Hey guys! Happy holidays! I'm here with my Secret Santa story!
This story was written for MaddieLovesFOB. Maddie, I hope you like it, and that you had a happy Hanukkah! I didn't know you shipped Gwent, but this was awesome to write.
And here we are with the disclaimer. I, mB13, do not own Total Drama. Fresh employees aren't allowed to read fanfiction so that if an episode vaguely similar to a fanfic for their show is aired, they don't get sued by a writer for their idea being used and them not being credited or something like that. I definitely doubt they would let one of their employees write fanfiction for their shows, as well.
Everything In Art Is Done For A Reason
Age 8
Gwen was on her way to school with her mom and her baby brother, Russell. It was her first day at this school because she had moved here right before winter break.
Gwen sat in the backseat of the car in her jeans, dark green sweatshirt, and small black coat with Russell, thinking about why she had to move.
As they pulled up to the elementary school, Gwen was reluctant to get out of the car.
"It'll be fine Gwen. Come on," Her mother assured her, grabbing her hand and helping her out of the car, then picking up Russell and carrying him.
When they reached the front office, the secretary told them to sit down for a minute while she got the principal.
"Hello, Mrs. Cooper. Welcome to Wawanakwa Elementary. I'm Principal O'Halloran," A woman with long blonde hair introduced. "And you must be Gwen," She said, bending down to shake Gwen's hand.
Gwen hid behind her mother's leg.
"It's ok Gwen. You'll be fine," Her mother reassured her daughter again.
"Why don't we go to your class?" Ms. O'Halloran suggested. "Follow me."
Ms. O'Halloran led Gwen and her mother to room 8, and opened the door. The class was currently having an indoor recess. The teacher walked to the door.
"Hi! I'm Mrs. Plymouth," She introduced herself, reaching out to shake Mrs. Cooper's hand.
"Hello. This is Gwen," Mrs. Cooper introduced her daughter, who was still hiding behind her leg.
"Hi," Gwen said, coming out a little from behind her mother's leg.
"Hi Gwen. You wanna come inside and meet your classmates?" Mrs. Plymouth asked.
"Ok."
Mrs. Cooper bent down and hugged her daughter goodbye. "Have fun sweetheart. You'll be fine. I'll come pick you up at the end of the day."
"Bye Mama."
Gwen walked into the classroom and stood up front with Mrs. Plymouth.
"Class," The teacher announced. "We have a new student. This is Gwen Cooper."
A few "hey's" and "hi's" were heard around the classroom.
"Why don't you go sit with Noah, Eva, and Izzy?" The teacher suggested, gesturing towards an Indian boy reading a book, a redhead coloring, and an athletic looking girl with her hair in a high, silky ponytail.
She took off her coat and bag and sat down, putting them on the back of the chair.
"Hi! I'm Izzy! What's up? Wanna color?" The redhead introduced herself to Gwen loudly and excitedly, causing the latter girl to tense up a bit at the unexpected volume of the wild ginger.
"Yes Izzy, I'm sure the new girl would absolutely love having a heart attack from shock on her first day here," The boy, presumably Noah, said to the redhead.
The other girl, most likely Eva, looked up from tying her shoe and said "Hi, I'm Eva," before looking back down to her shoe.
Gwen calmed down after a moment and said "Hi. Sure, I'd like to color. Do you have any paper I can use?"
Izzy handed Gwen a blank piece of notebook paper, and Gwen took a pencil and eraser out of her bag.
Gwen started to draw a small picture of the people at her table. Her drawing was of better quality than is usually seen in an 8 year old, but could use a little bit of improvement in drawing things like hands and shoulders.
She drew Izzy, smiling and laughing, with a chalk drawing on the ground around her; she had Noah sitting at a table reading a book, much like he was now, and Eva shooting a basketball into a hoop.
As she grabbed a colored pencil off the table, a girl with long blonde hair in a high ponytail at the next table over caught a glance of Gwen's drawings. "Wow! You're a good artist!"
Gwen turned to the girl and said "Thanks. I'm Gwen."
"I'm Bridgette," The blonde introduced herself. "Wanna sit together at lunch?"
