Cressida was aware of Van's movement in the room. He went to the toilet and then he served himself some tea. He sat drinking it and she let the seconds tick away on the clock. The grandfather clock's tick tock was a steady rhythm, the seconds of the day would pass into minutes and then an hour. But time didn't move that quickly. She set aside the ruler and then returned to the proposal, observing the notes she'd already made there.
"You should get that homework done, Van," she said, "I shouldn't have to remind you that if you want to get into MIT, they will require an impressive high school transcript." Her eyes never lifted from the paper. She knew he would be scowling or rolling his eyes or something akin to that. The school's little revolutionary. The rebel desperately searching for a cause. Trying to break the system by calling out inequalities that didn't actually exist when it came to it. He was trying though. He just picked the wrong fights with the wrong people.
Finising her own cup of tea, she put the paper down and rose from her desk. Cressida rounded it and then went to serve herself some more. She then brought the cup with her, seated on a small saucer. She set it on the desk, taking a note of a plant sitting on a bookshelf. Cressida took a small pair of pruning scissors from her table and went to inspect it.