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allthatgoesThe triumvirate of Moore, Brandt and Walsh always tried to be early to math classes. This was primarily because of the fact that Morgan – who was currently attempting to hide behind her bangs from the teacher as they made their way into the room and found three seats in an empty cluster of five desks toward the back – was absolutely terrible at anything concerning numbers. She couldn't get her head around them no matter how hard she tried, and was only in Math Part B because of all of the work that had gone into memorizing how the patterns of things worked and spending hours being tutored by Cat, who was a math wiz.
(Nick just didn't care either way.)
So the three of them were early, and the teacher had yet to notice them, and they planned on keeping it that way. The quieter one was, the less one was expected to actually pay attention. As the rest of the class filed into the first floor classroom, the three of them were sitting, heads close, all trying to hide the fact they were playing cards and planned to continue to do so until the bell rang. A gangly girl none of them knew nearly tripped on Morgan's bag, and at a chiding from Cat, she looked up, shoving her cards into her desk.
"Sorry," she said with a nervous laugh, pulling the bag out of the way. The girl gave her a nasty look and walked swiftly to her seat.
"What crawled up her ass and died?" Cat whispered, and Morgan giggled, then clamped her hand over her mouth before the teacher noticed.
Unfortunately, that question went unanswered, and it would be quite some time before it was raised again. Instead, the teacher called class to order, and collected their homework, and was distracted by one of the students near the front asking a question about problem eight, which ate up several minutes.
And then, as the teacher was finally finishing her explanation, there was a knock at the door, and a moment later a blond head intruded, followed soon after by an attached body.
"Hello," Grégoire Jourdain said, with a sweet, hopeful, and false smile for the teacher, "I am sorry, I think I am late? I have a letter for you from the office, though, I think this is the class I am meant to attend...?"
The teacher in question took the letter from his hand without a word, looked it over, waved her hand and then said, "Yes, go ahead, sit wherever you like. The rest of them had summer assignments, you'll just have to sit tight until we're done going over them and then fight with everyone else to get textbooks, same as it always goes."
Over at the back left cluster of desks, the three of them had certainly noticed their new friend Greg, but quickly directed their attention back to their notebooks. Nick was doodling in his, Cat was doing all the work with annotations in Morgan's so she could understand it later, and Morgan was writing down Neruda quotes in Cat's. It was one way to pass the time, at least.
And Greg, for his part, hesitated for a moment, because there were only three desks left open. One was at the very front of the room, within touching distance of the teacher's desk; the other two were at the back, near Morgan and Cat and Nick. One of those was next to Nick, and one of them was between Morgan and the gangly blond, who (along with half the class) was staring at him.
"That would involve sitting down now," the teacher pointed out, making half the class (if not quite the same half) laugh and Greg flush slightly, shoving past to sit between the two girls. It wasn't actually his first choice, but rather his second; his idea, settled on just slightly too late, had been to sit next to Nick and play it cool. Still, sitting between two girls, one of them Morgan, was infinitely preferable to sitting up front. There, he'd be too likely to be called on – and while he might have been okay at math, that was in French, for one thing, and not liked, for another. Getting called on was not high on his list of interests.
Tripping on the gangly girl's bag and falling into his seat, however, apparently was.
"You shouldn't leave your things where people can trip over them," Morgan informed the gangly girl with a very bright sort of smile, voice only slightly mocking. The girl shot her an even dirtier look than before, and then they stopped talking over Greg as the gangly one went back to her notebook and Morgan gave Greg a quick smile before returning to writing in Cat's.
Probably, Greg realized within a handful of minutes, it would have been a very good idea to bring a notebook of some sort along with him the first day of classes. Sure, every story he'd heard about American schools included a line somewhere about how the first day of classes never actually had class, unlike the schools he was used to, but apparently the people passing along those stories weren't familiar with Mamaroneck, New York.
Digging through his pockets revealed a broken stub of a pencil, a few centimetres long at most, barely enough to hold onto. Still, he could have at least tried to take notes, if he'd had anything to –
"Here," the gangly girl whispered, shooting him an expression that was possibly meant to be an apologetic smile, sliding over a few sheets of notebook paper. He blinked at her for a few seconds, surprised, before quickly taking them and straightening them out on his desk.
"Merci," he whispered back, and started scribbling across the pages, writing notes to himself and attempting to keep up with the class.
The class' actual class portion lasted another few minutes before the teacher announced that books were in the back and they'd go in alphabetical order by surname to select copies – backward.
"Spit," muttered Morgan. "I'm last."
"Language, Miss Brandt!" Cat whispered harshly.
"What? It isn't like I said damn in school or something."
"Morgan!"
She rolled her eyes at Cat and spun around in her seat to face Greg, eying him curiously. There was definitely something not quite normal about this boy – unless it was that it was more normal than most everyone else was. Something familiar, and she couldn't put her finger on it.
"– merde," Greg muttered, as the tip of his pencil broke, right on cue. He let it drop to the middle of the pile of paper with a sigh and a face, before glancing back up as he sensed Morgan looking at him.
By the time the teacher got to S, he realized that they were staring at each other, more or less, and had been for an unspecified but far-too-long period of time.
The realization hit Morgan at approximately the same time, and she smiled a little before turning to glance two seats down and then turning around to face him again.
"I hate Nick," she said blandly, despite the brightness of her eyes.
"I heard that!" Nick called.
"I know that! But I do! You and your stupid W!"
"It... could be worse, non?" Greg offered, giving her a weak smile. "His name, it could start with Zed."
"With what?" the girl asked, turning around in her seat and leaning over to be entirely too close. She did, at least, get him to turn away from Morgan with her question, so he supposed that some small part of him was probably vaguely grateful.
"A zed?" He shrugged. "How else am I to say it?"
"Like 'zee,'" Cat supplied helpfully, and then added, more toward the girl, "Hey, isn't your name Richards? Why don't you stop bothering him and go get your book?"
"Ma sauveur," Greg announced under his breath, once the girl had given Cat a very dirty look – one that put her earlier dirty look at Morgan to shame, although Greg of course didn't know about that one – and gotten up from her desk and gone to do just that. Greg threw Cat a far more grateful look, mock-swooning and blowing her a kiss.
Cat grinned, fluttering her eyelashes and twirling her hair around her finger until Nick kicked her in the ankle and the dirty look got passed about the room from her to him.
"Go get your book," Nick prompted her a minute later, and Miss Moore, satisfied in knowing that M at least came after J and B if not after W, did just that.
"We need to go get you an actual writing implement," Morgan told Greg matter-of-factly. "That's a piece of kindling."
"Non," he said ruefully, shaking his head a little, "I do not think it is even that. Perhaps it will do for lighting candles, but it is not even a very good match."
A couple of moments passed in relative silence, Cat's return to her seat and Morgan's cursing her for having a halfway-decent book the only things filling the pause (except, of course, for the fact that most of the rest of the class was talking) before Morgan turned around to talk to Greg again.
"You should go get yours," she pointed out. "And then it's only like three more people until me."
"You seem terribly eager," he pointed out in return, giving her a sideways sort of grin before sliding out of his desk and limping to the back of the room to get his book, returning eventually in bemusement. He managed not to trip on his way back, at least, which was something of an accomplishment really considering the way he was staring at his book. "There is a problem with my book," he informed Morgan, Cat and Nick. "I think it is older than I am."
"It's still better than Morgan's will be," Nick confided. "There are usually about four new ones a year, and thirty people on average in a class – it probably is older than you are, they don't update math very often, do they?"
"Math seems to remain sort of stagnant and unchanging over the years," Morgan agreed, and Cat laughed. "It could use an upgrade," she continued, which made Cat laugh more.
