I stared intently at the glowing light of the screen on my phone, completely disregarding my surroundings. They were of no matter to me, not when I was reading a fanfiction. Another Harry Potter one, as usual. As if I read anything else.

"…largely deserted—no one else would bother getting up for another few hours. Not only was it early on a Saturday morning, but it was early on a Saturday morning…"

I was on the sixth chapter of the fanfiction, but I was considering giving it up; it wasn't at all like I expected it to be. I honestly thought the character would be more soft-spoken, and not anything like the spitfire she actually was. Spitfire characters were good, but they were overused, and their dispositions were nearly the same every single time. They were just another copy of Ginny Weasley, one could say. It was like authors think that spitfire characters were the only characters worthy of the infamous Potter boys: James and Al Potter. Or Lily too, but slash fanfictions on HPFF weren't something you often find, unfortunately. Or on fanfiction dot net. Usually, Lily was the spitfire, although most definitely not for her brothers. That was kind of gross.

I went back to reading anyways. Or, was about to. A good shake to the shoulder had diverted my attention.

I turned my head. Behind me was my short brown-haired friend, wearing her signature blue tie and her low ponytail. She had a crooked smile on her as always.

"Hey, Hansa," she said, sitting beside me and starting to eat her lunch. Nodding towards my phone, she commented, "Reading fanfiction again?"

"Did you expect anything else, Maya?" I asked rhetorically, mirroring her smile. "By the way, everybody already left, and it's time to go to class again," I informed her in fake hurt, playing with her. She knew this.

Her smile still morphed into an apologetic one, however. "Sorry, I just really have to practice for that one really hard piece that I'm performing this Saturday. I often don't have time after school to practice with all the homework assigned. Its hard work you know?"

"Ah," I said in an understanding tone, "I feel you." I saw her starting to pack her lunch up again, despite the fact she had just begun eating.

"How can you?" she joked, poking fun at her innocence. She really was quite innocent, you know, and after meeting me, she became aware of this. She used technology minimally, and she knew nothing about the world of memes, fanfiction, Tumblr, and all of that other Internet-y goodness. And to this I say a resolute 'good.' Memes (and others included) were black holes that suck you in. It was so fun referencing a meme to her every once in a while though. Seeing the perplexed look on her face was just too good to pass up.

I laughed. "No, I suppose you can't. Come on, we have to go to Psychology now, Miss Taylor will get mad at us."

Maya nodded. I packed my things up, putting my lunch and books back in my bag.

I walked towards the Performing Arts hallway, and Maya followed. It wasn't a long walk, but by the time we had gotten there, everybody had already been seated. A mark of our lateness, but oh well, I'm not too bothered.

We went to our respective seats, which were close to each other.

Miss Taylor got up and walked to the front of the room, gathering every student's attention. She smiled a friendly smile at us.

"Hello class!" she said in chirpy kind of way, but not enough to grate on your nerves. She got straight to her point. "First: a recap of what we learned yesterday. Who can tell me?"

Maya feebly tried to raise her hand, but then put it back down. Poor thing, she really needed to get over her shyness. The room stayed silent, nobody willing to give an answer.

Miss Taylor sighed in exasperation. "Come on you guys, I know all of you remember. Do you want me to start calling up people, like some kind of Hunger Games?"

This elicited a murmur of laughs from the classroom of students.

I raised my hand, and Miss Taylor directed her attention to me. "Miss Singh?"

I coughed a small cough to clear up my throat. I said in a quiet but clear voice, "Sigmund Freud. We learned about his Psychoanalytic theory, which consists of the id, the superego, and the ego. The id lives in the unconscious, as does the superego. The id is an aggressive psychic force, demanding for its desires to be gratified, no matter how unreasonable. The superego is built upon morals and fights the id, wanting gratification as well. The ego is pulled by the two, like some kind of tug of war, and tries to achieve what the both want in realistic ways. But as a result of this, the ego is extremely fragile."

Miss Taylor nodded thoughtfully. "I'll take it. As Miss Singh said…" And she went off on one of her tangents, and my mind wandered off.

I thought about what I'll do when I get home, which was probably do my homework for a good while, and then get caught up reading fanfiction. What can I say? It was one of my guilty pleasures, although all my friends knew this. It was really fun to get lost in a world made within a world, especially if they were alternate universes. They were very engaging, you know? I also think reading an excess of fanfiction was what gave me my amazing grammar skills (if I may say so), and gave me the push to start writing this year. Nothing too ambitious for now though; I've still yet to learn the ways of writing properly.

The world of fanfiction was great, but you can find some… questionable things there too. I've come across sexual fanfictions more times than I would have liked. And a few furry fanfictions, but I don't like to talk about that.

And another thing—"Class! I hope you have taken the Humanmetrics Jung test for personality?"

"Yes, Miss Taylor," the class chorused.

"Great! I'm going to call out the all of the personalities and all of you will group up according to your temperaments. I will tell you this," Miss Taylor said. She searched for something on her desk and then began. After she had called everybody (I'm an INFP, if you were wondering), we had been given sheets with information about our personality. But instead of reading about my personality, I was more intrigued by the black haired boy sitting next to me. He seemed to be absentmindedly taking his surroundings in, learning everything about it.

I was staring at him unabashedly, and I knew it. I made no move to stop though.

Soon enough, his wandering eyes (which were surprisingly a nice shade of emerald; I had always thought that most green eyed boys and girls existed in young adult novels) moved to me, and he seemed a bit surprised to find me staring at him. He raised one of his eyebrows in question. I had enough sense to snap out of it and introduce myself.

