fandomhigh | The Club Fair - Gym

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!event: club fair

The Club Fair - Gym - Friday Afternoon

Today was the day of the club fair! Wasn't it just so exciting?!

Jean was totally excited.

So excited, in fact, that she showed up early to find it just as everything was being set up like the little overachiever she was. Maybe she'd be able to swing voters here!

Oh look! The club schedule! This was going to be so great, right everyone?!

[[~~Please wait for the~~ OCD is up, go to town!]]

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"Newchild is a...new child," he said and winced because that sounded patronizing. "I'm sorry, that's just the term we used for...newly born children. You're not talking too fast, I promise. It just takes me a few moments to process certain things."

He wasn't even going to try to explain age to anyone yet. That was just an incredibly difficult concept to try and explain and make other people understand.

"We'd just call them a baby. Or an infant, if they're really little." Dinah smiled, and popped a chip in her mouth to slow herself down, giving Jonas a wide-eyed look of 'see? Not talking.' Which lasted for another minute as she chewed, then said, "Is anything here more familiar to you?" And a beat, and chip, and: "Oh, and this is the club fair. For fun activities after school time." Pacing herself was an interesting challenge.

"Different things are familiar for different reasons," he explained with a slow nod. He decided now was a good time to sample the chip and he did, chewing slowly and making a slight face at the spices but deciding that it wasn't a bad taste at all.

"Actual schooling is something I know well," he shared, nodding. "Where I was, we went to school and took classes. The classes were different and it was pushing us towards different goals but the concept of school is something I know."

Clubs, yeah, he didn't know those. He'd done mostly volunteer work in the Community.

"Like it?" Dinah checked, then chugged some water. "You might want to get a drink, the salt might make you thirsty." She gulped, then wiped off her mouth with a napkin, and asked, "What kind of goals? If you don't mind me asking." She grinned at him cheerfully. "If it's personal, you don't have to say."

"It's not personal, I've just found that it's unlike what most people know," he explained, reaching for some water as he thought how best to explain it. "They're preparing you for your Assignment, whatever that might be. That's the goal."

The only goal. It was very narrow minded and mandatory. No choice, no options.

"Is that like a job? Your career, what you do to earn a living?" Dinah checked. "No extras, no fun stuff just because?" She took another bite of chip-and-salsa, and admitted, "Sounds boring. But that might just be me."

"It's, yes, it's your job," he confirmed with a nod after he'd parsed that word. "And there was volunteer work as well. Every girl and boy had to do volunteer work somewhere in the Community."

Mandatory rule. One of the many.

"It was fun." Sometimes. "It was enriching."

"Cool," Dinah said, pleased to be wrong about that for Jonas's sake. "What kind of volunteer work? Gardening, stuff like that?" She gestured around the gymnasium. "Some of these might have volunteer work connected to them too." She tilted her head. "What's your job going to be?"

He blanched on the topic of his job, unsure if he wanted to reveal that much about his past yet.

"Nurturer," he lied, using the first job he thought of and almost taking it back when he realized it was his father's job. "It's basically care of newchildren. And I did a variety of volunteer work. The most recent before I left--"

Escaped.

"--was helping with the elderly."

Dinah noticed the first reaction, but got distracted by his answer. "Really? You'll be taking care of little kids?" Dinah beamed at him. How very unstereotypical of him. Cool. "They're fun, aren't they? And they're not as much work as people think. Changing diapers isn't so bad." Now, when they were eight and demanding a sword and wanting to know why their Dad was being a prat, then, you had a problem. "Not too many elderly on the Island, I don't think. Would you want to do that again, do you think?"

Edited 2009-09-05 00:08 (UTC)

"I don't know," he answered honestly, shrugging one thin shoulder. There was so much that he wanted to do now that he knew he could do them. He didn't want to restrict himself but he didn't want to miss helping people. That was one thing he did thank the Community for, the want of helping others.

