Last Christmas (Book 1 in the Christmas Series)

Chapter Twenty

"It's not even the new year and they are already trying to kill us," Niska groaned, slumping forward over her workbooks. She let out a loud groan or frustration and lightly head-butted the table, as though it was going to magically teleport her somewhere else entirely. Believe it not, sudden teleportation is not a thing (no, my bell doesn't count).

"If you give yourself a concussion, I'm gonna leave ya 'ere," Joel said, not even looking up from his textbook. It was like he could see through his eyelids or something, seriously creepy.

"Wow, you're a great friend," Niska replied.

The three of us had stationed ourselves in the Library on Thursday after school in an attempt to battle through the rising amount of work. Not only was Mrs Reynolds piling on the work, much to everyone's annoyance, our other teachers had also whacked up the workload. Something about getting through our GCSE's? I dunno. If you ask me, the whole thing was an unnecessary amount of stress and I wanted nothing more than to use my Magic to solve it. I thought the workshop got pretty busy around this time, but school was a whole other level of crazy.

It was times like this when I wished I hadn't made the promise to Granny and I could actually use my Magic without the risk of being caught out. Using Magic would have made the homework deal a thousand times better, just a wave of my hand and the whole thing would be fixed, for a short time anyway. One of the problems wish school was the school work, of course, there were the early nights which sucked, but the work, when it got on top of you, was ridiculous. In a way, it tilted my decision slightly. If I stayed, the workload would get worse, if I went home it would all be relaxing and chilling in front of the TV. That sounded so much better.

Then again, it wouldn't have been too much of a stress if Papa had let me work in the workshop closer to Christmas. That way I would know what stress felt like.

"Snap out of the daydream, Kenz, you better start on that essay for Mr Collins. You are his top student after all," Niska joked. She had been hooked on me being Mr Collins' favourite since I won the Halloween art competition and it was beginning to get annoying.

"Shut up, you haven't started the essay either," I pointed out, pulling the sheets with the details for the essay out of my bag.

"He knows I lack any sort of skill, so I can hand in a tacky essay," she shrugged.

"You know it doesn't work like that. You're supposed to be getting better with your essays, not falling behind," Joel added in.

"Silence. I'm not artistically gifted in any way, shape or form. The essay is simply a critical piece on the work we did in class. I through some paint onto the paper and called it art, not much to it. Unlike Little Miss Arty over here who made a plan. For Art!"

"I wouldn't call it a plan, more like ideas scribbled down on some paper in the space of five minutes."

"Whatever, it still counts."

Our recent Art assignment had been to create something outlandish, unique and obscure but at the same time, in your face and as obvious as Rudolf's nose. Yeah, a little weird if you ask me, but it was fun to see what you could come up with. It's sort of like the painting with all the clocks, clocks everywhere but drawn in really bizarre and strange ways, so the landscape of the art just looks a little odd. Niska found the task to be stupid so painted some really bad cats all over her page and finished there. None of the cats were the same colour, and to be honest, from a distance they didn't look like cats at all. Nor did they look like cats close up. They just didn't look like cats.

The essay was an opportunity for us to explore the creative choices we'd made in the picture, for Niska, well, I don't think she had a reason. Mine was a little more complex. For a while I had seen some really weird puzzles online, ones where you had to spot a singular character amongst a page full of something that looks similar. That was what I had chosen to do. In my piece, there were two snowflakes that looked the same whilst the others were all different. The point was to find the two that were the same. It was a lot harder then it looked. Trust me, I drew it.