A/N Yes, another fic! This is just a trial run - I love the idea of this, but you know, some people might not. This is told from Jesse's POV, all the way through. Please let me know what you think - even if its not particularly positive.


Hollybridge Heights Campus Rules

TO BE FOLLOWED AT ALL TIMES – NO EXCEPTION

1. No food is to be taken into the classrooms and only bottled water is permitted.

2. Address every teacher as "Professor", followed by their surname.

3. No graffiti is allowed on files, textbooks, or notebooks.

4. Uniform is to be worn at a high standard.

5. Raise your hand when answering or asking a question.

6. No foul language is accepted in the classroom environment.

7. Arrive on time to every lesson fully equipped.

8. Vulgar behaviour such as displays of affection and violence are not tolerated on campus.

9. Any punishments handed out must be accepted with no comments.

10. There will be no student-teacher relationships at Hollybridge Heights.

Failure to comply with these rules will result in suspension, or expulsion.

Penelope Hollybridge, Headmistress of Hollybridge Heights.

Chapter One

Discontinuous variation – sometimes known as categorical variation – must be displayed as a bar graph as there are no intermediates. An example of discontinuous variation would be eye colour – the categories being blue, brown, green and grey.

Susannah Simon tossed the flimsy piece of paper onto the table in front of her in disgust, and spun around to talk to me. "Hey, Jess," she hissed, and our professor frowned at Susannah's lack of attention. "What a load of crap, right?"

"Querida," I whispered, and I tried to gesture with my head for her to swivel around in her seat to face the front again, as if her lab partner's frustrated poking wasn't doing the trick. "I think maybe we should talk after class." Susannah pouted, and turned around, placing both hands demurely on the desk.

"Glad you have deemed my class interesting again, Miss Simon," Professor Lipman said, and she shuffled her notes on her desk. "For a moment there I thought your social life with Mr De Silva was more appealing." Somebody wolf-whistled and I blushed brilliantly. Susannah, however, merely laughed and shrugged. I always admired her for that.

I finished my notes with a flourish, and inserted the neat piece of paper into my ring binder carefully, shutting the folder with a soft click. Susannah lifted up her ink-splattered work as she rummaged in her bag for her bent file and shoved today's notes in roughly, before spectacularly dropping her file to the floor with a loud thwack, scattering papers everywhere.

I climbed off my stool and knelt down to help her swiftly; aware Professor Lipman was casting several thousand disapproving looks our way. I collected Susannah's pages in a tidy pile, and handed them back to her. She stuffed them into her bag, smiling at me. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up on end.

"Class dismissed," our professor declared finally, and Susannah was first out of the door. "Please remind yourselves that starting tomorrow you will have a substitute!" Susannah waited impatiently outside for me to follow her, tapping her foot absent-mindedly and chewing her bottom lip, turning it red.

"Susannah," I said, kindly, and she took my arm as we began walking down the corridor towards the courtyard for the break we had in between classes. "Don't chew your lip. It will get chapped, and I know how you hate having to apply lip balm." She shook off my words, barely listening.

"You threw away that piece of crap, right?" she demanded instead, referring to the list of school rules Mrs Hollybridge had thought it necessary to issue us with first lesson this morning. Evidently she had hoped for a more positive response than Susannah's. I patted my breast pocket nervously, where the offending piece of paper sat, neatly folded.

"You mean Mrs Hollybridge's rules?" I asked her, as we turned a corner. The science block at Hollybridge was immensely vast – Science being the main subject here at the university – and it took at least ten minutes on a good day to escape the musty smells of carpet cleaner and mothballs. "Ah, no. I decided to keep them for Marta, because you know she's applying here this fall-"

"You mean so that you can tack it to your wall and memorize each and every one of them before you go to bed each night in your dorm?" Susannah corrected teasingly, and I sighed. She may be the most beautiful woman I will ever meet – even in the Hollybridge garb we are forced to don she still looks like a movie-star – but she is often the least sensitive. She squeezed my arm. "Jesse De Silva, you are a square."

I pursed my lips, and we entered the courtyard, inhaling the cool New Hampshire air – it was unusually cold for so early in the school year – and we took our typical bench opposite the archway, so that Susannah could see the gym, and all those that attended the extra-curricular sports activities religiously. She looked at me, and burst out laughing. "Oh, Jesse, you're not still upset about it, are you? I meant of course that you are an adorably cute square." I couldn't help but laugh, and she planted a kiss on my cheek that ended too soon.