"Hi," I said, giving what I hoped was a disarming smile. I held my hand out to him. "I'm Hansika Singh. And you are?"

He eyed my hand warily, but eventually he took it. "I'm Al," he said, offering up no last name, or anything of the sort. I blinked at that, but paid it no mind.

"It's nice to meet you," I said to him. "Are you new here?"

He nodded. "Transfer student."

"Oh?" I said, slightly puzzled. "But you have a British accent?"

"Oh, er…" He trailed off, clearly not knowing what to say.

I immediately went to rectify myself. "That's fine, though. I once had a friend who had a British accent, but she wasn't from Britain, and neither were her parents. Apparently, they wanted their child to have a British accent, so they spoke in one until she was seven."

I was nervous, alright? And when I'm nervous, I tended to ramble, and my mouth got a life of its own. I mostly spew out nonsensical stories, not deep, dark secrets of mine or anything, so that was one upside to it. Best of all, they weren't even real. The one I just said was from a post I saw on Tumblr. How cool am I? In case you didn't know, not very.

Al gave me a strange look, probably thinking that I was hit on the head when I was a baby. It was likely, and it would explain all of my blunders, mishaps, and the straight up stupid things I've done.

"So," I said, forcing out a rather pathetic and unconvincing laugh, "since you're a transfer student, I assume you don't know your way around here?"

"I know my way around a little bit. I know the essentials, like where my classes are, the courtyard, etcetera, etcetera," he said, likely to be trying to keep his answers short and simple.

"Oh, okay, that's good," I said.

Al shot a brief smile at me, and went back to reading. But I didn't really want to be alone with my thoughts, so I asked, "So, what personality type are you?"

His head looked back up at me, wary once again. He seemed to be determined to get through this year without having to talk to anybody. Well, I've got another thing coming for you, buddy o' pal. I am literally the most talkative person ever if I liked you, and well, it seemed I liked you, Al. Get used to it. Or push me away, that worked too, but that'll most likely end up with me having a decade long grudge on you. I'm persistent and stubborn.

He let out an inaudible sigh (well, maybe not so much if I heard it) and answered, "INTJ."

"Oh, the Mastermind. Very ambitious and have the ability to be a leader, although won't willingly take the position," I said, nodding approvingly. "Rare to find as well."

"Really?" Al asked absentmindedly, reading the articles about the personalities.

I nodded, but then I slap myself; he wasn't looking at me. And then it was my turn to sigh inaudibly. I didn't bother to relay my answer to him, and I busied myself with reading up my type for the next few minutes, after which we'll go to the next class.

The teacher dismissed us soon enough and I head off to my next class. The end of the day couldn't come soon enough.

The end of the day did come, but not as soon as I'd like. It seemed I forgot about the Interior Design meeting I had at the end of the day. It was fun, but it got boring really quick; we mostly just talked about what we had planned for the future.

My sister had picked me up, and we drove while listening to some type of bhangra music. My sister seemed to love it, as she had sung along to it every minute of the way. It's a good thing that two voices singing together create harmony, and not discord. I would have died from the ear splitting sound.

We arrived home, and I got out of the car, getting my things from the back. Immediately, a familiar face caught my eye. Except this time, he was with two other people. I would think that they were friends of some sort, but their shocking similarity to each other makes me think otherwise. The older boy sitting next to Al has the same hair as him, and the short girl sitting next to him has the same face structure… or something like that. I never claimed to be accurate in my observations.

Al looked to me from where he was sitting, and waved to me, and I waved shyly back. He went back to talking to his friends. Or siblings. I honestly think he was discretely talking about me, the girl who attempted to talk to him, despite the obvious signs that he didn't want to. Boy have I made mistakes today. Oh well.

I enter into my home that is strangely quiet, a sign that my parents aren't home. Thank god for that. My mother was likely to be at one of her friends' house and my father was probably still at work. I can do my homework in peace, without having my mother yell at me, or about what I need to be doing with my 'dead end' life.

I started on my homework, which took me five hours, partly credited to the fact that I took every chance to procrastinate in between. I whipped out my school library book, Gemini by Sonya Mukherjee. Some people actually might be surprised by this fact; they assumed that I am not an avid reader simply because I don't hold a physical book in my hands. Fanfictions were stories; just not the conventional ones that people normally perceived.

The book itself was okay. Not too exciting though. When I first had read it, I thought it was an interesting choice of plot and premise, and I was easily ensnared. But I made the mistake of reading the reviews for this book, most of which say that it was just another high school drama, and now I can only see through those glasses and boy did it suck. But I refused to put the book down, because if I left it unfinished, the book would haunt me in my dreams. You think I'm crazy, but it had happened before. Never again.

And besides, a story was a story, and it was an escape from reality no matter how poorly written. It offered up a temporary reprieve and for that I am grateful. They were engaging when you had a visual mind like mine. I started to picture myself as the main character, and suddenly I was in their bodies, feeling what they were feeling, doing what they were doing.

I wish the fictional reality of books were real, especially the reality of Harry Potter's. It was so hard being a sixteen year old, but not even have accomplishing a fourth of what the main characters in these books have. It was discouraging and it brought you down big time. I can only gratify myself by living vicariously through these characters, but never anything more than that.

A sad thought, no?

The Hunger Games belongs to Suzanne Collins, and I do not own Tumblr either. That one's owned by Yahoo! The post I referring to was by theqmmunity, previously thelesbianguide, on Tumblr.