7/9/14

Ivories

part one
serendipity

—for the first time in forever, there'll be music, there'll be light—

[chapter three / sophisticated grace]

I'm going to be late, I'm going to be late—where the hell did I put my jacket?—oh shit, I'm going to be late—

Or, so were Anna's thoughts as she hightailed out of her house at six-forty-two in the morning, half of a bagel clutched in her hand, with a coat she had (attempted to) thrust hastily on flapping pathetically off her right arm. She all but careened into her used, crackpot old hunk of metal she had the misfortune to call a car, an ages-old tan '95 Toyota Camry that she half expected to break down into several rusted pieces any day now.

Muttering a stream of curses underneath her breath, she jammed the keys into the ignition, violently twisting it to the left. The last thing Anna needed was to be late to school, on top of all her other problems with her fucking Astrophysics grade (she still had yet to talk to the teacher to ask if she would offer extra credit, or find a tutor for that matter) being three points below what was considered passable. The Camry spluttered to life, wheezing puffs of light gray exhaust into the still spring air while Anna aggressively backed the poor thing out of the driveway before shooting down the road as fast as she could force the junky automobile to go.

The dreary gray pall of the clouds hanging overhead matched her mood exactly, and it only further soured when she hit a string of red lights. She tapped her fingers against the wheel impatiently, staring at the digital clock on the dashboard all the while, as if by imposing her will upon it she could make time freeze in its tracks until she finally made it to the damned school.

At six-fifty-eight and with two minutes to spare, Anna finally screeched into the parking lot of Evigvinter High School, scrabbling distractedly to unfasten her seatbelt and stuffing what remained of her bagel into her mouth. Yanking the car keys out, she unceremoniously shoved them into the pocket of her still-half-put-on jacket and half-tripped, half-sprinted to the school's main entrance, her wildly out of control backpack almost hitting a security guard in the face.

"Sorry!" Anna shouted, hastily allowing herself to glance back at any collateral damage she may had caused inadvertently. The guard grumbled but shook his head wearily, leaving Anna to dash down the halls as fast as her legs could carry her to first-period Independent Writing Honors.

Anna was not the best at academics, if she was totally honest with herself. The only things she actually excelled in were, well, Orchestra and AP Music Theory, and she doubted the former subject counted as hard academics. It didn't help that she absolutely sucked at the Independent Writing course, which she wryly guessed were where she probably scored her worst grades after Astrophysics.

Mrs. Gerda, the rather plump teacher of the class, thankfully didn't comment on Anna's bulging cheeks (unfortunately, she was still vigorously chewing on her bagel and trying her damned hardest not to choke), nor her red-faced, panting state when she noisily clunked down into her seat, dropping her bag to the side with an audible thump that resonated throughout the classroom. Anna's ears flamed an even brighter shade of crimson when the class tittered and shot her amused glances, hiding their giggles and guffaws behind hands and rolled sleeves.

"So!" Mrs. Gerda said, addressing the class from the front of the room with her hands clasped together, "Today's assignment is going to take the whole class period, and only this class period. I don't want you to work on it at home, and I want the assignment to be handed in to me by the end of class. Your task is to compare six people of your choice—they can be anyone; a classmate, a friend, a celebrity—to a fruit."

Whichever of the nine hells Anna had expected the writing teacher to set upon the class after she had said the dreaded word assignment, it sure as heck was not this.

...What the fuck kind of exercise is this?

Judging from the vaguely dismayed looks on her classmates' faces, they were thinking along very similar lines as Anna had been, and still was.

"I'm sorry. But...a fruit?" Kristoff Bjorgman deadpanned from his seat besides Anna, a bushy blond eyebrow raised in a skeptical arch.

"Yes, Kristoff, a fruit," Mrs. Gerda dryly said. "Be sure to explain why you chose the fruit you did, as it correlates with the person you are comparing it to. You have fifty-two minutes. I suggest you begin now." Then, she added, "Use your imagination! It's what this exercise is all about." She looked pointedly at Kristoff while saying this, before turning smartly to her desk and pulling a stack of papers toward her.

