La Belle Français

[Domino]

The dry-erase marker squeaked as Neena neatly wrote the last name in the long list on the board: Zacharie (God has remembered), just after Yves (yew tree)and Valentin (healthy/strong). She'd always liked picking French names in her classes in high school; they didn't do it in college, perhaps because it was considered childish. She'd always thought it helped students new to the language slip more easily into a world.

Plus, it was kind of fun. Neena did the name switches by meaning (if a similar meaning could be found), which meant that many names changed quite a bit. Hers, for instance, switched to Valérie, which was fun to say. Of course, she had to go by Madame Thurman in class, but still. She knew.

Both of her white boards were covered in French names, one male and one female, each with meanings in parentheses next to them. Most kids knew the meanings of their names, and for the ones that didn't, she had BabyNames.com.

Neena liked names. So what?

After recapping the marker and waving the fumes around a little, Neena sat back down at her desk, reviewing her material. She'd taught the same first lesson about - what, eight or nine times now? - but she still liked to be prepared.

Je m'appelle Madame Valérie Thurman. Tu t'appelles? Il s'appelle? Elle s'appelle? Ton ami - il s'appelle? Ton amie - elle s'appelle?

They usually picked it up a little if she just started speaking in French. It was the best way to learn, anyway.

Or at least the best way to teach. And not only because of the priceless puzzled faces on her students. That was just a fringe benefit.

[selene]

Je m'appelle Selene et... et...

She flipped through the English>French>English dictionary after the word for 'dawn'.

Aube. Unless you want to be Eloise. My name stays the same. It hadn't occurred to her to refer to her sister with tu t'appelles or "Comment t'appelles tu?"- the phrase they'd been learning to ask others. They far more often had to introduce themselves than ask one another questions, and who was really interested in asking anyone else?

Of course Selene could see out of the corner of her eyes Eos looking about for someone to ask, though Selene was clutching her hand almost possessively as if to say don't you dare leave me, these people are freaks- the older twin and far more worldly(if you asked her opinion), Selene hadn't had the best first week at Xavier's. She might have felt more at home with mutants who had come from such varied yet similar backgrounds as her own, that was, after all her parent's hope in sending the twins here. It just wasn't in Selene's nature to see the silver lining. Only the cloud.

Her dark eyes looking up at the teacher. Selene actually liked this one, unlike some of the others. Miss Thurman- err, Madame Thurman seemed to have a little attitude under the stodgy teacher act. Selene put her eyes back to her paper and thanked heaven once again that she could speak alone with her sister whenever she pleased.

Think we'll have to walk around doing introductions? Ugh. I hate group activities.

[eos]

Er... Je ne sais pas? Unlike Selene, Eos did try her best to speak privately with her sister just as she'd speak with anyone else in the classroom. She was glad that she'd taken the time to look up 'I don't know', 'I don't understand' and 'Excuse me' (not that the last one was hard) - seemed like the kind of thing that would come in handy.

Still, she didn't know much more French than that. So she switched back to English quickly enough.

Yeah, same. And I like Eloise.

Raising her hand - the one not attached to her sister (her right - which also happened to be her writing hand, Selene was left-handed and Eos considered them quite lucky), Eos waited for the teacher's attention.

Excuse-moi, Madame Thurman, er... How do you say 'our names are'? She wondered for a moment if there was a French word for twins that they should know. It didn't really occur to her that they'd be introducing themselves seperately - for all that Eos had an easier time being by herself than her sister, she still thought of them as an inseperable pair more often than not. But it seemed like there had to be a different way to say 'we' if there were different ways to ask about boys and girls.

[Domino]

((Driest... post... ever...))

Neena loved small classes. It was so much easier to tell when someone fell asleep or wasn't trying. It was also easier, if she were to be positive about it, to see when someone was trying, she supposed; but all in all, they gave her a unique opportunity to figure out her students under the pretense of watching their progress.

Two in particular had caught her eye - twins, which was odd enough on its own, and completely silent twins on top of that. She could see them looking at each other and using facial expression as if they were speaking, but no sounds emerged from either except that caused by rustling paper and breathing. Telepaths, she imagined. Very strange.

It was still difficult to get used to the idea of others having powers, and more difficult still to imagine that they had any sort of control over those powers. Neena was so used to being a slave to her own good luck or ill luck, with only her self-esteem with which to control it, that the idea of control had become foreign long ago.

One of the twins raised her hand and Neena smiled in answer, inviting the question as mutely as it was signaled.

Excuse-moi, Madame Thurman, er... How do you say 'our names are'?

They were talking in her head.

She looked bewildered for only a brief moment before she reminded herself that, yes, that could happen when you worked with mutants. Perfectly normal, under certain definitions of 'normal.'

"'Our names are'?" she repeated aloud, as much for her own comfort as for the edification of the rest of the class. "It's slightly more complicated. The pronoun we translates to nous. Has everyone completed the name exercise?"

Everyone either nodded or didn't move. If any of them hadn't and were too cowardly to speak up, it was their own fault. Neena erased a circle in the middle of the male name board and wrote Liason in green so that it stood out from the sea of blue names.

"Some of you may have noticed the consonant-apostrophe at the beginning of appeller, the verb we use when referring to our names. This is an example of liason, which is the action of running a word which ends in a vowel in with a word which begins in a vowel."

She wrote Comment t'appelles-tu? underneath Liason, followed by How yourselves calls you?

"In French," she continued, "we don't drop objects the way we can in English. However, sometimes those objects are moved in front of the active vowel, which is here appeller, or call. So, if one were to use the subject pronoun for we, nous, and then to insert the object of the sentence, which is also we - another nous - before the verb, which would be conjucated with an -ons to make it first-person collective..."

