If a Pony Catch a Pony

When I got back to the dorms, they were so empty and quiet that I started walking a little more heavily since I knew there wasn't anypony around for me to disturb. I've always liked the sound of hoofsteps echoing in an empty hall. The reverberations have this sharp, crisp sound that you very rarely hear from even percussion instruments. Of course that's because orchestras don't play in rooms shaped like long skinny boxes, but that's not important. I just like the sound, even if a lot of times I'm horrified of making it because I hate being disruptive when I think a lot of other ponies are trying to study or sleep or something.

I wasn't surprised to find my room empty. Amethyst Star was a real socialite, so I knew that if anypony was still down at the big party at the stadium, she would be. I thought that might give me some time to finally listen to my new record, so I went over to my bookshelf took it out. It was one Symphony, my best friend from Manehatten, had written to say I should listen to. I wasn't really sure why—it was a recording of the Trottingham Philharmonic, who aren't considered the best orchestra in the world by any means, performing some adaptations of early Equestrian music. It wasn't the sort of thing I would ever have noticed myself, but I trusted Symphony's taste, so when she got excited enough about it to send me a letter just telling me to get my hooves on it, of course I did.

Dorm rooms are usually the worst places to listen to music, though. You can't even get any privacy in a dorm bathroom, so naturally the bedrooms are even worse, with ponies stomping up and down the halls all the time, and feeling free to just walk right in if they're bored and you left the door unlocked. That's especially true when your roommate is one of the most popular ponies in the college. Amethyst's friends were constantly going in and out, talking about inane things like the new dresses that just showed up in the high street shops or who they had a date with that weekend. So much of that kind of stuff went on that I hadn't even bothered unwrapping the record yet. I knew if I tried to listen to it, I'd just end up angry about all the interruptions.

It had been so long since I used my record player that it was actually a little dusty when I dug it out from under my bed. Fortunately, Amethyst hadn't been using it—she has a tendency to be clumsy with other ponies' stuff, since she's rich enough to replace anything she breaks. But even though my record player was kind of old and shoddy at that point, I wouldn't have dreamed of just replacing it. It was one I had bought a few years ago in Manehatten, back when Symphony and I were first old enough to have some money of our own and could go out and buy records for ourselves. Once a week, we'd go to this dark little record store, with a really snobbish stallion about the age I am now who was always sitting behind the counter reading a book and ignoring the customers. They didn't have a lot of new, popular stuff, but they had every obscure classical recording you could think of. Neither of us really knew much of anything when we started going there, but by the time I left for Canterlot, we had really developed our tastes. So we'd go spend all of our money on records, a lot of which we'd never even heard of before, but just bought because they were cheap and something about them caught our attention. Then we'd go back to my house and listen to them all on this cheap little record player I'd bought. One day when we were really bored, Symphony wrote a few lines from a poem she had been reading on the inside of the cover. After that, we'd both write little stuff like that in it whenever something seemed important to us. Sometimes it was poetry, sometimes it was quotes, sometimes it was just the juvenile, overly serious stuff we'd come up with ourselves. But to be honest, once I got to Canterlot, looking at what we had written there was about the only thing that made me really happy. That's why I was so glad Amethyst had never gotten her hooves on the record player and bent the arm or gouged up the platter or anything. She would've been all apologetic, and would probably have bought me a much nicer new model to replace it. But even though it would've sounded better, I wouldn't have wanted to use it. I don't think Amethyst has ever even heard the phrase 'sentimental value' in her whole life.

I had only listened to about two minutes of the record when I heard somepony lightly tapping on the door. I knew immediately who it was going to be, because the only other pony in the entire college who would have skipped out on the Hearth's Warming party lived next door. Suddenly, I was glad I had decided to listen to the record on headphones, even though I knew that wasn't going to save me. The door opened and even though I tried to avoid eye contact, I couldn't ignore the lavender unicorn creeping into my peripheral vision.

Twilight Sparkle had to be the most socially inept pony in the whole school. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't horrible or anything. A lot of ponies thought she was stuck up, since she was not only antisocial, but had been studying magic directly under Princess Celestia since she was a filly. I can't say I was wild about her myself—when she finally did make an effort to come out of her shell, it was usually at the worst possible times, like when you wanted to just sit by yourself and listen to music. But at least she seemed to actually want to be nice. That was something you couldn't say for everypony in Canterlot. Maybe not even most of them.

