A Gratitude Workshop

There’s a mental health event going on in the student center today, something about learning gratitude. It’s not your usual cup of tea—you already know how to appreciate the good things in life, thank you very much—but the promise of a free coffee mug has attracted you there. Such is the freshman life.

When you show up, you find something like a hundred students milling around the area. It’s a big school though, and you don’t really recognize anyone around. That is, until you spy Jennifer and Brooke glaring daggers at each other. Is this something you want to get involved in?

It’s too late. They’ve spotted you. They’re both looking at you expectantly.

You shoot a look back to see if you might be able to get to the doors, but the crowd has already blocked that way off and so you reluctantly inch forward to accept your fate.

“— you can’t seriously believe that, right?” Brooke asks, her voice rather biting as she shoots back at Jennifer, apparently riled up enough to give as good as she was getting back.

“What?” Jennifer chuckles, her eyes shifting over to your slow approach, almost as if she was beckoning you forth, to come and urge on her side of the argument, “Are you really trying to tell me that gratitude has nothing to do with making your life better?”

Brooke has her hands cocked on her hips, her nose flared, even as has to stare up towards Jennifer. But by now you’re close enough that both of them turn on you, like cobras towards prey, as they ask, almost as one.

“Alex?”

“Yeah?” you ask, wincing slightly with hesitation as the conversation shifts in a direction that might leave you culpable—at least in one, if not both their eyes—as taking the other girl’s side.

“You agree with me, yeah, that this whole thing is kind of a waste of time then?”

“No surprise that someone who doesn’t believe in moving past old dusty art also doesn’t believe in moving past, well, ‘just bottling it up’, huh?”

Brooke glares daggers at Jennifer as she continues on, and the air actually starts to feel thick with the tension running high between the two of them.

“So?” Brooke finally asks, turning onto you, her heels physically and metaphorically digging into the ground beneath her feet as she looks at you, her eyes mixing, in equal parts, truthful desire to get at what you feel, and a wholehearted plea for your agreement with her.

“Er…” you start, as you consider the choices laid out before you. On the one hand, Brooke seems to be really, really committed to winning this particular argument, especially against Jennifer, and especially especially because it’s you who’ll be deciding the winner.

On the other, Jennifer is wearing a rather revealing dress, which by no means aids in breaking the paralysis of the moment for you.

Brooke +5
Jennifer +5

Credit to Kallitseren for drafting this chapter :)