Oh No! Not My Glasses!

Charlie was so excited to have the student commons to herself. She was going to tinker with the tablet she'd been sent from her mom. She was probably going to replace the screen first she decided. She set her tablet on a table and continued to walk the room just to think.

She was in her favorite of the sweatshirts she'd successfully stolen from her best friend Philip Bracknell. She smiled. It was warm like him and thankfully smelled exactly like him. His mother may have hated Charlie, but she definitely taught Philip how to be hygienic, and for that Charlie was grateful. She was mildly disappointed Philip was busy with homework and couldn't join her upstairs, but it was it was and everyone needed alone time.

Charlie also did kind of wish she had more friends. She thought Philip was the greatest thing since sliced bread and all when it came to friendship, but it would hardly hurt to make a new friend or two. Back in the U.S. Charlie didn't really have any friends with living a rather sheltered life because of her father being a prominent figure in sports with the need to avoid media and her mother just liking her privacy to do her studies, so school was her only chance to make friends.

Unfortunately for Charlotte, at some point during her reverie her socked feet (she'd left her shoes in her dorm room for about the trillionth time) caught on some of the carpeting in the commons and she went don like she was yelling timber. She let out a loud squeak and face planted with a loud crack. Thankfully, the crack was none of Charlotte's bones. Unfortunately, the crack was her glasses breaking into two pieces. The glasses were probably more important than Charlie's bones too because at least with a broken nose she could still see properly. She wasn't totally blind without her lenses, but it was pretty bad.

She sighed and sat crisscross apple sauce on the floor while her eyes attempted to readjust to how the world looked. It was all blurry and all the miss mash of color kind of reminded her of Alice in Wonderland. Maybe she'd fallen down the Rabbit Hole and that's why she'd broken her glasses. Yep, that was what happened. She heard the door open and turned her head toward the sound and squinted at a somewhat familiar shape.

Harley was having an over all bad day. The recent Howler incident had successfully scared nearly everyone out of their wits, but she hadn't been affected. She was a victim of the panic though. Two students had already knocked her down because she had "scared them" and she had been given a detention after supposedly knocking a kid down the stairs.

She was going to the commons to read the letter she had received from Elijah seeing as it was too loud to read it in the Grand Hall. It was also the perfect opportunity to finish her Astronomy essay without someone asking her what she got for number thirty on the Arithmancy homework. It was a pain, really.

She was surprised to say in the least that someone else was in the usually empty room. "Oh! Are you okay? That was quite a fall, and trust me, I've had my fair share of them. I also heard something snap and trust me when I say it sounded like a broken finger," she informed the girl, rushing over to help her and seeing that it was only the bridge of her glasses. Harley wore contacts, it was easy for glasses to slip of her face and fall into whatever car engine she was fixing.

"You're the girl who visits the guy down the hall, right?" Points for description, Harley thought to herself. "Charlie, right? You're Philip's best friend. Don't worry, I'm not stalking him, he talks about you at the Montagnard table at breakfast. The name's Harley, Harley Fenwick."

Harley looked around to see if anybody was around, which was stupid now that she though about it, and whipped out her wand. "Oculus Reparo," she whispered, mending the snapped frames. "All better. Nice tablet by the way. I do mechanics too, but I'm mainly engineering cars and motors and designing computer programs. You know, code stuff."

"Yes, I'm relatively okay." Charlie murmured, rubbing her forehead "The girl that visits the guy down the hall." She repeated a little amused. "Yes, that sounds an awful lot like myself. Ha! Ha! We have a winner. I'm Charlie." She nodded. "He talks about me?" Her eyebrows arched. "Hopefully they're mostly good things."

When the girl fixed her glasses Charlie was extremely grateful. She often ignored her mother and father when they had tried to fix her glasses with magic in the past. Usually, she liked to tape them up, but she couldn't help but feel thankful to the girl. "Thank you very much."

Charlie's ears perked up at the mention of electronics. "You like coding? I'm more of a hardware person myself but I want to learn PHP coding badly. It's excessively fun to look at and all. What about you? What time of coding suits your fancy?"

"Yeah, he talks mostly about how you own half his sweaters and how you love computers. He also calls you the most intelligent girl he knows," she laughed. It was nearly impossible to not listen to how happy she obviously made him, it just made your day brighter thinking that there might be someone who talked about you like that.

"Oh, well, I mostly design software and the occasional antivirus for certain malwares on my hard drives. They're downloadable, so if you want, I can always put an antivirus on your PC. It doesn't interfere with the current one, just sorda enhances it," Harley offered. She didn't have to try very hard around Charlie, the girl was like an alternate dimension photocopy of herself.

"PHP is nice for building the base of some stuff, but I use it for data encryption mostly. I guess I'm okay at Java and HTML too, so if you want to, I could teach you the basics of them."

Charlie giggled. "I wouldn't say half more like two fifths? H-He really says that about me? Philip is such a sweet person." She bit her lip slightly. "I wouldn't go that far...I just...parents had me learn a lot of useless stuff I guess. My dad, he's a quidditch coach and my mummy is a naturalist, but I've always been into electronics. They've both really started feeding into my desire to learn the in and outs of computers."

"I would positively love that!" She said excitedly. "Can we please be friends?" She found herself asking excitedly. Maybe Charlie was making a friend after all. "I could teach you all about processing architectures!"

"I really have needed to make a friend who is a girl. Philip is wonderful, but he really isn't the same as having a girl to talk to." She laughed softly.

"Trust me, I know how you feel," she agreed, but she was really lying through her teeth. She had no friends yet. Just Ryan who occasionally argued with her, she called him her frenemy, and two others she had met in Amethyst Alley. So when Charlie asked if they could be friends, she was positively ecstatic. Charlie was almost like an alternate dimension carbon copy of herself, with the love of technology included.

"I honestly don't know too much on processing architecture, I never really needed it. Now, I really want to learn it. I'll get Elijah to send me a flash drive in the mail so I can copy it, unless you have one of course. I'll even help you program your PC. It's the least I could do," she insisted. Technology had always made her feel like a major outcast who had nothing better to do than design programs that could copy your handwriting into a computer font because she had no friends. Now, she had a friend because of it.

Charlie had yet to meet anyone like herself at school until now. Philip was wonderful and all, but he had no idea what she was talking about half the time and made a point out of telling her. Harley on the other hand knew exactly what she was talking about. It was like looking in a mirror. "You should get to know Philip. I bet you two would be friends too." Charlie found herself saying. A small portion of herself wanted her to shove those last two sentences in her mouth, but it was true she would love Harley to be close to both Philip and herself.

"That sounds perfect. I have a Cisco IT Essentials membership too, so if you want to get A+ certified just let me know and I'll hook you up." She said excitedly. "I would love for you to program my computer."

Harley was surprised when Charlie told her that she and Philip should be friends. It was strange, if she had a friend that close, she would want to keep him close. She had a weird tendency to get jealous over the few friends she could actually relate to, especially if a new friend started to pull them away. "Oh, well, us three could always go to La Petit Dragon. I'll pay," she smiled.

"I've actually been meaning to get certified sometime. I'd love to. I'm have my Microsoft Systems Engineer certification too, so if you ever need a study-buddy, I can always help," she laughed. The Systems Engineer card wasn't something she often played to make new friends, but with Charlie she found she could be her usual, nerdy self.