SOTF Archive/SOTF Classic

((Continued from One Pen Two Pen Red Pen Blue Pen))

She sat alone; surrounded on all sides by flowers.

Lucy was avoiding the hustle and bustle of other students on the campus a few feet away; preferring instead to work on the plants which had sat untended in this corner for many months now. As the head of the Bayview Gardening Society, it was her job to make sure that such things were dealt with as soon as possible.

Well, to call it a society was a bit of an overstatement. If anything, it was just her helping out the Groundskeeper during her free periods; there weren't any other members to speak of. However, she felt a small satisfaction from referring to herself as the head of the society, and smiled slightly as she played the name over in her mind.

"And let us thank Lucy Ashmore, our current head of the gardening society!"

Of course, vanity wasn't something she liked to get sucked into, but Lucy didn't see a problem with imagining a little praise and appreciation once in a while. After all, people like Benjamin Smith Barton and Augustin Pyramus de Candolle are still getting praise for what they did, so in theory she shouldn't feel embarrassed for bigging herself up a little in her head.

Taking some of the tools she had borrowed from the shed, she clipped away at the stray weeds that were beginning to peek through the otherwise unspoilt flower beds.
"I'll have to do something about those later." Lucy thought to herself, gently propping up the flowers which were beginning to droop from their strangled roots, only for them to flop back down again when her delicate touch was released, much to her dismay.

She sprinkled water around the greenery, refreshing their withered bodies whilst she wiped her sweaty brow. As the drops of liquid hit the ground, Lucy's thoughts flickered back to the previous day.

That time in the library...

That was so embarrassing for the girl: causing a huge stir; disrupting all those other people; being left alone to fix her own problems and receiving only a brief offer of help, before it was cruelly pulled away from her before she could even reply. Even that girl, Jacquard, who had set in motion the chain of events only helped out so she could get her highlighter quicker. She hadn't given it back yet either.

She sighed. True, it would've been nice to get some help in the matter, but she could hardly start pointing fingers. It was hardly a difficult request anyway, and she was just plain silly for reacting so badly. There was no sense in accusing others for her own clumsiness.

Suddenly she realised she had been watering the same spot for the last twenty seconds. Scolding herself slightly for her carelessness again, she returned to the rest of the garden, placed alone in the shade of the trees.

((Debut of Cheung-Ji Wong))

"Hey, watch where you're going man...."

"Sorry...."

C.J Wong was lost at sea. Faces of people he only vaguely knew were sweeping around him in the crowd. He recongized a few of them from his classes, but all in all, he felt like he was watching it all from behind a glass wall. People were talking. Laughing. Yelling. And he was alone. Being the new kid sucked balls no matter where you were, but when it was your senior year – the time that was supposed to be the crowning moment of your high school career – it was even worse. Then again, you're not going to know any of these kids in a few months anyway. Who really cares? Then again, there's the memories you're going to miss out on just because dad took that job offer. The partying. Messing around with your friends. One-week romances. Ah well, fuck it. Can't win em' all.

He'd just dropped his binder and a few loose papers had blown out. People were stepping on them and parting around him like the Red Sea, completely oblivious to the idea of reaching down and lending a hand. Gee, thanks guys. Really, why the hell are you people in such a hurry anyway?

C.J grimaced as he quickly opened the rings of his binder and clipped the papers back in. He'd never really been a guy big on luck, but damn, this just wasn't fair. It was almost prom and all he had to show for almost an entire year of being the new fish in the sea was a few nodding acquaintances in the hallway. There wasn't anyone to hang out with after school – most of the time C.J just sat in the room and surfed the Internet bored out of his fucking mind.

There wasn't anything wrong with him either. He had some pretty good qualities when it came down to it. He was a pretty funny guy even if his sense of humor was a little on the fucked up side, he always felt devoted to his friends and to top it off, he was far from shy. In fact, he was downright outgoing. It was just that in Bayview, nobody really seemed to care. They were already too immersed in their cliques and hectic social scenes.

His mind wandered for a minute as he clipped his binder and tucked it underneath his arm. People around him were clearly angry, wondering why there was a hold-up. He quickly got up and muttered apologies, hurrying off to the side of the crowd and forcing a smile on his face that practically glowed in the afternoon sun. Nobody noticed. God damn it...

