open- once more with feeling

[poppy lee hahn]

There were some things it was safe to say that Poppy was remarkable at. Math was not one of them. Music, language, art, yes. Math, no- It just went straight through her. Needless to say she needed a lot of time to learn. Unlike most students at Carson High, Poppy's study periods were actually used for hard studying of the subjects she was terrible at. Originally, she had planned to take just as much math as she needed to scrape by, but of course her mother read over her course selection and made changes... her mother had justified herself with the very true statement, 'you'll never advance by running away!' followed by a sharp jab in the spine for slouching as she played a nocturne. Poppy wasn't going to let her mother be a drill Sergeant, though, which was expressed when she lobbed her sunglasses at the older woman.

That's why Poppy was in this whole fucking math mess, anyway. She hauled her bones down to the library where there'd be a free table to spread her stuff over with her head down and a grimace on her features. She tried her hardest not to attract attention on her way, negative or otherwise. This was hard for a girl like Poppy. Though her binders and notebooks were decorated lavishly with pictures and words in brightly coloured markers Poppy herself was dressed in subdued colours. Black boots, black shorts, white coloured t-shirt with a brown tree, the palest skin in California and black hair in heavy contrast, held back with a black piece of heavy cotton and pinned up so it stuck out in every direction, brown feathers jammed in at strategic areas. Her 'look' usually had other people under the assumption that she was a goth girl, a horrible label to add to a girl like Poppy.

She didn't know what she was, but it definitely wasn't goth.

Shouldering open the door to the library, she dropped her pile of work on the first available table, pens of many different colours and papers fluttering out in an almost cartoon way. Poppy was faced with the challenge of sorting out what was usable information, and what was nonsense writings she had done during class. Poppy invariably took notes all class every class, but not necessarily related to the class. She drew pictures, wrote long pieces she couldn't remember that didn't seem to make sense, wrote long lists of words with obscure and distant relations to each other. Maybe thirty percent of everything she did in class was actual work, and that was being generous.

Poppy seated herself in front of the pile of paper, collecting her wide assortment of pens and organizing everything she had with awkward twitchy movements so it was laid out neatly before her. Fingers curled against her collarbone, Poppy exhaled quietly- music. Who studied without music? Another couple minutes of frenzied digging in her bag brought out her best friend, a 16-gig iPod maybe only half-full of music, tastes varying from Lady Gaga to Gustav Holst and back again. It picked up where she had left off, halfway through a Nightwish song. She picked up where she had left off as well, trying her hardest to decode formulas and functions.

Maths would not be hard were it not for those wretched variables. The concept of using letters to stand in the place of invisible numbers was completely foreign to her, for letters and numbers resonated completely differently within Poppy's mind. Where music and linguistics were languages of emotion and expression, mathematics was a language of technics and it just made a mess of things in Poppy's head when they crossed over. She leaned on her elbows, struggling to make sense of the interpretations her mind was sending her, a mix of colours that made no sense. 'What the tits?' she muttered to herself.

(count) 646
(clothes) polyvore
(music) willow - emilie autumn
(notes) i hate my computer. what the tits.

[landon andrew stang]

WAKING THE NEIGHBORS
unfimilar faces

Really, libraries were only good for one thing. Sleeping. It was almost dead quiet in there except for the small ruffle of pages turning. Every once in a while there would be a large outburst from a book slamming against a table or dropped to the wooden floor. Not even his bedroom was this dead silent. There was always the silent sound of the wind knocking against his window. Sometimes his dog would come in the middle of the night and pant heavily in his face. No one seemed to bother Landon places his head down against the studying desk. It was quite obvious that the book below him was not being read. Landon tried to read it for homework purposes, but had found it so incredibly boring that his head started to slip from his hand. The hand that his head was resting on. After he had drifted off to slumber, his head landed on the book, his arm proped against the hand, sitting in the air.