"Huh," Greg said, poking at his book thoughtfully, and then flinching back in surprise when the spine's cover fell off.
"Mark that one's condition as 'bad,'" Cat advised sagely, trying very hard not to laugh (and mostly failing).
(Of course, neither Nick nor Morgan were making any attempt to hide their laughter, which they would both argue was more at the book's expense than Greg's.)
"Does everyone have their books, then?" the teacher asked, and Morgan groaned, then stood.
"I don't."
"You – oh, yes, the third Brandt I'm going to be teaching this course to! You look just like Chelsea," she said, and Morgan looked (and felt) like she wanted to groan again, but didn't. "Go ahead and get yours – everyone else can leave."
"Spit," Morgan muttered under her breath for the second time in a half hour, and nearly got trampled by departing students as she went for the book closet. Cat and Nick stayed exactly where they were; so did the irritable Richards girl, for the time being.
"I wonder what happens if I turn in a book that's new," Greg mused to himself, but seeing as how he said it in French, it mostly went unremarked-upon. He glanced up, as the traffic mostly passed. "Morgan? Are you dead now?"
"No," grumbled Morgan's voice from mostly inside the book closet, "but I can't find one that's actually got a cover and I think I give up. There aren't any books hiding inside the wall. I'm stuck with this one."
"It isn't like you're going to use it anyway," Cat pointed out conspiratorially as she slipped her arm in Morgan's again. "Now, where are you going again, darling?"
"Chemistry. Where I'll get a book first because it's Bentley teaching and he's going to let me go first because he's got a B name too. You two are off to French, and – how about you, Greg?"
Six eyes focused expectantly on him, the irritating other girl forgotten.
"I think," he began, and dug around in his pocket, around his pack of cigarettes, for the piece of paper from the guidance office, even though he already knew what it said – at least what it said so far as his next class, at any rate. "I think I am in chemistry as well – Professor Bentley, oui, I did not know that was the same class you are in." Technically a lie, but then again, she didn't know that he'd asked in the guidance office to see if he could have the three of them in as many classes as possible, seeing as how they were the only people he knew.
"Dr. Bentley," Morgan corrected, smile widening, "and fantastic, good, I don't have to walk alone. Much as I love you, Cat, you're going upstairs and we've got to cut across outside, so I'm going to abandon you first."
"Fine," said Cat in a mock-teasing sort of way, sticking her tongue out at Morgan and attaching herself to Nick.
Morgan, therefore, let go of Cat's arm and shifted her bag, then offered her arm to Greg. "It's faster to go around back and then we can be early and play with the burners before class begins, if you want. Or steal you a pencil from the office ladies."
"Which office ladies are these?" he asked, linking his arm through hers and fighting down the urge to flush again. He gave her a grin instead, stuffing the paper back into his pocket and leaving his hand there as well as they sauntered out of the room. "I think that having a pencil would perhaps be wiser than playing with fire, non? The fire will be there later."
"The receptionists in front of Administration, we usually just call them the office ladies. I've gotten pretty good at just nabbing things off of their desks before they even notice – don't listen to Cat when she calls me a common thief, though, I'm not, I swear I'm not! Just a thief of serious necessity, and you really need a pencil."
Greg laughed. "I think perhaps this time I will let it slide, oui," he teased. "Perhaps next time you are stealing things, if they are not for me, I will have to pout at you."
"I'll make sure to steal things for you constantly, then," Morgan agreed with a grin, practically tugging him down the hallway back toward the administration offices and weaving in and out of other groups of people who were gossiping about various things. Halfway down the hall, though, Morgan's shoulder was grabbed by a hand sticking out from a locker.
Morgan didn't jump, just let go of Greg and spun enough to face the offender, and then a person stepped out of the locker. The person was a shorter, older-looking version of Morgan with that same distinct spark, and she said, "Good, I've found you at last, I want my dollar – hey, who are you?" The last directed at Greg.
He blinked at her. "Grégoire Jourdain – Greg, I think I am supposed to be called, and you I think are Morgan's... sister? Niece?"
Both girls laughed, and exchanged (matching) amused glances.
"Introduce me, you oaf," the shorter one said, and Morgan shook her head a little.
"Greg, this is Chelsea Brandt, my sister. Older sister, she's eighteen, just unfortunately cursed with being tiny."
"Pleasure," said Chelsea, offering a hand. "Exchange from France?"
"Ouais," he began, taking it and pressing a kiss to the back of her knuckles, "how did you – ah, wait, non," he added with a grimace. "I forget. Technically from Scotland."
"And so, again," Morgan teased, "you lose, Chels."
Chelsea looked utterly offended by the concept of his not actually being from the country she'd selected, and scoffed. "Oh. Well, in that case I have no interest in ever speaking to you again! You are no longer interesting. Oh, and Morgan Lenore, I would like my dollar now so I can go actually do something interesting."
Sighing, Morgan started rifling through her bag for change.
"For what it is worth," Greg said, wilting a little at the scoff, "I am from France? My parents, they moved to Edinburgh at the end of spring term, and I do not like it there. And so I am here, instead."
"Here? Instead of – oh, I don't know, anywhere else? Why would you do a silly thing like that?" Chelsea was, again, amazed – though quite a bit happier as Morgan handed her four quarters and shot her a half-smile. "There is utterly nothing interesting in Mamaroneck. At all. Really, nothing. Bad choice. Well – I'm interesting, as I'm sure my little sister will agree, but I don't think I'm quite enough."
"You're quite enough for lots of things," Morgan muttered.
"Ahh, mais non!" Greg protested, well-versed enough in this to have a ready response. "Do you not know? Legends of your beauty and intelligence, they have reached far and wide. I heard of you in Paris, and when I found myself in Edinburgh, even there they knew of you, and agreed that it must be that I come here to see you, so that in June when I am forced to return, away from your presence, I can tell those who were not lucky enough to come here that you are truly as radiant as the stories say."
"Well, good!" Chelsea beamed at him. "I think I like you. I approve; you can be friends with Morgan. Now run along, children, you'll be late for class and I've got a phone call to make. Rather long distance. Au revoir, c'était ravissant!"
And she was gone, lost in the whirlwind of people.
"My sister's a little bit –" Morgan strove for a word to describe her. "Intense. Sometimes. Sorry."
"Ouais?" He quirked an eyebrow at her, head tilted to the side. "I think I did not notice. Perhaps it is that I have had many friends similar, I do not know."
"I feel like I'm always obliged to apologize for her noisiness and she has a tendency to apologize for my quiet, too, so I've gotten it out of the way at least, and she's going to be in so much trouble calling Montréal from a pay phone – anyway," Morgan broke off her tirade. "Sorry for me this time. She liked you, though. So you don't need to worry about seniors bothering you. You're protected. Chelsea is the queen of her class."
"I suppose that at least is a good thing," he said warily. "Why is she calling Montréal?"
"Her boyfriend lives there. That's where she picked up the French, too, so if she sounds funny to you it's because she's speaking Canadian."
"Ahh, ouais, this is as I have guessed," he agreed cheerfully. "But – I was warned, I think, that it is necessary that we hurry between classes? There is not much time, oui? And we need to find me un crayon – a pencil, I mean."
"Well, it's early," Morgan explained with a wave of the hand, "and on the first day school is more like socializing than like school, but – yeah, we're almost there, come on."
She ducked swiftly through a door that was marked 'COPY ROOM,' across from the main administration office. Unsurprisingly, inside were a couple of mimeographs, some filing cabinets and a large table. On the table was an unopened box of No. 2 pencils. Morgan's eyes managed a physical feat and lit up more.
