Silver Letters:

To the School Board

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"There's nothing stopping me from goin' out with all your best friends

And if you come around, sayin' sorry to me

My daddy's gonna show you how sorry you'll be

'Cos I hate that stupid ol' pick-up truck you – "

Grumbling madly to myself, I reached over and slammed a hand on the radio, shutting the stupid thing up. Stupid Taylor Swift. Stupid used car. Stupid traffic that was making me late to my stupid school on the stupid first day. I didn't need this, not when I had planned to be at school early to get into the office to tell my guidance counselor that we didn't have to have our weekly meetings any more. But apparently the gods of whatever out there must hate me because my stupid alarm clock didn't go off when it was supposed to.

Then I discovered that my laundry hadn't finished and was forced to dig through my drawers until I finally discovered a clean tee and a denim skirt. So, naturally, after that, I didn't have any time to do anything with my hair other than pull it back into a very sloppy braid. The entire city of Red Rapids had then, obviously, decided to clog the streets with fat bald men in their black shiny cars and super moms in their minivans covered in little league baseball bumper stickers all so I'd be late instead of early like my plan.

To top it all off, this was, as I have said, the first day of school. That's pretty much the most important day of the year. It dictates where you are going to sit in class depending on who is in there with you and the table that you will use for lunch. Who would be the best student to be nice to in case of a group project and who will be avoided at all costs. Most importantly, today was the day that the teachers made their rulings. If you were a trouble student, that was decided today. If you were worthy of respect, they concluded that today.

After today, everything was final. It didn't matter if your shower suddenly doused you in mud instead of water and that's why you couldn't be there for first period, they will always think that you are a lazy, stupid child and will continue to treat you as such, no matter if you have memorized the periodical table of elements and can recite them backwards. It's a permanent for the entire duration that you are in that class.

And I was going to be labeled as that stupid and lazy child.

Nearly irritated out of my mind, I pressed a hand hard on the steering wheel, the horn blasting loud. That accomplished nothing other than the retard in front of me sticking a hand out of his fancy tinted window to flip me the finger. Instead of lowering myself to returning the gesture, I stuck my head. "Hey! I don't want to see that!" I yelled, "I don't know whose ass it's been up recently!" There, already I felt better. Mellowing just a bit, I waited for the line of vehicles to move. Fifteen minutes later, there was a total of three feet between where I had been and where I was now. Seriously, walking to school would be faster. At that thought, I sat up a bit straighter. I was right, it would actually be quicker.

Another fifteen minutes later and I had pulled into the parking lot for some apartment complex. As I pocketed my keys, I looked over my silver piece of crap and judged that, if I ran, I could be at school in seven to ten minutes. Sighing, I shouldered my mostly empty blue backpack and started to jog towards the back of the building, knowing there was a back alley way that cut across Gorgeman's Road. It was unbelievably hot and uncomfortable as heck running in the short skirt I was wearing, but I didn't slow down until I came to my school, Louisa May Alcott High School. Not stopping, I practically flew through the grounds, finally rushing into the building where my class was. Finding room 162, I paused and caught my breath before entering the room.

My eyes scanned the class before settling on my best friend Tabby MacCallum waving me over. I didn't wait before making a beeline towards where she was sitting across from Rose LeBlanc who was talking to a blond guy sitting next to her. That's how the art rooms were arranged, four students to a large table, five tables in a class. It saved up money on supplies so the school could spend the difference on getting the better quality stuff. It was a system that worked and I wasn't going to complain about it. Dropping my bag, I kicked it under the table as I slid down into my seat. The cool temperature felt like heaven on my over heated skin from the journey over. "Not a single word," I told Tabby before she could say anything about my flushed appearance.

"It wasn't like I was going to say anything." She sounded just about as happy that we were in school like I felt. Crossing her arms, she glared at some random point at the wall. It was times like these when she really looked menacing. Her hair, dark and about as curly as Annie's, was in a ponytail at the back of her neck. She was tall and curvy, which, somehow, made her seem somewhat overweight, even though she really wasn't. Then again, the baggy shirts and jeans she constantly wore didn't help either.

