Welcome to Gaia! ::

When your legal residence was a school, classes never really let out. Sure, the course load was really lightened, since Erika was a good student and liked to learn, so she didn't have to retake any courses. She just was taking... English. British Literature, actually, since she was already through English one and two. It was her worst class, and her grade was really suffering--her reading comprehension was good, but not that good...

Why did they have to read it in the original Old English, anyway?

So the school had told her to wait for a tutor. It was a community service thing, apparently, that this tutor had to do through her college. Some lady named Tallulah Cowden. Probably she was one of those really old ladies who wanted to finally get the College Experience or one of the bubbleheaded ladies who had pretended to want to help her and Shep before things got really bad at home.

Before Mama had died.

She took a deep breath, and started to slink under the table. By the time her tutor got there, she wanted to be completely in hiding. The only sign of her presence was the top of her head and the notebook next to her very, very beat-up copy of Othello.

Because of her sunken position, Erika didn't see the tutor approach. Her back was to the door, which was unwise, but St. Mags had always been reasonably safe. Barring, of course, the one time when she'd woken up to find her old roommate had shorn most of her hair off in a pique of revenge. Shep had taken her to a barber shop to get it as fixed as it could be, leaving her with her current style.

Which wasn't so much a style, it was just The Best They Could Do. It reminded her particularly terribly of a serial killer from a popular series of video games, which wasn't helped at all when she tried to conceal it with a bandanna or a hat of any kind.

(It was all in the bangs.)

So when she was shaken by Tallulah Cowden, her response wasn't so much looking up, shocked, as it was a small screech and skittering sideways out of her chair. She regarded the teal-haired girl with an expression that might be disguised as dead-eyed horror and then, after a few blinks, she managed a feeble "No?"

As much as she might not want to do this, she wanted to disappoint Shep even less, so she scooted into her chair properly and tucked her locket back under her St. Magdelen's uniform shirt. "Erika Adalsteinn," she said, but she didn't offer a hand to shake. In fact, she seemed reluctant to say anything else. Instead, she shoved the notebook full of essay outlines at Tallulah and went back to staring at Othello's cover.

She scrubbed a hand over her hair and gave the title of her book a sulky look. Couldn't everyone just study math and hard sciences like normal people? Her kingdom for Chemistry! Except state requirements were four years of English, three of maths and sciences. Nevermind that was the stupidest arrangement she'd ever heard, anyway, who really thought English was more important than understanding what made cars go? Or the logistics of dropping a chandelier on an evil man?

Well, or Carlotta.

Carlotta was a b***h.

"I suck at communicating my ideas effectively," said Erika, which was equal parts adolescent pique and adult summation of her capabilities in that arena. (The "I suck" part, of course, was the adolescent pique.) "I get the book, I know what I'm writing about, but whenever I write it people say it's stupid or a juvenile summation of the topics at hand." She shoved the essay sheet across at Talluah, her movements jerky, even angry.

The assignment: If you read the play closely you will see that not enough time could have elapsed on Cyprus for Desdemona to have committed adultery. Examine the problem of time in Othello and the possible dramatic reasons behind this unrealistic passage of time.

She slumped in her chair again, starting to sink. "I hate Shakespeare," she said under her breath.

What kind of stupid question was that? Of course Erika knew how to structure an essay! Didn't they go over that at the start of every paper? And she meant every paper. "You start with an introduction, which is a summary of your arguments, and includes your thesis statement. Then you have a paragraph for each piece of evidence you intend to discuss, and then a conclusion that restates the thesis. And a bibliography." While she recited this, she was shifting around in her chair--enough to place her chin on her hands.

She gave Tallulah a deadpan, even irritated, look as she started to write her outline as she remembered it down in her tiny, cramped writing. Erika was the kind of girl who could figure things out pretty well, but didn't always explain her logical jumps too well--although she couldn't quite articulate that, it showed in the way she wrote reasons why Othello could not have possibly heard of Desdemona's adultery by the time he got there and didn't thereafter provide evidence. Just the statement.