"Score, I thought that might've worked," she said, picking up the entire box and holding it out to Greg. "Now you've got fifty."
"How much trouble will I be in if we are discovered taking these?" he asked warily, taking the box and peeling back one side.
"Oh, none at all. Nobody will even notice, they never do."
"But what if they do?" he persisted, shoving the box of pencils into his pocket anyway.
"I have no idea, seeing as how they never have. Don't make a big deal about it and don't look guilty and no one will suspect a thing – after all, they're only pencils." She opened the door again, shooting him a smile. "After you."
"There is a problem with that suggestion," he pointed out solemnly, joining her in the doorway and offering her his arm again. "I do not know where we are going."
"Down the hall and up the stairs." Morgan gracefully took both his arm and the lead. "And then we're going to try to sit in the middle of the room so Bentley notices I've got you already. How are you at lab stuff, by the way?"
"I am not sure how I will be," he confessed. "I have only had one science lab before, biology, and I did not have trouble in it, but that was in French."
"Well, you'll be all right. I'm good at it because of Mom," she told him as they turned around a corner into a long hallway filled with lockers and staircases, one of the walls covered in mirrors where it wasn't with lockers. "We're going to the third one on the left – it says 'SCIENCE' painted up there, see? – and they try so hard to make this hall look more spacious by adding mirrors, I don't think it really works."
Without Cat there to fill up the silences, Morgan became a lot more of a rambler, and it was how she had been for so long she didn't even stop to think about what Greg must think of it. She was just glad he wasn't too quiet.
"Non, I do not think so either," he agreed, tightening his grip on her arm and pulling her closer just in time to keep her from a collision with a boy on the large side who was, apparently, of the opinion that it was necessary for him to reach the opposite side of campus within the minute. "I think it looks more as though we are in a circus. He helps."
"At least we aren't late yet – it gets harder to get places as the year goes on and they haven't even opened up some sections yet. The district is on the slow side when it comes to those things. We should probably hurry a little now, though," Morgan said, and turned into the large stairwell where there were a bunch of people on the right going up and a bunch of people on the left going down. "Do you drive? Because these hallways tend to follow traffic laws. Coincidentally, I don't think anyone does it on purpose."
"Non, we usually took the Métro," he said absently, busy looking around. "My parents said something about learning to drive in Edinburgh, but the laws are all different there."
"Don't they drive on a different side of the road, there? – I'll teach you to drive, though, if you want. I'm getting my license soon," she added as they fought through the crowds to make it up the stairs.
"They do, oui, and all the cars are flipped around, so the driver is on the right." He made a face. "It is very confusing. I think I would like to learn, though, it may be useful, perhaps. Either way I think I will be very confused if I try to drive in Scotland, but it may be easier if I know how to drive at all, to switch and mirror things and learn new signs, instead of learning everything."
"Then you'd get confused if you tried to drive in America, if you like it here enough to ever want to come back." The fight against the crowd continued as Morgan turned left, having to get across a bunch of people coming in the other direction. "It'll also make it easier to navigate the school – we really need traffic lights, this place is so crowded. Stupid war."
"I wonder how much it would cost, really, to install lights to keep people moving," Greg said thoughtfully, keeping close to her as they (finally) made it to the chemistry classroom's door. "Then, as well, there would probably be arguments that 'of course I would have been on time, Madame, but the light would not let me cross the hallway!' and students would say that more time between classes would be necessary."
"More than the district has, I bet, and yeah – they do that enough already, considering the fact that it's true, it can take forever to get around this place."
Morgan had barely gotten a chance to step in the door when she got stopped by a tall, lanky man with shaggy black hair in a labcoat who was, more likely than not, Dr. Bentley. He grinned.
"Glad to have you in my class again, Miss Brandt."
"Which Miss Brandt am I?" she challenged, grinning as she walked toward a seat in the middle.
"Jane. No, Chelsea. No – you're the other one!" Bentley was clearly teasing, and he and Morgan exchanged another laugh. "You're very definitively Miss Morgan, the only one who didn't need extra help in the seventh grade. Pleasure to have you again. And if you think I'm going to let you pick your lab partner –"
"Can't I keep him?" Morgan held tighter to Greg's arm. "He's so cute and I found him all alone on the hill this morning. I'll even clean up after him. I promise."
"Oh, sit down," Bentley waved a hand at her.
Greg fought to keep down his blush, laughing a little – at her words, at himself, he wasn't sure. He took a seat next to her, squirming just a little as he pulled one of the pencils from the box in his pocket. "– These have no points," he whispered to her. "Where am I to sharpen them?"
Silently, she pulled a small sharpener from her bag and put it on top of his side of the lab table, listening and watching as people filed in, and then –
"Hey, you stole my seat!" A boy who looked more like a man than a boy, really, for he was easily six feet tall was standing and looming over Greg. "You can't sit next to her. I need her."
Morgan didn't say anything, opening her planner and writing something in the margins and starting to hum, indicating just how much she was ignoring what was going on next to her at that moment.
"Merci, Morgan," Greg began, before being so interrupted. He raised his eyebrows, looking back and forth between Morgan and the stranger, who seemed familiar in the same way as Morgan and Chelsea both had, even though he still wasn't quite sure what that was. "Pardon, monsieur," he continued, after a moment, when the oversized boy was almost the only one still standing in the room, "mais non, je ne le pense pas."
"¿Qué dice él?" the boy asked, directed more at Morgan, who looked up for the first time to mutter back, "No sé. ¡Vaya se sientan en otra parte!"
"Fine!" the boy half-snapped, and sat in the seat behind her, instead. There was a pause, as Morgan considered him, and then went back to considering Greg, instead.
"What did you say?" she whispered.
"I thanked you, at first," he whispered back, somewhat bewildered and reminded once again that most of the people in the school wouldn't actually speak his main language. "And I apologized to him, and told him I did not think so, but what did you say? Both of you."
"He asked me what you said," Morgan started, and got cut off as the tall boy leaned right over her chair, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as he finished for her.
"I asked her what you said, and she said she didn't know and to go sit somewhere else. So I did. I'm Adam."
"Enchante, I think," Greg said, sketching a salute at him. "Are you the same age, or is one of you better at chemistry than the other?" He had the idea, somewhere in the middle of the way Morgan wasn't shoving Adam away but wasn't acting interested either, that perhaps they were siblings.
"I'm half of the twins, but she's not," Adam said with a grin, suitably impressed. "I am better at chemistry than my entire family including my twin brother, who isn't Morgan, clearly enough."
"You're not better! You're as good. Which is why you're in my class, which you didn't tell me, you idiot," Morgan countered. "And if you see Adam here in the hallway later and try to say hello, Greg, watch out, you might be wrong. But Andrew will happily answer to Adam and pretend to know you because he's just as much of a moron."
"Or perhaps I could ignore them both and see if one of them tries to say hello to me," Greg suggested. "Although now I have said this, so I suppose neither of you will say anything – him because he does not know me, and you to be contrary, non?"
"Exactly." Adam grinned.
"Would everyone please do your collective best to be quiet now, please?" Dr. Bentley raised his voice above the din of students. "We have syllabi to discuss and books to pass out before you can all get out of here, so if you'd pass these papers back –" He handed green sheets to the people in the front of the room, and the syllabi gradually made their ways back.
"Are the books always so bad, or was that only for math class?" Greg whispered to Morgan, leaning over close to be inaudible to Adam more than anyone else, once the syllabi had been passed past them.
"The science books are new every year or so," Morgan confided. "They actually update them. So it's about even whether you get one that's brand new or a little bit rusty – as opposed to falling apart. And they're getting passed out, none of this letters business, so mine might actually not be completely awful."
