"Hey, Cas! Is Peter still tutoring you, or can we hang out today?"
Cassie turned her green eyes to her best friend. "Sorry, Jessie. I'm going to go hang out with Peter and his friends." The silence seemed to grow and the blonde's smile faded at the irritated expression on her friend's face. "…Is something wrong?"
The redhead just pursed her lips. "I have to pretend I'm this perfect little giggly girl for the first six months after I move here and you, the one that wants to be one of those giggly girls, gets to hang out with the Goth kids. I cannot believe this! After all I did, you don't even want to be one of those girls anymore?! I even got you an invite to Sharon's slumber party on Friday and everything!"
Cassie gasped. "You did!? Oh, that's wonderful!"
Jessica snapped. "I know! This is finally your chance to show those hussies how much of a girl you are! Don't go and ruin it! Ruin it after you show them a thing or two! That way they'll feel like complete losers for not noticing how much you didn't even care about how they treated you!"
"But…I cared a lot…"
"They don't have to know that, though, do they!?"
Cassie smiled. "Oh, Jessie. I'm so glad I met you when I did… You're a much better friend than any of them could be. I'm happy just having you, you know. I don't give a crap what they think about me anymore, thanks to you."
Jessica grinned. "Oh, so since you've already decided to be a social outcast, can we both raise hell at the slumber party on Friday??"
Cassie grinned. "We can, and will."
"Great! I have to go get a haircut on Friday and pull out all the fishnet from the back of my closet! Oooh! I'm going to make them so friggin' scared!"
The door opened wide open and the sandy-haired girl came out with her friends again. Jessica turned around and dashed off after Sharon. "By, Cas! I'll see you later!" The second she became absorbed in the group, they all began whispering hurriedly.
Cassie smiled and waited patiently for Peter to get there, and after a while, he came out of the school building. He had a sheet in his hand, and it looked fairly important. She smiled and waved, standing up.
"Hi, Peter…"
He looked up and turned red, yanked the paper behind his back. She tilted her head and reached around him, grabbing it. "What's this?" It was a form, requesting a transfer out of some advanced classes. She whistled. "Why are you trying to get out of the advanced classes? You're so smart!"
He turned red and grabbed it from her. "N-No reason… It just…got too difficult for me to keep up with…" After a while, he sighed. "Um, Cassandra?"
She smiled and nodded her head. "Yes?"
"Is it alright if I just go to your house and tutor you? Um…I think it'd be better to get all of this over with…"
Cassie frowned, getting the wrong impression. She cleared her throat a little, fought back tears. "S-So…you don't…want to talk to me anymore?"
His eyes widened and his cheeks flushed, his hands went out in front of him as if in surrender. "N-No! It's just…I don't know when the test is coming up for you since I take advanced English… Also, Nicholas was telling me that it wasn't in good taste to procrastinate…"
Cassie giggled and wiped a tear from her eye, feeling alright again. "That's true… Can we hang out on Thursday, then?" Peter nodded his head and she gave him another hug. "Thank you! I know I'll win your friends over in no time!"
He smiled a little and put a hand on her back cautiously, stood there for a while, entranced. She smiled and grabbed his hand. "Come on! If we're going to get this studying over, we should do it today!"
––––––––––––––
"Well, for The Bells, the poem has many different meanings to it, as long as many different allusions. For instance, in the first part, with the silver bells, you get a distinct feel of Christmas, right?"
She nodded, scribbling it down as he pointed to the passage on the page in her textbook. She was in his court now, so she really could only nod her head and write, leaving him to ramble.
"In the second poem it seems to imply summer; don't you feel the mood there? And in the third the sense of urgency could really only be compared to fall, right? Because it's after summer…?"
She nodded again, although that didn't explain why Spring had been skipped. That was her favorite season.
"Not true. When you read this poem, it's very easy to try and compare it to the different seasons, but that's not what you should do. If you took it literally, there would really only be two seasons–summer and winter. Instead, you have to look at it in terms of life."
She looked up, scratched out all that she'd written about seasons. "Life? Like how?"
Peter smiled and pointed to the first part of the poem. "Christmas has always had a sort of childish feel to it, right? The first part of the entire poem deals with birth and childhood. More specifically, the innocence of childhood."