Then his mind wandered even more - and to the extreme this time. Wandering off on the side of the crowd, C.J thought about superheroes. The good guys. Guys like Spiderman or Captain America – those were the guys who didn't take shit from anybody. They weren't the ones that were off on the side field just walking by with a binder tucked under their arm outside. They were out in the center of the action. And more importantly, they weren't the ones that got through life trying to get people to like them by cracking jokes. They didn't get worried about getting invited to parties. They're the heroes. The real heroes. Why aren't you a hero, C.J?

He wandered away from the crowd and scanned the campus. There was a girl surrounded by flowerbeds a few feet away, watering them with an attentive look on her face. He looked around even more and noticed that she was one of the very few people around who was alone. Not just alone, but not immersed in the crowd either. He took that as an encouraging sign. One whole year, C.J. And this is what you have to show for it? C'mon, go over there and talk to her. End it now.

Struggling to keep the smile on his face, he walked toward the girl surrounded by flowers and sat down beside her.

"Hey", C.J said. The voice that came out didn't sound anything like his. "Whatcha doing there?"

"Right, if I put some mulch around here later, these daisies should bloom right back up, and then I can get to work on these poppies..."

Directing herself in her mind, Lucy continued her working on the various greenery surrounding her. After that, she would start seeing how much trimming the trees could take to get the plants some more sunlight, and then follow up with -

"Hey, Whatcha doing there?"

She turned her head around to the side, then up slightly into the eyes of a rather large faced stranger. She thought that his name was B.J., or something, but she couldn't be a hundred per cent sure. She didn't know him that well, but then she didn't really know anyone here that well.

Oh right, he's still there.

Well, she couldn't just stare at him, but then to ignore him would be rude. What to do, what to do...

Now come on Lucy, we were just remembering the library, remember? Just say something calmly.

Swallowing the pit in her throat quickly, Lucy uttered a small smile at the guy sat next to her, but subconsciously shifted her look back to the plants.

"Well, I'm just tending to the flowers. I sorta do it sometimes in my free periods..."

She slightly scrunched her eyes behind her glasses as she snipped away a stray leaf, more out of discomfort than anything. Saying something like that, he'd probably start laughing at her and call her a freak, which would put her back at the start of this attempt to converse with people.

She turned back, righting her face, to look just below C.J.'s eyes, unable to look straight at this new person sat down next to her.

"I'm sorry, I guess you think think it's a little silly..."

She tried to utter a small chuckle, but if anything, it was more of a small whimper.

"No", C.J said. "What you're doing here is fine. If there's anyone silly here, it's me - I mean, I write the advice column in the school newspaper".

He smiled at her, trying his best to start a conversation. She seemed a little awkward to him, maybe even a little bit shy. C.J had been there. Back when he'd been really fat, his social skills had been pretty limited. Being an overweight third-grader had sucked, and with most of the weight gone now, C.J relished the fact that he didn't have to be the fat kid in Bayview now as well as the new kid. Then again, if you were fat maybe people would at least know who you are....

He bent over and sniffed the flowers. He'd gotten a cold in the last several days, but even with a stuffed up nose, they still smelled nice. He turned back to her and smiled.

"I'm C.J Wong".

'"No", C.J said. "What you're doing here is fine."'

Phew. Seems like he wasn't about to shove her face in the soil of her efforts, and a flower might actually bloom.

Odd way to phrase it, Lucy.

As he talked, Lucy found herself able to make eye contact; he seemed nice, even if he was a little intimidating on the outside. Quite muscular, dark skin and a round face: the sort of thing that even a normal girl might be put off by. But then this is why people tried talking to new faces, and it actually seemed to be paying off!

"I'm Lucy; nice to meet you."

It sure had been a while since she'd introduced herself to another student. Apart from a flopped attempt to make friends with her chemistry partner (which failed spectacularly when she dropped a dish of copper sulphate over her, ruining the girl's favourite skirt), she couldn't remember the last time she'd needed to tell her name to someone.

"Oh, you're the person who writes the advice column?" to her surprise her eye contact didn't waver. "I quite like that section: you give good help."

It wasn't really a lie, since she did read it every now and then; it just wasn't her favourite section (that was the jokes section, as silly as it sounded.).

