A girl with medium length blonde hair exited Salem High School's library. Her green eyes smiled at the janitor who was locking up the library behind her. Elizabeth wore her green backpack over both shoulders as she ambled down the empty halls. It was Friday, long after the final bell had rung and she'd spent too long reading in the library. She'd finally been kicked out when it came time to lock up. She didn't mind the walk home back to the Institute. Elizabeth was a little surprised to hear voices as she came close to passing by the art classroom. The art teacher, Mrs. Kinsley, sounded upset and almost angry. Elizabeth slowed down because she didn't want to interrupt the conversation, especially since it sounded like an argument.
"Your work is only average, Mr. Toynbee, and your work ethic is abysmal," Mrs. Kinsley sounded pompous to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth heard the sound of Mrs. Kinsley's low heels snapping on the hard floor as she walked away. Elizabeth cautiously peered around the corner of the hallway, in time to see the skinny sophomore people called Toad toss a notebook into a nearby trash bin. She recognized him by the layered long sleeve and short sleeve tee-shirts she often saw him wearing and his messy brown hair. Elizabeth waited until Toynbee had bounded out of sight before she came around the hall corner.
Elizabeth pushed back the long fall of blonde hair as she reached in carefully to pull out the notebook. It fell open as she did and she saw immediately that Mrs. Kinsley was wrong about his work being average. After a cursory glance through the book Elizabeth put it into her backpack, intending to give it back to him when his temper had cooled down a few degrees. She was sure he would regret throwing his work away.
At home, Elizabeth was used to the antics at the Institute. The loud noises of practice and training sessions, the crashes and explosions, and the general ruckus of students. Eventually, though, it could get to be too much for her. On Saturday afternoon she left the girl's dormitory, passed the basketball court and the pool, strolled along Breakstone Lake and finally found some quiet among the trees. It was about the only place she could be sure she could get some peace. She had her backpack slung over her shoulder, intending to work on an essay for her English class. She knew what she wanted to write but she couldn't think straight inside the Institute.
She sat underneath a tree with the light dappling the ground between the shadows of leaves. Elizabeth's hair was pulled into a half ponytail today, as usual. When she opened her backpack, instead of pulling out one of her own notebooks she instead pulled out the book full of elaborate sketches. Her green eyes widened. She'd actually forgotten about the rescued notebook until she'd pulled it out.
Elizabeth felt a little guilty looking at it but she was alone and couldn't resist. The artwork was really very good. She'd seen Toynbee around school and she had figured out that he was a mutant like the other students who lived at the Institute. He and his clique didn't seem to be friendly with the mutants at the Institute. She thought there was some kind of mutant-prep-school rivalry going on between the Institute and the Brotherhood of Salem Center.
She turned the pages slowly, recognizing the girl she thought of as Scarlet on many of the pages. Her real name was Wanda but Elizabeth wasn't sure she'd ever heard anyone other than her brother call her by her real name. Scarlet, her brother, Toynbee, Tabitha, Lance, and Fred mostly kept to themselves and the students from the Institute left them alone. Sometimes, Elizabeth would see Tabitha and Kurt talking but that happened less and less often recently. There were other things on the pages: rough, incomplete sketches of the human body, eyes or noses or hands or feet, different hair types and styles, different items of clothing, and roses. The sketches of Kurt's unusual body shape made Elizabeth's eyebrows wing up.
Elizabeth chewed on her lower lip, considering. She was torn between trying to return the notebook without anyone knowing that she'd had it and wanting to tell Toynbee to keep working on his art. Finally, she pulled out her own notebook for English and ripped a page out. She sighed at her own work: the page had torn so that there was a triangle of blank lined paper still attached to the metal ring. Elizabeth set to writing her note anyway. She figured that if she didn't sign it then he wouldn't be able to figure out who had written it. Elizabeth folded it into his notebook carefully and wrote a shorthand memo in her planner to leave the notebook on top of his locker on Monday.