"I thought that you wished it to be letters, though, so that you would be one of the first in line?" He glanced at the front of the class, where the teacher was watching the syllabi finish their rounds, and then behind him, to see Adam not looking as though he could hear them. "Although I think your brother, he would still get one first."
"Probably. But I don't care that much so long as I'm not last."
Bentley started talking about the syllabus, then, and for the most part the class seemed to pay attention, though Morgan was doodling musical notes in the margins of hers.
Hopefully she would be willing to explain a few of the more confusing parts to him. Greg did at least try to pay attention, scribbling himself more notes in his own margins in French, but at least four times he ended up completely lost, not knowing the words the teacher was using. He made a face as he snapped the point off his pencil again in his frustration, picking up Morgan's sharpener again and fiddling with it while he waited for the teacher's words to make sense to him again.
The droning about the syllabus went on for another twenty minutes, and the best part of it was really that it wasn't droning per se – Bentley used his hands, and an interesting inflection, when he presented what he had to say. He wasn't a flat lecturer, even if some of what he said made no sense to at least half of the class, not just Greg.
Neither of the Brandts had any particular comprehension problems, and by the time Bentley got around to passing back book cards and passing out books (after explaining how to fill out the book cards, which was rather self-explanatory really) they had swapped papers and were doodling on each other's, instead.
Greg thought about leaning over to Morgan and whispering that he felt left out, that she wasn't doodling on his syllabus instead, but –
But the problem was that he had known her for a few hours only, and her remarks to the chemistry professor before the class started notwithstanding, he was not at all sure how serious she was. And he didn't know if he wanted her to be particularly serious, or if t was a terrible idea to seek a romance instead of friends – and while it would be easy enough to lean over and be teasing and say that he was left out because she wasn't drawing on his syllabus as someone who was just a friend, the problem there was that, just at the moment, he very much wanted to be more than simply friends with one Morgan Brandt, who was very good at chemistry and very poor at math, who spoke Spanish and not French, and was perhaps the most beautiful person he had ever met.
Morgan hadn't a clue about any of it.
For that matter, Morgan wasn't even really thinking about it – she did, of course, think he was a sweet kid, and Cat had decided they should adopt him, and so, as a group as well as as individuals named Cat, Morgan and Nick, they would, as long as he let them keep trying to take care of him. She wasn't thinking anything past that, and maybe if she'd thought about including him more she'd have doodled on his syllabus, too.
By the time that occurred to her, though, she'd come up with a better idea, and when they were both given (mostly new) books, she opened the inside of Greg's, not hers, to write 'the oldest of the five French students' on the 'property of' line.
"There," she said. "Now you'll be easy to find. No silly 'name' business. If there are any other French students who aren't freshmen, though, you're screwed, sorry."
"How is it you are certain there are five?" he asked her, tilting his head a little to the left as he studied his new 'name'.
"I remember them from last year, when they were always trying to feel like Big Strong 8th Graders and mock my little sister's poor French."
"I decked them," Adam chimed back in. "Every single one except for the last one, because she was a girl, and Andrew cut her braids off instead. We both got detention for a month, but they left Jane alone."
"That is not very kind of you," Greg pointed out thoughtfully. "On the other hand, I think it is not very kind of them, either, so I think I will not be angry with you. And if she is still studying French, I would be willing to speak with her – Jane, you say? – so that she can insult them properly."
The two of them laughed, and Morgan gave him the most beautiful of the beautiful smiles she'd already given him.
"That would be lovely. She'd enjoy that so much, even if she's an 8th grader now – they're in high school, so if she sees them again and they bother her again –"
"– which would be dumb," Adam interrupted.
"Which would be dumb, yes, but I bet that'd help. Jane does still take French, she loves it, and wants to be as good as Chelsea, who keeps reminding her that what she speaks is actually Québecois and their grammatical structures are somewhat different."
"Does Jane prefer true French, then?" Greg asked, casually nationalistic and not even noticing it. "C'est bon. I will teach her many things, and they will be afraid of her."
"Jane has dreams of singing in Paris. She's a singer, that's what she does, soloist in the school choir and everything, and she got to go to Paris for her thirteenth birthday and now she's even worse about it," said Morgan.
"She's a terror about everything, though, she's the baby. Gets everything she wants and isn't afraid of pointing that out to us," Adam chimed in. "What time is it, Morgan, when's the bell going to finally go?"
The bell went.
Adam grinned.
"Do you still want the time?" Morgan asked.
"No. I want lunch."
"It is time for lunch already?" Greg asked, surprised. "But there have only been two classes."
"Do you have a free first?" Adam gave him a jealous sort of look. "Because I know Morgan and I have had three classes already, and yeah there's no gyms the first week of school."
"I – un moment," Greg said, and scrounged around in his pockets to find his schedule (and not the pencils, and not the cigarettes). He spread it out on the table in front of him, attempting once again to make sense of it. "There are too many days here – what is today?"
"Five A," Morgan, Adam and about three random students who were exiting the room said, all at once.
"Oh, thanks for that!" some other person who had been just as confused said. "I hate the way they sometimes don't announce it."
"The first day's always a five A, you idiot," another voice chimed in.
"You're not the only one who's lost," Morgan reassured him. "People always get lost after vacations, even though the first day is supposed to be a given."
"I am still confused as to why it is there must be so many different schedules," Greg confessed. "Surely nine is a bit extravagant, even if two of them are the same? And why is it that those two are the same, when all the others must be different?"
"They didn't exactly consult the student body when they made the schedule, so we don't actually know – I'm not going to eat with you, Morgan, I hope you don't mind, but I have to eat supper with you every day and everything," Adam said, giving Morgan's braid a playful tug before running off into the crowd.
"I don't want to have lunch with you either!" Morgan yelled at his retreating form, then lowered her voice as she turned to look back at Greg and shrugged a little. "Actually, that was a lie. I'd rather be able to watch him, but he'd never agree to it."
"I cannot help but think the teachers, they would not like it either," Greg replied, and shrugged back at her before folding up his syllabus and shoving it into one of his pockets, then offered her his arm. "May I ask, is there some reason you would wish to watch him eat?"
"They forget, too. Everybody forgets." Morgan threaded her arm in Greg's, and then said, "It's not that, it's – he's new. He and Andrew are freshmen and they're very tall but they take that as a reason to think they can defend themselves against anything, and some kids are mean. And most of his friends aren't in our gym section, so he's going to be mostly by himself until it's actual lunch and someone might pick on him. But never mind. You're going to come out with us for lunch, right? Or do you have other plans?"
"I do not have any plans, non," he said. "And I am new, as well, so perhaps you can at least protect me, ouais?" He grinned at her, patting her hand. "I think perhaps now I understand why my – I am not sure the word to use, host-father, I think? Why he gave me money this morning. I had thought there was a cafeteria here."
"There is, but you have to pay for the food there too! Nothing is free. Diner food is only a few cents more expensive and a thousand times better."
"Ahhh, d'accord, that makes more sense I think," he said, giving the table one last check to make sure neither of them had forgotten anything before they headed out of the room. "I am not familiar with the word 'diner', though, I think? Not pronounced like that. Le dîner, that I know, that is a meal at night, and my host-family has it very early, I think, but 'diner'?"
"Oh," Morgan smiled again, pushing an errant bang out of her eyes. "It's a kind of restaurant. You'll see."
And no matter how he tried to persuade her to explain, she refused, as they made their way slowly out of the building, through the crush of bodies of those not so lucky as to have gym scheduled in their fourth period.
(Nick just didn't care either way.)
