Twenty Random Facts about Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
1) Hank leaves his DVDs in the rec room for everyone to share. This is a change, because Scott keeps his upstairs in his room and brings them down one at a time, carefully labelled "Property of Scott Summers -- please return." That's not new: Hank and Warren and Jean learned very early not to walk off with Scott's possessions without asking, because although any of them would be annoyed at not being able to find their things, Scott would actually get upset.
2) Sitting on the roof is forbidden under the school rules, which are extensive and frequently ignored. This is less an attempt to keep students off the roof than it is to discourage them from leaving soda bottles, their homework, articles of clothing, or pieces of furniture behind. Scott had to use a block and tackle to get the sofa down, and he was not pleased.
3) The swimming pool is only open from May to September. Ororo has been lobbying for an indoor pool for years, but it would have to go in the basement, and Scott hates letting students spend more time in the basement than they have to. Sometimes Bobby would freeze the pool solid and get out his ice skates and go skating, with John sliding across the ice after him in his tennis shoes until it began to melt in the sun and soaked through his shoes.
No one has bothered to drain and cover the pool this fall; there have been too many things to worry about, and by November the pool is murky and strewn with fallen leaves.
4) There are paper files for every student, past and present, in the medical lab, as well as briefer versions in the school's computer. The earliest ones have indecipherable notes in Charles's handwriting, and the later ones have careful handwritten records kept in Jean's rounder, more legible hand. Hank is reorganizing the files according to a complicated system of his own designing. Scott wishes he wouldn't, but he can't think of a rational reason why.
5) Charles keeps his bedroom locked during the daytime, not because there's anything of value there but because he values the illusion of private space. At night he leaves it unlocked in case of emergencies. He sleeps facing the window so he will not have to open his eyes in the morning and see the wheelchair waiting by the bed, although he doesn't think he could sleep if it weren't there.
6) The oldest clothes in the attic are in dusty trunks or standing wardrobe boxes, and were outgrown or outworn just after the war. The stiff black suit Charles wore for first Communion is packed away along with his mother's moth-eaten hats and a pair of his father's shoes that are hopelessly scuffed at the toes. The clothes he sorted through after his mother's funeral are packed more neatly in cardboard boxes and stacked against the wall. The ones various departing students have left here are in boxes or plastic bags or the occasional dusty suitcase.
Jean's clothes are carefully packed in her suitcases, which are resting on plastic bags Scott put down to keep them out of the dust. They look like they are ready to be put on a flight to somewhere far away.
7) There is a schedule of assigned chores for students and staff taped to the wall in the kitchen. It is redone monthly, but always ends up a maze of handwritten changes and additions. Ororo once tried forbidding hand-written changes, which resulted in a daily procession of visitors to Scott's office wanting him to redo the schedule to show that they had traded dishes on Wednesday for raking leaves on Saturday, at which point Scott and Ororo had words and the pen that had originally been taped to the list reappeared.
Every now and then when the wrangling over the list gets on his nerves, Charles points out that there is, in fact, a lawn service that he pays to do things like rake leaves, and that if deciding who will rake the leaves -- for instance -- is too difficult a task for Scott and Jean and Ororo to manage, Scott and Jean and Ororo can leave the leaves alone. Student chores are then roundly defended as building character and teaching valuable life skills to students who (Ororo usually points out) will probably not have a lawn service when they grow up, and the ritual argument comes to its ritual conclusion.
Hank has suggested that allowing students to use their powers judiciously in the process of performing their assigned tasks would be motivational. This has so far been vetoed on the grounds that (according to Scott) most students don't even know what "judiciously" means, and that (according to Ororo) they all still remember the Mailbox Incident of '84.
8) Also in the attic are a set of rock climbing ropes and a pair of expensive hiking boots, several worn tennis rackets, a set of stacked metal cages that briefly contained mice, a very old child's chemistry set, and a cheap stereo system made in 1976. The stereo system is in perfect working order, and when plugged into one of the dangling extension cords in the attic picks up radio stations from surprisingly far away.
9) The listing of appraised and insured property in the school is thirty-six pages long in small type. Many of the pieces of art are not replacable, and Jean occasionally used to say that she wondered if it was really fair keeping them in a house that was more than statistically likely to burn down, have an indoor rainstorm, or explode. Charles usually pointed out that the students weren't replaceable, either, and if the house was safe for them, he thought a vase could probably survive.