As soon as she was in my room, Twilight started talking, before I could even take my headphones off to hear what she was saying. For a minute I considered just leaving them on to see if she'd take the hint, but I didn't want to be that rude. Still, I took my time, lifting the needle off the record very carefully and everything.

"Twilight, I didn't hear anything you just said."

"Oh, sorry!" she said, looking a little flustered. She always looked a little flustered, honestly. You could tell she saw everything as an assignment she was going to be graded on. Because of that, every time she made some minor social faux pas, you ran the risk of her coming completely unglued.

"I was just surprised that you weren't at the stadium with everypony else," she said. "I kind of thought I was the only one who didn't go." She almost looked ashamed when she said it. It made me feel awful for her and resent her at the same time.

“I just didn't feel much like going,” I said. I hadn't told anypony about my decision to leave Canterlot College yet, and wasn't even sure I was going to. Honestly, it really wasn't any of their business. But of course I wasn't going to tell Twilight Sparkle about any of that. "I kind of just wanted some quiet time to listen to this record."

"Oh, I completely understand," Twilight said. "I spent so much time preparing for my final exams that all I wanted was some time to myself."

"Same here." Of course that was a total lie, or at least the part about spending time preparing for finals. The only ones I had worried about at all were for my music classes, and those came so naturally to me it was hardly like work at all. I don't think I even opened a book to study for any other subject. I started to put my headphones back on when she spoke up again.

"So what are you listening to?"

"Just a record," I said.

"I know that," she said, and kind of started nosing around the room, mostly looking at Amethyst's stuff. "But what kind of record?"

"Oh. It's a recording of the Trottingham Philharmonic. A friend back in Manehatten recommended it to me."

"How is it?"

"The first minute was great." I don't love being sarcastic or anything, but she really wasn't taking the hint. If I had gotten to her, though, she didn't show it. She was too busy looking at Amethyst's things. She was using her magic to levitate a brush that was lying on the little vanity table we shared. I have to admit, the brush was really pretty, silver with embossed garlands and inlaid sapphires on the back. Amethyst never said anything about it, because she wasn't one to brag about how well off her parents were, but I got the feeling it was an antique that had been in her family for generations.

"You should probably ask before you just start going through Amethyst's things," I said. I wasn't in any mood to give Twilight a lecture on basic etiquette, but I was still a little irritated at how she had just barged in on me. She looked shocked, not like she was mad, but like she hadn't had any idea what she was doing. That was Twilight. She was the kind of pony who would fall down a hole and break all her legs someday because she was too busy thinking about astronomy to notice that there was a huge hole in the ground in front of her. She was going to make a great professor. All the irritating eccentricities came naturally to her.

I started to put my headphones back on for about the hundredth time, but just then Amethyst got back to the room. She came bursting through the door and almost gave me a heart attack. It must have gotten even colder outside. There were still some flecks of snow in her mane, and the cold was radiating off her like she was some crazy ice sculpture.

"Sweet Celestia, it's bucking freezing out there!" Amethyst could be pretty crass, when she wanted to. She hadn't noticed Twilight standing there, and I almost laughed at how surprised both of them looked. Amethyst's mood changed pretty quickly.

"Oh, um...no offense, Twilight," she said. Nopony wanted to risk saying anything bad about Celestia when Twilight was around, what with her being the princess's special student and all.

"It's alright," Twilight said. I think she had mostly looked shocked because she had just been levitating Amethyst's stuff all over the room a minute before. "I need to get going anyway. I still have one more report to finish before I leave for break."

"I don't think she likes me very much," Amethyst said, when Twilight was gone.

"I don't think Twilight knows how to like anypony," I said. "I wouldn't take it personally."

Amethyst went over to the vanity and sort of ran the brush that Twilight had just been fooling with through her mane a couple of times. "It's snowing like crazy," she said, mostly to herself. "My mane is going to be soaking wet. Are you going out anywhere tonight?"

"I hadn't thought about it yet. Why?"

"Well, I kind of have a date tonight, so if you're going to be sticking around here anyway, I was going to see if you could do me a big favor. I have a composition due for my piano class—it's my last assignment. I've written most of it, but I was going to see if you could look over it and maybe polish it up a little bit. And come up with the last couple of measures. It's supposed to be very melodic, but not full of crazy harmonies or anything. Just keep it simple so it won't sound like you worked on it."