She gasped. "Oh! That makes perfect sense!"
He smiled and pointed to the second half. "This one is much more obvious because of the first line–mellow wedding bells. This deals with marriage and the happiness associated with it. At the same time, think about old churches: They had one bell in the bell tower usually, right? They would ring it for weddings and for funerals. In a way, you could also look at this part to be a symbol for the death of that innocence you had as a child. It's a death of childhood and a door, somewhat, into adulthood.
"And in the third, it has a panicked feel to it. It's rushed, anxious, scared. This is middle age, and back then people died younger. So, middle age was pretty much what came before death. They'd sometimes skip with the whole elderly part. However, this part pertains to facing one's own mortality. You anticipate it, you fear it, thus, the anxiousness in this part of the poem."
She scribbled that down and pointed at the last part of the poem. "So that has to do with death, right?"
Peter nodded. "Here are the funeral bells. At this point in life, the fear of death has gone, and you accept it with ready arms, as scary as it might be. There's also something many people miss in this one, too. Look at all of the words in this: solemn, melancholy, throbbing, sobbing, moaning, groaning. Those are attributed to people. However, there are also the Ghouls, the demons, so to speak. If you look at the words pertaining to them, it gives the entire thing a different meaning: glory, merry, dances, happy."
"Wait, but in the second poem, you mentioned how it was the death of innocence childhood and also gives birth to the new life of adulthood… Shouldn't this last part signify death and the life afterwards that you've achieved? I mean, why else would he put that in there?"
"Because it signifies being conquered by death and the futility of fighting it. The Ghouls were happy to take the life of someone, and nothing else. This poem pretty much shows life played out just as it is. There's finality, there's a permanent end."
Cassie frowned, pouting her bottom lip out a little farther. Her eyebrows rose and slanted, in a half-sad, half-annoyed expression. "But…that's so sad… It's just death and that's it? That's…horrible."
Peter shrugged. "Well, that's Poe. Edgar Allen Poe had depression… It's not that hard to see that he'd write something as depressing as this. I like this poem, though. Through his use of repetition, rhyme and onomatopoeia, he gets the feel of each and every bell and the sounds they make. It's probably one of his best poems…"
She smiled and scribbled the last part of symbolism in the poem. "Yeah, I guess if you look at just the prose, it's a bit better…even if it is depressing…"
She closed her book and stared at her desk for a while, and Peter walked to the door. "Well, do you understand it all yet?"
Cassie looked over at him, frowning. "Sharon invited me to her slumber party on Friday…" Peter turned and looked at her; she was smiling sheepishly, staring at the door. "I've always wanted to be accepted by them…but now it just seems like a hassle… I mean, it'd be great if I became her friend and forgot about how she used to tease me mercilessly…but…"
He blinked and tilted his head a little, staring at his shoes. "Then…shouldn't you at least try it? To be their friend?"
"Yeah…but…what about your friends…?"
"What about them?"
He glanced over at her and their eyes met for a moment until she looked away, eyes misting over slightly. "All I've ever tried to do was fit in. And so far, I've failed every single time I tried. I mean…I don't even have a lot in common with your friends, and I have even less in common with Sharon… I mean, I doubt I'd fit in with your friends, either, you know?"
He frowned. "So? It doesn't matter if you fit in. All that matters is if people accept you, right? You shouldn't have to force it; then they wouldn't really accept you. They'd just accept what you put on to fool them."
"Yeah…but wouldn't you rather I had more in common with your friends?"
"No."
She looked up, gave him a weird look, and he turned bright red and looked back at his feet. "I mean… I like my friends and all…but…" He looked over to the foot of the door, as far away from her as possible. "–but…I like you more… Y-Your hair is blonde, and you have more of an interest in happy music and fairy tales, and you wear bright colours, and pretty much look nothing like the type of person my friends would be within five feet of…but…it's nice. Th-That's why I was thinking about transferring to the same level as you, so we'd see more of each other, since you're fun to talk to…
"See, even though you're not like us, you're not like them, either… So I guess…it's because you're unconventional. And I'm fine with that, so my friends will be fine with that, too…"
He looked up slowly, afraid of seeing a strange expression of disgust and degrading humor on her face, but she was wiping at her eyes and smiling. He bit his lip, realizing she was crying. "Ah! I-I'm sorry! Did I–"
She shook her head and took a deep breath. "You're so nice. Thank you for being my friend, Peter."