So the three of them were early, and the teacher had yet to notice them, and they planned on keeping it that way. The quieter one was, the less one was expected to actually pay attention. As the rest of the class filed into the first floor classroom, the three of them were sitting, heads close, all trying to hide the fact they were playing cards and planned to continue to do so until the bell rang. A gangly girl none of them knew nearly tripped on Morgan's bag, and at a chiding from Cat, she looked up, shoving her cards into her desk.
"Sorry," she said with a nervous laugh, pulling the bag out of the way. The girl gave her a nasty look and walked swiftly to her seat.
"What crawled up her ass and died?" Cat whispered, and Morgan giggled, then clamped her hand over her mouth before the teacher noticed.
Unfortunately, that question went unanswered, and it would be quite some time before it was raised again. Instead, the teacher called class to order, and collected their homework, and was distracted by one of the students near the front asking a question about problem eight, which ate up several minutes.
And then, as the teacher was finally finishing her explanation, there was a knock at the door, and a moment later a blond head intruded, followed soon after by an attached body.
"Hello," Grégoire Jourdain said, with a sweet, hopeful, and false smile for the teacher, "I am sorry, I think I am late? I have a letter for you from the office, though, I think this is the class I am meant to attend...?"
The teacher in question took the letter from his hand without a word, looked it over, waved her hand and then said, "Yes, go ahead, sit wherever you like. The rest of them had summer assignments, you'll just have to sit tight until we're done going over them and then fight with everyone else to get textbooks, same as it always goes."
Over at the back left cluster of desks, the three of them had certainly noticed their new friend Greg, but quickly directed their attention back to their notebooks. Nick was doodling in his, Cat was doing all the work with annotations in Morgan's so she could understand it later, and Morgan was writing down Neruda quotes in Cat's. It was one way to pass the time, at least.
And Greg, for his part, hesitated for a moment, because there were only three desks left open. One was at the very front of the room, within touching distance of the teacher's desk; the other two were at the back, near Morgan and Cat and Nick. One of those was next to Nick, and one of them was between Morgan and the gangly blond, who (along with half the class) was staring at him.
"That would involve sitting down now," the teacher pointed out, making half the class (if not quite the same half) laugh and Greg flush slightly, shoving past to sit between the two girls. It wasn't actually his first choice, but rather his second; his idea, settled on just slightly too late, had been to sit next to Nick and play it cool. Still, sitting between two girls, one of them Morgan, was infinitely preferable to sitting up front. There, he'd be too likely to be called on – and while he might have been okay at math, that was in French, for one thing, and not liked, for another. Getting called on was not high on his list of interests.
Tripping on the gangly girl's bag and falling into his seat, however, apparently was.
"You shouldn't leave your things where people can trip over them," Morgan informed the gangly girl with a very bright sort of smile, voice only slightly mocking. The girl shot her an even dirtier look than before, and then they stopped talking over Greg as the gangly one went back to her notebook and Morgan gave Greg a quick smile before returning to writing in Cat's.
Probably, Greg realized within a handful of minutes, it would have been a very good idea to bring a notebook of some sort along with him the first day of classes. Sure, every story he'd heard about American schools included a line somewhere about how the first day of classes never actually had class, unlike the schools he was used to, but apparently the people passing along those stories weren't familiar with Mamaroneck, New York.
Digging through his pockets revealed a broken stub of a pencil, a few centimetres long at most, barely enough to hold onto. Still, he could have at least tried to take notes, if he'd had anything to –
"Here," the gangly girl whispered, shooting him an expression that was possibly meant to be an apologetic smile, sliding over a few sheets of notebook paper. He blinked at her for a few seconds, surprised, before quickly taking them and straightening them out on his desk.
"Merci," he whispered back, and started scribbling across the pages, writing notes to himself and attempting to keep up with the class.
The class' actual class portion lasted another few minutes before the teacher announced that books were in the back and they'd go in alphabetical order by surname to select copies – backward.
"Spit," muttered Morgan. "I'm last."
"Language, Miss Brandt!" Cat whispered harshly.
"What? It isn't like I said damn in school or something."
"Morgan!"
She rolled her eyes at Cat and spun around in her seat to face Greg, eying him curiously. There was definitely something not quite normal about this boy – unless it was that it was more normal than most everyone else was. Something familiar, and she couldn't put her finger on it.
"– merde," Greg muttered, as the tip of his pencil broke, right on cue. He let it drop to the middle of the pile of paper with a sigh and a face, before glancing back up as he sensed Morgan looking at him.
By the time the teacher got to S, he realized that they were staring at each other, more or less, and had been for an unspecified but far-too-long period of time.
The realization hit Morgan at approximately the same time, and she smiled a little before turning to glance two seats down and then turning around to face him again.
"I hate Nick," she said blandly, despite the brightness of her eyes.
"I heard that!" Nick called.
"I know that! But I do! You and your stupid W!"
"It... could be worse, non?" Greg offered, giving her a weak smile. "His name, it could start with Zed."
"With what?" the girl asked, turning around in her seat and leaning over to be entirely too close. She did, at least, get him to turn away from Morgan with her question, so he supposed that some small part of him was probably vaguely grateful.
"A zed?" He shrugged. "How else am I to say it?"
"Like 'zee,'" Cat supplied helpfully, and then added, more toward the girl, "Hey, isn't your name Richards? Why don't you stop bothering him and go get your book?"
"Ma sauveur," Greg announced under his breath, once the girl had given Cat a very dirty look – one that put her earlier dirty look at Morgan to shame, although Greg of course didn't know about that one – and gotten up from her desk and gone to do just that. Greg threw Cat a far more grateful look, mock-swooning and blowing her a kiss.
Cat grinned, fluttering her eyelashes and twirling her hair around her finger until Nick kicked her in the ankle and the dirty look got passed about the room from her to him.
"Go get your book," Nick prompted her a minute later, and Miss Moore, satisfied in knowing that M at least came after J and B if not after W, did just that.
"We need to go get you an actual writing implement," Morgan told Greg matter-of-factly. "That's a piece of kindling."
"Non," he said ruefully, shaking his head a little, "I do not think it is even that. Perhaps it will do for lighting candles, but it is not even a very good match."
A couple of moments passed in relative silence, Cat's return to her seat and Morgan's cursing her for having a halfway-decent book the only things filling the pause (except, of course, for the fact that most of the rest of the class was talking) before Morgan turned around to talk to Greg again.
"You should go get yours," she pointed out. "And then it's only like three more people until me."
"You seem terribly eager," he pointed out in return, giving her a sideways sort of grin before sliding out of his desk and limping to the back of the room to get his book, returning eventually in bemusement. He managed not to trip on his way back, at least, which was something of an accomplishment really considering the way he was staring at his book. "There is a problem with my book," he informed Morgan, Cat and Nick. "I think it is older than I am."
"It's still better than Morgan's will be," Nick confided. "There are usually about four new ones a year, and thirty people on average in a class – it probably is older than you are, they don't update math very often, do they?"
"Math seems to remain sort of stagnant and unchanging over the years," Morgan agreed, and Cat laughed. "It could use an upgrade," she continued, which made Cat laugh more.
"Huh," Greg said, poking at his book thoughtfully, and then flinching back in surprise when the spine's cover fell off.
"Mark that one's condition as 'bad,'" Cat advised sagely, trying very hard not to laugh (and mostly failing).
(Of course, neither Nick nor Morgan were making any attempt to hide their laughter, which they would both argue was more at the book's expense than Greg's.)
"Does everyone have their books, then?" the teacher asked, and Morgan groaned, then stood.
"I don't."
