Hello everyone! I am here with the second chapter! Enjoy reading!
I do not own Pokémon in any way!
Chapter 2: A Heartless Hedgehog and a Plan
"Mr. Shinji?" asked my father once I told him whom I got for my homeroom teacher. "As in Paul Shinji?!"
"How am I supposed to know his first name?" I replied in annoyance.
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me in the eye.
"Gary Junior," he said. "If it turned out to be Paul Shinji, then that would be ridiculously hilarious!"
"Who is this Paul Shinji anyways?" I asked, crossing my arms. I was ignored.
"I mean, if Paul actually ended up going in education. Hah! Paul? In education?" My father started to laugh. "Oh wow. Hey, when's meet the teacher day at your school?" he asked all of a sudden.
"Uhh.. I dunno," I replied, hoping he would never figure out that he could have an appointment booked with any teacher any time. "Um, I'm going upstairs now. Homework on the first day. Better get started!" I quickly dashed upstairs to my room.
"Sounds like something Paul would do," I heard my father mumble to himself. And then I heard no more.
I plopped onto my bed with a frustrated sigh. Mr. Shinji was not at all as I had expected. I was hoping for a teacher like Mr. Snape from Harry Potter or maybe Filch. But those were just fictional characters. In reality, he was just a bored looking guy in probably his mid-thirties, who would have rather been anywhere but the classroom. Very boring.
Flashback:
I entered the classroom followed by Angelica and looked around. I had expected to find myself facing a mean looking teacher who'd start lecturing me about his classroom rules or something. But I only saw students laughing and talking, just like in a normal classroom. Was the teacher even in the room? Yes. I finally spotted him sitting at the teachers desk in the corner, rubbing his temples, as if he had a headache.
"Good morning!" Angelica said to him sweetly, but he did not reply.
I took a seat at a desk at the front of the room and Angelica sat down beside me.
After about ten or twenty minutes later, the teacher stood up with a paper in his hands and started calling out names for attendance. He went through the list for a while until, finally, he reached me.
"Juliet Nikki?"
"Here!" called out a girl from somewhere behind me.
"Ga—" Mr. Shinji suddenly stopped.
He looked at the paper as if it were the most ridiculous thing he had ever seen. He had stopped at my name, I knew. But why my name? Was there a problem?
He finally looked up.
"Gary Junior Oak?"
"Here!" I called out. He got a good look at me before he continued on with attendance.
After going through all the names, he put a stack of papers in front of Angelica, telling her to pass one to each student. Once I got a paper, I realized it had a list of what I needed for class, and on the other side, there were the classroom rules. He told us to read the paper specifically "in your head". Talk about lazy. He could have just read them out to us himself.
Because he was our math teacher too, he wrote some stuff on the board for homework. Then, he went back to his desk looking all bored again.
I stared at the ceiling. Would he even react if we pranked him? I decided to phone Stem and tell him to forget about the prank.
"Hello?" Stem's brother, Root, picked up the phone.
"Hi. Is Stem there?" I asked, pacing around my room impatiently.
"One sec. I'll go look…."
"Tell him I'm not home," I heard Stem's voice say.
"Okay. Stem's not ho—"
"I HEARD YOU STEM!" I shouted in the phone, cutting Root off. (Pun not intended.)
"Darn it," I heard Stem say. "Hello?"
"Hey, Stem," I said. Before I could continue, Stem started to speak.
"Okay, listen," he said urgently. "I'm really busy right now so we'll talk at school. Don't worry, I've got a prank planned. Just leave everything to me. Got it? Bye."
"Don't I get to know what the prank is?" I exclaimed. "We were in this together!"
But my friend had already cut off.
With a groan, I plopped back onto my bed, letting the phone drop to the floor. It didn't break.
I did my homework (of last year's review), and went to sleep at nine o'clock.
My alarm woke me up, as usual. Grumpy sister. Got ready for school. Grabbed a cookie on the way out the house. And so on, and so forth. It had become a daily routine by now. I reached the school building at six forty-nine. I was halfway inside my classroom when another presence made its way beside me.
"Hi!" exclaimed Angelica cheerfully. "What a coincidence! We came at the same time!"