No wonder she had a time writing essays!

"Basically, with travel being really long, there was no way Othello could have heard about Desdemona cheating on him in Cyprus. The message would've had to have left as soon as her ship docked." Erika shrugged, as if This Was Obvious. "That's it."

Erika shook her head. She didn't like plays, she thought plays were terribly boring. She liked music, though, which was why she'd been helping out with the production of Phantom and was going to help out with some other musical soon. Sweeney Todd, maybe? It started with an S, and it wasn't a play she was familiar with, but she liked some people there. From afar. She liked them from a very great distance, really. "I like the Phantom of the Opera," she offered, her tone guarded. Not getting any more from her, no sir. "The book's good, too."

Honestly, if she had to write her paper on dramatic timing in the Phantom of the Opera, she'd probably rock it. She thought so, anyway; she understood Erik, she thought she'd be pretty good at getting into his head. And Christine was a dumb b***h anyway.

"Because if he didn't have it all happen really fast, the play would've been six hours long and if that didn't fly for the Lord of the Rings, why would it fly for Othello when everyone had to sit around without central air and popcorn," she said, frustrated; because honestly, the temporal logistics were the only thing she properly understood, anyway. She knew what went on in Othello just fine, but character motivation? who cared!

Erika couldn't even manage sitting still for a marathon of Star Wars, and Othello definitely wasn't as enthralling as the greatest space epic of all time. Mama had liked watching movies with her, though. She remembered that fairly well. "No," she said, guardedly. Of course that was a lie. She adored books, all books, although she'd never touched Harry Potter or Twilight. She liked grown-up books. Like Jane Eyre and Peach Blossom Pavilion and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Othello was not a grown-up book. It was stupid.

"I mean I like to read." That guarded expression just didn't bode well for her impressions of Tallulah. Erika had to be here, but it didn't mean she had to cooperate. Did she? "I'd rather just read things that are actually… Interesting!" And Othello? Othello was boring.

She nudged her books back into the backpack under her chair, and then began to slide back under the table.

Dense was a good word, if you used it to mean stupid.

Erika didn't say that, though. She kept it to herself, giving Tallulah a somewhat resentful look at the question about her chair. There was nothing wrong with Erika's chair, and she defiantly slipped just a little bit lower. After a count of ten, she slid herself back up. That had to be enough to tell this tutor that she didn't think of her as an authority figure, right? That she knew if she scared off Tallulah Cowden she'd be left in peace until someone else needed internship hours. Unfortunately, it seemed Tallulah had a stronger spine than most of Erika's earlier tutors.

Better suggestions, too. Watching a movie instead of reading a book? Not her usual modus operandi, but in this case it would probably help. Even Erika, in her determined distaste for her new English tutor, could acknowledge that. A rap by an acting company was met only with scorn. She knew music, and rap was just an assault on perfectly trained eardrums. She preferred musicals. She thrived on Les Mis and Phantom and Fauste. Just, no one taught Les Miserables, Phantom, or Fauste. They taught Othello, which had no songs, only stupid essay questions.

She decided to be deliberately difficult, and name only the most obscure authors she could think of. "I like Gaston Leroux, Mingmei Yin, Arthur Golden and the lady who wrote the alternate imagining of Sleeping Beauty." There! See if Tallulah knew any of them!

Erika slumped in her chair and nodded. "Okay," she said, a little bit of resentment slipping into her voice. "I'll see you next week." She took the paper from Tallulah, gave it a once-over. She didn't actually have a cell phone, but you could use the matron's phone for calls if you were good. She'd have to behave, then: Not like she thought she would actually be calling Tallulah Cowden. Just because she liked being able to call Shep.

Isabel Allende and Amy Tan. Erika turned in her seat to give the shelves behind her a look. If they were little kid books, Erika was going to flip her s**t.

[FIN]