It wasn't the personal book that really bore him. It was just that in general. He had a hard time learning, so hated to bother with it. He only did it so he could pass his Junior year, since this was his second time around already. It was about time for him to do something. At least get out of the school. Landon had the slightest idea where he was going to be leading his life after he got out, however. His main concern was to get it all done. Once that goal was completed, then he could just focus on what to do. More of crossing the bridge when you came to it. Or something like that. Though he supposed that sleeping on the book he was suppose to be attempting to comprehend wasn't the greatest start to everything. Probably wasn't the best choice either. It seemed that he spent so much time the night before drinking that he didn't get all that good of a sleep. Waking in the middle of the night to get a throbbing headache. Just his luck. Go to sleep late just to wake up with a headache, then wake up early the next morning. It was a drag.

So he decided now would be a good time. His other arm that wasn't propped against his head was under his head, giving him support. His mouth was slightly open, drooling a little bit on his arm, but nothing too noticable. It wasn't enough to reach his navy blue t-shirt. Landon was a surprisingly quiet sleeper, especially for his mouth hanging wide open. If you couldn't see him, it would just sound like he was breathing heavily. Though the hunched over body with the slow rise and sink of his shoulders gave a clear sign, even if you couldn't see the shut eyes. There was a couple of people who had walked past, debating to wake him or not. Some teased him, since Landon was also a quite deep sleeper, touching his dark neatly cut fluffy hair.

The thing that woke up really didn't mean to. At least, that was the impression he recieved. The poor person had about three books in their arms, and needed a place to set them down. So they decided right in front of him would be nice. Between the accidental large bang and the shake of the table, he snorted away. His eyes were blurry at first, not remembering where he was at, and only seeing a small swirl of colors. His eyesight was fine, but it seemed to do this whenever he woke up. Once his eyes fixed into focus, he realized that he had actually fallen asleep in the library. He sighed deeply, for this wasn't the first time. Feeling stiff, he grunted and sat himself up. The girl above him looked terrified that she had woken him up, but he looked as if he could care less. His eyes were still a little droopy from the nap. His hair was slightly russled and his arm had a bit of dry spit.

He rubbed the dry spit off, then looked at the book, trying to remember where he last took off on this math assignment. It didn't matter what damn book it was, he could never get the damn thing straight. The paper that was sitting beside the book, looking barely touched except for the turned corners on the ends from the small folder showed that he still had twenty five more problems to go. Fuckface He cursed in his mind, knowing if he really wanted to say it at the volume here, someone was going to hear him and he was so going to get kicked out. His mind traveled to the why bother, but he knew that math was one of his highest grades. A 78 percent. That was a high C. He was actually trying for a B so his mom would quit bitching on how he had so much more poteitntial and such.

Still kind having the first waking up droziness, he didn't notice the girl sitting next to him until his eyes started to wander around. It looked and people watched some of the freaky people walking by. Then he looked over and about jumped when he realized that there was actually someone there. A person, no doubt, that he hadn't talked to yet. Taking a first glance, he knew he would remember that face. At first, she just kind of looked like she was missing out of an old black and white photo, since all of her clothes were huge contrasting black and white (mostly black). Then her skin was just about glow in the dark white with pitch black hair hanging down. She kind of looked like a bird with her tall thin face, even if he only saw it from the side. Then it occured to him she might have been one of those dark freaky people who worshiped the devil and all that shit. Landon was quite the labeler, but there was something else. She was a girl. Oh, how Landon loved his girls.

Then she landed in a position that Landon found himself in not too long ago before collasping on top of his book that still didn't mean a thing to him. She mumbled something and he straighted. If he was a dog and had ears at the top of his head, they would have shot straight up as well. Did she just say tits? Landon was a guy and thought of that as one thing. He didn't even pay attention to the little words she had mumbled before. He cocked his head, also leaning forward to see if he could see her full view. "Did you just say tits?" He asked, slightly slurred from the sleepiness. There was also a hint of confusion in his voice. Not quite the way most would just strike up a conversation, but it was better then nothing. Landon could really care less about how he started it. He was just social like that.

He looked over to see if he could read what she was working on. He couldn't see properly, as he wasn't that talented. So, not wanting to be left out, he asked, "What is that?" He asked, obviously indicating that he couldn't see over it to really properly account for what it was. He hardly ever tried to hide anything. Most of the time he didn't have much to hide. If he was trying to look at something, he was pretty obvious about it, leaning and craning his neck each way he possibly could.