"You – oh, yes, the third Brandt I'm going to be teaching this course to! You look just like Chelsea," she said, and Morgan looked (and felt) like she wanted to groan again, but didn't. "Go ahead and get yours – everyone else can leave."
"Spit," Morgan muttered under her breath for the second time in a half hour, and nearly got trampled by departing students as she went for the book closet. Cat and Nick stayed exactly where they were; so did the irritable Richards girl, for the time being.
"I wonder what happens if I turn in a book that's new," Greg mused to himself, but seeing as how he said it in French, it mostly went unremarked-upon. He glanced up, as the traffic mostly passed. "Morgan? Are you dead now?"
"No," grumbled Morgan's voice from mostly inside the book closet, "but I can't find one that's actually got a cover and I think I give up. There aren't any books hiding inside the wall. I'm stuck with this one."
"It isn't like you're going to use it anyway," Cat pointed out conspiratorially as she slipped her arm in Morgan's again. "Now, where are you going again, darling?"
"Chemistry. Where I'll get a book first because it's Bentley teaching and he's going to let me go first because he's got a B name too. You two are off to French, and – how about you, Greg?"
Six eyes focused expectantly on him, the irritating other girl forgotten.
"I think," he began, and dug around in his pocket, around his pack of cigarettes, for the piece of paper from the guidance office, even though he already knew what it said – at least what it said so far as his next class, at any rate. "I think I am in chemistry as well – Professor Bentley, oui, I did not know that was the same class you are in." Technically a lie, but then again, she didn't know that he'd asked in the guidance office to see if he could have the three of them in as many classes as possible, seeing as how they were the only people he knew.
"Dr. Bentley," Morgan corrected, smile widening, "and fantastic, good, I don't have to walk alone. Much as I love you, Cat, you're going upstairs and we've got to cut across outside, so I'm going to abandon you first."
"Fine," said Cat in a mock-teasing sort of way, sticking her tongue out at Morgan and attaching herself to Nick.
Morgan, therefore, let go of Cat's arm and shifted her bag, then offered her arm to Greg. "It's faster to go around back and then we can be early and play with the burners before class begins, if you want. Or steal you a pencil from the office ladies."
"Which office ladies are these?" he asked, linking his arm through hers and fighting down the urge to flush again. He gave her a grin instead, stuffing the paper back into his pocket and leaving his hand there as well as they sauntered out of the room. "I think that having a pencil would perhaps be wiser than playing with fire, non? The fire will be there later."
"The receptionists in front of Administration, we usually just call them the office ladies. I've gotten pretty good at just nabbing things off of their desks before they even notice – don't listen to Cat when she calls me a common thief, though, I'm not, I swear I'm not! Just a thief of serious necessity, and you really need a pencil."
Greg laughed. "I think perhaps this time I will let it slide, oui," he teased. "Perhaps next time you are stealing things, if they are not for me, I will have to pout at you."
"I'll make sure to steal things for you constantly, then," Morgan agreed with a grin, practically tugging him down the hallway back toward the administration offices and weaving in and out of other groups of people who were gossiping about various things. Halfway down the hall, though, Morgan's shoulder was grabbed by a hand sticking out from a locker.
Morgan didn't jump, just let go of Greg and spun enough to face the offender, and then a person stepped out of the locker. The person was a shorter, older-looking version of Morgan with that same distinct spark, and she said, "Good, I've found you at last, I want my dollar – hey, who are you?" The last directed at Greg.
He blinked at her. "Grégoire Jourdain – Greg, I think I am supposed to be called, and you I think are Morgan's... sister? Niece?"
Both girls laughed, and exchanged (matching) amused glances.
"Introduce me, you oaf," the shorter one said, and Morgan shook her head a little.
"Greg, this is Chelsea Brandt, my sister. Older sister, she's eighteen, just unfortunately cursed with being tiny."
"Pleasure," said Chelsea, offering a hand. "Exchange from France?"
"Ouais," he began, taking it and pressing a kiss to the back of her knuckles, "how did you – ah, wait, non," he added with a grimace. "I forget. Technically from Scotland."
"And so, again," Morgan teased, "you lose, Chels."
Chelsea looked utterly offended by the concept of his not actually being from the country she'd selected, and scoffed. "Oh. Well, in that case I have no interest in ever speaking to you again! You are no longer interesting. Oh, and Morgan Lenore, I would like my dollar now so I can go actually do something interesting."
Sighing, Morgan started rifling through her bag for change.
"For what it is worth," Greg said, wilting a little at the scoff, "I am from France? My parents, they moved to Edinburgh at the end of spring term, and I do not like it there. And so I am here, instead."
"Here? Instead of – oh, I don't know, anywhere else? Why would you do a silly thing like that?" Chelsea was, again, amazed – though quite a bit happier as Morgan handed her four quarters and shot her a half-smile. "There is utterly nothing interesting in Mamaroneck. At all. Really, nothing. Bad choice. Well – I'm interesting, as I'm sure my little sister will agree, but I don't think I'm quite enough."
"You're quite enough for lots of things," Morgan muttered.
"Ahh, mais non!" Greg protested, well-versed enough in this to have a ready response. "Do you not know? Legends of your beauty and intelligence, they have reached far and wide. I heard of you in Paris, and when I found myself in Edinburgh, even there they knew of you, and agreed that it must be that I come here to see you, so that in June when I am forced to return, away from your presence, I can tell those who were not lucky enough to come here that you are truly as radiant as the stories say."
"Well, good!" Chelsea beamed at him. "I think I like you. I approve; you can be friends with Morgan. Now run along, children, you'll be late for class and I've got a phone call to make. Rather long distance. Au revoir, c'était ravissant!"
And she was gone, lost in the whirlwind of people.
"My sister's a little bit –" Morgan strove for a word to describe her. "Intense. Sometimes. Sorry."
"Ouais?" He quirked an eyebrow at her, head tilted to the side. "I think I did not notice. Perhaps it is that I have had many friends similar, I do not know."
"I feel like I'm always obliged to apologize for her noisiness and she has a tendency to apologize for my quiet, too, so I've gotten it out of the way at least, and she's going to be in so much trouble calling Montréal from a pay phone – anyway," Morgan broke off her tirade. "Sorry for me this time. She liked you, though. So you don't need to worry about seniors bothering you. You're protected. Chelsea is the queen of her class."
"I suppose that at least is a good thing," he said warily. "Why is she calling Montréal?"
"Her boyfriend lives there. That's where she picked up the French, too, so if she sounds funny to you it's because she's speaking Canadian."
"Ahh, ouais, this is as I have guessed," he agreed cheerfully. "But – I was warned, I think, that it is necessary that we hurry between classes? There is not much time, oui? And we need to find me un crayon – a pencil, I mean."
"Well, it's early," Morgan explained with a wave of the hand, "and on the first day school is more like socializing than like school, but – yeah, we're almost there, come on."
She ducked swiftly through a door that was marked 'COPY ROOM,' across from the main administration office. Unsurprisingly, inside were a couple of mimeographs, some filing cabinets and a large table. On the table was an unopened box of No. 2 pencils. Morgan's eyes managed a physical feat and lit up more.
"Score, I thought that might've worked," she said, picking up the entire box and holding it out to Greg. "Now you've got fifty."
"How much trouble will I be in if we are discovered taking these?" he asked warily, taking the box and peeling back one side.
"Oh, none at all. Nobody will even notice, they never do."
"But what if they do?" he persisted, shoving the box of pencils into his pocket anyway.
"I have no idea, seeing as how they never have. Don't make a big deal about it and don't look guilty and no one will suspect a thing – after all, they're only pencils." She opened the door again, shooting him a smile. "After you."