I groaned as I crossed my arms on top of the table and let my head fall forward to crash into them. Yes, I was wiped. Exhausted. Pooped. It didn't matter what the word was, that's how I felt. I let my eyes slide close for a moment, letting myself relax before the bell rang, signaling the official end of summer and the start of our incarceration. Three heartbeats passed. The chimes of the bell, which sounded like they should belong in a church's steeple, echoed throughout the hallways.

And school was finally in session…yay. Groaning again, I decided that I wasn't going to lift my head, not until the teacher actually started talking. Which, I hoped, would be never. The rest of the students in the class went silent after the bell except for one voice; the guy who was right across from me.

"What a complete and total psycho-bitch!" he gasped suddenly, making Rose laugh. "What did your sister say?"

The psycho-bitch part of that was extremely loud, and I could practically hear every head turn towards him as I lifted mine to stare. He looked perfectly angel like actually. Childlike in face, he had large pale blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair that extremely wavy and long enough so the entire thing didn't fluff up. I didn't know if it was just me, but it looked like it would fluff up to something that resembled a clown's wig if it was short enough.

Basically, he looked like those little naked baby statue gods of love from Roman and Greek times. The smile that stretched across his face showed true enjoyment, the dimples showing up making him seem even more like a cherub. I hadn't seen him before – I would know, I'd remember a face like that – which meant that he was a new student. Intriguing.

Rose didn't seem to realize that she was talking to the hottest bit of gossip since Gregory Smithson had ended up getting his clothes stolen two years ago and had thought it'd be a good idea to try to sneak out of the window in the guy's changing room so he could get to his car without walking through the entire school in a towel. Too bad he didn't know about the journalism student who decided to stay after school that day and the window to her room was right across the alley from Greg's escape. Lets just say that she got the most interesting pictures.

Anyways, Rose nodded at the new guy as she twirled a strand of her hair around her pinkie. "I know, she really is a bitch, isn't she? So anyways, Katherine stared at her for a moment before dumping her drink all over the chick's white shirt. And, for some reason, she thought it'd be smart to not wear a bra plus she had to walk home in the rain since her ride was late. I enjoyed her misery."

The guy seemed to agree completely. "As anyone in their right minds would be."

Tabby leaned towards me. "I think," she said, just loud enough for the other two to realize that they did indeed have audience of the entire class listening in, "That Rose has found her soul mate. Or a long lost twin."

I couldn't help but laugh at that, considering that the two were almost as different in appearance as night and day. Sure, they both had pale smooth skin, but Rose had dark hair and eyes that were a deep chocolate color. She was incredibly short, while this new guy, even while sitting down, looked like he'd be about as taller than Tabby, who was the tallest of our friends. However, already, personality wise, Blond Boy and Rose were almost like puzzle pieces, that's how well they clicked. I never thought I'd see the day when Rose found someone who could actually understand her. I've known her for years and still I really only get her about a fourth of the time.

It seemed to dawn on Rose that I was there because she put her hands on the table. A moment before it happened, I braced myself for her lunging towards me. I was released from the hug as she slithered back to her seat. She was slithering because she had to lie across the table to manage to give me the hug. Everyone else in the room realized that everything was back to normal and most of them turned back to their conversations with their friends, a few girls still gazing at Blond Boy with such a predatory look in their eyes that they'd scare off a wolf. Ignoring them, I gave a pointed look to Rose, then to Blond Boy, then back again, urging her with my sheer mind power that I wanted an introduction.

She got it after a few seconds. "Oh, right!" she exclaimed as she grinned widely, leaning back in her chair. "Sorry. 'Kay, so…uh, yeah." Waving a hand over at us, she turned towards Blond Boy, "Q, these two are Tabby MacCallum and Artie Simone. I told you about them." A guilty expression on her face, she turned back towards us. "And guys, this is Q Jamenson, he moved in my building during the summer."

I didn't have to look at Tabby to know that she had raised an eyebrow. "Q?"

He didn't so much as blink, instead he honed in that blue stare onto Tabby. "Yeah, like the letter after 'p' but before 'r'." The way he answered it wasn't rude, just informative. Like we didn't know where the letter was in the order of the alphabet. Then again, the way Tabby had asked was incredibly rude, so I wasn't going to hold it against him. When Tabby laughed, it was obvious that she wasn't going to either.

Introductions done, Rose leaned forward, the excitement practically bursting through her. "So, Artie are we gonna do the annu –"

The door to the classroom burst open with so much force that I wouldn't have been surprised to find an elephant behind it. Instead there was a pair of yellow high heeled shoes, long panty-hose clad legs and a box full of random junk. "Sorry I'm late class!" a voice rang out from behind the box. Once it was settled down on the teacher's desk, we got our first look of our teacher. Of medium height, she was built like a stick, with no curves and thin arms and legs. Her face was plain with thick glasses perched on the edge of her nose. What surprised me the most was that she couldn't have been much older than her mid-twenties. We didn't get any younger teachers here. This year was just full of surprises.

Since she was here, that meant that chit-chat was over. Knowing that Rose would try to keep talking over the woman, I shushed her and turned towards our teacher, who identified herself as Miss Netves. Our first assignment? To grab something from the box with our eyes closed and use that as our inspiration to do a sketch that was due at the end of the week; we had five ninety minute periods to complete it. A few students groaned but she pointed at them and told them that if they were so reluctant to work, they could pick last, when the choices were seriously depleted. I guess our table had some sort of good student aura because she let us go first. Q practically ran over there and plucked out something so quickly that I didn't get to see what it was before he was already on his way back to the table. Well, someone certainly went to Star Bucks this morning and got a double shot of espresso.

I was next. I closed my eyes and thrust my hand in the box, my fingers wrapping around something cold and metal. When I pulled out my hand, I didn't look at what was in it until I was sitting down again. It was a metal tube that was only about four inches in length, painted white with blue and red diagonal stripes going upward. The first thing I thought of was that May Pole in my dream last night. Smiling rather stupidly to myself, I closed my eyes, picturing that little village with the May Pole set up in the middle, the girls who were roughly thirteen milling around, giggling as they tried to flirt with the boys they liked.

Dreams like that had been sneaking up on me for the better part of ten years now, ever since I was seven. Strange as it was, I had found myself falling fully in love with my Dream Guy, like I called him in my mind. Never, not once, in ten years had I ever heard his actual name. Then again, dreams are ruled by the subconscious mind, right? Maybe I just wasn't creative enough to come up with a decent name for that god-like face. And I wasn't about to go so far as to come up with a completely retarded name like you'd find in a soap opera or something. He had a name that would click somewhere out there, I just hadn't found it quite yet.

"I got a Christmas ornament," Tabby muttered as she sat back down and another table was picked to go up. Seriously though, what was with this one table at a time thing? We weren't in middle school anymore.

Since I was jerked out of my thoughts rather suddenly it took me a moment to realize that she had actually been talking to me. In response to her comment, I lifted up my little candy cane looking thing and showed it to her, not really wanting to voice anything in case Miss Netves had anything else of interest to say that I should probably hear.

Which she did. After everyone had gone up and plucked something from the box o' crap, she put her hands on her hips and gazed at the rest of us, most of whom were probably wondering if this new teacher was completely insane or something. "Okay," she said, her voice easy, "I'm not expecting a masterpiece here, just a simple sketch. What does the item in your hand make you think of, how does it make you feel, what's the first thing that pops into your head? I don't want to see a drawing of the item itself. So, go get whatever you need and start. You have seventy minutes." She paused for a moment. "And I don't care if you listen to iPods or MP3's as long as you are actually working."