"Sure," Gwen said, grabbing an orange colored pencil and coloring Izzy's mess of hair.
At lunch, Gwen and Bridgette sat with Bridgette's best friend, Courtney. The three of them quickly became friends.
Age 11
It was the first day of middle school for the trio of friends. Gwen, Bridgette, and Courtney had talked for the duration of homeroom about how excited and nervous they were and their plans for the school year.
"I'm running for class president," Courtney declared to her friends.
"Court, you know only 8th graders can run for president, right? You'll have to run for the 6th grade governor, instead," Gwen told her friend.
"Well I'll run for that then," She declared, a little less excited than she had sounded before.
Gwen was now walking by herself to art class, which neither of her friends had signed up for.
"Hello class. I'm Mrs. Greyson, and I'm your art teacher this year. I have assigned each of you a seat, so when I call your name, please sit down at that seat."
Mrs. Greyson called through about 20 names before she got to Gwen. "Gwen Cooper," she called, assigning her to a seat near the back of the classroom, but not so far back that the teacher wouldn't be able to see anything.
"Trent Nicholson," She called, assigning the boy to sit next to Gwen. The teacher then assigned Izzy, the redhead from Gwen's 3rd grade class, and a boy named Dave Fredrick to sit at the table with them.
Gwen looked at Trent, and noticed that he was looking at her. Their eyes locked for a moment, and then they looked away, blushing.
"Today, we will be doing a getting to know your classmates activity. We will go around the classroom in alphabetical order, and you will say your name and one thing about yourself," Mrs. Greyson announced after assigning seats to the last 8 or so students.
They started with Harold Arnold, and quickly got to Gwen afterwards. Gwen stood up and said "My name is Gwen Cooper, and I love drawing the people around me."
The class continued to move from person to person, and Gwen started drawing a small sketch of a rose on a piece of paper. She didn't look up from her drawing until she saw that Trent had stood up. He said "My name is Trent Nicholson, and I play guitar."
Gwen looked at him, then looked back at her drawing when he started to sit back down. She started drawing a figure next to the rose, but the features weren't defined enough to identify who it was supposed to be.
Class went by without interruption, and Gwen left for her next class, science. When she arrived, she chose an empty table near the middle of the classroom.
She started unpacking her supplies for science that were on the list of things to bring, and sat down, only to have another figure arrive at the table and ask "Is this seat taken?"
Gwen looked up and saw Trent, the boy from her art class. "No, it's open."
"Can I sit here?"
"Uh… Sure."
Gwen looked around the classroom, seeing Courtney and Bridgette at a table across the classroom, looking in Gwen's direction and smiling.
She turned her attention back to her supplies when the teacher started taking attendance. After having all 28 students accounted for, the teacher announced "Good morning class. I'm your teacher, Mrs. Anderson. These are your seats for the rest of the year. I hope you chose them wisely."
Most of the class cheered quietly, though there were a few groans.
At lunch later that day, Gwen sat with Courtney and Bridgette as she had for years by that point.
"I saw you talking to Trent. You looked like you were blushing," Courtney started.
"Do you have a crush on Trent?" Bridgette asked.
"No, I don't have a crush on Trent," she said, though her bright red cheeks said otherwise.
"You do have a crush on him!" Bridgette exclaimed.
"Would you keep it down? I don't really want the whole school to know this."
"Sorry, but this is so exciting. Both of my best friends have crushes!" Bridgette quietly squealed.
"Both of us? Courtney, you have a crush on someone?"
"No!" Courtney said defensively. She then calmed down a bit, but still said "Ok, so maybe I do, but I'm not just going to go telling people who when I'm in a crowded cafeteria."
"Fair point," Bridgette said.
"Why don't we get off the topic of guys for now and save it for when we hang out later?" Gwen asked her friends.
"Alright," They both said, and the trio continued eating their lunch talking about their teachers and their schedules.
After 4 more classes that day, Gwen went home and gave her mother the multitude of papers she had to sign, and went to play with 4 year old Russell.
"This is going to be a long year…" She thought to herself.
