welcome to the first level literati [rolf]

APRIL 2004

Not for the first time, Adam wondered if there was a way to appear more conspicuously Californian. He pulled his hat a little lower over his eyes, but he’d gotten the impression that Rolf was like, very wizardy, so did he even know who the Raiders were? This was so hard. He was regretting now that he’d thought the idea of wearing or bringing something specific to the cafe was too romcom-ish to bring up. It wasn’t like it’d had to be a single red rose or whatever – why hadn’t he suggested they both wear stupid hats?

He’d never met Rolf Scamander; usually Rolf’s trips to America had not brought him out to Shackamaxon, or had coincided with Adam’s holidays at home. They barely even wrote anymore, now that Adam was no longer a socially maladjusted eleven-year-old and Rolf, presumably, had made real human friends, and neither of them had school counselors on their backs. He’d gotten a photo like, five years ago, but that had been five years ago and, also, Adam had lost it, and though he had done his best to draw it up again in his mind’s eye, he’d always paid way more attention to the gigantic hairy animal in it than to the far less gigantic or hairy dude standing next to it. What a fool he’d been.

Somebody came over asking for the other chair; Adam squinted up at him (way too tall, didn’t seem young enough) and said “Nah, it’s taken, sorry,” and went back to trying to remember what hair color he was supposed to be looking for.

Adam had only gotten a free water cup – still waiting for Rolf – and he was getting a sense that the waitress was mad at him for taking up valuable cafe table real estate without buying anything; he glanced back at the door (where was he? Was he being stood up? That would be just like him – he’d never even been on a date and somehow he’d already been stood up) and realized with moderate dismay that he couldn’t even get up to go and buy a Danish without relinquishing his excellent table, which that supertall white dude would almost certainly swoop right in on.

He took his hat off and put it on the table to reserve it, but wasn’t confident that it would be safe on its own; one last time, he frowned around the cafe, trying to determine if anybody here seemed like the megageek he was supposed to be meeting here. (Damn it, he thought again – at this point the red roses would have been a great idea.)

@Rolf Scamander

The last time Rolf had visited Shackamaxon had been in the depths of winter and he'd been accompanied by his grandparents. He'd also been a lot younger then, and it turned out the things he'd noticed as a pre-teen weren't the sort of things that were actually going to be useful when it came to finding his way around the village. Not that it was a large one, not by American standards, but nonetheless it took him longer than expected to find the cafe he and his penfriend were supposed to be meeting in today.

Penfriend. Yeah, right. He smirked a little to himself and thought how inappropriate that term was. When Rolf had been a lonely twelve year old and had written to every wizarding school he could think of wanting friends to write to, Adam had been a new first year who was only just learning about the wizarding world. Rolfs letter had answered the sort of questions he hadn't wanted to ask real life friends; in return, Rolf had learned about movies and cars and all the kind of muggle/no-maj things that his maternal grandparents just hadn't been interested in. It had been fun for a couple of years, then gradually the letters had tailed off until they'd just exchanged Christmas and birthday cards.

And then they'd decided to meet up. Rolf had suggested that next time he was in the US he could arrange to drop by Shackamaxon, and after a delay of several weeks, Adam had said sure, that sounded good. It had seemed like a great plan right up until Rolf was actually standing with his hand on the cafe door, when disapparating to absolutely anywhere and sending an apologetic note explaining that unfortunately his right leg had unavoidably and inconveniently fallen off seemed like the best plan in the world.

He didn't even know what Adam looked like. Well okay, he knew what twelve year old Adam had looked like, because they'd swapped photos once, but aside from knowing Adam's family was Vietnamese...it was better than not having a clue who he was looking for, but not much better.

Right. Open the door, go in, look around, spot Adam. Smile, say hello, Order a drink. Chat. The words circled round and round in Rolf's head as it seemed to take him a century to actually perform the first action. Naturally, the cafe was pretty full, he couldn't just spot the one teenaged boy in there and go over to introduce himself. Maybe he could just wander around and take a look at everyone? Sure, and how long would it be before he got asked to leave for acting weird? Nonetheless, he took a ridiculously long, circuitous route to what looked like a free table, thinking he was surreptitiously glancing at people but in reality looking like the worlds most hopeless and suspicious secret agent.