"There's a lot of things I could now," he continued, looking around. "I liked doing both of those but I'd like to explore too. I wouldn't want to pick something and never get to experience other things."

Dinah took another chip to nibble, nodding. "Anything I can help explain? I've been here a while, I at least know the clubs they had last Spring. Some of them might not be up your alley, though." Jonas seemed really nice, and she tried to picture him in Girls with Guns Club and totally failed. Which didn't mean he didn't need it, but....

"Do these...gatherings happen often?" he asked curiously. Already, there'd been a picnic and now this.

"Mmmm...." Dinah ate a chip while she thought about it, and dipped another in salsa, and said, "Fairly often? There's dances, at least once or twice a semester. Homecoming Dance and Carnival is next month. And Halloween, there'll probably be a party for that too. Then Thanksgiving the next month, and maybe something for Christmas after that. And sometimes people have birthday parties, or other big parties in the dorms for no particular reason. They'te not usually as big as this, but they can get pretty big. The dances are about this size. And every once in a while we have an assembly or some other school-thing, where everyone is supposed to show up." She tilted her head. "Wow, we're social, hunh?"

Edited 2009-09-05 00:39 (UTC)

"Apparently so," he said, breathing a laugh and trying not to let all those gathering, all those words and the total lack of recall frighten him. "Are they always this well attended?"

He bypassed asking about each one individually. They were gatherings, he'd learn about them more specifically later.

"Sometimes? I haven't been to all the ones I just told you about, only heard about them. I've only been here eight months. Homecoming, that'll probably be huuuge." She swallowed. "Some of the students who graduated come back to visit. So it's even more." Dinah gave him a sympathetic look. "You don't have to go to them, though. They're not mandatory."

"Homecoming," he repeated. Jonas was always thankful for two words combined to make one because it made figuring out the meaning that much easier. "People come home?"

"Yup! The graduates, the ones who left last May, or the May before that. I mean, this isn't their home, but it was for a little while, right? So they come home. For a visit. There'll be food and music, and games and rides at the Carnival." Dinah took another drink of water. "What were assemblies like back at the Village?"

"They weren't assemblies, they were ceremonies," he said, keeping the bitterness out of his voice. All the ceremonies, every single one of them, was just more useless pomp and circumstance to cover the truth that only Jonas and the Giver knew. "And they weren't like this. The Elders talked, everyone else listened."

"Bleah." Dinah made a face, and then stopped herself. "Um. Sorry. I would've gone nuts, if it were me. But I have a really short attention span. I don't mean to be insulting." See, she had learned something after almost a year!

"It's all right," he said and laughed. "Don't worry, you weren't the only one like that. My friend Asher liked to fidget in his seat until someone told him to stop. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. We had a lot of ceremonies. It was only natural to get bored sometimes."

Especially when you'd been through them so many times and you were just waiting for the focus to be on you, to get through your important bits before fading into the crowd again.

"Well, mostly these are optional. I think the only one that was required was the drug assembly, when I first got here," Dinah said, thinking about it, then grinned. "That wasn't so bad. Tyler and Professor Atreides sang. Tyler was dressed up as a pink dinosaur. And Mister H---" Hot Algren. Oh. Right. "Um. Anyway. That was the only one, and it was ages ago." Dinah coughed. "And this place isn't boring, I can say that much."

"Why would there be a gathering on drugs?" he wondered curiously. He'd just keep asking questions if Dinah let him. He was that kind of person. And he knew drugs as relief-of-pain medicine that were always strictly regulated so a ceremony seemed like overkill.

She was okay with that. Turnabout, right?

"They thought some people might be taking them?" Dinah looked at him, then paused, running that back through her head. "Oh! Addictive ones. Recreationally? Very bad. Illegal. So, uh. They thought they should maybe lecture us on that." She grinned. "Funnier than it should have been."

"There are illegal drugs?" he asked, brow knitting in concern. "Not just those used when you're injured or ill?"

The Club Fair - Gym - Friday Afternoon

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