[poppy lee hahn]

With her rainbow of pens marking out certain letters and numbers in every formula, Poppy knew that she either looked like something from the Hello Kitty store or completely mad. But it made things she didn't understand maybe fifty times easier to understand. She could easily read simple black text, but when the words or letters all had their colours it brought on a whole different experience for her. When Poppy read black text, the information went straight to her brain and she understood it. When Poppy read text written with just the right colours, the information affected her vision and hearing and she lived through everything the word was instead of just knowing it. It was effortless for her to see meaning behind things and so writing in colour was the easiest way to go when she was learning something new and difficult.

Her mother was the only one who really understood how Poppy saw, and when one looked back at her old schoolwork and music it was very obvious that she was encouraged to learn her own way, with lots and lots of pretty colours. Her method brought on countless psyche evaluations where she'd sit on the floor and play with crayons and paper and a hospital doll that smelled weird- the one they used to ask children where the man touched them- while her mother talked in an important voice to a doctor who wasn't wearing a white coat and didn't stick her with needles and hit her knees. Then he'd bend down and ask her innocent sounding questions, and send her home with a new name- synesthete. She scratched out an X in blue ink and tapped her pen on the desk to the beat of some pretty intense medieval folk music. The music was beginning to distort her vision and cloud her reality, and Poppy tried to blink it away. Poppy's thought process amazed the doctors without white coats, but it did nothing more than royally piss Poppy off when it interfered with her life like this. It'd probably all be better if Poppy chose to take her medication, but she didn't want anybody to see her taking drugs at supper- they'd make assumptions.

Prior to his waking up, Poppy was really doing her best to not disturb the sleeping boy ahead of her. Seeing as how he was sleeping at school, he probably really needed it. She had absolutely no ability to sleep the way he was sleeping, under the eyes of everybody in the library. Hell, she couldn't even sleep if the pictures on the wall were looking at her. And her wall was covered in art. All the eyes in the portraits looked at the door on purpose. It was probably a bit eerie to other people. As soon as they walked in... lots and lots of eyes staring at them. Poppy didn't sleep much regardless of where her pictures' eyes were looking, proven by the dark circles under her eyes (more black). She flinched and waited fearfully for the end of her life as the boy groaned, stirred and woke up. She squeaked a half-intelligible apology and bright her knees to her chest, wrapping her forearms around them. Negative attention at school was the last thing she wanted.

She recognized the face across from her. It was a boy she had met some time ago at a party, or a school function or someplace where she had met a lot of people. They had talked for maybe forty seconds about something mundane and general like school or celebrities and then never saw each other again. She vaguely remembered his angular face, golden-spiral conventional hotness. Poppy couldn't help it- she smiled a tiny bit as he questioned the tits. She had been allowed to say 'dirty' words like shit and fuck in the house when she was younger- so that they would cease to be in her mind words of infinite power and just normal words, thus making it so that she wouldn't swear as much in the future, but she had found different words that pissed off her mum, usually improper words for the female anatomy. Tits, twat... she never really grew out of saying them, either.

'Yes, I said tits,' she said in her usual quiet voice. 'I was just thinking to myself that I'd like to haul these ones out. Interested?' Poppy snorted and pointed at her unsubstantial chest, a hint of acid in her voice as well as a playful tone. She wasn't one to talk much to people she wasn't close with, but when she did it came out like that. Well, that or serious verbal abuse. Namecalling was a normal occurrence, something fun for her to do. It didn't necessarily mean she disliked the victim of her sharp tongue, but it meant that they were approaching their final chance. Men on the street who threw blatant invitations to sexual intercourse her way, anyone who gave her grief for being different and wearing feathers in her hair and homemade clothes, and especially people who called her a beggar for playing music on the street who made her want to run them through with various sharp objects.