Oh great. Not her again.
"Hello, Angelica," I grumbled. She didn't seem to sense my annoyance. She followed me all the way to where we had sat last time.
"I'm so glad you're here!" she cried. "Last night, I was almost afraid you wouldn't come. Because who would've been my friend then, right? But here you are! And here I am! And now we can stay best buddies!"
She looked at me. I looked at her. She was wearing a light pink button-up sweater and a lacy white knee-length skirt. Her pink socks went up to her knees, and her hair was done in her usual pink bow. I just wore a black t-shirt and faded jeans.
"Let's get this over with," I heard the teacher mumble to himself. He stood up and took attendance. Once he was done, instead of saying anything, he just wrote some equations on the board.
"Do it," was all he said. He then sat back down.
What kind of teacher was this anyways?
"Mr. Shinji?" a brunette with a red headband called out. "Aren't you going to explain how to do it?"
"You should know how to do it," he replied. "It should be last year's review."
"Oh come on!" shouted someone, and a bunch of students started yelling at the same time.
"Okay, okay!" Mr. Shinji stood up again, looking extremely annoyed. "Fine. I'll explain."
And then he explained, though he looked like he thought this was a waste of his time.
"One thing you should all remember is BEDMAS. Brackets, exponents, divide, multiply, add, and subtract. Now here, we see a five, and beside it in brackets is a sixteen, so we multiply—"
"I thought we do brackets first!" called out a boy with messy red hair. "Why are you multiplying?"
"Because when it's written like this"—the teacher pointed to 5(16)—"we multiply it."
"Say, whaaaat?" someone said.
Mr. Shinji ignored him. "So who can tell me what five times sixteen is?"
We all started pulling out our calculators. The teacher face-palmed.
"Do you seriously need a calculator for this?" he mumbled.
"Eighty!" I called out.
"Please raise your hand."
I raised my hand.
"Eighty!" I called out again. Mr. Shinji looked like he was about to say something, but then he let it go.
"Good." He wrote down eighty. "Now since there are no more brackets, we move on to exponents. There are two exponents: two squared, and five to the third power. We all know that two squared is four and that five to the third power is one hundred twenty-five, so— Yes?"
I noticed that Angelica had raised her hand.
"You made a mistake, Sir," she said. "Five times three is fifteen."
"Five times three and five to the third power are two completely different things!" he exclaimed exasperatedly, as if stating the obvious.
And it went on like that for the entire class time.
Break time soon approached, and I had managed to get rid of Angelica. I walked around the school, trying to locate Stem and my other friends. I spotted all three hanging out just outside the building.
"Hey, guys," I said casually, walking to where they were. "What's up?"
"Well, according to my observations, there are multiple cumulonimbus clouds up," said Tom Ato in a matter of fact tone. "And I am sure there are also many particles floating about and a great variety of—"
"I get it, I get it!" I laughed.
Unlike his father, Tom had a very serious nature and was obsessed with science. He had black hair that fell to his forehead and always wore a blue and white cap. He was wearing thin glasses over his brown eyes, and an open navy-blue jacket over a white shirt and ironed blue jeans. He was the shortest among the four of us.
Watergem, on the other hand, was a rather sarcastic, tomboyish girl. Unlike her mother's fiery orange hair, she had light blue hair tied back in a ponytail that ran down her back like a waterfall. Maybe that's why her name was Watergem. She had green eyes and was wearing a white t-shirt with a picture of a happy-face emoji, along with jean shorts and black and white cleats.
Stem was wearing his usual green t-shirt and jeans.
"So what's the plan?" I asked Stem.
Instead of replying, the boy squinted his eyes and looked past my shoulder. "Who's that?"
I turned around and groaned. Skipping towards us, as happy as usual, was Angelica, now accompanied by two other kids. One I recognized as the girl in my class with the red headband. On her shirt was written 'Be the Cool Noodle' and had a picture of a bowl of noodles wearing sunglasses.
Uhh. What.
The second one, I didn't recognize. He had green hair, green eyes, and was wearing an open black leather jacket over a violet-coloured shirt. His hands were shoved in his pockets in a carefree manner.