"I honestly don't know what I'm doing tonight," I said, because the last thing I wanted to do was get into another damned music theory conversation with a non-musician, "but I guess I can take a look at it, if I have some spare time."

"Really? It'd be such a huge help."

Amethyst was giving herself the once-over in the mirror, and started levitating accessories out of her closet without even looking while she was doing it. Unicorns can do just about anything with their magic if they really want to, but all most of them ever seemed to do at Canterlot College was levitate their personal items around the room. I had sort of lost any urge I had to listen to music, so I got up and started pacing around the room a little. I noticed that Amethyst had left the sheet music for her composition out on her desk, so I half-heartedly picked it up and starting going over it in my head. It was pretty pedestrian stuff, but I had some ideas on how to improve it.

"So who do you have a date with?" I asked. "Somepony from the college?"

"No, she's actually from Manehatten," Amethyst said. I was a little surprised that she was going out with another mare. It's not like same-sex relationships have ever been uncommon in Equestria—not when there are so many more mares than stallions just about anywhere you go. But there are some ponies who are strictly hetero, and I had always figured Amethyst was one of them. I had only ever seen her go out with stallions in the past. "Maybe you know her. Her name's Vinyl Scratch."

"What?" I half dropped, half threw the sheet music back to where I found it, but she looked at me like I had turned the desk over or something. I hadn't realized how loud my voice had been.

"Wait, do you actually know her? I was just joking."

"Y-yes, I know her. I haven't seen her for a couple of years, though. We lived next door to each other for a while. My parents couldn't stand her because she was always blasting this crazy—"

"But she's cool and all? I mean, it's just kind of a casual double date thing that Lyra set up so she could go out with some mare from Ponyville that she won't shut up about."

Part of me said that I shouldn't be getting worked up, because Amethyst probably didn't see a date with Vinyl as anything more than a way to kill an evening. That was the other thing about her love life—there was nothing remotely like love involved in it. She didn't talk a lot about it, but from what she had said, she very rarely dated the same pony more than a couple of times. When she asked if Vinyl was "cool", what she really wanted to know was whether she was going to want things to get serious.

"Unless she's changed, she's definitely not the clingy type. She's way too into parties and trying to get her music noticed. Did she say anything about that—I mean, about how that's going for her?"

"No, she didn't even mention that she was a musician. I mean, I could kind of guess, from her cutie mark and all." She sighed and looked at herself in the mirror again. "How do I end up with so many musicians in my life?" She had finished fixing her mane, and was putting on her coat. "Oh well, I guess I couldn't pass my music classes without you." Even though she sounded completely exasperated, I at least knew her well enough to know she was joking.

"Hey, could you maybe not mention me to Vinyl?" I asked. I had no idea why I said it, and of course Amethyst wasn't going to ask. I doubt she could've cared less.

"Sure," she said. "I'll see you tonight, if you're still awake when I get back."

Amethyst left, and I went and sat back down by my record player. I didn't feel like listening to music at all, though. Really, I didn't feel like doing anything, but at the same time, I had to do something. I knew if I didn't, I'd spend the rest of the night thinking about Amethyst and Vinyl. Even if she wasn't interested in a serious relationship with Vinyl, that didn't mean nothing was going to happen between them. From what I had heard Amethyst say about her dates before, it was almost guaranteed that something would. I got up and paced around the room for a little while, but couldn't stop my brain from going back to the same place over and over again. I had barely thought of vinyl since I came to Canterlot, but all of a sudden the thought of her going on a date with somepony who hadn't spent a whole summer listening to her basically create her own style of music, who hadn't snuck out with her in the middle of the night to go up on the roof of our building and listen to her talk about a new kind of beat she'd just come up with, was making me crazy.

Because it was the only thing I could think to do instead, I decided to go down to the cafeteria. It was about time for dinner anyway, and I hoped that the walk through the snow would clear my head, even if I didn't feel like eating the awful cafeteria food at all. I grabbed the scarf I had bought the other day when I was bored and went out shopping with Amethyst and Lyra. It was made of thick wool, with a kind of bright, mostly red, plaid pattern. Normally I'm not one for accessories. About the only time I wear them is in the winter when you have to to keep warm. But there was something I had liked about the scarf, even though it was way brighter than the black and gray accessories I usually wear.

