Welcome to Gaia! ::

Cora had a great way of making Ray feel unusually tall, which tended to be a common talent of short people. She stared at him for a few moments more, in a way that gave him the feeling that he was weirdly out of place in this setting: an armadillo piloting a helicopter, maybe.

Well, she wasn't much of an axe murderer, unless she'd borrowed that camera in her left hand from The Omen and was planning on photographing him to death. (Sometimes he suspected that sort of death was incapable of finding him, that the death which inevitably shadowed his footsteps and would someday do him in was of the The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon variety, but these sorts of feelings tended to come on most strongly after he'd been grading midterms, so who knew.)

"It's hard to get a good block of time in the darkroom during school hours -- but I do have a pass to stay late." She shifted her camera and manila folder into the same hand, then fished into the front pocket of her messenger bag till she produced a hall pass he wasn't particularly concerned about checking. She didn't seem to be the Smoking in the Boys' Room type, anyway, and he wasn't the Nurse Ratched. "I'm sorry to scandalize you like that with my school-sanctioned extracurriculars, Mr. Gordon," Corinna said drily, in a fledgling attempt at humor. "I know how delicate your nerves are."

Corinna didn't laugh or look charmed at his suggestion that she was axe-murderer-fodder. She stood there, as if waiting to see if he was finished with his attempts to lower the tension of conversation between two people who were mostly strangers. When he decided he was, she persisted with that flat look that said she would now resume ratcheting the awkwardness back up to normal operating levels.

She looked really, really serious. "Don't worry," Corinna said, disinterested in humor. "If there's an axe murderer, I'll protect you. But try not to panic -- that's irritating and distracting." She was, apparently, fully capable of hypothetical situations; she was not, however, capable of making them hypothetically any fun. He hadn't initially pegged her for the kind of teen who was convinced that mouthing off to adults was the only way to assert grown-uppedness, but apparently he'd been wrong; she was a bit of a snot, after all, it seemed.

They started down the hall, Ray having to abridge his stride a little bit so that she could keep pace. Her stride wasn't so much a 'stride' as it was a very purposeful stamping about, the sort that usually coordinated well with 'fee, fi, fo, fum' and grinding someone's bones to make your bread. Hopefully this would be, as promised, the axe murderer and not Ray. But it had definitely been too long a day if the sound of a high school student's clomping footsteps made him think of giant cannibals in the sky, particularly a five-foot-nothing student that wasn't exactly varsity football material. It was a weird train of thought.

"You shouldn't carry a Swiss Army knife on school grounds," she said when they were partway down the hallway.

Being grabbed by the strap of her bookbag apparently put Corinna far out-of-joint -- she stared down at the floor as she walked the first few paces, silent and frowning. Then, once she had done whatever mental coping technique it seemed like she was doing, she looked back up.

"You seem a little preoccupied with axe murder, Mr. Gordon," she said finally, her tone a little grudging. "Should I be worried?"

She tucked the manila folder under her arm, against her side, then began fishing in her bag until she pulled out a smaller, side-zipper pouch that looked to be made out of wetsuit material. Corinna tucked her camera into the carrying case and zipped it closed, then slid the whole affair back into her messenger bag. She kept the oaktag folder in her hands, held carefully flat.

She made a face -- some people had a habit of careful neutrality, if they weren't interested in what you had to say, and some affected a certain cold blankness, the kind that did a karate chop to the conversation faster than a body could say, 'wax on, wax off.' Corinna Grant was neither careful nor neutral, neither cold nor blank. She looked like someone had served her very bad curry chicken. Her expression said nothing so much as it said, 'blech.'

"I tried watching House, I've seen some episodes," she answered. Like many teenagers in Ray's teacherly experience, she had the unfortunate misconception that people everywhere would be deeply invested in hearing her opinions. "I couldn't stand it though -- he's terrible." Ray wasn't deeply invested in hearing her opinions on Hugh Laurie. He was, however, deeply invested in not having to put any more effort into seeing Cora home than was humanly necessary -- and so long as she kept talking, she apparently remained content to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Everyone, Ray found, had some carrot or another that you could dangle in front of them to keep them motivated. Cora's was turning out to be hearing herself talk, today, and even more conveniently she was willing to put it on a string right out in front of herself, no assistance required. Generous girl.