"I was thinking of writing in for some advice a while ago, but I guess I never got round to it." that bit wasn't a lie, since she really had been meant to ask about how to approach a guy she had been having a mild crush on for a fair while now.

As she spoke, she felt her heart rate slow back to normal. It was really happening; she was having a conversation with someone without being called a nerd or a geek, or accidentally blundering in a way that ended up humiliating her. It was just a calm, simple conversation down by the flower beds.

For the first in a long time, Lucy gave a sincere smile to a stranger.

(Sorry for the late post. D:)

Her name was Lucy. He remembered now - he'd seen her around school, but like most of the other people in the small social circle he called his life, he'd never really gotten to know her because of the fact that he never really thought she'd find anything interesting about in him. He was just a big Asian kid with a thing for movies. Still, C.J smiled back at her, an odd kinship formed in his mind from the fact that the conversation seemed to be unfamiliar territory for both of them. He looked back at the sea of faces out on campus behind them. It was an odd crowd. Jocks and geeks. Criminals and preppies. Maybe you fit under one of those labels, Ceej.....

"Thanks", C.J said. "I work really hard on the advice column. Trust me, you could send anything and I wouldn't care. I've seen some weird shit in my day. You'd think high school kids would have problems, but you never thought they'd be this bad. Still, most of the stuff I get is just junk mail though. Kids think it's funny to drop a stupid drawing or a fake letter in the advice box. I'll tell ya, people are dumb".

He looked at the flowers again. They really were cool. He was used to the artificial kind, the ones that his mom would stick in the vases in their living room, but these were different. They were real. This was good, because when you really looked at it, there wasn't anything more pathetic than something shitty pretending to be something it wasn't. Artificial flowers. Gotta remember to tell Mom to throw those bastards out...

[Just in from One Pen Two Pen Red Pen Blue Pen]

Lucy was with the flowers, of course.

Not that he'd really expected her to be anywhere else. She was always with the flowers.

Simon had been peaceably sitting in the library, trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to get his work done. And then a series of jackasses had quite apparently made Lucy feel like crap. Simon might not have known her very well, but he tried to make sure everyone was okay (including, he reminded himself firmly, the jackasses: got to keep them in mind if ya wanna keep the moral highground). He'd headed out after her, lost her in the midst of a crowd, gotten distracted.

But after a moment's thought, he'd simply headed for the flowers.

He had a moment's hesitation, watching her talk peaceably amongst the flowers she was tending to the new guy whose name he didn't know (CK? That didn't make sense. DJ? Felt closer, but...what was it, damn it?). No reason, he supposed, to disturb her: didn't want to dredge up anything, make her feel any worse than she...

Then again. He'd prefer her to feel a little humiliated and a lot comforted than inwardly embarrassed and isolated.

"Hey, Lucy," Simon greeted, stepping out to the new guy's left. "Hope you didn't take any of those dumbasses in the library to heart." He gestured with his head back to the school building. "Wasn't even a thing. You alright? You looked pretty, uh, harried." He scratched the back of his head, wondering suddenly if this was a good idea."

((Please link your threads Wolf. It gets confusing otherwise. If you click on the 'url' button above the posting window, there's a quick wizard for doing it.))

((Talk about lateness; apologies woven with a side of cherry pie.))

This conversation was turning out to be rather pleasant. She wasn't making a huge mess of herself by blurting out something stupid, and CJ wasn't turning her into a laughing stock through some cruel joke. Could it be that she would finally make a friend?

You did have friends before you moved, Lucy; remember?

It would still be the first new friend she had made in a good long while; stop ruining the moment.

Picking up the water pail, she continued her task on the greenery whilst resuming her conversation with CJ, and gently pulling her hair behind her ear.

"So..."

Well, she tried to resume her conversation.

He had been doing the initial talking every time so far, and now it was on her shoulders to think of a topic.

Music? For all she knew, he couldn't stand the stuff.

Literature? As if any normal teenager read the sort of stuff she reads.

Films? If she picked the wrong genre, she'd ruin the whole conversation.

School? Why didn't she just shoot herself in the foot now and get it over with?

Damn it, Lucy! Just pick something!

