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Some say Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween movie. Some Christmas. How about we split the difference? Nightmare Before Christmas is a Thanksgiving movie.

But yeah, I wish I did, but with this pandemic bullcrap, not a whole lot happened T-T

Peter wasn’t crying -- he wasn’t crying -- he’d just washed his face a bit. Ocean’s Coast’s bathrooms were significantly nicer than any of the bathrooms at Horizon, how was that fair? Of course, Peter had only seen, like, half of Horizon’s bathrooms and only one Ocean’s Coast, so the sample size was a little off, but still. It was cleaner, it had better lighting, and, perhaps most importantly, the urinals had dividers between them so you could feel more justified breaking the standard alternating pattern most bathroom-goers just seemed to do. Briefly, Peter wondered if this was indicative of the dedication of schools’ respective custodial staff, or if it just meant that nobody at Ocean’s Coast ever peed. But that thought came just before the real consternation began, and the fact that it had distracted him at all just made him feel worse. This was supposed to be a big deal, wasn’t it? Losing like that? At the same time, hadn’t it been drilled into his head that losing, while never really forgivable, was going to happen? He could already hear his parents being like, “Okay, now what did you learn from it?” What had he learned from it? Well, that Chaos MAX dragon wasn’t the end-all-be-all, apparently, and that he couldn’t rely on it to bail him out every single duel, but he knew that already. Really, that was the problem, everything he was thinking he could learn from this experience he had already been taught. But if he didn’t learn something, then the whole experience would be for naught, right? The worst part was, that whole thought cul-de-sac wasn’t even the reason he was upset (not crying, just upset). It certainly contributed, to the overall mood, sure, but the real reason, when he really thought about it, was that he lost. It was stupid and he was thirteen and older than all this now, but it still hurt. It hurt to let everyone down like that, for one. It hurt to have a public debut and go down in such an embarrassing fashion. And yeah, the fact that he was supposed to just get over it hurt too. He was certainly going to lose more games in the future, even ones against other schools, were those going to hurt just as much? A few deep breaths calmed him down for the moment, at least. Peter felt uncomfortable leaving the restroom with more questions than he’d come in (and with fewer and fewer answers, too), but he was getting nowhere fast. At the very least, he could recognize when he was beat on that front. The moment he left the restroom, that was the time to leave such questions to the unknowable abyss and forget all about it. He was Peter Wilson the third. He had an image to keep. The walk back was a bit trepidatious -- Peter kept imagining someone turning the corner and recognizing him while he still hadn’t entirely sobered up -- but he managed to retrace his steps just fine, returning to the gymnasium trying to cause as little fanfare as possible. He took a quick detour to grab a granola bar before joining the other Horizon spectators. “Back,” he said. “How’re we looking?”

We meet again.