of the subject areas I’ve been given.”
The afternoon was starting to look up. Firstly Arian met someone who was also co-incidentally going to the same school as him - which meant that he'd at least recognise someone when he started back at Meadowview properly after the summer. Secondly Gigi was nice enough to help him with figuring out American History. If the rest of the summer went like this - maybe catch-up classes wouldn’t be so bad after all.
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Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 7:27 am
Gigi smiled at the neatly ordered books and reached over to jiggle the little froggy charm on Arian's pencilcase as she slid into the second chair. Too cute. Accepting Arian's notebook, she pulled out her own, matching up topics. This was good. She'd done a fair bit of the stuff on his list - maybe half - and most of it this year. He was probably going to be the year above her, she guessed, but that was okay, she could still help.
She opened the first book on the table between them and got started, pausing every so often to jot down a reference for her own project.
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Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2011 4:24 pm
A couple of highlighters, yellow and green (the blue and purple ones had been discarded as too dark) were fished out of Arian’s pencil case and as Gigi matched topics, Arian used first the yellow and then (when the ink in the yellow highlighter ran out) the green to highlight the ones in his notes that matched.
It was relatively easy for Arian to fall into a pattern of looking through books, every now and then jotting the odd note down for future reference and his original notes gradually went from slightly messy to very messy not helped by the fact that Arian’s approach to note-taking was to jot down words wherever he could fit them and then use arrows drawn in red ink to link them to the topics.
Eventually though, Arian copied down one last title of the history book in his hand before pushing the book back towards the middle of the table. “I think I’m done for today” he admitted. “How about you Gigi?” It was hard for Arian to tell quite how much time had passed, but it had been enough that he’d managed to at least get some notes on most of his topics – or at least it felt that way.
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Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 3:42 am
Gigi's notes, by contrast, ran in neat lines under her pre-written headings, trailing across several pages. The book titles lined the bottom half of one page. This was biggest bibliography she'd ever had, the teacher would have to be impressed. Her circles and arrows would appear later, when she got ready to type everything up.
She looked up when Arian closed his book, a little startled. She wasn't the best timekeeper either, and library time was especially fluid. Hemmed in by shelves, it was anybody’s guess what the outside time was.
She flipped through the last few pages of her book, and finding nothing else to add, snapped it shut. "Yeah, I think so too.” She sighed and stretched her arms out over their workspace. "We did good. I’m sure you’ll ace your tests.” No, she couldn’t remember the term he’d used earlier.
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Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 12:42 pm
“Yes we did. Your help made going through the topics much easier” Arian smiled as he carefully stowed his notepad away in his rucksack. “Thank you for your help – to be honest I was getting pretty lost on my own.” Left to his own devices he probably wouldn’t have managed to get half as much done.
In response to Gigi’s comment about acing his tests Arian admitted “I hope I do well.” After it would make sitting his GCSEs pretty pointless if he ended up bombing the exams. Arian was pretty confident that he’d do well in both D & T and Art and Design – he’d done well in the Mock exams and they were his favourite subjects. Maths on the other hand he was dreading – Maths was easily his worst subject.
Moving onto making a start on carefully stacking the books, Arian added “I hope you do well in your summer studying too and thank you again for your help. Maybe we’ll see each other around school.”
Arian still wasn’t sure how classes worked over here, but it was nice to think that when he did formally start – that somewhere amongst all the new faces there would be at least one that he’d met before.
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Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2011 6:25 am
Gigi waved away the thanks, crumpling her neat notes as she shoved them into her own bag, careless now that the task they represented was complete. The actual finished assignment would need to be typed, with coloured borders and fancy font headings. Stage two was the typing up, stage three the prettifying. At age fifteen, prettification was still a vital part of the homework process. She was mostly past flowers in the margins, though.
She smiled at Arian, shrugging her shoulders as she helped him transfer the books back to the shelves. "I didn’t do much, really! But it’s so much less dull with someone else to study with. Especially history, right? Too many years to memorise." Her face contorted into an expression she believed matched the internet’s XP smiley, poking out her tongue and scrunching up her eyes for a moment, oblivious to how silly this actually looked. "Thanks for letting me join you!”
With the summer still ahead of them, Gigi was already excited about the new school year ahead. She would have to make plans. “I hope so! I’ll look out for you! If you ever need a tour guide, I can show you around!”
“So I’ll see you later? Good luck!”
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