I don't want your pity (Astrit)

[Charlotte Delprat]

After handing in their assignment and the subsequent detention that resulted, Charlie and Astrit had become sort of friends. By some form of silent agreement they carefully ignored each other for most of the day. This suited them both as neither wanted to be teased by their classmates, Charlie for regarding the class loner as a fellow human, and Astrit for daring to even look at the cute Aussie girl as if he had the right. However after school had ended they would meet in the library and find a table to sit at. With their schoolbooks and pencil cases they looked like any other children working on their homework.

Sometimes they actually even did their homework. Other times Charlie would draw cartoons to amuse themselves with. She was especially proud of the one of Astrit dressed in medieval knight’s armour wielding a sword against a giant that may or may not have strongly resembled Logan Ryder. For that one she’d made Astrit pose with a ruler for ten minutes in order to get the look right. Other times Astrit would quietly tell her stories, mostly ones that he’d read but occasionally ones that his sister had told him. Stories that were familiar because they were fairy tales and all fairy tales are similar; but were also strange because they were from a land that was worlds away.

On this particular day Charlie arrived at the library first and had spent the last fifteen minutes chewing the end of her pen as she looked at the blank piece of paper before her. It should have been easy, all the writing assignment wanted was for her to write a page about her mother and how they celebrated mothers’ day. Her mother? Mothers’ day? Charlie bit her lip and frowned at the paper. She absolutely could not write about her mother, not in the way the assignment wanted. At the same time she could not talk to the teacher about an alternative because then they would know. Charlie was very proud in her own way, and the last thing she wanted was for people to feel sorry for her.

357 words for Astrit Zupan

[Astrit Zupan]

For all they seemed to have so little in common, Astrit and Charlie had ended up getting along pretty well ever since the incident with the history assignment. The teacher had been alarmed, to say the least, by their take on World War I, and the resulting detention seemed to have cemented a camaraderie of sorts between them. They had become “partners in crime,” as it were—a designation which made the odd secrecy of their friendship somehow appropriate. It was a comfortable and weird thing, hiding that they were on good terms from their classmates. Astrit often found himself tucking away some incident from the day into the back of his mind to share it with Charlie later.

The afternoons in the library were consistently great fun. Even when they did their homework, it was far more interesting than usual because of having somebody else to joke with about the teachers and the strange subjects that occasionally came up. Doing other things, of course, was generally even more fun. Astrit had never known anyone who cared enough about the stories he knew to listen to him retell them, so it was quite a treat to get the experience of doing so before an appreciative audience. In turn, he found Charlie's drawings to be delightful things, and was particularly pleased by her rendering of him as a literal knight in shining armor.

Today, Astrit arrived at the library as usual, and found that Charlie was already there, staring at a blank sheet of paper. He pulled up a seat nearby and extricated his own supplies from his book bag. “Are you having artist's block, or is it a hard assignment?” he wanted to know, rifling through his own stack of assorted papers to find a blank one for some of his own work.