The sound of creaking chairs and soft groans tinged with resignation permeated the air. Pencils scratched on paper, erasers stuck in the corners of people's mouths. Anna, in contrast, stared at her empty notebook in despair, and then frantically turned to Kristoff, who was looking equally lost and confused.

"Who are you going to write about?" she whispered, tapping the end of her pencil in an uneven staccato rhythm against the pad of her glaringly blank loose leaf.

Kristoff only made a strangled sound, his mouth slightly opened in dismay.

"I don't know," he croaked. "I suck at this kind of thing. And a fruit? Why do we have to compare a human being to a fucking fruit? I hate fruit!"

Anna was wholeheartedly agreeing with Kristoff's spluttered statement when another whisper registered, "Hey, Anna!"

Anna swiveled around in her chair, staring at Marshall with wide teal eyes. "Yeah? Oh, Marsh—who are you writing about?"

"You know, we just saw Elsa Vinters perform, maybe you could—"

"No, I most certainly will not!" Anna immediately interjected, a little too quickly and way too loudly. Everyone turned to stare at her. Mrs. Gerda looked at her critically and sent her out of the room, but not before she heard Marshmallow snicker quietly to Kristoff:

"I think she's finally undergone a change of heart after yesterday."

"What, about Vinters?" To his everlasting credit, Kristoff sounded skeptical.

"Mhmm, we saw one of her live performances. You know, the one at the city's concert hall?"

"You mean the one that had been shamelessly advertised all of last week, with at least ten flyers being shoved down legitimately every single person who lives in the city's mailbox?"

Marshall rolled his eyes, "Whatever, man."

There was a long pause. Anna slowed her trudge to the door, and consequently was close enough to hear when Marshall offhandedly mentioned, "I'm pretty sure she was drooling when she watched Elsa play."

...Jesus Christ—

It was perhaps at that precise moment when Anna realized that her high school and its residents were most certainly out to fuck with her life.

—

Anna got called back into class five minutes later, after standing shock-still in the hallway and having totally suffered through her quarter-life crisis during those few agonizing moments. After her outburst, the whole class had either continued talking, or continued working, or a combination of the two. In the case of Marshall, whom Anna instantly deigned as the worst dumbass of a brother ever and now also had the personality of a dick, he was still grinning at Kristoff:

"...and you know, I think that Elsa'd be a bit like a lychee fruit."

"You realize that you're talking about a world-famous pianist who's pretty infamous for not ever talking about herself, like ever?"

"Yeah. I'd think she's a bit prickly on the outside, but beneath the shell she's small and sweet."

"...Are you sure Anna was the one who was drooling over her playing? 'Cause you sound pretty infatuated, if you ask me—"

"Excuse me," Anna indignantly said.

Marshall waggled his eyebrows at her. "Yes?" he asked, drawing out the s sound so he sounded like he was trying to impersonate a snake, and was failing miserably.

"Lychee fruit?" Anna frowned.

"Well, yes," Marshall conversationally said, "I think she's exactly like a lychee fruit. For the reasons I'd stated before—"

Because right now, Anna's been brought back to the snapshot in time where she bumped into the blonde pianist; in hindsight, Elsa Vinters had been all softly spoken words and stammers. Avoiding eye contact, fingers twitching at the ends of her sleeves, that in retrospect she had seemed downright vulnerable. And Anna felt a twinge of vague remorse for ever shutting down like she had immediately upon recognizing the famous pianist, based upon some prejudiced misconception of her, personality—and right in front of Elsa, too—when clearly the blonde had meant nothing wrong and was simply passing by.

Waaay to go, Anna, that's what you get for stereotyping.

"Elsa Vinters cannot be a lychee fruit!" Anna spluttered thickly through the haze of her thoughts, her voice rising dramatically without her ever noticing. The class immediately quieted down once more, staring at Anna (again), not that the redhead really noticed this. "I saw her on the street, and it was awkward, and it was an accident that I bumped into her, and fine, I shouldn't have acted that way, and—gods, I hate lychee fruits! Elsa Vinters is a lot better than a lychee fruit!"

There was another long and awkward silence. The class continued to stare at her. Marshall looked as if Christmas had come ten months early. Anna immediately clammed up, her hand drifting up to press against her lips.

