Fandom High School

Claire almost forgot there was a club meeting today, but she remembered just in time, midway through an IMing bitch session with Parker. She logged off fast and went to the art classroom. On a whim, she grabbed out pencils, tempera paints, and an enormous roll of butcher paper.

"Art Crawl was awesome," she announced, once people started joining her. "We raised a little money, people had fun, nothing went wrong. Which was amazing. And this club was awesome. And, uh, this is our last meeting, unless somebody really wants to come down here and set up during our free week."

"I'm working on a mural" -- she nodded to the roll of paper -- "of, I dunno, stuff that happened this year. You guys can help with it or do your own thing."

After which she went back down to the paper and started sketching a harpie perched in a tree. The terrifying stuff had to be on there, after all.

So yesterday half the school was fighting zombies and a big chunk of the other half actually was zombies, and today things were back to normal.

Kind of normal. Sort of normal. Normal enough that Claire was in the art room after classes, dragging out crayons, construction paper, and pipe cleaners for the club meeting, when an especially small and timid gremlin who would never have bothered her at all if it wasn't for the treaty hopped out from behind the tempera paints and bit her wrist hard.

"Fucking OW," Claire said, and that was the last thing Claire would say as herself for quite a while. For the moment, she thought she was a three-year-old furry red monster.

"La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's world ...," he sang, repeating it as people assembled for the club. Elmo kept talking once everyone was there. He had so many friends, and they all looked so smart!

"Hi! Elmo's goldfish Dorothy was thinking about art." Dorothy was, in fact, a misshapen attempt at pottery left in the studio to dry, and thus had probably been thinking about no such thing. "Elmo has a question for you! How do you make art?"

He bounced. "And after you answer that, we'll sing the art song! 'Art art art, art art art, art art art art aaaaaaart'!"

The tables in the art room were covered in small bins of different kinds of stone, metal and plastic beads, wire, different colors of silk cord, and the fastenings needed to turn these things into necklaces and bracelets.

"Hey," Claire announced, once she realized everybody was there and looked up from her attempt at a fake-amber-and-silver bracelet. "We're making jewelry today. I got some directions off the Internet, but it's kind of not rocket science."

"Anyhow, while we're working we have to talk about the Art Crawl thing next month. It's April 15-16, so we need ..." she looked at her notebook. "Somebody to talk to the music club about DJing or playing, somebody to talk to Geoff at the theater about if the cast wants to perform, people to get the art together, somebody to make the advertising posters and hang them up, and people to clean the warehouse out before the show. There's a sign-up sheet going around, so please let me know what you can do so I don't go insane. And I think that's it."

There was the usual array of drawing supplies and some Plasticine left over from last week on a table at the side, but that didn't seem to be Claire's focus this week.

"Hey," she greeted. "So, call this a planning session. We only have a couple weeks left in the semester and if we want to do a show or something, we need to figure out where and when and make stuff for it, and, like, decide if we should do a theme or anything. Anybody got ideas? I was going to ask Miss York if we could do it at the gallery, but the school's a castle. We might have space here."

Claire had been relieved to hear radio that morning. If the phones were screwy, it meant Cal probably hadn't intentionally not called her back.

She hoped.

She guessed she would find out during the meeting, anyhow. Right. She waited for most of the people who had signed up before starting to talk.

"Hey, I'm Claire. Thanks for signing up for this. It's really just to hang out and make stuff, and maybe we'll do an art show at the end of term if people are into it. I am way, way open to other ideas, though, so let me know if you have any.

"I was going to ask people to, like, bring something they were proud of to share today? But my phone was sort of blowing up at me yesterday so I never sent the email. So that's next week. This week, I got out all the drawing supplies" -- she gestured at a table heaped with pencils, crayons, ink and brushes, and other moddable media -- "so I thought we could just do that during the meeting. Maybe pair up and draw each other if you really feel creative? And like I said, next week we should each bring something and we can do show and tell."

"Oh, and Ms. Aldrin is our sponsor. She rocks."