I really don't like most cheeses. It must be mature, otherwise it's just completely wrong to even consider putting it in your mouth. Harry can't stand cheese like Babybel and cheese strings, because they leave a bad taste in his mouth and with my special connection to his tastebuds I get to taste it too. Luckily, he has the common sense to stay away from such blasphemous excuses for food as much as he can help it. If you give him mature cheddar or wensleydale, sign me up, but brie, blue cheese and camembert? Well you can just sod off right away, find another victim for your poison.
How is this relevant? You're meant to be talking about Harry's totally amazing life, not his food preferences!
Shut up Joy, just because you've had a wonderful story to tell. I've got nothing that's as good as what you've done for Harry, unless I talk about the things that he likes. What is it with those guys interrupting anyway? I think I haven't had a single one of my goes without them cutting in for some reason or another. If Harry did that in the real world, he'd be rejected so fast that you wouldn't even be able to say Shrek is love, Shrek is life (though if you said that, you'd be rejected anyway, so just don't) before it happened.
Okay, now my rant about food is over, I can actually talk about what I 'have' to talk about. Okay Joy? I think we should skip forward a couple of years to our last year of secondary school, year 11. We'd been with our carers for almost six years, and dipsite some ups downs, we managed to recover nicely, not as good as some of us hoped, but we were getting reasonable grades in practice exams and we managed to get most of our homework in on time, a big improvement on year 7 through 9, where we, on average, missed a piece and a half a week. Now, Harold had a few friends, not too close to most people, but these guys were pretty dece, if you know what I mean. I tried my hardest to have Harry try to impress them, or at least be accepted into the group, which was really hard. We couldn't use computers unless we were at school, and video games? Well forget it. Harry had nothing to truly connect to the group he was drawn to, no super powerful PC to play Counterstrike on, no access to the wonders of Facebook, and a lack of all the things that made someone cool.
That's why I became a little more influential all of a sudden. Not too much, but I crept in there a little, along with Sadness and Anger. Joy was still the top dog, but I get a feeling that it was kinda forced sometimes. We'd been having mixed memories for years now, which had started back when we were eight, and quite a few of our happy memories were tinted one shade or another, mostly green and blue, but sometimes we got red too.
It was still a good year though. We got bragging rights for being one of the top of our science and english sets (granted, we were in the bottom set for each, but I felt good about being the best at something, I tend to get a big head over these things), and we even got a decent controlled assessment grade in History and Business Studies, go figure! However, it was time to get going for real, and thankfully Fear didn't even bat an eyelid for the whole run through. I can't remember the order, but I can tell you that, apart from the english and ICT exams, Harry just breezed through like the wind. Out of the eleven subjects we did, we got three As, three Bs and 5 Cs. All passes, and I was impressed, but was also kinda disappointed in us.
"So, these grades are not what I had in mind, what happened to religious studies? We were projected an A for christ's sake! What are we doing with a C? Now we can't do it for A-level, what are people gonna think of us?" and Joy being Joy, gave a little pep talk
"Relax there, we'll just go and get some advice from the head of sixth form, see what else we can do with our grades. Anyway, look on the bright side, we still managed to get the grades to get into the sixth form."
"But now Harry's a failure, how will he be able to live with himself after all of this?"
"Sadness, I know you mean well, but I think it might be a good idea for you to step away from the console for juuuust a second" and Joy lightly pushes Sadness away "this day's meant for celebration of Harry's success, not for contemplating what we did wrong and what we missed out on."
But that just brought Anger into the mix.
"Oh? So you're saying that it doesn't matter that we thought we'd fail Art because some bright spark managed to lose almost a year's worth of portfolio work, which accounts for about two thirds of the overall marks? What about that complete abomination of a French speaking test that we bombed? We could have got an A or A* in that but nooo, we had to get a D in it instead, dragging us down to a B overall. ICT was an utter disgrace, three Cs and a D across the subject. If Fear did his job properly and gave Harry the motivation not to be average instead of saying, 'meh, it's not that scary, we don't need to revise', then maybe we could have had at least six As, maybe even an A* or two."
Joy was pretty flustered by this outburst, but luckily Anger hadn't brushed the console even once, otherwise that rack would have started filling up with quite a few red orbs.
"Well...I don't know what to say Anger...is that really how you feel? I never knew that you thought this way"
"Yeah well, I'm just pissed that we put so much effort into improving so much over all of these years to not end up like our parents, to make everyone proud of our achievements on life, and then we go and come out with these grades, just like some people said we might." She was trying so hard to keep her cool there, and I admired her for it. She was really strong sometimes, and she's got better at not going straight for the console when some shit goes down somewhere. I just wish that I had that much control over my urges to use the console. I guessed it was my turn to cheer her up a bit, because I knew first hand how ugly it got when Anger was really pissed off (the bullying incident comes to mind),
"Hey, I think that we should still look up about this, I know we didn't do as good as we expected, but Joy is kinda right here, and Anger, I think we'd both agree that it could have been much worse. If it was bad, we'd never be accepted anywhere respectable ever again, and imagine how unfair that'd be"
"Yeah, like really unfair, almost as if they cancelled Doctor Who again."
But then Sadness inserted her two pennies. What would a little motivation be like without input from Sadness?
"Exactly, that'd be really depressing. I think I'd cry for weeks and crawl into the memory dump"
"Way to go Sadness, you sure know how to lighten the mood, you'd be great at parties."
"Really!?"
"No, you'd literally turn it into a funeral."
"Oh…"
Luckily the mood got a whole lot lighter after that, good happy times. We were officially sixth formers, and now we only had to do the subject we wanted to do (and Extended Project Qualification, which kind of sucked but it was an easy grade apparently). With only a little bit of the summer left and September close approaching, things were looking great considering. Though I knew that A levels were a whole new kettle of fish and that it got harder from here, I don't think any one of us were ready for just how hard it was going to get.