On the way, I ran into this unicorn named Minuette, who was one of the few ponies at Canterlot College who I genuinely liked. For one thing, she was really nice. I don't just mean she smiled a lot, or had good manners, even though she did. What was different about Minuette was that you knew she really meant it. When she smiled, it was because she actually was happy, and her manners were good because she thought other ponies deserved that from her. When you get a lot of wealthy ponies together in a place, like Canterlot College, you get a lot of fake politeness and insincere smiles, and it can wear you down really quickly. Give me genuine rudeness and unhappiness any day.

What I liked even more about Minuette, though, was that she had the broadest view of cutie marks and special talents and all that of anypony I ever met. Her cutie mark was an hourglass, and she was one of the best students in the college in physics and math. But instead of going down a really obvious path, like trying to get a job at one of the laboratories in Equestria that was researching time travel, she was always looking for some left-field way to use her talents instead. Sometimes she just did it to fool around, like one night when a couple of us were in the bathroom brushing our teeth, and she started lecturing us about the proper number of strokes per minute for each side of your mouth and all. But sometimes it was also pretty creative, and you got the feeling that even though she didn't seem to have any interest in doing anything world altering with her talents, she would probably have a way more interesting life than some of the ponies who act like their entire future is set in stone the second their cutie marks appear.

The food at the cafeteria was always pretty bad, but that night you could really tell the cooks had already checked out, even though most ponies were going to be around until Sunday turning in the last of their assignments. Still, talking with Minuette while we picked through our meals for the edible parts made it a little more tolerable. I wasn't exactly in the mood to open up, what with my terrible grades and Amethyst and Vinyl still distracting me, so we just kind of talked about nothing in particular, and by the time we finished, I was even laughing and feeling pretty good. When we got back outside, the sun had gone down, and the snow was really starting to stick. Minuette used her magic to speed up the snowfall in a small area, just to get enough piled up to make a snowball that she threw at a group of ponies right as they were walking out of the cafeteria. Everypony started laughing and trying to get enough snow piled up to fight back. I have to admit, there was something really pretty about it. There always is when you know everypony is really enjoying themselves and not just putting on an act.

After we fooled around in front of the cafeteria for a little while, Minuette and I started walking back to the dorms, and since we hadn't really eaten much at dinner—and since I think she had realized that I was upset about something, even though she was too polite to just ask what it was—she suggested we go into town and get some good food somewhere, and maybe go to see a movie or something. The movie part didn't sound great to me, but I really didn't want to spend the rest of the night alone, so I agreed. We went back to our rooms to get some warmer clothes, and for some reason while I was getting ready I decided to go over and see if Twilight Sparkle wanted to go with us. When I knocked on her door, it took a minute for her to answer. When she finally did, this weird smell came flooding out into the hallway.

"Hey, Octavia." She said it more like a question than a greeting. We really didn't talk that much, even though we had lived next door to each other for the past year, so it made sense.

"Hey, Twilight. Minuette and I were talking about going into town to get some dinner, and we thought you might want to go with us."

"Oh. Well, I was working on some potions, but I guess I can leave them for a little while. Where are we going?"

"No idea. We'll figure it out on the way."

Twilight's brow furrowed a little, and I started getting annoyed with her again. It's not that I was doing her some great favor by inviting her or anything, but I could tell that knowing which restaurant we were going to mattered way more to her than it should have. I didn't want to get annoyed again, since talking to Minuette had made me feel so much better, so I tried to take control of the situation before Twilight could find something to worry about.

"Anyway, we need to get going, if we're going to."

"Ok," she said, still looking none too pleased with the whole situation. "Just let me get my coat."

The three of us took the train into town. Normally we would've just walked, but it was way too cold for that. Once we were on the train, even Twilight loosened up a little, and by the time we got to the restaurant we were having a pretty good time. My grandmother had just sent me way too much birthday money a couple of weeks before, so I didn't feel bad about treating everyone to desert after we ate. By the time we finished, we were all too full to rush over to the movie theater, so we ended up just hanging around the restaurant a while longer, then heading back to campus.

As soon as we were there, Twilight went rushing back to her room to tend to her potions and make sure her baby dragon, Spike, was still asleep. Even though I had been having a good time, the thought of going back to my room and being alone again scared the hell out of me, and I practically begged Minuette to come back with me so I'd have some company. I think I might have given her the wrong idea, though, because she made an excuse about having plans to get in on some card game in Moondancer's room or something. Actually, it probably wasn't really an excuse, since she invited me, but the only thing worse than having a panic attack by yourself is having one in a room full of ponies you barely know, so I turned her down and went back to my own room.