He sat down, asked the waitress for a glass of water and wondered why she let out a frustrated sigh. At least he could look at people more easily from here without it looking so obvious. Where was Adam, though? Most of the people in here were in groups, with the exception of a corpulent elderly witch who appeared to be eating her way through the entire menu, and the person in the hat pulled so far down their face was barely visible. His water arrived and Rolf accepted a menu as well, thanking the waitress in that uniquely English way that suggested he was really apologising for his own continued existence. Someone walked over and asked if the other chair was free and he apologised that no, he was waiting for someone. The man muttered something that sounded like 'not another one' and stalked away with bad grace.

Another one? Rolf half got to his feet, looking around once again. Did that mean the person in the hat was..? Taking his water firmly in one hand and his courage in the other, Rolf walked over to the hat-wearer. "Um. Hi. Sorry to bother you, I just wondered if. That is. I mean, are you Adam? Rolf. I mean, I'm Rolf. If you're Adam, that is." Then he waited for the ground to open and swallow him whole.

There was somebody else wandering around the cafe now hunting for an empty table; so that he wouldn’t be approached again for his free chair (Adam thought there was nothing more humiliating in his life than sitting in a public place waiting for somebody else to show up, and he’d once called a teacher ‘Mom’) Adam tilted his head slightly to let the brim of his hat cover his face. God this had been a stupid idea. Why had he said it sounded good? Maybe this was his karmic punishment for leaving Rolf hanging for so long, but Adam didn’t think that was fair – they called it snail mail for a reason, didn’t they?

He was used to the U.S. Postal Service. It wasn’t his fault if Rolf wasn’t.

But this line of thought was, it turned out, unnecessary: Rolf had come, and Rolf had found him before he had found Rolf (which – as Adam looked around the restaurant – wasn’t that hard; he was easily the only person here who could have fit his own description.) He slid his hat on the table closer to him, like a security blanket, and gawped up (and up, and up) at Rolf – he was even taller than the first stranger who’d asked for this chair, and did not seem nearly as dweeby as Adam had expected him to.

Then he opened his mouth. It had been a while – such a while – since Adam had heard somebody speaking with a genuine British accent; just as he had at summer camp, last year, he had to immediately suppress the urge to mimic it. “Yeah!” he said, “Hey! Yeah, I’m Adam.”

He couldn’t think what to say, next, so he gestured to the seat across from him – “You can sit – someone already got your table anyway, probably.” Once Rolf had settled in, Adam returned his hat back to his head, though this time he didn’t pull the brim down so low. Rolf had a menu – that meant the waitress was going to come by, right? it was how Adam did things when he waited tables, but this place was packed.

What were you supposed to say to somebody you were meeting for the first time after several years? All he could think of was, “Well, you’re a lot taller than you sound.”

Rolf could feel the tips of his ears turning slowly red, a sure sign that he was out of his depth socially. He almost wanted the hat-wearer to say no, he had no idea who Adam was and would Rolf like to take himself right out of the cafe until he learned to construct a sentence properly? It would be a reasonable enough suggestion, he thought, wishing he could turn time back forty five seconds and make a better introduction.

The relief when it really was Adam, and he really did speak and really did recognise him, was immense. He also took his hat off temporarily and that was another relief, because while he'd only had a photo of a twelve year old to go on, there was at least some passing resemblance betwen the kid in the picture and the young guy sitting at the table. Rolf put his water glass on the table and slid into the empty seat, smiling awkwardly as he did so. He also tried to look round at the table he had recently vacated, seeing that yes, a couple with a young kid were indeed already claiming the empty seats.

He wasn't sure what to say next, and was actually relieved when Adam said something pretty ridiculous. "Yeah, I forgot to stop growing" he said with a grin and a shrug "and I have to say, that hat makes an awesome disguise".

Rolf still had the menu in his hand, and he hadn't looked at it yet. He glanced now at it in his hand as if he'd forgotten entirely that it was there, which wasn't far from the truth. It seemed as if his hand belonged to someone else as he watched himself place the menu, still unopened, carefully on the table. Rolf was very aware of his every movement in these first few minutes of meeting someone, as if watching himself through their eyes. He wondered if he should ask if Adam wanted to get lunch, but then decided that was a stupid question considering the time of day and that they'd met in a cafe.

"It's good to finally meet you" was what he unimaginatively settled for instead. "How are you doing?"