From the fateful day Susannah had moved from Brooklyn to Carmel, she had been my best friend. After being surrounded by the usual flock – Kelly Prescott, Debbie Mancuso, Bryce Martinson, all of which were eager to hear about the metropolitan New York – she had pushed them all aside to speak to me – the quiet geek that nobody spared much thought to. And at that instant, when she sat beside me and asked me my name, I fell deep into her green, green eyes.

And now I suppose it goes without saying that I am irresponsibly, irreversibly and irrevocably in love with her.

She sat now, with her long shiny hair tied back with an emerald ribbon, and her legs crossed haphazardly underneath her regulation black pleated skirt. She had thrown aside her black blazer with the Hollybridge emblem, and was now hurriedly untucking her mint green blouse. Once satisfied, she pulled a notepad from her bag.

"So did you get any of what Professor what's-her-job was saying?" she asked me, plucking a biro from her pencil-case and turned to me. "Homophobic, homosexual, homo-"

"Homeostasis," I answered for her, with a laugh. "The physiological processes that allow an organism to maintain its internal environment notwithstanding its external environment. Weren't you listening at all?"

Susananh shook her head. "Sounded like baloney to me," she replied. "Can you repeat all of that? Slowly, and in English?"

"Why are you taking Biology, Susannah?" I quizzed her, and she pressed her biro a bit too hard onto the paper and caused a large hole to appear. "It's obvious that you hate it more than you hate oranges."

"Hey!" Susannah cried, throwing her pen into the air in protest. "Biology isn't that bad. It's not like it has pips in it or anything."

"It's only not that bad because you refuse to listen to anything Professor Lipman says," I said. I pointed at her notepad. "Organism, not orgasm."

Susannah scribbled her words out furiously, and began writing again. "I need a man," she decided, chewing on the lid of her pen – for once, instead of her own lip. "A nice man. A man that buys me flowers every day of the week."

"Would those flowers happen to be orchids?" I asked her, and she smiled.

"Of course! What kind of man that loves me would consider any other kind?" she demanded, and I shrugged, imitating her earlier action. "Its orchids or no flowers. Do you think you could drill that into the guy's head, when he comes along? That way, I can pretend that he was perfect all by himself?"

The perfect man for you is already here, I thought desperately, and I took her hand, separating each finger and examining it. Right here, holding your hand.

Susannah's eyes narrowed and I followed her gaze across the courtyard, to see a man who looked no older than I or Susannah, sitting on another bench eating an apple whilst talking animatedly on the phone. He was dressed in a dark suit – unusual for students, perhaps he was just a visitor – and his brown and blonde-speckled hair gleamed in the wan sunlight. He smiled – obviously in response to whatever he had heard on the phone, but I felt Susannah's pulse race as I held her wrist.

I looked at my watch, for want of something to do. It was ten-twenty-five. Our next class began in five minutes. "Come on," I whispered, pulling her up off the bench. Her distracted gaze was still fixed on the man, and I had to yank her inside. I think both of us knew even then that that wouldn't be the last time we saw him.


But he was promptly forgotten during our second lesson – Social Studies. This was an environment Susannah was much more comfortable in, where she was able to talk to me – who was her desk partner – and got a lot more answers right when she thrust up her hand excitedly.

The rule that Mrs Hollybridge neglected to mention on her well-received (or not so) bulletin was the one concerning dormitories. It was common knowledge on campus – even to the brand-new freshmen that just oozed enthusiasm – that there were to be no members of the opposite sex in your dormitory. Susannah and I – now sophomores – had found that out the hard way, when my dorm advisor had waltzed into my room to find Susannah there instead, watching television. I still have cramp in my wrist from where I had to write lines.

Not that lines had stopped Susannah, of course. She visited me quite regularly after that, showing her underwear to the cat-calling footballers I shared a dorm block with. Often it was so that she could copy up whatever she didn't understand or had been to busy creating a mass army of paper aeroplanes to write down from Biology, but tonight it was to drool over the man she had seen across the courtyard.

"I was surprised not to see him in Social Studies, weren't you Jess?" she asked me, whilst I looked over my Biology notes. "Jess? Jesse!"

My head snapped up to attention, only to realise what she had been talking about, and droop again. "I suppose. Perhaps he's just a visitor?"

"He seems like the Social Studies type," Susannah mused, mostly to herself. She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on my bed, like a bored child. She then stopped and leant over my shoulder to snatch my biology notes from my hands.

