thatsamilkshake | Room 511, Saturday Evening

Entry tags:

Room 511, Saturday Evening

If Francine had made it back to the island in time for the Welcome Picnic, anybody who didn't know her might well have mistaken her for one of the new students, considering the number of boxes and bags she was laden down with.

But no, she'd been here more than a semester now, and the packages were just the debris of a Peters family Christmas, divided about half and half between wearable and edible. Her flight got in late enough that by the time she hit her room and offloaded at least enough packages to start pulling off three layers of mom-knitted outerwear, Francine was way too...... flooooooooph to consider heading down to what was left of the picnic.

It was a happy kind of flooooooph, though, as she set about trying to sort things into Hang Up, Give Out, Eat, or Drop Off At The Thrift Shop And Tell Grandma It Burned In Freak Closet-Fire.

The door was propped open with a couple of neatly-wrapped boxes as she moved around the room, humming cheerfully.

[OOC: Open to oldbies, newbies, roomies, and pretty much anything that ends in ies except mummies because NO.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Zombies okay then?]

[Sure, if they like cookies!]

Had Katchoo taken to prowling the hallway of the fifth floor every now and then just to see if Francine was back yet?

No.

Except yes.

Duh.

Which was why a hoarse voice was suddenly yelling through the crack, "Francie! About time you got back, geez!"

Francine spun around with an armful of sweaters and scarves -- when that woman knit, by God, she knit -- and nudged the door open with her hip. "Katchoo!" she shouted, throwing said arms wide. Yarn goods and all.

Katchoo was about to blurt out some kind of warning about flying sweaters, but the warning promptly evolved into some kind of woolenly-muffled sound, and then there was hugging, and yay.

"Mmmph mmmph-mmph -- gah!" she sputtered, yanking the scarf away from her mouth. "Holy crap, Francine, what did your mom do, deprive a whole flock of sheep?"

"I think they were acrylic sheep," Francine answered, giggling. "Want a scarf? I've got...two, three... five!"

"Have you talked to her about a twelve-step program maybe?" Katchoo asked, because wow, that was a lot of scarves.

"One was from my Grandma and one was from my aunt Libby," Francine insisted. "She's not that bad." she was totally that bad. Especially considering the one with the green reindeer? Oh yeah, a Marie Peters original.

Yeah, the one with the green reindeer was the one Katchoo was looking at. "Yeah, so I blew off math class sometimes --" All the time. "But I think that still means your mom did a lot of knitting."

Which was stated in a slightly complaining tone of voice, but mostly to hide the fact that Katchoo was just glad Francine was back.

. . . not that she'd been prowling the hallway to check on that because she'd been worried or anything. Really.

"Yeah," Francine admitted, nodding. "She has to do something with her time now that 'both of her babies have abandoned her to move across the country...' She rolled her eyes, albeit a little guiltily.

It wasn't anywhere near the first time Katchoo had looked a little bit envious about the topic of conversation.

So she steered it sideways a little. "Have a good Christmas?"

"Everybody was there!" Francine said, which granted might not always be a clear answer to the question, but the tone of enthusiasm in this case reflected the relative lack of crazy she'd experienced this year. "Even my brother's new girlfriend. She seems--" Less sad than the bulimic one and less creepy than the gothy one. "--nice. What about you? What did you do?"

"Stayed here and worked," Katchoo half-mumbled. "Nothing really exciting. It was nice and quiet."

Which was true, actually.

"What, no elf invasions?" Francine teased. Sort of. She reached for Katchoo's arm to tug her towards her bed. "C'mere, you. I've got a present for you!"

And thus was the fatal flaw in Katchoo's hallway-prowling plan revealed: she hadn't thought to bring Francine's present along with her. Well, at least she was only a couple of doors down.

"It doesn't have knitted reindeer on it, right?" she asked, more than willing to be tugged along, which when you factored in their relative sizes worked pretty well in Francine's favor.

~~THAT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE GRUMPY ICON WTF.~~

"No..." Every three years or so Francine came up with a clever answer. "That's your present from my mom!"

Katchoo was duly impressed. Except wait. "I thought your mom didn't know I was here."

"That's what my mom would have given you if she'd known you were here?" No. No, it's not.

Katchoo raised one eyebrow at her in the universally recognized 'yeah, not buying that' look. "Franciiiiiiiiiiiine . . ."

What? She wanted her present.

Francine grinned and shifted a pile of new jeans from the end of her bed. Lo and behold, a package a bit bigger than a shoebox was revealed, wrapped in red and white paper that was plastered in uber-jolly Coco-Cola Santa Claus faces and tied up with a fussy red ribbon.

"Here you go. Merry Christmas!"

It's not that Katchoo could see the size tag on said pile of jeans, and she wasn't looking anyway; even if she'd been inclined to peek there was some incredibly cheerful wrapping paper demanding her immediate attention.

"Geez, Francie," she said, staring at the package, "what did you put in there, a fruitcake of doom or something?"

She was, it should be noted, grinning ear to ear, a look that would probably scare just about anyone else in the dorms.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject