As Marco finished getting dressed (which included wrapping his leg in a tourniquet), he left his room and walked down the stairs to the living room. His parents were up now, and they were preparing what looked like a feast for breakfast. Marco guessed it had to do with the breakdown he had when he saw them for the first time the night before, and how Star had to explain to them that he'd been trapped in another dimension "for a while". After hearing that, his parents had coddled him a lot more than he would have liked, and they were probably making the giant breakfast as some sort of welcome back gesture.
Marco sat at the table and looked at the piles of pancakes and eggs. He hadn't seen this much food since he rescued that village from the Gar'bun'ka pirates. The villagers' food had been half-rotten, but he ate it gladly considering he'd been starving for a week. His mother put another plate down (french toast?) and then handed him an empty plate to fill with whichever food he wanted.
"Eat up, Honey! I don't know what they made you eat in that other place, but it can't be as good as your dad's french toast!"
Well, she wasn't wrong. Marco took a piece of french toast and took a bite. It was delicious. He almost felt like crying. Here they were, enjoying these kingly pleasures, and he'd been to dozens of villages and towns that could barely make enough bread to feed their children. A pang of guilt hit him as his mom's expectant face stared him down. He took another bite.
It was just as delicious the second time, but his mother didn't seem to get that impression from his face. "Are you okay, Marco?"
Marco managed a smile. "Yeah, it's delicious." His dad turned around to face him.
"Oh, we know it is. But are you okay?" His dad pointed a spoon at him for emphasis.
Marco smiled at him the best he could. "Yeah, I'm just a little bugged out by all the food." It was as close to honesty as he was willing to give them. The last thing he wanted was everyone stepping on eggshells around him.
A frown spread across his mother's face. "No more adventures for a little bit, okay? I don't want you to get lost again. You neither, Star." She asked it like it was a request, but the stern look in her eyes told them it was an order.
"Okay, Mrs. Diaz." Star pulled Marco's scissors out of her bag and handed them to his mom.
"Thank you. You'll get these back in a week, okay? And when you go adventuring from now on, please try to be more careful?"
"Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely." Star rigorously nodded her head in a way that was just catering to his mom, but it cheered her up anyway. In a second, the tension dissolved.
"Good! Now, let's eat some breakfast!" His mom grabbed a plate and started shovelling food on to it.
Marco grabbed a couple pancakes and started eating them. He felt like he was eating them too slow, but he watched everyone else and tried to keep pace with them instead. The pancakes were really good, but he kept thinking to the parents who died to feed their children in the Plains of Wrath. Somehow that made the pancakes taste a little worse.
"Oh, look at the time!" His mom started picking plates off the table. "You're gonna miss the bus again if you don't hurry!"
That prompted Star to jump to her feet and run up the stairs. Marco followed and went up into his room. The notebooks were still scattered by the side of the bed, so he gathered them up into his backpack and double checked that he had everything. He barely remembered what he needed, but all his textbooks and notebooks and a few pencils sounded about right.
He left his room with the backpack hanging from his shoulder and watched as Star scrambled around for her things. As soon as she was satisfied, she grabbed Marco's hand and pulled him down the stairs and out the door. Marco watched as the bus pulled away and Star groaned.
"Well, we missed the bus. Looks like we'll have to stay home today," Marco said, hoping for the best.
"Alright, time to run!" she said before grabbing Marco again and bolting down the street. Marco followed closely behind her and the feeling of being dragged around by Star felt almost nostalgic. He'd missed this. A big smile spread across his face as they raced back to the school and he even laughed a bit.
Apparently that was exactly what Star needed, because even she began to relax (he hadn't even noticed how tense she was) and started actuallyracing him. Marco smiled and they chased after each other until they made it to the entrance to the school. Marco knew he could beat Star, even with his flabby old body, but he had no idea where the school was, so he trailed just a little behind her the whole way. When she reached the edge of the stairs at the entrance of the school, Star smiled teasingly.
"Wow. Riding that dragon-cycle so long must've made you lazy," she said, punching his arm teasingly. "It's okay. Once we get the scissors back, we'll have plenty of places to run to."
"And away from," Marco added.
"Yeah, but we've got each other's back."
Marco had heard that line before a hundred times, and his first thought was of all the times in the shifting chaos of alliances that was Heckapoo's dimension that he'd been betrayed. But this was Star! In an instant, all the feelings of distrust that surfaced were gone as he remembered that she was the whole reason he started the quest to begin with, and the whole reason he came back. He could trust her.
"Yeah, you're right. There would be nothing to worry about." Between his expertise and Star's magic, they'd probably be unstoppable in every dimesnion.
A loud ringing came from the school. Star jumped a little at the sound and raced inside.
