and on the f i r s t day of t h i r d grade

entry for warm.summer.nights' friendship contest
characters: kairi && selphie
setting: pre-kh1; destiny islands
prompt: lunchbox

Sora, Kairi, and Riku were always together.

Everyone had noticed it, even when the children were eight (or in Riku's case, nine) years old. The three did everything together, both in school and out. Group project? Sora, Kairi, Riku. Groups of three in P.E.? Sora, Kairi, Riku. Choosing new seats? Kairi, Sora, and Riku were probably going to try to get seats close to each other. The teachers noticed this in first and second grade, and finally, the three third grade teachers decided to do something about it: They separated the three of them and staggered the recesses so that they wouldn't be able to hang out so much during the school day. Maybe it was a little cruel to separate the three friends, but it was justified in the teachers' eyes.

After all, children shouldn't be forming little cliques so early.

It just wasn't healthy.

Right?

Kairi was not enjoying her first day of third grade.

To begin with, she wasn't in the same class as Sora or Riku. That in itself was enough for Kairi to not like third grade. But it was made even worse by the fact that when she was going out to recess, Sora's class was going in. And when her class was going in, Riku's class was coming out! If she wasn't an innocent little third-grader, she would have thought that someone had planned that. But she was too young to be thinking about conspiracy theories, so she just thought that she had really, really bad luck.

Still, she had hope for third grade. After all, there might be other nice people in her class! With that in mind, she'd approached a group of boys at recess and had asked to play with them - only to be shot down and told that they didn't play with girls "because girls have cooties. Eeeeyuck!" That had really confused the little redhead. After all, Sora and Riku played with her, and they were boys; therefore, these boys shouldn't be so against playing with her, right? But they were.

And of course, Kairi didn't know that they were just... well... immature and mean. She thought that there must have been something wrong with her. So she spent her first recess in the bathroom, crying behind the locked door of a stall.

At the age of seven, Selphie was already a little girl-shaped bundle of energy. She was so full of energy that she actually scared a lot of the other kids, so she didn't get to hang out with that many people. Not that it really mattered to her - Selphie was a girl who could be just as happy playing by herself as she could be playing with others, because she understood that she didn't have to depend on other people to have fun - she had her imagination, and that had gotten her through a lot of boring days already.

She'd started school early because she was so bright, but people would jokingly say that her parents had started her early because they couldn't deal with her at home. And while her parents were glad to have a few hours of peace while she was at school, that wasn't the only reason she'd started early, as was made apparent by her grades (though she did get in trouble a lot for talking out of turn, getting out of her assigned seat, or sneaking candy into class and eating it while the teacher was talking).

The teachers knew all about Selphie's energy, and none of them actually wanted to teach her in third grade (Selphie's previous teachers had always complained of headaches during teachers' meetings). So they chose a completely mature method of making the decision of who would take her: they played Rock-Paper-Scissors.

And, as chance might have had it, Kairi's teacher got stuck with the little yellow-clad bundle of joy.

Selphie was loving her first day of third grade.

Sure, she hadn't made any friends yet. But she was sure that would change - after all, it was only the first day, and she couldn't expect to make a kajillion friends on her first day of school (that never happened in real life). The first part of the day had been pretty fun. They'd gotten to choose their seats and Selphie had chosen to sit in the back, because, young as she was, she'd figured out that she could get away with more if she wasn't right up where the teacher could see (and catch) her.

And recess had been fun, too. She and some other girl whose name Selphie couldn't remember yet had managed to sneak into a shed where they kept the stuff for the big kids and had gotten a bunch of jump ropes, and then a whole group of them had spent the recess playing jump-rope games (and just for the record, Selphie had pretty much kicked everyone's butts). If she'd been bothered at all by the fact that the other classes didn't have recess with them, she didn't show it, not one bit.

Of course, the teacher had been a little mad that they'd "stolen" the big kids' things, but Selphie could tell that she was more impressed than mad - if she'd been really mad, she wouldn't have been half-smiling even as she scolded them on the way in.

"Look, look! My mommy packed me a cookie!"

"Well, my mommy packed me a cupcake!"

"Aww, no fair! I just got broccoli."

"Eeeewwww!"

Kairi sighed as she stared down at her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and listened to the chatter of the children around her. It was lunchtime, and Kairi was alone; they ate their lunches in their classrooms after all, and none of her friends were in the same class as her. She was really starting to hate third grade and, for what seemed like the millionth time that day, was wishing she was back in second grade where she and Sora and Riku were all in the same class. She'd never been alone at lunchtime then.

"Hey."

She blinked, and looked up from her sandwich. In front of her desk stood a rather heavily-set (for his age) boy, who had a look on his face like he'd just smelled something really bad (Or maybe he'd just looked in the mirror a moment ago, which is what Kairi would have thought if she was older and not so nice). But even if he looked mean, he'd approached her, which meant that he could be nice, right? Right?

Wrong. For he snatched the brown paper bag that was holding Kairi's lunch off her desk and proceeded to look through it, claiming a candy bar and a little cup of chocolate pudding, and dumping the rest on the floor. Kairi's eyes widened in shock and she stared up at the boy, tears welling up in her eyes as he just started to laugh. And then he noticed the tears, and started laughing even more. "Aww, is the widdle baby gonna cry? Crybaby! Crybaby! Crybaby!"

And this just served to make the tears spill over and down the redhead's cheeks. Kairi sniffled and tried to keep from crying any more, and the boy laughed even harder.

"Hey hey! Cut it out!"

...The boy laughed until a certain energetic girl wearing yellow came up behind him and slammed a tin lunchbox on his head. And then he was the one crying and the girl was the one laughing - and Kairi just sat there, her tears starting to dry up.

It was at this point that the teacher finally noticed that something was happening, and she took the boy away from the two girls, then pulled Selphie aside and gave her a stern talking-to (which gave Selphie an opportunity to tell her that the boy had been bullying Kairi and that she was only stopping him from hurting her feelings anymore). Once the teacher was done, Selphie grinned widely and headed back to Kairi, plopping down at a desk next to the girl and opening her now-dented lunchbox. She rummaged through it for a few moments before pulling out a cookie, splitting it in half, and holding one half out to Kairi, who simply stared at her for a few moments before taking the cookie half and offering up a shy smile, which was returned with another grin.

"My name's Selphie!" Selphie took a bite out of her cookie.

"I'm Kairi." Kairi took a bite out of hers.

"We're friends now, yeah?"

Kairi nodded, and that was when she decided - maybe third grade wasn't so bad after all.

fin.