Nous nous appellons ______, she wrote, and then circled it.

"This can also be applied to vous, which is the second-person collective," she said. "North of the Mason-Dixon line, we don't have a direct translation for vous, but if it helps, you can think of it as the y'all tense."

Damn Yankees and their lack of second-person collectives.

"If you were introducing yourselves, you might say - in addition to Nous nous appellons Eos et Selene, of course - Nous sommes des jumelles, "jumelles" being the feminine from jumeaux for twins. And binoculars."

The French were so efficient.

"Does all that make sense?"

[selene]

Nous sommes Gémeaux, then. Cause that's Gemini in French. Selene said it to both her sister and Miss Thurman- okay, thought it- without lifting her head from the paper.

3) Write "My name is _________."

Nous nous appellons Gémeaux. [/i]

Selene smirked to herself, pleased with her little act of defiance. Someone had told her the teachers at Xavier's were supposed to be into letting mutants be what they were. She lifted her face to look at Miss Thurman.

Let's see if this one can keep up.

[eos]

Rolling her eyes, Eos instead wrote 'Nous nous appelons Selene et Eloise Montgomery.'

She wondered how she felt about calling herself a pair of binoculars. It was a bit odd that they'd use the same word - binoculars weren't identical girls, after all, or even non-identical twin girls. The French were weird.

At least this one hadn't looked at them too funny when Eos had spoken to her. Well, she'd recovered quickly enough, anyway - the young mutant could imagine that she got plenty of odd looks herself, with her pale skin and dark patch. It was actually making her quite curious about what Madame Thurman's mutation was - she kinda reminded Eos of a dalmation, only with less spots.

For a moment, she wondered if you could mix words. In English, you could say 'Our name is Gemini' - even though there was a bit of a grammatical problem for some people. Could you do the same with French? Was Nous nous appelons 'are' or 'is'? She'd let Selene handle that though, if she thought of it.

[Domino]

Nous sommes Gémeaux, then. Cause that's Gemini in French.

"Gémelles," Neena corrected with a smile. "Gémeaux is masculine. While normally it would remain so, as it was derived from another language - Greek or Latin, I can't remember my mythology - when applied to a subject with an actual gender rather than a technical one, I like to make the word feminine. L'Académie can fight me on it if they wish."

There was so much gramatically insane about them in the first place. Should there be a Les? People named after everyday French things didn't need articles, but people named after everyday French things were named after a singular thing - and if they weren't, there was only one of them at a time.

Whatever. Gémelles was good enough for French One.

"And well done," she said. "You two have evidently done your research, but you must never rely too heavily on dictionaries or translation services. French, though less so than English, is very connotative. Also, as you are not actually the constellation Gemini, you should use appeller - appellons, in this case - when referring to yourselves."

She wondered whether she should ask the pair - Gémelles, she supposed - to speak out loud, but something told her that it might be out of the question. She decided to follow her instinct. It would be a bit silly not to.

"And," she said, directing her comment to the rest of the class, "if you choose to follow Mademoiselles' Gémelles' example, je m'appelle Madame Domino."

That sounded a little ridiculous, but it was only fair. And Domino was both a French and English word; it would be easier to tie to her. Especially with her spot.

Damn spot.

"Moving on," she said, turning from the class and erasing the rest of the board, "We've brought up our second point of the day quite accidentally, which is our second verb, être, to be. Appeller means only to call. Charting conjugations as a memory trick can help many students, so if you'd like - "

She drew a box of six wide rectangles on the board, filling in je sais, tu es, il est down the first column and nous sommes, vous êtes, ils/elles sont down the second.

"First person, second person, third person, in order of rows," she said. "You should find être on your worksheet just below our last question. Once you've got that down, we'll move on to avoir, as long as there are no questions - though do keep ahold of appeller, as we'll be reviewing introductions at the end of the lesson."

[selene]

Selene was a bit disappointed that she wasn't able to fluster the teacher- or impressed, she hadn't really decided. Deciding either way the best reaction was to pretend she hadn't even heard "Miss Domino", she watched her sister erase her answer and gave up, putting her pen down and crossing her arms with a yawn.

Looking around the room listlessly, Selene entertained herself with thoughts of the dreams she was going to visit the teacher with that night. Something about Gemini, certainly. No one went around telling her she had to be called Domina, that's for sure.

It only made her frown a little deeper.

[eos]

The word Gemini is from Latin, but the mythology behind our names is Greek. She meant all of their names - Selene, Eos, and the twins of Gemini. Well, no-one could blame the girls for being educated about their names - their parents were professors, after all.

She spoke without looking up as she erased her answer and started writing in what the teacher was calling the correct one, broadcasting the thought to the teacher and her sister. She might have spoken to the whole room if she'd thought of it, but it was too late now. Selene looked like she was going to be stubborn - well, that would be about right. Eos just liked to keep the peace and get her marks, rather than kick up a fuss and end up arguing with the teacher over something relatively trivial. They could just call themselves Selene and Eloise in here, anyway, couldn't they?

Mrs Domino? Interesting. Eos still thought that the spot looked more like a dalmatian. What on earth did that name mean, though? Was her mutation that she liked to play games?

[Domino]

Well. Everyone certainly looked enthused.

Neena was reminded forcibly, as she was every year, by the major flaw of first days: no one was comfortable enough to joke yet. The only resistance you met was surly and angry, everyone else too petrified or bored to try anything.

Neena did love it so when they tried things.

"In any case," she said, "points will always be awarded for perceived effort, so do try to put something down. Are there any questions about être or appeller, while we're on the subject?"

Repeating the backwards cinq-quatre-trois-deux-une she always employed after the dreaded request for questions, Neena waited for the hands to go up. Confused looks didn't cut it in her class.