"There is a problem with that suggestion," he pointed out solemnly, joining her in the doorway and offering her his arm again. "I do not know where we are going."
"Down the hall and up the stairs." Morgan gracefully took both his arm and the lead. "And then we're going to try to sit in the middle of the room so Bentley notices I've got you already. How are you at lab stuff, by the way?"
"I am not sure how I will be," he confessed. "I have only had one science lab before, biology, and I did not have trouble in it, but that was in French."
"Well, you'll be all right. I'm good at it because of Mom," she told him as they turned around a corner into a long hallway filled with lockers and staircases, one of the walls covered in mirrors where it wasn't with lockers. "We're going to the third one on the left – it says 'SCIENCE' painted up there, see? – and they try so hard to make this hall look more spacious by adding mirrors, I don't think it really works."
Without Cat there to fill up the silences, Morgan became a lot more of a rambler, and it was how she had been for so long she didn't even stop to think about what Greg must think of it. She was just glad he wasn't too quiet.
"Non, I do not think so either," he agreed, tightening his grip on her arm and pulling her closer just in time to keep her from a collision with a boy on the large side who was, apparently, of the opinion that it was necessary for him to reach the opposite side of campus within the minute. "I think it looks more as though we are in a circus. He helps."
"At least we aren't late yet – it gets harder to get places as the year goes on and they haven't even opened up some sections yet. The district is on the slow side when it comes to those things. We should probably hurry a little now, though," Morgan said, and turned into the large stairwell where there were a bunch of people on the right going up and a bunch of people on the left going down. "Do you drive? Because these hallways tend to follow traffic laws. Coincidentally, I don't think anyone does it on purpose."
"Non, we usually took the Métro," he said absently, busy looking around. "My parents said something about learning to drive in Edinburgh, but the laws are all different there."
"Don't they drive on a different side of the road, there? – I'll teach you to drive, though, if you want. I'm getting my license soon," she added as they fought through the crowds to make it up the stairs.
"They do, oui, and all the cars are flipped around, so the driver is on the right." He made a face. "It is very confusing. I think I would like to learn, though, it may be useful, perhaps. Either way I think I will be very confused if I try to drive in Scotland, but it may be easier if I know how to drive at all, to switch and mirror things and learn new signs, instead of learning everything."
"Then you'd get confused if you tried to drive in America, if you like it here enough to ever want to come back." The fight against the crowd continued as Morgan turned left, having to get across a bunch of people coming in the other direction. "It'll also make it easier to navigate the school – we really need traffic lights, this place is so crowded. Stupid war."
"I wonder how much it would cost, really, to install lights to keep people moving," Greg said thoughtfully, keeping close to her as they (finally) made it to the chemistry classroom's door. "Then, as well, there would probably be arguments that 'of course I would have been on time, Madame, but the light would not let me cross the hallway!' and students would say that more time between classes would be necessary."
"More than the district has, I bet, and yeah – they do that enough already, considering the fact that it's true, it can take forever to get around this place."
Morgan had barely gotten a chance to step in the door when she got stopped by a tall, lanky man with shaggy black hair in a labcoat who was, more likely than not, Dr. Bentley. He grinned.
"Glad to have you in my class again, Miss Brandt."
"Which Miss Brandt am I?" she challenged, grinning as she walked toward a seat in the middle.
"Jane. No, Chelsea. No – you're the other one!" Bentley was clearly teasing, and he and Morgan exchanged another laugh. "You're very definitively Miss Morgan, the only one who didn't need extra help in the seventh grade. Pleasure to have you again. And if you think I'm going to let you pick your lab partner –"
"Can't I keep him?" Morgan held tighter to Greg's arm. "He's so cute and I found him all alone on the hill this morning. I'll even clean up after him. I promise."
"Oh, sit down," Bentley waved a hand at her.
Greg fought to keep down his blush, laughing a little – at her words, at himself, he wasn't sure. He took a seat next to her, squirming just a little as he pulled one of the pencils from the box in his pocket. "– These have no points," he whispered to her. "Where am I to sharpen them?"
Silently, she pulled a small sharpener from her bag and put it on top of his side of the lab table, listening and watching as people filed in, and then –
"Hey, you stole my seat!" A boy who looked more like a man than a boy, really, for he was easily six feet tall was standing and looming over Greg. "You can't sit next to her. I need her."
Morgan didn't say anything, opening her planner and writing something in the margins and starting to hum, indicating just how much she was ignoring what was going on next to her at that moment.
"Merci, Morgan," Greg began, before being so interrupted. He raised his eyebrows, looking back and forth between Morgan and the stranger, who seemed familiar in the same way as Morgan and Chelsea both had, even though he still wasn't quite sure what that was. "Pardon, monsieur," he continued, after a moment, when the oversized boy was almost the only one still standing in the room, "mais non, je ne le pense pas."
"¿Qué dice él?" the boy asked, directed more at Morgan, who looked up for the first time to mutter back, "No sé. ¡Vaya se sientan en otra parte!"
"Fine!" the boy half-snapped, and sat in the seat behind her, instead. There was a pause, as Morgan considered him, and then went back to considering Greg, instead.
"What did you say?" she whispered.
"I thanked you, at first," he whispered back, somewhat bewildered and reminded once again that most of the people in the school wouldn't actually speak his main language. "And I apologized to him, and told him I did not think so, but what did you say? Both of you."
"He asked me what you said," Morgan started, and got cut off as the tall boy leaned right over her chair, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as he finished for her.
"I asked her what you said, and she said she didn't know and to go sit somewhere else. So I did. I'm Adam."
"Enchante, I think," Greg said, sketching a salute at him. "Are you the same age, or is one of you better at chemistry than the other?" He had the idea, somewhere in the middle of the way Morgan wasn't shoving Adam away but wasn't acting interested either, that perhaps they were siblings.
"I'm half of the twins, but she's not," Adam said with a grin, suitably impressed. "I am better at chemistry than my entire family including my twin brother, who isn't Morgan, clearly enough."
"You're not better! You're as good. Which is why you're in my class, which you didn't tell me, you idiot," Morgan countered. "And if you see Adam here in the hallway later and try to say hello, Greg, watch out, you might be wrong. But Andrew will happily answer to Adam and pretend to know you because he's just as much of a moron."
"Or perhaps I could ignore them both and see if one of them tries to say hello to me," Greg suggested. "Although now I have said this, so I suppose neither of you will say anything – him because he does not know me, and you to be contrary, non?"
"Exactly." Adam grinned.
"Would everyone please do your collective best to be quiet now, please?" Dr. Bentley raised his voice above the din of students. "We have syllabi to discuss and books to pass out before you can all get out of here, so if you'd pass these papers back –" He handed green sheets to the people in the front of the room, and the syllabi gradually made their ways back.
"Are the books always so bad, or was that only for math class?" Greg whispered to Morgan, leaning over close to be inaudible to Adam more than anyone else, once the syllabi had been passed past them.
"The science books are new every year or so," Morgan confided. "They actually update them. So it's about even whether you get one that's brand new or a little bit rusty – as opposed to falling apart. And they're getting passed out, none of this letters business, so mine might actually not be completely awful."
"I thought that you wished it to be letters, though, so that you would be one of the first in line?" He glanced at the front of the class, where the teacher was watching the syllabi finish their rounds, and then behind him, to see Adam not looking as though he could hear them. "Although I think your brother, he would still get one first."
"Probably. But I don't care that much so long as I'm not last."
Bentley started talking about the syllabus, then, and for the most part the class seemed to pay attention, though Morgan was doodling musical notes in the margins of hers.
