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muppet_thighs (muppet_thighs) wrote in tensor,
@ 2011-03-10 00:13:00

Entry tags:

jono_starsmore, paige_guthrie

Paige
After Dinner

The internet was a great thing, but having too many pages open confused him and more than once had destroyed hard work when the wrong red X was clicked. So Jono was taking some of his miserly hoarded money and using it to buy a good Spanish-English/English-Spanish dictionary before he tossed his laptop out the window. A good thick one. Maybe even a heavy one, to see if his arms could gain any muscle.

He'd tried to get down to the bookstore in the Activities Center during dinner to avoid the crowds and clubs and noise, but with the three people he shared a bathroom with out, he'd decided to take a shower instead. When one did not sweat or become oily or use the toilet, one did not have to bathe as often, much to his surprise. Jono had thought he'd have to bathe more because he was... dusty or something. But his hair didn't even become stringy or flaky. It was a pleasant surprise.

Still, unwrapping was a private thing he didn't let anyone see, and he had to when he bathed.

In his uniform minus his tie and blazer, sleeves rolled up, shirt untucked, top button undone, Jono had slunk into the bookstore and into the reference section. None of the foreign language dictionaries had that comforting heft but several of them looked good and meaty. He flipped through them, looking for ones with definitions he understood easily. He hated those dictionaries where a single word definition, when looked up, was the first word he'd been trying to define.

Eyes still on the various definitions, Jono stepped back to let any others around easy access, but bumped into someone behind him.

*Oh, god, terribly sorry,* he murmured.

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skinny_girl
2011-03-10 10:57 am UTC (link)

"She?" Paige raised an eyebrow, somewhat amused. It weren't any of her business, but it was still kind of funny that in the few weeks he'd been there, he apparently already had girls giving him glittery unicorn presents.

It was time to get down to business, though, and she opened her mouth to correct him, glad when he went ahead and did it himself. "It helps if you just repeat it a lot. Like, try counting to ten a few times out loud and then go back to the problems. It might help you not forget the order as easy."

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muppet_thighs
2011-03-10 11:08 am UTC (link)

*Some ruddy 'appy girl wi' too much time onner 'ands 'n th' biggest ruddy s'pply o' stickers I ever seen,* he said absently. *I didn' know they made 'em in big pages like tha'. I just set me things down 'n suddenly she's there, huge smile, sayin' 'welcome, new kid' 'r somethin' like, 'n I got a uni-corn on me book whether I wont one 'r not.*

He shook his head. The girl had come and gone so fast he couldn't say who it had been, just some 'really happy girl'.

Pondering Paige's advice, he nodded and a whispery sort of sound issued from his mindvoice, Jono counting to ten over and over again.

Then he looked back down at the problems. *Ocho.*

Tres plus cinco. And then, *Uh.*

The answer was seven and it took him a second. *That one really is siete.*

And his pencil scratched as he wrote.

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skinny_girl
2011-03-10 11:29 am UTC (link)

Paige laughed at his explanation of how the unicorn sticker came to be... though honestly, if someone had started slapping stickers on her notebooks, she probably would have been a whole lot less amused. Unless the sticker slapper was under the age of twelve. Then, she might be okay with it.

She nodded along as he counted, leaning in to look at the problem in question as he worked through it. When he figured out the answer, she nodded again. "Si. Did that help at all? The numbers thing?"

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muppet_thighs
2011-03-10 11:56 am UTC (link)

Jono had not been amused at the time, but it was there and he couldn't do much about it, so he'd made his peace with it. As a plus, he always knew which notebook was for Spanish.

He nodded. *But I canna do tha' every time I need a number. I suppose practice'll make it easier.* Tapping his pencil end on the worksheet he looked down the rows of problems. *Not lookin' for'd t' countin' t' twenty.*

Honestly, the language he'd been most exposed to after English was French, thanks to the Chunnel. But in America Spanish was more useful and supposedly enough like French that it would be easy to make the parallels.

