Somebody That I Used To Know (Claire)

[Sebastian Kendrick]

It had been that awkward moment when you have to sit behind a desk and watch your little cousin audition for the theater department. It had been awkward to acknowledge that she was actually rather good. It had been tough to get over the fact that he wasn't the only member of his family who wanted to pursue a career as an actor. Of course, they weren't his family anymore, but during that horrible dark time when he had been an Underwood, it had made him feel special; it had given him an escape from that terrible plague he had come to know as Mormonism.

Of course, then there was the other part of it, the part that stung even more than the acting part. Something about Claire made her special like him. The upper level of administration kept a hold and a short leash on all the students' personal information, so there was no way of knowing what their 'gift' was unless they volunteered that information directly, or if you guessed, of course.

Sebastian had learned to push this from his mind. Just because his little cousin was one of his students (thank luck that he hadn't had her in any of his classes once) didn't mean he was going to walk about his own place of work in fear. He liked this school, he really did. Not only did they provide a steady paycheck, but they honestly made him feel at home, as they let him be himself openly...and when he meant 'be himself', he could be himself in all sense of the phrase.

New York summers were hot and sticky, but that was no excuse for him to shut himself up in his office and swelter in there. Instead, he took his stack of papers and scripts down to the gardens, found himself a quiet nook and began to read.

[Claire Anette Underwood]

Claire was wandering the hallways, still trying to take in everything about this place. It was just so huge! She liked it though, it had a fun, free atmosphere. Having lived outside of Utah a looser environment didn’t throw her off as much as it would her cousins back in Salt lake. Sure she sometimes felt like a fish out of water since she didn’t do the party thing or the hook-up thing and her language was significantly cleaner than most of the people she met, but all that was worth it to get to go to a school like this. And the people here were still awesome, regardless.

She still hadn’t told anyone she was Mormon though. It wasn’t that she didn’t want them to know, she just didn’t want them to know yet. Otherwise, people would look at her and immediately see “the Mormon girl” instead of Claire. She wanted people to get to know her as person and identify her that way, not because of a set a beliefs that a lot of them probably had distorted understandings of anyway. That hadn’t been as big a problem in Australia since a a lot of the people there had barely even heard of the LDS church, but here in the US it had gotten a lot of publicity lately, and not of the positive kind.

Honestly though, she’d been more worried about fitting into the theater department than the student body. She hadn’t heard the results of her audition yet, though she’d thought she’d made a good impression. She hadn’t blown them away, exactly, and based on what she’d seen she didn’t think she’d made the cut to be a lead this time around, but she was only a freshman. The best thing for her now was just to get on their radar and then work her tail off at any and all rehearsal’s and performances regardless of what her role was.

She rounded a corner into the Gardens and almost crashed into someone, “Sorry sir, uh, Mr. Kendrick?”