A bunch of thankful sighs echoed throughout the room as nearly everyone but me stood up to go to the supply room to get our stuff. Miss Netves didn't specify what type of sketch it had to be, so we were pretty much free to decide on the size of the paper to what type of drawing utensil. I liked that. I waited at my seat, picturing exactly what I was going to bring to life on the paper. When the supply room was empty, I finally stood and grabbed an eleven by fourteen piece of drawing paper and a 9H pencil.

Once sitting again, I didn't waste any time beginning my work. Drawing was my one real talent in the world. My mother used to love seeing the pictures I drew when I went outside and just sketched what I saw. She would be so happy when I sometimes added a fairy's face peeking between the petals of a flower or a princess playing on my tire swing. Things were different now, but the times that I did spend time just to doodle made me feel close to Mom again.

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By the time fourth period came around, I was so close to stabbing myself through the eye with a pencil that my fingers clenched and unclenched unconsciously around the writing utensil in my hand. It wasn't just because of the fact that school had begun the long painful process of sucking out my soul. No, it was from the sheer annoyance that I felt. See, by the time that first period ended and I had to go to study hall, I discovered something very interesting. Q had the personality of a two year old who was being fed coffee constantly through an IV. I'm not kidding. It seemed like it was physically impossible for him to actually shut up for more than the three seconds it took for him to breathe.

The end of second block came with an even more incredible piece of information. I had every class but the last one with him.

I would have loved to have strangled him at some point during the five hours I had to deal with him since he wouldn't actually leave me alone. However, he was like a two year old in more ways than one. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't actually stay mad at him. And trust me, I tried. It's like cycling on the Tour de France. You know that, if you really really put your mind to it, you might be able to do it. But then the cute guy in front of you smiles and your heart stops so you fall off the bike. I'd get irritated for a moment, but then he'd smile, change the subject, I'd laugh, he'd laugh, and we'd be back to where we started. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that, since he was already friends with Rose, we weren't going to get rid of him. And, I'd never admit it, but I was kind of growing attached to all that energy.

Anyways, here we were, sitting in the last two minutes of third period, which was English III. Yeah, we all love that class. It's not like we've grown up with the language. No, how about someone throw some weird, obscene vocabulary words at us so we just feel like retards. The teacher, a decrepit old woman who appeared to be about four heartbeats away from a heart attack, was reading from a list of actions that were appropriate for her class. The funny thing was that she actually seemed to think that we were listening to her. Which none of us were.

Especially Q, who, for some odd reason, was staring at me, twisted around in his seat in front of me. And he hadn't blinked in about four minutes and it was seriously starting to freak me out just a bit. "What?" I asked him, wanting to know why I was suddenly so interesting.

He shrugged, still not blinking. "I think you'd get along with my brother."

He had a brother? Did that mean that we had another new kid? Good grief, what was going on with the school system these days? In the entire time I've been at LMA, we've never actually had a new student that didn't walk through the doors as a freshman. And now we had two. Still, he had opened himself up for the question, so I had to say it. "You have a brother?"

"I just said I did. Sheesh, Artie, learn to listen." He rolled his eyes and finally, finally, blinked. "Yeah, you both have that suppressed rage thing going on. But then again, he's not exactly ragey...more like intense all the time. He gets on my nerves more often than not." Humphing, he crossed his arms.

"Suppressed rage?" Where was he getting this? I am not an angry person. I can be an angry person sometimes, but it's not like it's a habit or anything.

Without saying anything, he pointed at my hand, which was clutching the pencil so tightly that my fingers were white. Oh, that would explain what he was talking about. Slowly, I released the pencil, stretching out my fingers as I did so. "I didn't know I was doing that," I told him, glancing at the clock in the corner. Okay, just another thirty seconds until this boring class was over.

