The Roof of the Dorms, Tuesday Afternoon

[genesishero]

It wasn't that Evan was big on shirking his responsibilities, but this week he was seriously not feeling up to going into work. With Thanksgiving in a couple of days, 'service with a smile' or even being in remotely the right mindset to be helpful to customers was the last thing he could manage, and so he'd handwavily left his boss an apologetic message saying that he couldn't come in today, and he'd spent most of his morning in bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking and trying to get the heavy weighted feeling out of his chest.

Of course, being a dog owner, it wasn't like he could hide in bed forever. It was a couple of hours into his 'stay in bed all day' escapade that Ozzy decided that it wasn't just time for walkies, it was time to leap up onto the bed to inform Evan of the fact that it was time for walkies by licking his face into submission until his boy relented and finally rolled out to pull on his clothes. And once Ozzy had been taken for a walk, it just seemed like a terrible waste of the day to crawl back under the covers. A tempting waste of a day, but still a terrible one. So, Evan grabbed a book and an umbrella, and he made his way up to the roof. It was cold and a little wet out, but that wasn't a bad thing, necessarily. It was difficult to mope when you were trying to keep your book dry.

... There were worse ways to cope with a case of holiday blahs than reading outside in the rain in November, right? Yeah. Yeah, there had to be.

[Open roof! This kid, sometimes. Honestly.]

Comments

[arsenicmauls]

"Not if the restaurant stuff's better than what you could make on your own," Gert reasoned. "Then it's a public service."

Wise, Gert. Very wise.

[genesishero]

Evan fell silent for a moment, considering that.

"But... what if you think maybe you can make it just fine... if you remember helping make it for Thanksgiving meals growing up... but actually going through with it alone for the first time has you scared?"

Scared and a little heartsick, but he wasn't going to leap right into 'heartsick' quite so early in the conversation.

[arsenicmauls]

Gert processed that, and she thought about the fact that, yeah, she didn't exactly feel like leaping into the holidays either. Not yet, anyway. And sure, that was kind of an annual thing for her -- no one would ever accuse Gertrude Yorkes of having much holiday spirit -- but at the same time, there was something else going on there, too.

"That depends," she said after a moment. "Do you want to try?"

[genesishero]

"I don't want to give up before I've even made an attempt, but that's not really the same thing as wanting to try," Evan sighed. "This seemed way easier to figure out back at the Student Council planning meetings."

He probably should have just stuck with chicken fingers or something.

[arsenicmauls]

"'Cause I've never made cranberry sauce," Gert disclaimed, "but I was thinking of commandeering a kitchen to try and make potato pancakes. It's Hanukkah tomorrow, and my parents' latkes used to be amazing, so... if you want to share the kitchen with me, we can help each other out?"

[genesishero]

Oh, Gert. Gert, you were the most awesome person on the roof right now. The. Most. Awesome.

"That... that actually sounds like fun," Evan replied, actually giving a genuine smile, this time. "It was Ma's cranberry sauce I wanted to make, but I've never really made it on my own, you know? I'm not even sure if any of the recipes I've found come close."

And it wasn't like he could call her up and ask.

[arsenicmauls]

Hey now, Karolina was pretty awesome too.

"So you can try a bunch of kinds," she suggested. "Whatever doesn't work, you can put in the fridge. I'm pretty sure in a dorm building full of teenagers, someone will eat it."

She paused. "Plus, I bet cranberry sauce would be pretty good on latkes."

[genesishero]

"You suppose so?" Evan tilted his head curiously at that. "I've never had latkes before. We could... kind of trade? My family's recipe and yours, if we can get it right?"

[arsenicmauls]

"They're like flat hash browns and they're amazing," Gert informed him. "Can't promise I can replicate them even remotely well, because my cooking prowess is kind of a non-issue, but yeah. I'll give it a shot."

She even managed a genuine grin at that. "Tomorrow sound good?"

[genesishero]

"Tomorrow sounds perfect," Evan replied, nodding a little and even grinning a bit in return. "That gives me time to settle on a recipe and pick up ingredients. It's usually just sugar and cranberries and some spices and things, but actually getting enough cranberries for the whole student body..."

How much cranberry sauce could people possibly eat?

[arsenicmauls]

"My advice?" Gert said. "Don't overthink it. If nothing else, you'll have to carry the bowl, and I'd feel really bad if you got weighed down under a massive load of cranberries."

She paused. "Plus, there's only like fifty students at this school, which means probably fewer than twenty will show up."

[genesishero]

"Are you calling me scrawny?" And now Evan was actually smiling, blatantly so. "I mean, I know I'm a little bit noodly, but I'm pretty sure I can handle some berries."

Noodly? Noodly was his mutant power, here.

[arsenicmauls]

"So you say, but remember, I saw you straining under the weight of those Tolkein books," Gert joked. She had seen no such thing. "Speaking of which, thanks for those."

[genesishero]

"There's enough weight in a complete set of Tolkein to replace a steamroller if it's gone out of commission," Evan sniffed. "And I still managed. Mostly."

He'd done fine.

"But it was my pleasure. It was nice to see someone so into reading, you know? The library is usually pretty quiet on Sundays, and I was expecting to be passing out a whole lot of See Spot Run, instead."

[arsenicmauls]

Gert wrinkled her nose again, almost scowling. "Yeah, doubt there'd be too many people interested in that," she said after a moment's pause while she searched for a way to be diplomatic. "I never knew any kids who liked that stuff that adults always claim is catered to little kids' interests. That stuff's boring and juvenile no matter how old you are."

[genesishero]

"There's no plot," Evan agreed, nodding. "No character development. It's just... there's the dog, and he's running, now. But I did kind of like the Pat the Bunny kind of books. The fuzzy ones? When I was really little."

[arsenicmauls]

"I never read 'em," Gert admitted. "But if they're fuzzy, then I guess they could qualify as an exception."

Fuzzy things were usually of the good.

"I was always more into getting my parents to read me Dumas."

[genesishero]

"I read his stuff myself when I was a bit older," Evan replied. "My parents wouldn't. They liked the 'one for all' stuff, but they thought the swordfighting was a little too violent."

It was weird, just casually talking about his parents as though they'd ever really existed. Even now, he was feeling that pang in his chest. He missed them.

"Actually, there are a lot of books I didn't get the chance to read until recently. I kind of wonder if maybe that's because there wasn't any place for them in the scenario that was put together for me to grow up in."

[arsenicmauls]

"Granted, my parents' childrearing technique was questionable, since they were murderers and all," Gert noted, almost offhandedly. "But more to the point, those jerks would do something like that. As if making a kid educated and giving him entertainment and literature isn't part of a decent childhood."

She was definitely scowling now. "At least your job now sets you up to compensate for that, I guess."

[genesishero]

"Both of my jobs, actually," Evan replied. "I work at the library and at the bookstore now. Except... I kind of called in today. I should technically be at work right now, but it wasn't exactly a good morning for that."

It wasn't a good week for that.

[arsenicmauls]

"Because of the holiday blues?" Hey, Gert wasn't judging. She'd called out of work for pettier reasons.

[genesishero]

Evan nodded a tiny bit.

"It's my first year knowing that they're not even there," he murmured. "I don't think I'm ready for that."