"He's not even good at his job," she was enumerating. "He's always wrong, at least two or three times a case; he puts in no effort; he's remorselessly cruel; and then at the end of every episode he comes up with some eleventh-hour solution -- which is the show's way of validating that fact that he's a heartless doctor and a worse excuse for a human being, when the reality is that if he cared about the lives he was trying to save -- if you can call it 'trying' -- he'd come up with the solutions sooner, rather than forcing terminally ill patients to the rasping death-rattle precipice of death before swooping in to yank them back with his snide, stupid face." (Passion alone, Ray noted, did not a good speechwriter make.)

"My new show is Criminal Minds," she continued her oversharing. "They almost always are right about their theories, maybe because they don't spend all their time bathing the people they're trying to help in an acid soak of their disdain. Of course, it usually is lupus on Criminal Minds, lupus in this case being a middle-aged white male."

She stopped and looked up at him, as though to indicate that this general line of discussion had been a considered sequence, rather than a series of verbalized Twitter posts. "But despite your obviously precocious case of near-lupus, Mr. Gordon, I really don't think you're cut out for axe murder anyway. You'll never get a reservation at Dorsia with a Swiss Army knife." Apparently this made some kind of point, and she resumed walking. Cora used the handrail as she went down the stairs towards the exit, even though there were only three of them.

She sighed, at this. It wasn't a casual sigh, or even a put-upon sigh. It was a sigh that sounded exactly as though he had just asked her the question that all the philosophers had been arguing over since the very beginning of time. Ray was discovering that she was a little bit of a ham, was Cora Grant.

"Slow," she said with some resignation. "Slow and messy. The justice system falls short of justice, in the real world. I'm not really a fan. But -- I've thought about this a lot, actually -- you can build a system of laws that thinks it's more important to avoid false positives, or one that avoids false negatives, but not both: you always have to err on the side of something, right? So the law would rather see a guilty man go free than an innocent one be punished, and in the course of that, a lot of guilty men go free. That's why I don't really want to be a lawyer anymore, I think I'd be miserable. But it's the only justice system we've got, Mr. G. We haven't come up with anything better."

After a pause, she asked, "Are you a Republican, or a Democrat? Or something else? Please don't say you're an ambivalent moderate, anything but that." Cora looked concerned, like ambivalent moderates were the cancer that was killing /b/, like ambivalent moderates had betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, like ambivalent moderates had set a trap for William Wallace and had struck Obi-wan Kenobi down with a lightsaber. Cora seemed a bit young (and probably a bit under-educated) to have well-rounded political opinions. But then, had this ever stopped a teenager from having any kind of opinions?

Corinna Grant smiled, a little -- or was that the lamplight? She looked up overhead as she spoke, which made curious yellow flickers in her eyes every so often. "My father's a Republican," she sighed. Clearly the shame of the Grant family. "I know. Mom doesn't get it either. I mean, married to an educator. But it's -- I don't know -- he doesn't listen." Some Republican parents had a knack for creating Democrat children, didn't they?

Cora's purse buzzed -- vrrrt-vrrrrrrrt -- and she halted her train of thought to listen to it. "Hold this for a second?" She handed the manila folder over in Ray's direction, which he was obliged to take mostly because there was no particularly concrete reason not to. Once done, the teenager flipped open one of the pockets of her handbag and yanked out a phone. "Sorry," she said, which wasn't the same as asking permission, and then, "Hi, is everything okay?"

Pause.

"Hunh-uh, I'm on my way, though. Mr. Gordon's walking me, he's here."

Pause again. Cora covered the bottom of the phone with her hand. "Dylan says hi," she conveyed.

She burst out with a short, sharp laugh at the phone, and said, "...No!" She looked over at him, to which he raised his eyebrows, but after a moment's consideration, all she said into the phone was, "He already threatened to axe murder me once, I wouldn't want to push it. Listen, can I call you back? Always, always. I love you. Bye. I love you." The phone went back into her purse.

"A man who was killed," she answered, while he turned to the next photograph. At the wider shot, you could see the knife sticking out of him, but the focus of the photo was still the man's face. "A corpse, obviously, but a man first. I think photos of the dead shouldn't forget that they were living once. A dead person isn't a thing -- I don't know, it's sort of a -- an issue with me. People, and how we perceive them post-mortem. Anyway, um -- this man, I was actually out shooting photos for my semester project, and I found him instead. So after I called to report it to the police, I took some photos, just for my own understanding. I won't be using these in a project; I didn't decide to ask for release permissions or anything. I think they're strong photos, though. I know you're a devotee of words, not images, but -- feel free to critique if anything comes to mind."