"...Um," she weakly laughed, attempting to wave off her utterly inexplicable tirade, her cheeks a bright and flaming red, "sorry! I didn't mean to be—um—that loud...? Heh..."

Her face colored some more, if that was even possible. Anna was having her second existential crisis in as many minutes and was now considering ways in which she would be able to melt into the scuffed floors of the classroom and never be seen again by humanity.

As if sensing Anna's absolute mortification, Mrs. Gerda took pity on her, tapped her on the shoulder, and sent her out the room again.

—

The Elsa Vinters in question, while melodrama was unfolding in Evigvinter High's first-period Writing class, was steadily eating her way through an extraordinarily delicious breakfast sandwich, studying the score of Liszt's Transcendental Étude No. 8 in between bites. Yet, her glassy blue eyes, which had been focused on the same two measures for the past fifteen minutes, completely betrayed the fact her mind wasn't at all on the song.

Elsa couldn't help but let her mind drift back to the strawberry blonde she had already encountered two times in the city, once in the square and the other at her concert. She had seen the girl sitting in the very first row after her performance of the Fantaisie-Impromptu, mouth set in a straight line but eyes shining with poorly concealed wonder. Maybe it was her expression, or maybe it was something else entirely, but the fact remained that it had been nagging at Elsa all morning now, refusing to back down for the better part of her waking hours, and it was driving her insane.

I've seen her before.

And Elsa couldn't pin down exactly when she had seen the strawberry blonde before, couldn't remember where she had seen her complexion and eyes and simply the way she held herself upon initially bumping into the pianist—awkwardly adorable, a train of words tumbling out of her mouth in a ramble. She had a special air around her, almost, sweet and unique in a sense, that Elsa was sure no one who had ever encountered the girl would be able to forget so easily.

But clearly, Elsa had been able to forget, yet the memory of the girl still tugged gently at the back of her mind, and Elsa found herself unable to let it go.

She stayed at the piano bench long after her sandwich had been eaten and she'd brushed the crumbs off her fingers, padding slowly to the bathroom to wash her hands and then back again. Brooding over the sparkling white-and-black keys, staring with dazed, slightly unfocused eyes at the page inundated with black notes set stark against the white of the paper, and all the while trying to remember who this girl was. There was a slight feeling of guilt attached to her memory, that much Elsa remembered, however fuzzily—but she didn't know why, and she didn't know where.

It was only when her father stepped into the practice room and dropped a stack of mail onto the tall wooden stool besides the piano, where he normally sat, watching her like a bird of prey, that Elsa drew herself slowly out of her reverie, reaching over to the teetering envelopes and pulling the one placed on the top toward her.

"You have two weeks to make the decision," Father brusquely told her while Elsa frowned at the letter, "notify me when you have decided to accept or not. The application deadline is in a month."

Elsa nodded distantly, running a nail underneath the creases in the back flap of the envelope and gently pulling upwards. The paper make a slight tearing noise when she pulled at it and then dragged the neatly folded, heavy cream-colored stock paper out. Her eyes skipped across the formal black lettering, narrowing imperceptibly as she skimmed across the letter, before she came stumbling to a complete halt over one particular phrase:

"...would be pleased to offer you a guest faculty position for the upcoming school year at the Arendelle Institute of Performing Arts..."

They wanted her? To teach?

Elsa could already feel the familiar tightening in her chest that always came to her before a concert, before she choked down two hexagonal orange pills down with a swallow of water. She tossed the letter aside where it floated to an almost delicate halt, fluttering on the polished tiles of one of the practice rooms in the Evigvinter Concert Hall, which Elsa's father had expressly booked just for her for the whole week. Pressing her fingers to her temples, she took several deep and calming breaths before her heart rate deigned to settle down to a normal, if slightly harried pace.

Although her father had told her she had a choice, she knew she didn't. Guest faculty positions were extremely hard to come by in AIPA, never mind a permanent professorship at the highly selective music college. To be offered one, with no prior interview, no prior background checking—granted, she was a world-class pianist, so she probably didn't even need that—or any of the fancy admissions criteria Elsa could never make heads nor tails of...it was practically unheard of. No doubt she would be offending someone very important higher up if she declined, and she knew that her father, while a stickler for ferrying her around the world and arranging her performance after performance, contest after contest, would never allow her to pass up what he would undoubtedly deign as an "important learning experience." Sure, she'd have to be preparing for her entrance into the International Tchaikovsky Competition the following June (which she was frankly terrified about), but by that time, classes would be over and her father would tell her to somehow juggle practicing for that as well as this...guest teaching position, whatever she would be expected to do.