“Heh,” said Adam – he wished he could’ve forgotten to stop growing and hit six feet, too, rather than be stuck like a loser four inches short of it – Rolf commented on the hat, and Adam reached up to adjust the brim, grinning ruefully. “Oh, that,” he said. “It’s a California team. I guess you wouldn’t know that.” Rolf didn’t look like he’d ever even heard of football. (American football, to boot, not soccer.)

He pulled the menu over as soon as Rolf set it aside – probably the older boy had already picked something out for himself – and opened it up, memorising a creatively named omelette title at random and then putting it back down, figuring that – whatever was in the Super Southwest Supreme – it wouldn’t be so bad he couldn’t eat it.

“Yeah, you too,” he said, feeling like he was at a family party meeting one of his mom’s friends whose name he’d already forgotten and would never again manage to suss out. This was going to be a very boring conversation if they didn’t both step up their game. “I’m good. I’m gonna graduate this year, actually, so that’s… yeah.”

Exciting; scary; weird; he was sure that Rolf had better words for how it was. British people used so many hilarious, fake-sounding words. But if he started thinking about that his brain would get caught up thinking about the accent again, and he couldn’t do that lest he start thinking it was funny and grinning like a Cheshire cat all over the place.

What was he forgetting to do? He felt like there was a natural way a conversation was supposed to – oh. “And, uh, how are you?” he asked, speaking a little more formally than usual.

A Californian team? Rolf stared at the hat logo curiously, deciding that Adam probably didn't mean a Quidditch team. Not having had the opportunity to play on a school team Rolf had never really followed the wizarding sport, nor any other, though he had a vague idea of what was popular in America. What was it called...baseball? Okay, that was probably what the team was supporting. Not that it mattered anyway.

Good, Adam was looking at the menu - well, glancing at it anyway - so they didn't need to have an awkward conversation about that. He mentioned graduation though, so that was at least something to latch on to, if he asked in the right way. Nobody wanted to talk about school subjects and grades, not even Rolf who'd taken his first OWL at the age of fourteen. "That sounds good. Have you got plans for after graduation?" he asked. A nice open-ended question.

Unlike his friend (Were they friends? Could you call someone a friend if all you'd ever done was exchange letters?) Rolf didn't feel the same sense of discomfort - or rather, he felt no more uncomfortable than any other British person on their best behaviour when meeting someone for the first time. Instead his mind was racing with important questions such as When do I look at the menu? Has it been long enough since Adam put it down that I won't look like I'm snatching it? He let out a breath he hadn't realised he was holding.

"I'm fine thanks. I've just started working for the Daily Prophet-" he assumed Adam would have heard of the paper, or at least know what it was from the title "-well, freelancing really. Consulting magizoologist, which basically means I write articles and they pay me, so that's good..." he decided enough time had passed since Adam had put the menu down and he reached for it, quickly scanning through the various items and deciding that a regular cheeseburger was the safest option. No sooner had he replaced it on the table but the waitress reappeared, asking if they were ready to order.

"Oh. Yes, we...I mean, I...um. Adam. Are we okay to order?" he asked politely, sounding like he was reading directly from a etiquette guide.

Adam didn’t really have plans for after graduation, not in the professional way, which was what most people meant when they asked. He said, “Me and one of my friends are gonna do a road trip back out to California. Then… I dunno, I might hang around L.A. with her, or I might just go back home. I kinda don’t know what I wanna like, do.” Christ he felt idiotic and vapid talking like this, which was how speaking to British people usually made him feel. He told himself sternly to stop saying “kinda” and “like”.

Though it wouldn’t do much for his desire not to sound stupid, he added, “Dunno how anybody decides when they’re like, eighteen what they wanna do for the rest of their life. Seems kinda insane.”

Whether or not Rolf agreed with this sentiment, of course, Rolf had a real job (well, as much as freelancing was a real job; Adam’s parents would have said it wasn’t, but he was getting paid real money, right?) so Adam should probably have waited until he’d learned that to complain about his aimlessness. Fortunately the waitress turned up to rescue him; Adam looked up at her and said, “Yeah – can I get the Super Southwest Supreme?” and, “Uh, hash browns,” and then glanced at Rolf.

She departed, and Adam resumed his slouch. “That’s like a newspaper, right?” he said, as though they hadn’t been interrupted. “Cool – what sorts of animals? How to take care of a –” he selected a magical creature at random from the ones that had been so horrifying that their names had been cemented in his brain – “lethifold?” Rolf seemed pretty young to be a consulting expert, not that wizard ages had ever made sense to Adam. His roommate Hudson’s grandfather was a hundred and one and hadn’t retired yet.