"You know, there's a rare flower in the fields behind the trees called the Ram's-Head Lady's-Slipper. I'm kind of lucky to find out there was one there, since it's fenced off. In fact, it's become an endangered -"

Of all the topics to think of, she starts babbling on about flowers. FLOWERS.

Maybe if she was talking to a mirror, it would work, but no; she was talking to a normal person, and normal people don't give two hoots about some rare flower in the fields behind the trees.

She scrunched her eyes, her hair crawling around her head and shielding her face.

"Hey, Lucy,"

She whirled around at the voice; she could tell it wasn't CJ's. Peering up at the new figure, she was greeted by a slightly chubby, sharp-eyed red haired guy, looking down at her.

"Hope you didn't take any of those dumbasses in the library to heart."

He was on about before, in the library. She didn't remember seeing him at the time, but then she was a little distracted by the whole situation of making a complete idiot of herself in front of the entire room. She could forgive herself for not remembering the little details.

"Oh... it's fine. Don't worry about me, really..." Lucy mumbled quietly, more to herself than anyone.

It looked like this situation was going downhill fairly quickly.

And of course, it was only going to get worse.

For as Lucy had been muttering her reassuring lies, she was still tipping the water pail in a way that made the water pour out. And since Simon had approached from behind CJ, Lucy happened to have her arms turned in his direction. This resulted in the water pail being tipped directly at CJ's leg.

"Oh, oh my god! I'm so sorry!"

Throwing the water pail into the flowerbed, knocking aside the delicately cared for plants, Lucy wiped desperately at CJ's legs with her bare hands. In moments, she realised she was doing nothing but rubbing CJ's leg up and down, doing nothing to dry the wet spot, and yanked her hands away towards her chest.

She stumbled to her feet, hurrying away from the two men. Trying to apologise, all that came out was a weak, startled stutter.

"I.. I have to get to class!"

Grabbing at her bag Lucy bolted away from the others, blending through the crowd, meekly shoving past the dozens of people, leaving the gardening equipment, leaving two, kind hearted strangers far behind.

Way to go Lucy.
Way to go.

((Continued in Minuet.))

((Liam "Brook" Brooks continued from An Afterschool Meeting))

It was a funny thing how sometimes, when given time, experiences become more or less profound retroactively. The somewhat calming and somewhat annoying trip to the pool yesterday hardly helped Brook at all to take his mind off of things at the time. Now with it being the next morning, however, nothing about that hour or so of swimming (maybe a half hour, he could hardly be bothered to keep the exact time) was particularly stressful. He had a good laugh or two with Peter and his mental chiding of Laverne, and it did make him forget about his faliure with Tiffany.

Well.... now he was remembering his failure with Tiffany. With his sinking feelings still dropping at a good pace, Brook exited from his first class. The scene he stumbled upon was an odd one; a girl who he recognized almost immediately as Lucy Ashmore (Brook followed the events of the gardening society but was not a member) ran past him as he was heading outside, looking upset about... well, whatever it was, Brook wasn't really interested in getting caught up with all the teen drama today.

But I still have a chance... right? I gotta stop angsting about this crap, find Tiffany, and tell her that I was in a really big hurry but that there's something that I've been wanting to ask her for a while! ... Hey... that isn't bad at all, she'll probably take that! At least feeling self-assured about this, Brook headed off to his next class early. He had a ten minute break between his two classes to work with, though, and decided to hop on over to one of the many garden patches along the campus lawn. What he found was a bit... disturbing.

"What the hell!?" He asked nobody in particular, bewildered upon seeing the patch a little worse for the weather. "Half of these things are drowning, the mulch is kicked up here, and..." He gingerly reached in to lift the watering can off of some of the flowers. "Wow... the faculty here needs to learn what the fuck they're doing..." He had hardly noticed the two other boys within close proximity of himself and the garden. If he had, there's a good chance the now-irritated Brook would probably think they vandalized the garden somehow.

"No one's fault," Simon said gruffly, leaning in to help the other boy clean up the patch. He realized he didn't really know what to do, so he simply grabbed a few of the gardening tools and moved them to one side, freeing up space for the more-experience boy to work. "She had to go to class and she didn't have time to clean up." The lie came easily to his lips and he shot a warning look at the near-at-hand Asian boy (he was pretty sure he was new, but couldn't remember): he didn't know who this guy was but he didn't want to cause anyone trouble.