Expected to do.

She sucked in a deep and shuddering breath, holding the air in her lungs until they felt just about to burst, before letting the breath rush out of her in an airy exhale. She wasn't perfect, goddammit. She wasn't some machine who could keep on walking out onto stage, day after day, week after week, bowing and smiling something synthetic before crowds upon crowds of people and playing piano for the sake of entertainment and money. Elsa wasn't good with people and she doubted she ever would be. And frankly, she was getting sick of all these expectations that had been placed upon her since day one of her career—perhaps even before then, too—she just wanted to play piano, without anyone scrutinizing the way she played every note, how much mastery she held over her technical playing and how much personality she could infuse into her music. She wanted to play for the sake of playing—playing pieces that led not up to some all-important competition or concert, but simply for herself and herself alone. Elsa wasn't a selfish person by nature, but she had her own desires, just like any other human on the planet.

Elsa pushed her fingers further into the crown of her head, as if by trying to bruise her forehead she'd be able to leech out all the weariness and worry and pressure placed on her thin shoulders as well.

The letter laid face-down on the floor of the room, invisible yet present, inconsequential yet omnipotent.

Elsa slammed her fingers down onto the piano keys. Discordant notes clashed horribly and immediately began intermingling with each other, spitting fire and flames, filling the air with some monstrous kind of desperate wailing.

The blonde who had produced the god-awful noise buried her head in her hands and let out a muffled scream.

—

By fifth period, Anna was found in a darkened Astrophysics classroom with her head lolling dangerously close to the table beneath her, her eyelids slipping shut on the own accord and her head jerking up and down like a puppet as the redhead tried in vain to stay awake through Ms. Ambrose's lecture on apparent and absolute magnitude, whatever the hell those were. Anna was pretty sure it had something to do with how bright a star was, but ask her the difference between apparent and absolute and she'd only give a blank stare as a response.

The teacher ended the class with giving her hapless students another load of homework, and Anna was getting alarmed by this point because she had Calculus and European History before this class and both of her teachers had given her a veritable landslide of homework as well. There was still AP Music Theory—which Anna really didn't mind, but the work could be annoyingly tedious sometimes—and Computer Science and Studio Art left, and it went without saying that Anna had no idea how to code anything beyond some basic HTML and she could draw a mean stick figure, but that was about it.

Still, she cautiously approached Ms. Ambrose's desk after the bell had rung and the rest of the class was slowly trickling out into the hallways, swallowed up by the incoming tide of hungry students stampeding their way to the cafeteria for questionable food that was called lunch, provided by the school.

"Um, Ms. Ambrose—?"

"Yes, Anna," and she cut in the middle of Anna's stuttering sentence, her watery blue eyes fixated upon Anna's slightly embarrassed expression. Shuffling a few papers in her hands, she continued bluntly, "Your academic average in this class leaves much to be desired."

Anna winced. "Yeah, uh, about that...I was kind of wondering if I could...um...maybe do a little extra credit work?" To somehow find a way to boost my average up twenty-eight points by the end of the year, which is absolutely impossible and oh gods I'm going to fail this class and I won't be able to attend AIPA and, holy fuck, how big is that packet she's taking out from her desk drawer—?

Indeed, Ms. Ambrose had reached into the dusty bowels of her desk and pulled out a thick packet of worksheets that had to be at least two thousand pages long, setting it down with a very loud and very audible thump. Anna took one look at the diagram on the first page, something with a sun in the center and two earths on either side of it and a bunch of dotted ellipses orbiting around the aforementioned sun, or something, she couldn't even comprehend the dense wall of text that had been placed in front of her spinning eyes.

"I suggest that you read through this whole packet by next Friday," Ms. Ambrose suggested softly, lacing her fingers together right underneath her chin, so she looked like the perfect picture of a serene and supremely unconcerned teacher figure. "And complete all the questions, as well—trust me, they will help."