Age 14
It was the first day of high school. 'The most dreaded time of the year for most people, except for maybe Courtney,' Gwen thought to herself as her mother dropped her off in the parking lot of Wawanakwa High School.
She said goodbye to her mother and her brother, and walked to the front steps of the school, where she, Bridgette, and Courtney had planned to meet.
She waited for a few minutes, checking Twitter on her phone. She saw a Tweet from Geoff, who Bridgette had been dating since 7th grade, when he not-so-subtly tried to win her over with macaroni art, which she felt was a sweet gesture and agreed to go out with him. Two years later, they're still going strong.
After looking through her Twitter feed a little more, Bridgette and Courtney showed up, and they all started freaking out about how they were finally in high school. Courtney had already been working on buttons for her presidential run, even though the elections weren't for another two months.
They walked to their homeroom to get their schedules and locker combinations, and then split up so they could go to their lockers, which were spread throughout the school.
Gwen approached her locker and turned the dial for her combination, 22-6-40. She got her combination on the first try, and opened the door. She put her bag and folders in her locker, and closed the locker door.
She turned her head to the left to see who had the locker next to hers. Who she saw left her in shock.
The person next to her was Trent. The person she had been harboring feelings for since 6th grade. The person that she hadn't interacted with since 6th grade, for that matter. She quickly turned around to return to her homeroom.
After homeroom, she went to her double English class, where all they went over was the rules and class introductions. It was a generally uneventful class, and Gwen didn't care to remember most of her peers' names.
After class, she returned to her locker to get her paper bag for her lunch. She had learned better than to get a school lunch and suffer through the undercooked food and horrible taste.
Taped to her locker, she found a note that read 'Meet me in the art room during lunch,' in somewhat frantic-looking scribbles.
"I wonder who this could be from," Gwen thought.
After walking to the art room, which was across the school, Gwen sat down at an empty chair, waiting for whoever sent her the note to show up.
After a few minutes of waiting and nobody showing up, Gwen decided to just go to the cafeteria. As she stood up to leave, someone burst through the door.
"Dammit. Cafeteria line took too long and now she's probably left…" The person said, not noticing that Gwen was there.
When he noticed Gwen, he smiled, though Gwen was shocked. She probably should have known it was him, but she didn't figure it out until then.
"Trent? Are you the one who left a note on my locker?"
"Yeah."
"But why?"
"Remember 6th grade, when I asked to sit with you in science? Why do you think that is?"
Gwen thought back to that moment, and said "I just assumed it was because it was the first open seat you saw."
"Everything in art is done for a reason.[1] Life is kinda like art, in a way. So everything in life is done for a reason. I sat with you for a reason. I sat with you because I liked you, and I still do."
"You sat with me because you liked me?" Gwen thought about her feelings the entire first day of school that year. "To be honest, I like you, too. I have ever since I saw you in art class on the first day of school."
"Well, that certainly makes this a little less awkward. Anyways, there was a reason I asked you here, and I'm pretty sure you already know what it is, but I'm going to say it anyways. Will you go out with me? There's an art fair over on Main Street at six tomorrow," Trent asked her.
Gwen, who had figured it out as Trent had assumed she had, thought about this for about 10 seconds, then said "Yes. I'll go out with you."
So, did you like it? I hope you did Maddie.
Happy holidays, everyone! I'm also going to be publishing a Christmas fic on the 25th, if you want to read that. I'm publishing multiple things in less than a week?! Shocking! :P
Please R&R, favorite, and you don't have to follow this one since it's a oneshot. And as I have said many times before, guest reviews are completely welcome!
[1]- So, in my language arts class last year, my teacher would always say "Everything in art is done for a reason." He had it written on the chalkboard the entire year, and he would say it whenever we had to annotate something, and my class got to the point where we quoted it to each other. The quote speaks to me, I guess, and it was a spur of the moment thing to include it. I thought it would be kinda sweet and I needed something to lead into the cute fluffy moment.
I was also stuck for a title until literally 5 minutes before posting this, and I got the idea to use that as my title since it was a nice quote, even though it really had nothing to do with the actual story. :P
That's all for now! Bye!