10) There is a door from the garden into the conservatory that is now Ororo's classroom. Ororo rarely uses it because she hates letting cold air in. Scott can't use it without remembering the time that Warren tried to land in a storm and hit the conservatory wall. Scott ran out into the rain and dragged him in, trying not to put his hands on his right wing because it was bleeding and he was afraid it was broken. He sat on the floor with Warren until Warren could stop shaking, watching him open and close the wing over and over even though it hurt to prove that he could. It'll be all right , Scott said, but it scared him to understand that even people he looked up to were fragile.
11) There are six washing machines and dryers in the laundry room, plus a plentiful supply of detergent and fabric softener. There is also an ironing board, which largely goes unused, except by Scott, who likes his pants creased, and by Bobby, who occasionally irons his shirts out of a sense of obligation to his mother. Ororo helps the youngest students with their laundry, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the Soap Suds Incident of '97.
Charles sends his clothes out to the cleaners and has them returned folded and pressed with the socks matched and his shirts perfectly starched. The washing machines are top-loading, which is awkward for him, and besides he does not feel that he needs to build any more character at this point in his life.
12) The large globe in the library in its wooden stand still shows East Germany and the Soviet Union. Ororo has suggested that it might be less confusing for the students if they replaced it, but Charles says he is waiting for the coming of world peace and the ensuing end to the redrawing of maps. Ororo is almost but not quite certain that he's not serious.
13) The basketball court has a slight ridge at the seams where it opens up for the jet to launch. Everyone learns not to bounce the ball right there, or it will go spinning away. Scott and Hank play basketball late in the evenings, after most of the students have gone to bed or settled down in the rec room to watch movies. Bobby has started staying out to play ball with them a couple of nights a week; he keeps expecting they'll tell him to go inside, but they never do.
14) There is a stack of Piotr's sketches and watercolors in a cabinet drawer in the library. Charles asked if he could hang one of them on the library wall, but Piotr said it would feel wrong for his work to hang there next to the real art simply because he is a student. He wants his place when he has earned it.
15) No one uses the chess table anymore, although the pieces stay set up as Jean left them, neatly arrayed in black and white ranks. Hank has always found the chess table too low for him to play comfortably, and is teaching Bobby to play chess using a large board set up on his lab table. He hasn't decided yet whether he thinks Bobby really wants to learn to play, or wants to learn because people have told him he would be good at it, or wants to learn because the other X-Men know how to play, or is simply looking for sympathetic company. Understanding Bobby is becoming a project for Hank, one he thinks no one else has found the time for.
16) Hank has a computer file full of interesting article citations he was planning to send to Jean. He knows he should delete it, but he can't bring himself to press the keys.
17) Jean had a collection of cheerful Thanksgiving decorations that both Scott and Ororo thought were hideous; Charles always said he thought they were charming, but in the same tone of voice he used to describe brightly-patterned ties given to him for Christmas. Ororo can't decide whether it will be worse to get the little turkeys out this year or to put them up in the attic to gather dust.
18) Logan claims that he doesn't actually live at the mansion, but there are clothes in his closet now, and cigars and beer cans stacked on the nightstand, and a private stash of unhealthy food under the bed. Scott still glares at him when he comes anywhere near anything Scott owns. Logan tells himself that next time he leaves he won't take anything that belongs here, so maybe he won't feel like he has to come back.
19) When Warren went home after Jean's funeral, Scott kept looking through the house because he was sure Warren had left something behind and would call home wanting it. Whatever it was, he couldn't find it.
20) Scott helped Charles repair Cerebro, although he still doesn't understand what most of the pieces do. The new lock on the chamber door requires both a retinal scan and a password that only Charles and Scott know. Scott knows it's a security risk for him to know it, when there are telepaths out there who could pry it out of his mind, but he needs to be able to open the door if anything happens to Charles without blasting Cerebro apart. He isn't sure how Charles can stand to use Cerebro anymore, but that's one of those questions he knows better than to ask.
Sometimes Charles goes down to Cerebro late at night and puts the headpiece on and feels the world spinning around him, as if this house were the center of the universe, the pivot on which the world turns. He tries to remind himself that's only perspective, but from where he's sitting it feels true.