A road trip. That sounded exciting and cool and exactly the sort of thing Rolf had no experience of whatsoever. He'd travelled, sure, but mostly with parents or grandparents and talking about that felt like he was still a kid, while Adam was...well, more mature despite being a year younger. Rolf barely noticed the stilted speech, the likes that punctuated Adam's sentences. All he heard was that this boy was travelling to California, free as a bird, without needing to have any clear plans about what to do when he got there or even when he would need to head home again. It sounded incredibly brave, and Rolf was impressed.

He actually agreed with the next part, as well. "Yeah, I'm lucky in that respect. I mean, with my grandfather and the magical beasts thing...I just wanted to be like him since I was a little kid..." he trailed off, feeling inexplicably foolish. He shrugged and pulled the menu over, glancing through it in the nick of time. Out of the corner of one eye he could see the waitress approaching. Adam ordered first, which meant Rolf had a few extra seconds to randomly pick something that would at least be tolerable.

"Can I have the House Hamburger with fries, please?" he said, sounding ridiculously English "oh - and a lemonade, please" Ugh, he'd said please twice and would be judging himself on that for the rest of the day. Still, they'd ordered food, so there was no worry that Adam had decided to hate Rolf on sight and was about to get up and leave. Not until after they'd eaten at least. He relaxed a bit and instead briefly worried that his jeans were too smart and that maybe normal people didn't use an ironing charm. Rolf had very little point of reference for 'normal', having never attended school, and he badly wanted to ask more about Ilvermorny - he had a thousand stupid little questions left over from when he was still a kid - but had no desire to be irritating.

"The Prophet? Yeah, it's the main wizarding paper in Britain" he said, though at that moment his mind went blank and he couldn't actually remember any others. Well, there was The Quibbler, but (and he was sincerely glad Luna would never find out) there was no way he was going to try and explain that to someone he was meeting for the first time. Rolf had opened his mouth to reel off a long and uninteresting list of creatures when he let out an unexpected bark of laughter. "Sorry. It's just..." he was grinning widely now "That's like, the most dangerous thing in the world. Well, top five, anyway. It, um.." he glanced around briefly to make sure there were no little kids in earshot "eats you in your sleep. And it just looks like a grey blanket. I don't think anyone would even want to domesticate one. I mean, a chimaera's really dangerous too, but at least they're interesting to look at" Probably Rolf wasn't stating his case very well "Actually, so far they've only wanted stuff about crups and hippogriffs" he shrugged, looking a bit guilty, as if he was just pretending to know what he was talking about. 

“Cool,” said Adam, wishing he could think of anything more appropriate to say to this than ‘all my grandfathers are dead.’ Ilvermorny people (he assumed Hogwarts people too) seemed less interested in comparing their familial war tragedies than people back home, where he had earned a fair amount of clout for having a grandfather who’d starved to death in re-education (but less clout than Ryan whose dad was almost killed by a pirate off the Malay peninsula.) Thank God the waitress turned up when she did, or Adam probably would have blurted it out anyway.

Rolf let out a laugh even more awkward than the rest of him; as soon as his confusion dissipated (so he didn’t know what a lethifold was – so sue him), Adam decided he liked him more. Eats you in your sleep – was that really bad enough to merit top-five most dangerous things in the world status? Adam couldn’t remember anything else but surely a dragon could eat you in your sleep too.

He had a point, though, about it being boring; if Adam were in the domesticated magical creatures business he supposed he would be more interested in interesting animals. “You ever seen a real chimaera?” he said, with due interest – he hadn’t taken Animal Husbandry, and so the scariest creatures he’d faced yet were territorial house elves. He didn’t really remember what weird combination of normal animals that was supposed to be – he assumed a horse, because magic really got a lot out of horse hybrids.

Crups, he didn’t know, but hippogriffs he did, because his roommates had managed for a month to convince him that was a kind of winged hippopotamus. “Cool,” he said again, wishing he knew any other adjectives (awesome seemed like a less cool thing to say, and he was still trying to seem cool, even though he thought by now it was pretty obvious, between him and Rolf, which of them had done more drugs.)

He was out of things to say about creatures, or writing. He said, hopefully, “You probably travel a lot for that, huh?” Travelling jobs had always interested him; it seemed a fair sight more exciting than going to work four blocks away at a strip mall.