She continued with the little progress she was making on her studying, making a purple M to represent the slope of something or other, when she heard the boy's voice again. 'This,' she paused and put her pen down. 'This is rainbow math. Solve a question and you get a sparkly unicorn covered in frosting and sprinkles.' Poppy was always quick to poke fun at her own mental handicap. Plus, by now she felt she deserved a sparkly unicorn covered in frosting and sprinkles for questions this impossible. She wanted to murder her math teacher with a rusty pair of scissors.


(count) 968
(clothes) polyvore
(music) königin - faun
(notes) --

[landon andrew stang]

WAKING THE NEIGHBORS
unfimilar faces

His eyes finally started to come into a focus. To where she wasn't such a fuzzy picture or something to scan over. Now it was definate features, and Landon even reconized her. He was very good with faces, but it was the names that really made him mind scramble. He could remember the faces and the names, but he couldn't fit one to each. It was like a puzzle to him. Match the faces with the following names inside of his head. It was a complicated game, and the first couple of times he strongly disliked the embarassment of not remebering someone's name. If the name was complicated, then it usually took him about five billion times to remember it. If it was simple, then it would only take him a couple. Since this girl he reconized had to be the first or second small time, he couldn't remember. Hopefully that wouldn't come up in conversation.

Who knew if she even remembered him? Landon thought himself of a guy that was not easily forgotten, but that was his own ego clouding his mind. It was a small conversation none the less. He believed it was at some random school function. Maybe a party, but taking in that Landon really couldn't picture her at one, it was a school function. He was always quick to judge people on what they were like before they even began speaking. If he was right or wrong was the thing that was different with just about every time. Sometimes he would get lucky and the person would be exactally like he thought they would be. Other times, they completely surprised him with a random move he never thought he'd see.

She answered quietly, though he could hear just fine since it was just in a quiet area. He made a crooked smile on his face at her small snort. Oh, now that Landon's attention was officially grabbed, he straighted up, leaned back into his chair. Then he put his enourmous packed arms and swung them over his head in a large stretch. It sure felt good after a hunched over nap like that. Not that he stood up nice and straight and tall before, but all the same. He went back to his original position, still with a smile on his face, holding back a large yawn. Signs that he was starting to wake up. First the blury sleepiness, then the stretching and yawning. Normally it would be the standing up and walking around, but supposed now that he had company, he could stay a little while longer.

"Hell yeah." He perked, still slightly slurred, but nothing to what it was before. "If you were smart, you could make some money since you seem to be hauling them out anyway." Landon wasn't really afraid of offending anyone. Just what he was thinking came right out of his mouth without any more thought. It was a habit he devoloped as a child, and was quite popular for it among the teachers. It got him in loads of trouble, unfortunately. As sometimes what he was thinking was clearly inappropriate, like maybe 'well fuck this is stupid as shit' really loud in a classroom that echoed like an empty hallway. The teachers for some odd reason didn't like cursing. Landon never understood it, since frankly, he was sure they were thinking even worst then he was saying out loud about him. At least Landon didn't point his thoughts generally toward anyone.

At her response, he looked at her with at first a confused expression. He wasn't sure if she was making fun of his random question or if she was having a load of sarcasm coming out of her mouth. Eh, Landon could play along. After all, two could play at that game. So his expression soon changed as he went, "Awesome!" He exclaimed, as if it happened all the time, "Always wanted one of those. Even if I did get one of those, I'm too much of a dumbass to get them right." Landon knew he was, and he'd be the first to admit it. At first, he would take it very personally, getting into a fight whoever called him so. Now he just wanted to get in a fight, but would save it for a later date. Only he could make fun of himself. Of course unless it was just teasing him, but that was an entirely different game of play.

Though he would pick a fight sometimes just to pick a fight. He would usually dig deep to find a reason if he really was desperate to punch someone hard in the face. If there was nothing else more he hated, it was the fight beginning be his fault. Even if it was, he could back up his story on the inside he dug up. It was like trying to convince himself that this was the real reason they were butting heads. More then once, he had been wanting to get into one, so he was starting to joke around with the other guy, kind of teasing him, making clear it was just kids. The guy, naturally, would usually do it back, and he pretended to take it personally so that he could get his tough guy status in for the day. There were other times when he saw a girl watching and he just wanted to show off. One of the other things he was known for was trying to be the center of attention. In fact, if he really wanted to, he'd probably talk loudly in the library, just so that everyone could turn their head to blink at him. Instead, he figured since he just caused enough for sleeping on his book, he would let it down. Besides, if he guessed correctly about this girl, she wasn't the one for attention. But again, it was all just a theory.