Hopefully she would be willing to explain a few of the more confusing parts to him. Greg did at least try to pay attention, scribbling himself more notes in his own margins in French, but at least four times he ended up completely lost, not knowing the words the teacher was using. He made a face as he snapped the point off his pencil again in his frustration, picking up Morgan's sharpener again and fiddling with it while he waited for the teacher's words to make sense to him again.
The droning about the syllabus went on for another twenty minutes, and the best part of it was really that it wasn't droning per se – Bentley used his hands, and an interesting inflection, when he presented what he had to say. He wasn't a flat lecturer, even if some of what he said made no sense to at least half of the class, not just Greg.
Neither of the Brandts had any particular comprehension problems, and by the time Bentley got around to passing back book cards and passing out books (after explaining how to fill out the book cards, which was rather self-explanatory really) they had swapped papers and were doodling on each other's, instead.
Greg thought about leaning over to Morgan and whispering that he felt left out, that she wasn't doodling on his syllabus instead, but –
But the problem was that he had known her for a few hours only, and her remarks to the chemistry professor before the class started notwithstanding, he was not at all sure how serious she was. And he didn't know if he wanted her to be particularly serious, or if t was a terrible idea to seek a romance instead of friends – and while it would be easy enough to lean over and be teasing and say that he was left out because she wasn't drawing on his syllabus as someone who was just a friend, the problem there was that, just at the moment, he very much wanted to be more than simply friends with one Morgan Brandt, who was very good at chemistry and very poor at math, who spoke Spanish and not French, and was perhaps the most beautiful person he had ever met.
Morgan hadn't a clue about any of it.
For that matter, Morgan wasn't even really thinking about it – she did, of course, think he was a sweet kid, and Cat had decided they should adopt him, and so, as a group as well as as individuals named Cat, Morgan and Nick, they would, as long as he let them keep trying to take care of him. She wasn't thinking anything past that, and maybe if she'd thought about including him more she'd have doodled on his syllabus, too.
By the time that occurred to her, though, she'd come up with a better idea, and when they were both given (mostly new) books, she opened the inside of Greg's, not hers, to write 'the oldest of the five French students' on the 'property of' line.
"There," she said. "Now you'll be easy to find. No silly 'name' business. If there are any other French students who aren't freshmen, though, you're screwed, sorry."
"How is it you are certain there are five?" he asked her, tilting his head a little to the left as he studied his new 'name'.
"I remember them from last year, when they were always trying to feel like Big Strong 8th Graders and mock my little sister's poor French."
"I decked them," Adam chimed back in. "Every single one except for the last one, because she was a girl, and Andrew cut her braids off instead. We both got detention for a month, but they left Jane alone."
"That is not very kind of you," Greg pointed out thoughtfully. "On the other hand, I think it is not very kind of them, either, so I think I will not be angry with you. And if she is still studying French, I would be willing to speak with her – Jane, you say? – so that she can insult them properly."
The two of them laughed, and Morgan gave him the most beautiful of the beautiful smiles she'd already given him.
"That would be lovely. She'd enjoy that so much, even if she's an 8th grader now – they're in high school, so if she sees them again and they bother her again –"
"– which would be dumb," Adam interrupted.
"Which would be dumb, yes, but I bet that'd help. Jane does still take French, she loves it, and wants to be as good as Chelsea, who keeps reminding her that what she speaks is actually Québecois and their grammatical structures are somewhat different."
"Does Jane prefer true French, then?" Greg asked, casually nationalistic and not even noticing it. "C'est bon. I will teach her many things, and they will be afraid of her."
"Jane has dreams of singing in Paris. She's a singer, that's what she does, soloist in the school choir and everything, and she got to go to Paris for her thirteenth birthday and now she's even worse about it," said Morgan.
"She's a terror about everything, though, she's the baby. Gets everything she wants and isn't afraid of pointing that out to us," Adam chimed in. "What time is it, Morgan, when's the bell going to finally go?"
The bell went.
Adam grinned.
"Do you still want the time?" Morgan asked.
"No. I want lunch."
"It is time for lunch already?" Greg asked, surprised. "But there have only been two classes."
"Do you have a free first?" Adam gave him a jealous sort of look. "Because I know Morgan and I have had three classes already, and yeah there's no gyms the first week of school."
"I – un moment," Greg said, and scrounged around in his pockets to find his schedule (and not the pencils, and not the cigarettes). He spread it out on the table in front of him, attempting once again to make sense of it. "There are too many days here – what is today?"
"Five A," Morgan, Adam and about three random students who were exiting the room said, all at once.
"Oh, thanks for that!" some other person who had been just as confused said. "I hate the way they sometimes don't announce it."
"The first day's always a five A, you idiot," another voice chimed in.
"You're not the only one who's lost," Morgan reassured him. "People always get lost after vacations, even though the first day is supposed to be a given."
"I am still confused as to why it is there must be so many different schedules," Greg confessed. "Surely nine is a bit extravagant, even if two of them are the same? And why is it that those two are the same, when all the others must be different?"
"They didn't exactly consult the student body when they made the schedule, so we don't actually know – I'm not going to eat with you, Morgan, I hope you don't mind, but I have to eat supper with you every day and everything," Adam said, giving Morgan's braid a playful tug before running off into the crowd.
"I don't want to have lunch with you either!" Morgan yelled at his retreating form, then lowered her voice as she turned to look back at Greg and shrugged a little. "Actually, that was a lie. I'd rather be able to watch him, but he'd never agree to it."
"I cannot help but think the teachers, they would not like it either," Greg replied, and shrugged back at her before folding up his syllabus and shoving it into one of his pockets, then offered her his arm. "May I ask, is there some reason you would wish to watch him eat?"
"They forget, too. Everybody forgets." Morgan threaded her arm in Greg's, and then said, "It's not that, it's – he's new. He and Andrew are freshmen and they're very tall but they take that as a reason to think they can defend themselves against anything, and some kids are mean. And most of his friends aren't in our gym section, so he's going to be mostly by himself until it's actual lunch and someone might pick on him. But never mind. You're going to come out with us for lunch, right? Or do you have other plans?"
"I do not have any plans, non," he said. "And I am new, as well, so perhaps you can at least protect me, ouais?" He grinned at her, patting her hand. "I think perhaps now I understand why my – I am not sure the word to use, host-father, I think? Why he gave me money this morning. I had thought there was a cafeteria here."
"There is, but you have to pay for the food there too! Nothing is free. Diner food is only a few cents more expensive and a thousand times better."
"Ahhh, d'accord, that makes more sense I think," he said, giving the table one last check to make sure neither of them had forgotten anything before they headed out of the room. "I am not familiar with the word 'diner', though, I think? Not pronounced like that. Le dîner, that I know, that is a meal at night, and my host-family has it very early, I think, but 'diner'?"
"Oh," Morgan smiled again, pushing an errant bang out of her eyes. "It's a kind of restaurant. You'll see."
And no matter how he tried to persuade her to explain, she refused, as they made their way slowly out of the building, through the crush of bodies of those not so lucky as to have gym scheduled in their fourth period.
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Date: 2007-11-02 11:14 pm (UTC)Also, let me make sure I have the siblings in order: Chelsea, Adam/Andrew, Morgan, Jane?
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Date: 2007-11-03 01:12 am (UTC)And it is, in fact, Chelsea, Morgan, Adam and Andrew, and then Jane. Chelsea is a senior, Morgan is a junior (as is Greg, along with Cat and Nick), Adam and Andrew are freshmen, and Jane is in eighth grade, and I was going to ask Rue about that and then remembered that it is mostly covered in the story, just in a vague sort of conversational way, and hence confusing.
(But thank you. ♥)
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Date: 2007-11-03 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-03 01:25 am (UTC)