Marco walked up after her and took in the sight of the school. His memory had twisted it somewhat, and he didn't even realize it. It was the little details that he forgot, like the scuffs on the rail where some idiots had skateboarded too many times, or the faded letters along the entrance.
After a moment, he walked through the building. Star caught his wandering gaze, and she ran up to him.
"Marco! Come on! We're gunna be late!" She pulled him over to what must have been his first class and pushed him to his seat. He sat, and looked around at the classroom.
"Star, what class is this?" he asked.
"Uh, did you sleep at all last night? It's History." History? God he hoped there would be some kind of review today, because he had no idea what he was even supposed to be studying. After the bell rang again, the teacher stood up from her desk and spoke to the class.
"Alright everyone, I hope you've been studying." She held up a pile of papers and started to pass them out. They were taking a quiz today.
Marco looked down at the paper handed to him. It was complete gibberish. Literally. When had he forgotten how to read English? He briefly tried to remember the last time he'd even seen English in its written form, and realized it hadn't shown up once in his entire 16 year journey. By the time he'd gotten a journal, he'd learnt Riradesh and it was so much easier and faster to write than English (a single symbol could represent an entire sentence or phrase) that he only wrote a few entries in English before switching over. The teacher's voice brought him out of his thoughts.
"You have fifteen minutes. Books on the floor."
Oh. Right. The quiz. He looked back down at it. Several words seemed familiar, but there was no way he was going to translate this in the fifteen minutes they got to work on the thing. At least it was multiple choice.
Marco had two options before him. The first was to answer each question randomly and the second was to get his answers from the people who understood what was even on the page. He figured he'd be better off trusting his classmates' knowledge than random luck, and so he took a deep breath and looked down at his paper again.
Out of the corners of his eyes he could see the papers of the people next to him, and he noticed that they both had circled the second answer on the first question. He quickly did the same and then looked to the second question. This time, they had two different answers. He bit his lip and decided that the person farther ahead in the quiz was probably more knowledgeable in the subject.
Switching to just copying that student, he finished the quiz with five minutes to spare. Marco stared back down at the paper and tried to read it again. He knew the word at the top, before a long line, must have been "name", but he only knew that because it made sense, not because he was actually reading it. The teacher called that the time was up and started collecting the quizzes from everyone. Some students complained that they didn't get to finish.
"If you didn't have enough time to answer all the questions, then you obviously didn't know the material," she said, "and also, there were three versions of the quiz, so if you cheated off another person, I'll know." She shot Marco a sharp look and he felt his stomach drop.
She knew. She knew and he was going to fail.
"Now why don't you all get together with your reading partners and read the next chapter together while I grade these. Then, we'll go over the answers together."
Marco swallowed uneasily. He didn't really know how long he would have been able to pretend he could read English, but he didn't like the idea of the entire class finding out on the first period of his first day back.
"Marco! Pssst! Come sit by me!" Star excitedly whispered at him from the other side of the class. She gestured for him to come and sit in the seat beside her. Marco grabbed his backpack with all the books in it and walked over to her.
"Hey," Marco said, attempting to sound like his whole world wasn't about to crash down on him.
"Wanna do it the usual way?" she asked.
"Uh, yeah. Sure." Marco hoped the usual way was just Star reading out loud to him, though he doubted it.
"What's wrong?" Star frowned and scooted her desk against his.
"I…" He couldn't say it. There was something just so dehumanizing about telling someone he didn't know how to read.
Star bit her lip and then smiled understandingly at him. "Wanna start the chapter?" She pulled out a textbook and put it on her desk.
"Y-yeah. Sure." He looked down as she opened up to a page with a big picture on it of some painting of a battle. She turned the page and the next one was covered in words and Marco realized that there was no way he was going to make it through the day. Star turned her attention to Marco expectantly and he realized he was supposed to read first. Great. He looked back down at the page at started at the top left (that was how English worked, right? He remembered that, at least), putting his finger under the first word and attempting to wrack his brain for what it meant. Yeah, there was no way he was translating this on the spot.
"I-... er...um…" He mumbled under his breath for a long moment, sliding his finger across the words in an attempt to imitate reading.
"Marco, you look like you're about to cry…" Star looked worriedly at him.
"I-I'm just feeling a little under the weather. Still adjusting to Earth's climate, I guess," he lied, hoping that was enough to drop the subject. It wasn't.
"Whatever it is, you can tell me…" She stared him down and it forced an answer out of him.
"I- I can't say it out loud." He was being honest, at least. The second he said it out loud, that made it real, and way too big for him to handle right now.
"You can write it down." Star handed him a paper and Marco felt like he was going to throw up. She looked at him expectantly and he couldn't take it anymore.
He ran out the classroom door and into the hallway. He wasn't sure where he was headed, but anywhere was better than where that conversation was taking him.