Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cassirin 
Where he currently stood? Tate tilted his head and leaned back in his chair, giving the girl a long look. "I think you want this for other people's reasons, and I think you'll regret it almost immediately. Your friends will be in different classes, the new classmates will already have established relationships, you're only just scratching the surface of elective classes and cannot really anticipate how they'll go once you're past the introductory classes..."
That all sounded very negative, actually, and he didn't want to dissuade the little Ravenclaw from being an achiever. "Every professor in this school would be willing to offer supplementary work to encourage your interests and studies, which is a much more reasonable suggestion than skipping an entire year of learning. Have you tried that yet?"
Presley felt like she'd been slapped. Not because he'd said or done anything to hurt or offend her, because every word he said was true. She was doing it for other people's reasons. Indirectly her own, but first and foremost because her father wanted her to, and she wanted her father to be proud of her.
She had thought about the classmate thing, and it had been one of the few reasons on her cons list. Of course it would be brought up now. But really, she would still share a dorm with her friends, and it's not like she wouldn't see them out of classes. Really, in classes, friends were only a distraction anyway. But still, Pres wanted this for someone else. And she was going to fight for it.
She nodded at the question.
"Yes, sir. I've been asking for extra work all term, and most teachers are willing to work with that. The problem, sir, is that I'm still stuck in the lower classes, learning things I already know." Should she pull it out now? Presley looked down at the desk and folded her hands. She looked back up, and stared Tate right in the eye. Eye contact was supposed to be a good thing, right?
"Headmaster, if I can get perfect O's on all of my finals this term, will you think about it more? You can send me an owl over the holidays and let me know about your decision, but I really think I can do this, sir. And I feel I'm being underestimated."
She could be so much more, or so her father said. All Pres wanted was to walk up to her father and tell him she was smart enough to skip a whole year of school, and for him to look away from whatever he was working on, walk out of whatever meeting he was in, and tell her she'd done well. Maybe he would take her out to lunch, just the two of them, and he would tell her he'd always known his child was special. But at the rate this conversation was going, that was never going to happen.
Presley shook the thought out of her head. It didn't matter. If Tate said yes, then she would no longer be bored in classes. If he said no, she would stay just where she was and nothing would change. Neither option was a bad one.