karenhealey

Oh Internets, I'm sorry, I meant to post yesterday but I had a late shift at Retail Job and then I came home and climbed straight into bed, where the warm was.

So today you get BOTH of our final two When We Wake character wardrobes!

Romance is nice (especially when it involves Abdi) but Tegan really needs friends. Fortunately, she has two good ones.

Joph Montgomery



Joph Montgomery is a pretty great person. She's kind, she's peaceful and she likes to make people happy. While everyone else runs around getting excited, Joph tends to saunter around getting mildly interested. Which is not to say that Joph doesn't care about things and take risks. She does! But in a generally tranquil way.

Of course, like everyone, Joph has flaws. One of her less important flaws is that she is a very boring dresser. She's just not super interested in clothing. Brown leggings? Brown tunic? Brown sandals? She's good to go!

I had to blink hard in the sudden flare of brilliance. When I could see again, I was staring at a slim girl my own age, with shaggy light brown hair, and skin a few shades darker than mine. She was wearing a purple dress that reached to her knees and cuffed leggings under it that went halfway down her calves. She was sitting in the lotus position, bare feet resting casually on her thighs, and the light was coming from her computer, which was draped over her shoulders like a cloak. “I’m Joph,” she said. “What does ‘I suck’ mean?”

“I’m Tegan,” I said. “Teeg. It means that I’m a terrible person.”

Joph thought about that. “You don’t look terrible, Teeg.”

I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Of all the weird conversations I’d had over the previous weeks, including the one where Marie told me I’d been dead for a hundred years, this was a really strong contender for the weirdest.

“It’s okay,” Joph said. “You can stay here with me.” She gestured at her tiny domain as if it was a gift she was presenting.

“I’m not sure that would work,” I said. “But it’s tempting.” I was beginning to suspect that some of Joph’s serenity came from less-than-natural causes. I’d thought her eyes were black, but closer inspection showed a ring of light brown around the edge of the iris. Her pupils were really dilated.

That purple dress is the most exciting thing Joph ever wears.

And to be honest, it was probably a gift from Bethari.

Bethari Miyahputri



Bethari Miyahputri, on the other hand, takes a lot of interest in clothes. She's a cheerleader, a journalist, and an Indonesian Australian Muslim woman who covers. She pays attention to the way clothing can be a performance or a signal, a form of protest or a marker of community. Of the four Main Crew, she is the fashion maven, the one who lends Tegan things to pad out her scanty wardrobe and the one who uses her web presence to discuss fashion as well as politics - because she knows they're frequently connected topics.

She has a lot of clothes - more than enough to supply Tegan with a complete set of dark clothes when they need to undertake some espionage. Cheerleading, as Tegan observes, lends itself well to breaking and entering.

But when she's not engaged in uprooting conspiracies, Bethari wears colours that play well against each other and her skin tone. Her signature colours are purple, grey and gold:

The main building’s rooftop was a garden run by the first-year students; Elisa M put it in all their publicity materials. I’d scoffed at the pictures; from my experience with similar programs back home, I’d expected it to be a scrubby thing with shallow, unfilled holes and empty chip packages blowing around dying trees.

But this looked exactly like the tubes had said it did. Soft fake grass on the walkways and lounging patches, but in the beds, real grasses and shrubs, so much green massed together that it made me gasp. There were paper daisy bushes, just beginning to bloom pink and yellow and white. There were snow gums, genetically modified to grow in this heat, and water gums and two long rows of tall Illawarra flame trees covered in hectic crimson blossoms. Most of the plants were natives, I thought, hardy and water-conservative, but I spotted a couple of lemon trees laden with fruit, and I could smell something that hinted at an herb patch farther on.

The whole thing was all watered with the school’s gray water and grown in compost mixed from food scraps and humanure.

And in the middle of all that color waited Bethari, wearing a long gray dress, a purple-and-gold headscarf, and gold sandals.

She was also wearing a huge grin.

The grin is because Bethari just heard about something that she's going to tease Tegan about. It's hard to keep secrets in an Even-More-Information Age!

What is that thing? Well, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until March to find out. Or February, if you live in Australia or New Zealand. Mmm, Antipodean advantages.