"Uh-uh...sure you didn't." He didn't sound like he believed me. As soon as he said it, the bell rang. All of us stood up, grabbed our backpacks, and started squeezing ourselves out of the door while everyone else was trying to get out at the exact same time. I was in the middle of that group, Q pressed a little awkwardly to my side. When we were free, he turned back to me and I had to look up at him since he was taller than me. "Anyways, I'm off to go attack Rosie." Turning, he waved at me from over his shoulder. "See ya!"

He had to be completely insane. That was the only explanation. Still, I knew I wasn't going to get rid of him, not with the way that he and Rose were friends, so I might as well be friends with him as well. Would be better than fighting off the inevitable. Shaking my head, I turned and started walking down the hall. Two lefts, a right, down a flight of stairs and I was outside, the wind whipping my hair away from my face and giving me a rather rude wake up call.

The strange thing about LMA was that it was planned out more like a college than a high school. The classes weren't held in a single huge building that was just separated into the different subjects. Instead, there were smaller individual buildings for the subjects. They were all arranged in a large oval shape, the largest one which held the administer office, cafeteria, library and nurse's little nook at the end closest to the parking lot. The space in the middle of the oval was our courtyard, a bit smaller than a football field, and it had benches, trees, bushes, some flowers growing in one side, and a tranquility garden that the gardening club upheld at the other. The bad thing about the courtyard is that, if you have classes on opposite ends of it, it takes forever to get there. The school fixed that by giving fifteen minutes between classes.

I liked the fifteen minutes between classes.

Strangely, I was actually looking forward to my next class. Ancient History. I love ancient history, like the Greeks and Romans. Actually, let me rephrase that. Especially the Greeks and Romans. They fascinate me. I waved at various people that I knew, but ignored them, as I made a beeline for the History Building. Thankfully the class was on the first floor so I didn't have to go up any stairs. It didn't take me long to find the class. I wasn't the first one in there. There was a guy already sitting down in a desk already, flipping through the textbook that was under the chairs. I couldn't see his face, only wavy hair the color of milk chocolate.

There was another book on the floor beside him. I figured since he was the only one in there that it was his and he didn't realize that he had dropped it. Deciding to be nice, I maneuvered through the desks and sat down in the one next to him. After dropping my stuff and shoving under the desk, I leaned over and picked up the book. I couldn't tell what it was. The title of it was in another language or something. Maybe he was taking a language. Shrugging, I poked him in the shoulder, then held up the book as he looked over at me. My breath whooshed out of my lungs.

It was like a belt had constricted around my chest. I was unable to do anything but stare in open mouthed shock at him. He...he wasn't real. He was a figment of my imagination. That's what he always had been. But every detail was perfect. His hair was longish and fell in eyes the color of amber. Tanned skin and leaned muscles. One eye brow lifted in an expression that I had seen countless times before in my sleep. "Oh," he said, the voice gentle and deep. Just like what he had sounded like in my dreams. "That's mine. Thanks."

After he grabbed it, I did nothing other than nod. A long moment passed as he returned back to the text book and I stared. Then I realized what I was doing and put my arms on the desk before slamming my head down on it. It made a loud noise as the pain of impact vibrated through my head. I closed my eyes and wondered if this was the beginning of a mental breakdown. It certainly wouldn't be the first one.

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Jenna's Thoughts:

Hey-yo!

I know there wasn't too much dialog in here, but that will hopefully change in the next chapter. If someone here had actually read Friday of Magic -- my for-fun story as of right now -- I had actually used Red Rapids and Artie's name in there....yes, they are the same. Just thought I'd clear that up.

And before anyone asks Q is indeed one of my favorite persons. What I have so far is but a small, small taste of his insanity. Oh, and I am willing to offer a cookie to anyone who can figure out what those dreams are about. A really really big chocolate chip cookie.

To all you lovely people who took the three seconds to review me, I am currently free of the debt to update until the moment you review again! So go on...get to it!