"Wh-wha—?" Anna stammered in disbelief, flipping through the packet in a panic. Equations and scientific terms and problems flashed, ephemeral, before her eyes, and the strawberry blonde could already feel the headache coming along. "All of this? By next Friday?!"

"Yes, these are condensed versions of my lectures," Ms. Ambrose dryly said, "you can refer back to your notes if you want for some of the terms."

Anna mumbled something about not having any, and the brown-haired teacher responded, "Then you may want to ask one of your classmates who has bothered to take notes in class to lend them to you."

Anna weighed the packet in her right hand and looked up, her face half-horrified and the other half confused. "You want me to do this two-thousand-page packet—"

"One-hundred-sixty-four pages."

"—yeah, that—by next Friday?!"

The teacher looked at Anna over her steepled fingers, "Well, yes, considering that you have your quarterly exam coming up the Monday after I expect you to be complete with this work. If you complete it, Anna, and achieve at least an eighty-five on the entirety packet, I will be sure to count your work as two quiz grades. Does that sound fair?"

If Anna weren't at her wit's end and absolutely desperate by this point, she'd have said no, because goddamn—she didn't have time to look through one-hundred-and-sixty-four pages of useless shit about the trajectory of incoming asteroids and Einstein's constant and the Second Law of Thermodynamics and how exactly it disproved the existence of theoretical white holes—but Anna had to pull her average up, she knew it.

Which was how she ended up staggering down the hall leading from the library, three massive astronomy textbooks teetering in the circle of her arms and the extra credit packet Ambrose had given Anna to complete shifting dangerously on the surface of the top-most coursebook. She all but careened into the cafeteria, drawing more than a few odd looks from passerby, and collapsing down into a chair at the table Kristoff was currently occupied at, idly scrawling a sketch in his sketchbook. He glanced up when the loud thump registered, eyes widening in surprise and maybe a slight hint of trepidation when he saw the mountainous stack of soporific words sitting prominently on the table, with Anna panting behind it. Her eyes were gleaming with desperation and a slight, manic glint that unnerved the burly blond student.

"...Um, Anna...what are you doing with that many coursebooks?"

"Extra credit," she groaned, pulling Kristoff's untouched tray of food toward her and methodically chomping on the soggy fish sticks, only grimacing slightly when the dry fish hit the back of her throat. Then she gazed at him, a breaded stick hanging limply from her fingers, eyes pleading and gleaming with panic—"Please tell me you know something about astrophysics."

"If I were interested," Kristoff wryly said, sketching a few more strokes onto his drawing, "I would have taken the class. But...man, that thing is huge."

"One-hundred-sixty-four pages," Anna whispered, shaking the thick packet spasmodically into his face. "By next fucking Friday! A hundred and sixty four pages! How the fuck am I supposed to do this, I ask you?!"

"Well, you could always ask Marshall for help..."

For all his oddities, Marshall was an absolute science whiz. In fact, he excelled in every subject his sister was mediocre or failed at, but he wasn't that much for playing a musical instrument.

Anna, still slightly peeved over the whole fiasco involving lychee fruits and Elsa Vinters during first period today, stubbornly said, "No."

"Ah, Anna, he's probably like the only kid in the school who actually understands this shit. You're lucky to have him as your brother."

"Kristoff!" she shrieked, swatting him across the arm.

"What?" the blond grumbled, rubbing self-consciously at his stinging flesh. "It's true! You gotta admit, the marshmallow knows his stuff."

Anna only grumbled under her breath and bit aggressively into another fish stick.

End Notes / Eghh, I hate this chapter -.- But it's three in the morning and I've got three consecutive two-hour lectures to sit through tomorrow (...well, today...) and I spent two weeks plodding at a snail-like speed through this shit and yeah I'm a lazy ass so here ya go, throwing this out to the wolves. So more of a humorous (I hope) filler chapter than anything, but I promise you it contains value for the upcoming one, which is a lot less...meaningless. :P Hopefully, I will be able to update more consistently...assuming that the camp I will be going to in two weeks has Wi-Fi or not. Then I'm sure I can update every other day starting from then, for at least three weeks. If not, things will remain fairly few and far in between. -.-