"There you are!" exclaimed Angelica, running ahead of the other two. "I was looking everywhere! Oh, so you made some new friends for our friendship group? What a coincidence!"
I was starting to hate that phrase now.
"I made new friends for our friendship group too!"
My three actual friends were all staring at me with their eyebrows raised as if waiting for an explanation. I sighed.
"Guys, this is Angelica. She's a girl in my class," I explained.
"I'm his best friend," she added with a big smile.
Talk about embarrassing...
"This is Rosie," she said while gesturing to the brunette. "And this is Shu." She gestured to the green-headed boy who flipped his hair in greeting.
"What are your names?" She looked at my friends with expectant eyes.
Tom looked uncomfortable, Watergem just stared, but I saw a glint in Stem's eyes. I knew that glint too well; something was up.
"Hello Angelica!" exclaimed Stem, overly cheerful. "My name is Stem. This is Tomato and this is Water-gym!"
Watergem glared at him and Tom's face turned red. Hah. Now he really looked like a tomato.
"Oh, but did you say you were his best friend?" Stem continued in fake shock. "I thought I was his best friend. We always hang out together."
"Oh." Angelica looked slightly downcast. Stem's smile grew wider when he saw that I was getting annoyed.
"Hey! Maybe we both could be his best friends!" he said.
"Yeah!" The girl's eyes were shining again. "Ooh, this is going to be great!"
"No!" I shouted, before she could speak any further.
"Huh?"
I gritted my teeth together. Keep it cool. But this was getting too much….
"I've had enough of this," I said to Angelica. "I don't recall agreeing that we be friends. I don't recall agreeing that you follow me around everywhere I go, and pester me with all that girly talk of yours! I don't recall agreeing to any of this friendship blah blah blah-ness! I already have my own friends and I'm fine with them. So stop following me and leave me alone!"
I clenched my fists. "So just leave me alone."
There was a stunned silence. And there was Angelica, her eyes shining. Not with happiness, but with hurt.
"You—" she choked out, fighting back tears. "You— I thought you were my friend!"
Silence followed.
"You—" And then her tears poured out, quite like a waterfall. "How could you?! After all I've done. I thought you— You betrayed me! You treated me like I was all a joke, like I didn't matter! You—"
Okay, now she was so overreacting.
"You're a betrayer!" she cried. "You're a meanie! You're a heartless… a heartless hedgehog! That's what you are! You're unbelievable!"
I just stood there stiffly.
A heartless hedgehog? But my hair wasn't even spiky…. How could she call me a heartless hedgehog?
"I'm done being friends with you!" she shouted. Then she turned away and ran off.
"Angelica! Wait!" cried Rosie. Casting a glance at me, she ran off after the girl.
We all looked at Shu, who was left standing there. He shrugged a carefree shrug. Then, after another flip of his hair, he just walked off.
Watergem blinked. "Okay then," she said.
"Stem Man does it again," muttered Stem.
I blinked. Guilt washed over me. I didn't think Angelica would get so upset. What have I done?
"Hey, aren't you gonna ask me what I mean?" Stem asked me. "Gary Junior?"
I turned away.
And she called me a heartless hedgehog. Was all that hair gel just a waste? My hair wasn't spiky. It was never meant to be. But she was just saying as she saw it, wasn't she? Did that mean my hair looked like a hedgehog?
"Hello? Earth to Gary Junior!" Watergem waved her hand in front of me.
"Do you want me to tell you the plan for the prank?" asked Stem when I didn't respond.
"Sure," I said. But I didn't pay attention to a word my buddy said.
I felt my hair with my hand. It didn't feel spiky….
"So yeah. That's the plan," Stem concluded. "Genius, huh?"
"Uh, right," I replied distractedly.
Stem laughed. "I didn't even say the plan! I just said random words and you—"
The bell rang, signalling the end of break time.
"I'm going to class. Bye," I said. And without waiting for a reply, I headed off.
"What's up with him?" I heard Watergem ask. Tom said something in reply, but I didn't hear what.
I didn't have any other classes today with Angelica, so I managed. It sure had been a busy day today at school.
And done! Wow, that took longer to write than I had expected! I hope you enjoyed it. R&R and have a great day!