"Continuous data should be displayed in a line graph," she read aloud. "As the categories flow from one to the other – for example, height. There are no set limits to the highest and lowest amounts." She scoffed. "We did variation today?"

"Yes," I said impatiently. "We did."

"But I thought we did homeostasis."

"We did," I said again. "This was a revision lesson, being the first of the semester." Understanding spread across her face.

"Oh." She scanned through the rest of my notes quickly, and I watched her pupils dart from one side of the page to another quicker than wildfire. She was intelligent, I knew – I saw snippets of her wit everyday – but she tended to be a lot more reserved in class, and instead poke fun towards the school traditions and its teachers. She wrapped her legs around me from the back and whispered in my ear: "Piggy-back to the door?"

I laughed and disposed of my notes, holding onto her ankles and standing up from the bed. Susannah swung like a monkey and I spun around and around, and for a moment it was like it was just the two of us in the world, spiralling in circles again and again.

And then we reached the door, and she hopped off my back like a rider hopped down from his horse, and blew me kiss, before opening the door and leaving. I sighed. That was all I'd be getting from Susannah for now.

And for now, that was enough.


"Susannah!" I yelled, banging with my fist on her dormitory door. "Susannah! We have biology in fifteen minutes!"

I tended to act as her alarm clock every morning, refusing to enter her dormitory – which she shared with a rock chick named Cassie, and both of them had a disregard for the launderette – and instead choosing to beat on the wood and call her name until she appeared at the door sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired.

"God," she said, when she eventually emerged in her uniform with her satchel thrown across her back and a hairbrush in her hand trying to tame the wild beast that was her hair. "Couldn't you just IM me or something every morning?"

"I find this way is more effective," I replied, as Susannah struggled with an apparently stubborn knot in her wave of long brown hair. "Do you have your biology folder?"

She scoffed. "No," she said. "Today we have a cover, which means he probably won't have any idea what he's doing and we'll spend the entire hour just messing with his head. We won't be doing any work." I shrugged, deciding she was probably right. Professor Lipman tended to employ bald-headed old men who still wore braces attached to their trousers, but didn't know how to teach in the modern age. These were Susannah's favourite types of lessons – the ones where she never actually had to do anything.

Thanks to my wake-up call, we were early for our first class, and our fellow students were still queuing outside the lab. I unzipped my bag and rummaged for my folder, rummaging for my notes.

"Biological form and function is created from and is passed on to the next generation by genes, which are the primary units of inheritance," I read aloud, and Susannah yawned in response. I scowled. "It's important you know these things, Susannah," I scolded her. "Don't you want to be a marine biologist?"

"Yes," Susannah said. "But I want to have a life, unlike you." Her words were out of her mouth before she could stop them, and I was stung instantly. I sighed, and put my notes back in my bag.

"I see," I said stiffly. Susannah looked pleadingly at me.

"Oh Jesse, I didn't mean that, I'm so sorry. Jesse-" I refused to make contact with her, and instead spotting something a little more interesting. The man in the suit from across the courtyard was coming closer. He was obviously a student of Biology, or so I thought, anyway, until he pulled a clipboard from his bag and headed straight for Susannah.

"You would be Miss Simon, then?" he asked, glancing down at his list, and Susannah stopped babbling her apologies to me at once, whirling around to face him. I suppose he was handsome – in the way Susannah's favourite boy-banders were, with their chiselled cheekbones and tortured eyes. Susannah blushed – a rare occurrence – and nodded. The man grinned. He stuck out a hand.

"Professor Lipman told me to keep an eye out for you – the one who never shuts up. It's nice to meet you, Miss Simon." Susannah shook his hand mindlessly, blinking bewilderedly at him. He dropped her petite hand and nodded at me. "I'll let you get back to your boyfriend now."

Susannah gasped, obviously embarrassed. "He's not my boyfriend!" she cried out, causing me to roll my eyes and turn scarlet. "He's just my Jesse friend… I mean my friend Jesse. My Jesse friend called Jesse." She cringed.

"Hello there, Jesse friend," he said, with a pitying smile to me.

"Are you taking Biology this year?" I asked him, and he threw his head back, erupting with raucous laughter.

"Not at all, Jesse!" he said, his charming grin turning Susannah to jelly beside me. "No, I'm Paul Slater."

"Paul Slater," Susannah repeated softly.

He nodded. "I'm going to be your teacher this semester."