[Annie/Russel] - Today I made you a mix tape

[pianistofraielin]

Who: Russel & Annie
When: Feb. 14, Friday
Where: LCHS
What: Russel gives Annie a mix tape to expand her musical horizons and neglects to consider how that sort of thing will be taken on Valentine's Day.



Russel had finished his mix tape for Annie the night before, and he could barely contain his excitement. As soon as classes let out for lunch, the first thing he did was track her down to hand it over to her.

To call it a "mix tape" was a bit misleading. For one thing, it was on a CD-R, not a cassette tape.

For another, it was actually...on seven CD-Rs.

Over nine hours of music, organized by genre, and each CD case had painstakingly written notes along with it, containing a track listing, the artist and year of release for each track, and the album or greater body of work the track was pulled from, if applicable. They were categorized fairly broadly: Classical, Country, Rock, Jazz, Electronic, Soul, and Blues. There were no repeat artists, and not a single 21st century release date to be seen. The songs were arranged on each CD to flow neatly into each other, creating a smooth listening experience instead of the jarring mess you usually got on compilation albums. (That would be the reason it was organized by genre instead of by decade.)

He'd obviously put a lot of thought and effort into it, but that was mostly because he was a music nerd who loved sharing his interest with new people. He would've done the same for any of his friends.

But when you hand a girl a stack of CDs that you obviously toiled over on Valentine's Day, the whole thing takes on a completely different context. To which Russel was, of course, perfectly oblivious at the moment.

Comments

[sun_sun]

Annie was generally the sort of person upon whom Valentine's Day weighed heavily. It's not that her self-worth was particularly tied to being in a relationship, it's just that she felt like the world took today to rub her fifteen-year losing streak in her face.

Russel manages to catch up to a kind of sulky-looking Annie in a non-deserted hallway, on her way to the cafeteria.

[pianistofraielin]

When Russel ditched Annie in the hallway, he did not run to the nurse's office. He ran to the boy's bathroom.

It was safe there, you see. And he could clean himself up and hide the evidence before anybody else saw.

The bleeding had stopped by the time he got to a sink, but there was still enough blood on his hands and face to make it pretty obvious he'd just suffered a severe nosebleed. That, or to make someone suspect he'd just murdered a person.