He realized, abruptly, that he had no idea who this boy was.

He paused.

Lucy he'd met once or twice before, though he wasn't sure he'd ever introduced himself (bit problematic, that) But he simply had no idea what who this guy ways. He wanted to say something with water, but...why something with water?

Oh. Brooks.

"It's Liam, right?" he asked.

C.J Wong was in a state of shock. Well, maybe not really shock, but really just that, "what the hell just happened?" kind of mentality. He tended to get like that a lot, but damn, this was weird. They'd been talking fine, maybe even casually, and he'd thought he'd been doing a pretty decent job of keeping things rolling. He'd nodded with his goofy smile on his face, not really taking in what she was saying and trying to brainstorm some kind of one-liner he could say. She didn't look like the kind who would find his self- praised ethnic jokes funny, but maybe he'd get a chuckle out of her. Just maybe....

But then she'd poured water on him, flipped a shit, and ran away. Woh, weird chick. Way to go, man. That's another relationship down the drain. Then again, maybe Lucy Ashmore isn't the best base to start out on if you want to talk to people. Back to plan B, Ceej....

"Um bye", C.J said, knowing Lucy was too far away to hear him now. "It's really no big deal, you know..."

He came to the realization that there were two other guys here now. Not wanting to look like he was talking to himself, he looked up and smiled. He recongized each of them right away. Even as a new kid, C.J was observant enough to learn the names of his student body pretty quickly. The first kid was Simon and the other kid was Liam, or Brook as most people called him. Did any of them talk to you? Were you too dazed out by the water to notice? They better not think you're weird. Second chance. Plan B. Don't blow it this time...

"Well, that was fun while it lasted", C.J said, speaking more to himself than them. He looked up and spoke louder. "What's up guys?"

"Class?" Brook responded off-handedly as he was picking through the tools and generally tidying up. That came first, clearing the area. Once he had everything squared away, he could give detailed attention to... Aww damn, I have class in just a few moments. Most of this will have to wait until after, but I can still clean this up some. "A student was working on this and not faculty? Huh..." He gave a little bit of thought as to who could've been the culprit of such shoddy work. Probably something to do with the gardening society, and female judging from what this..... person said...

"It's Liam, right?"

Brook was picking up his head to look at the person just as they said this last bit, allowing him to pin a name and face to the voice. He knew the guy as 'Simon' and nothing more or less, but decent enough of a guy through and through. "Call me Brook, everybody else does!" He said in a more personable manner than before. His eyes snapped from Simon to somebody he definitely knew: C.J. freakin' Wong. Most people should've known C.J. anyway, or at least the kids who read the newspaper.

"Well, uh.... there isn't much going on aside from this disaster area right here..." Brook rubbed one of his eyebrows with the back of his hand, reflexively taking care of an itch without smearing dirt all over his face. "You?"

Simon got to his feet, grimacing. "Brook, eh?" he said thoughtfully. Simon tended to be a bit antisocial, but he see'd Liam around enough over time to know his name.

The other kid (who, he reminded himself ruefully, was havin' a great conversation before I showed up) had had water dumped on him, and had been kind enough not to say anything about Lucy. Good man, and he didn't even seem angry about things.

"Well, that was fun while it lasted."

Or perhaps a bit angrier than he seemed.

"What's up guys?"

"Not much," Simon replied shrugging and glancing towards the building. "I've got a free period, figured I'd take a walk around." He gave the Asian boy a look. "I'm Simon, by the way," he said, offering his hand. "And you're...?"

"Cheung-Ji", C.J replied. "Call me C.J".

Still a little dazed from getting water poured down his pant leg, he shook hands with Simon. He'd seen him around school - kind of a quiet guy who stood clear from the crowds, but alright in C.J's book. Even as an outsider himself, C.J often had to force himself into accepting other people he didn't see as birds of a feather. Quiet people confused him. Is it really that hard to strike up a conversation? Seriously? It's okay to be shy, but that's just rude. It's high school. Live a little.

"Do any of you...." C.J began. "Do....do any of you know that girl? I was just talking to her and then she ran away".