Or just mess up a lot by being confused.

Down to the next row, he regarded his notebook and brought it closer to his work. The teen numbers gave him all sorts of trouble, even though it was just diez plus the single numbers most of the time... except for the pesky 11-15. Fifteen bothered him the most because quince was a fruit that he'd liked quite a lot back when he could eat and not was pronounced 'keen-say'. Eleven was the other one, as it was not 'wonce', it was 'un-say'.

All quite disagreeable.

Jono's brow furrowed like an accountant trying to find the missing three cents. As if to throw it in his face, the first answer to the second row was eleven.

*Eleven,* he said, stubborn. *Bloody Spanish. En't good 'nough t' take Beckham from us f'r four years. Cuatro anos.*

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skinny_girl
2011-03-12 05:00 am UTC (link)

"If you do it enough, you won't have to repeat it every time. You'll just remember it." Repetition was something that was very helpful, and it was probably what he'd missed out on the most by not being there from the beginning.

"Isn't Beckham in the US now?" Paige knew very little about pro soccer, but she was pretty sure that he was in California or something. Beyond that... not a whole lot.

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muppet_thighs
2011-03-12 06:56 am UTC (link)

*I s'pose tha's true. And aye. With Posh 'n the kiddies. Though I think Poshie's back in the UK to 'ave 'er baby there.*

Jono tapped his pencil eraser on his notebook while he regarded the next two problems. The first one was easy, *Diez y ocho* but the second one was thirteen and he couldn't remember what that was. So he looked at his notes. *Trece.*

Which looked more like it should be pronounced 'tres' than 'tres' did. 'Tres' looked like 'trees' but spelled wrong.

He quickly filled out the rest of the page and skipped the question asking for an answer in the millions and moved on to the second sheet. Crude black and white drawings illustrated various sentences, like a boy and a girl walking to the cinema or park, and various little drawn clocks with hands pointing hither and yon.

*Marisol and Benito go to the park at three o'clock.* The first part was easy and he wrote 'Marisol y Benito'. Translating the times wasn't bad either, it was the verbs that got him.

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skinny_girl
2011-03-14 09:32 am UTC (link)

Paige tried to look interested in where Posh was going to have her baby, but she honestly had absolutely no clue that Posh was even pregnant. It was one of those things that just had absolutely no purpose taking up valuable space in her brain.

She opened her mouth expectantly while Jono tried to remember trece. When he peeked at his notes and figured it out, she nodded in agreement, smiling as he finished out the rest of the sheet. He didn't seem to be doing all that poorly, and she sat back slightly as he turned to the second page.

"Those worksheets are frustrating," she commented. "The illustrations are really ambiguous sometimes... but I guess that's okay because they'll probably give you credit if the sentence is right even if you don't interpret the picture the way they want you to."

She watched as he hesitated, after deciding what the sentence was in English. Nodding, she offered, "Ir."

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muppet_thighs
2011-03-19 11:04 am UTC (link)

Jono didn't care about Posh and Becks anymore than Paige likely did, but knowing what was going on with them was currently part of being British, or so the tabloids would have them believe.

*Eh. I ignore th' li'le pictures. Just there t' take up room.* They were high schoolers, for Christ's sake. They didn't need illustrations on their worksheets. Especially cutesy ones like these.

Jono's pencil tapped the paper again. *Ir, tha's right. That tricky one.*

Ir did not conjugate nicely as 'iro' or even 'irgo', but as 'voy', 'vas', 'va','vamos', and 'van'. So sometimes Jono remembered one of the v-words and sometimes he remembered ir, but when he recalled one he could never remember the other.

There were two of them, so the verb was 'van'. Jono mumbled as he wrote, *Marisol y Benito van a el parque a las tres.*

*Wait.* It wasn't 'a el', it was 'al'. He corrected after scrubbing his sheet with his eraser. But 'a las' was fine.

*Marisol y Benito van al parque a las tres. Sound roight t' yeh?*

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