The corners of his lips twitched upward slightly and he pulled down on the bottom of his shirt, tugging on it. "S-Same here…"
She laughed. "And you're also really smart, so you shouldn't go out of your way to take less-challenging classes on my behalf. Then you wouldn't be following your own advice. Besides, I'm sure Henrietta would be upset if you did something like that. She seems to be really proud of you…"
He smiled a little and took out the papers from his backpack, all the forms for transferring to easier classes, tearing them up. "Y-You're right… I d-don't know what I was thinking…" He frowned slightly, and his face turned and even darker shade of red.
"Well…b-bye…"
Before she could offer to walk him to the front door and see him off, though, he opened the door and hurried out of the room.
1) "The Bells", by the Poemeister
This is my own interpretation of it, so you may feel differently. (If you do, I'd love to hear how you interpret it.) In Mr. Brightside, Peter also makes a speech about "The Raven", another Poe poem, and I'm fairly sure that one is completely wrong. I haven't read "The Raven" in years, due to the fact that I hate that poem with a passion.
2) Fitting In...And All That Jazz
I don't know about some of you, but I hope some of you can relate to Cassie. I know I for sure was just like that as a kid (even now). I went to a private school from kindergarten up to the seventh grade, and so I tried to fit in with the people there and failed. (At the same time, I didn't WANT to fit in with them, mainly because they seemed to look down on all the kids there that didn't have enough money to buy clothes from places other than Target or Wal-mart.) And in the ninth grade (I moved to public school) and got grouped into the "Gothic" group, mainly because I didn't know how to talk with people easily, and those were the kids that went out of their way to talk to me. That quickly ended after tenth grade, mainly because all the people in that group I was close to moved away (If you read Mr. Brightside, I mentioned a few of them, just so you know; not like I expect any of you to care.) Even now, I'm sort of in-and-out between the "Anime-Game-Cartoon" nerds, and I STILL find them to be a bit too shallow for me. (There's really only four people these days that actually TALK to me about things that are some-what deep. Two of which aren't even in that group.) All they talk about is Naruto and crap, when I'd rather talk about interesting things like psychology and different serial killers and the price of Corn Wheats and Opal Fruits and Gummi Bears and how much the 80's rocked harder than the crap they have today. (Can someone say The Care Bears?) So yeah. I hope some of you can relate to her to some degree, because pretty much everyone feels like this at one point in their life (to varied degrees of course; some feel like this more than others).
3) Fairy Tale Peter and Real Peter
I wanted to do two things with this fic: 1) Pair Peter with Craig's little sister, thus creating the conflict between "social classes", and 2) Show something that I experienced a lot as a child. I was an imaginative child, and so sometimes I'd create elaborate fantasies about people I'd met that I wanted to be friends with or crap like that, when in reality it was never that simple. So, in this story, I wanted to show that Cassie's fantasies of how Peter got to know her are nothing like they are in reality. I wanted to show this difference in fantasy and reality. So, in her fantasy, Peter comes out and tells her he likes her, tells her he's watched her for a long time, that he's always watched her and loved her from afar. In reality, Peter simply saw her at lunch or after school a few times and thought something was off with her; he wasn't anything like that creepy stalker-type knight-in-shining-armor type of thing she had been imagining. He became interested in how she really was, and why she was the way she was. In reality, he's not going to be that forward. He's more shy, more subtle. He'd rather first try to give her encouragement, which she, in turn, also gives him. However, he also DOES want there to be a relationship between them, so he gets a bit frustrated with all of her talk of "I want to be your friend," and "Don't do that for me; Henrietta's proud of you". To him it's as if she doesn't GET it, so he gets frustrated and, as shown in the very last sentence, runs home cryin' to his mama. Not really, but he does go home and throw a little fit or something about how she's acting so dense. I never really had a set idea for what he does afterwards. Use your own imagination. ;D