[poppy lee hahn]

Eyes half closed, Poppy squinted at the boy she had just woken up. She knew she knew him, and from where more or less, but there was one little problem. Who the hell was he? There was no personality she could place, no name to call this bow. She knew he was looking at her and paying full attention by know- but she didn't bother trying to make it a secret that she was studying his features, as if a particular part of his face would jog her memory. Poppy didn't consider herself one to forget a person, so was it possible that they had never met and it was some creepy form of destiny that had brought her to him, like in a bad romance movie? Yeah, that was totally likely.

She pondered introducing- or reintroducing herself, or if that was a bit soon. Well, they'd already spoken of her rack. This hadn't established itself as any regular conversation. Her blue pen doodling swirls and triangles on her margin, she rested her chin on her palm, sighed, and glanced back up at the boy across from her. Yep, still the same guy as she saw twelve seconds ago. Her eyebrows slightly raised, Poppy murmured, "You probably don't know me. I would be surprised if you did. I'm Poppy." She harbored a certain kind of resentment for her own name. You couldn't nickname it except for old man names like Pops. Pappy. Like someone's grandfather. And then in school when she was younger- when her teachers read 'In Flander's Fields the poppies grow' people giggled and looked at her. Yes, she definitely grew between the crosses row on row. But the worst part was how obscenely easy it was to ridicule her name. Schoolchildren had honestly thought it was an original idea to call her Poopy, when she had heard it literally millions of times before.

Poppy's smirk spread. She didn't meet the boy's eyes, but nodded, laughing softly and flicking her pen. "And-" Poppy paused, pulling on her nest of hair, picking a feather from it and twirling it between her thumb and forefinger. She always got fidgety when she spoke to people. "And how much are you willing to pay for me to 'haul them out anyway', as you put it?" She said it with a flirtatious tone, but had quite obviously intended it as a joke. They were in a library, after all, her breasts weren't so interesting anyway. Not so beautiful and voluptuous as to pass for what was seen as sexy, not so small as to pass for an athlete. She had small tits and no excuse for it. Plus, she was, despite all the messages stating otherwise, a lot more reluctant to show them off than other girls her age. She didn't want to be treated like a piece of meat just for showing off two pieces of meat.

She had sensed a bit of insult in that last comment, which had sent her defenses thundering up. She was trying not to take that to heart, but he had called her stupid. And easy. Well, sort of. Although she didn't hate this boy, didn't even dislike him yet, his backhanded comment did make Poppy question her immediate trust for Mr. Good-looking. Had she brought it on herself with the underlying sexual invitations? Men were shallow, maybe she had pushed his fragile, yet inflated ego too far by just about throwing herself at him- no matter how sarcastically. Sexual overtones probably made him think he was so attractive that a woman such as Poppy would just lay down at his feet.

"That's why I use the weird rainbow coding system, I'm too much of a dumbass to understand it the way teachers tell me to," Poppy replied uneasily. She wasn't going to tell anybody, ever, anything about why she really used the rainbow pens. She wasn't too convincing. It didn't look at all coded- just a bunch of uncoordinated colours all over the paper. Poppy just hoped he wouldn't think she was 'too much of a dumbass' to come up with a really complicated coding system. She was quite good at codes, as it happened. Mixed up numbers and letters and things corresponding to other things were like her 'other' language. English, French, Gaelic, Russian- and Concealment.

She studied the little bit of personality she could draw from his last statements. He seemed like the 'man' type. Aggressively masculine, maybe a little bit cocky. Alright by her. Maybe he had some confidence to share with her.

(count) 758
(clothes) polyvore
(music) the islander - nightwish
(notes) sorry. spent a week with my ex, then had to live in his house and feed his cat while he went away.