Marco raced past doors that all looked the same. It only made it more frustrating that he couldn't tell what was on the signs labeling them. And so he just kept running, maybe in circles or maybe to an exit or something else, until he saw the cafeteria in front of him. He slowed to a stop and caught his breath.

He walked into the empty room, sat down at a table, and started to hyperventilate.

He couldn't read. Like 90% of Earth's society revolved around reading. You couldn't go five feet without having to use a sign or get a text or read something. Marco closed his eyes tight. He was going to be a burden to everyone. He had hopped out of a world he had conquered, and into a world where he was just a little kid crying in a cafeteria.

"Marco?" Star's voice echoed a little despite her quiet tone.

Marco looked up at her. She was holding a paper in one hand and his backpack in the other.

"What are you doing here?" he managed.

"I went to find you in the utility closet, but you weren't there," she said. Marco then remembered how he used to hide in that closet whenever he wanted to escape the craziness of the school, and realized that if he'd been able to read which door it was, he probably would have hidden there instead.

"I couldn't find it."

Star sat down next to him and put his backpack on the table. "When you left, I told the teacher you were sick," she explained, "and she told me to go check on you. She also wanted me to give you this."

Star handed the paper to Marco and he realized it was his quiz. There were red circles across half the questions. "She said you can retake it tomorrow, if you want."

"It wouldn't matter." Marco stared down at the paper. It was still all gibberish.

Star bit her lip. After a moment, she pointed at the top of the paper. "What's this? It looks familiar." Marco looked up at his name and wanted to slam his head into the table.

"It's my name." In the Ancient Tongue. He didn't even realize he'd written his name down like that.

"It looks cool, it's like the writing on the scissors." Oh. She couldn't read his name on the scissors either, could she.

"They're the same thing. It's one of the languages I learned in Heckapoo's dimension." He took a deep breath. "Its one of the only two written languages there."

"Is that why you can't read English anymore?"

Marco froze. Either she could read him well enough to tell, or it was just that obvious. God, it was all crashing down on him.

"Hey, hey. It'll be okay." Star put an arm around his shoulder and smiled at him. Marco felt tears pool in his eyes.

"I'm going to fail all my classes, Star. I'll have to stay back, my whole life will fall behind and I'll be useless and weak and-" Marco sucked in a breath and Star wrapped him in a tight hug.

"I'm gonna teach you English," she stated, filled with determination.

"Really?" He couldn't imagine Star being any sort of teacher or even a tutor.

"How hard could it be?" She pulled away from the hug and smiled confidently at him.

Marco still didn't buy it.

"It could take years…"

"You knew how to read it before, didn't you? It's like riding a warnicorn! You never forget, you just gotta muster up the courage to get on the saddle again." Star pulled out a paper and pencil.

"You want to start now?" Marco said incredulously. It seemed a little ridiculous to just start after he'd had a mental breakdown.

"No time like the present! Ready to read?"

"I guess." Marco took a deep breath and looked down at the paper. This was the first step toward getting better. Star started writing down a long string of symbols, which he assumed where letters.

"Okay, the first step to learning English is the Alphabet. There's twenty-something of these little guys called," She paused dramatically, "Letters."

Marco started seriously regretting having Star take on this daunting task. She continued explaining enthusiastically.

"Now, the trick is, not all of them are useful. Like Q, for example. When are you going to use that? It makes you question why they have it there in the first place!" Star then laughed at herself when she realized she'd said something funny, and Marco sat there confused.

"This isn't the time for grammar jokes, Star." This was serious business. "And I doubt English is that broken."

"That was a fluke, I'm sorry," Star said through giggles.

"Why don't you just start with my name? You know, like something easy?" Marco didn't want to be so patronizing. After all, Star was going out of her way to do this and she was trying her best. Luckily, she didn't seem to take offense.

"Great idea, Marco! And thus the Student becomes the Master." She stroked her chin mock-thoughtfully.

"I don't think there ever was a master," he said. Star brushed off his comment, but not before pouting at him.

"Okay, let's get serious now." She wrote a word down on the paper that was supposedly his name. "See? Mar-co!" she said, pointing at the two halves of the word. "Now you try."

She handed the pencil to Marco and he copied the word.

"Okay, do it again," she urged. Marco copied the word again. Somehow this felt like a punishment rather than a lesson. He didn't think he was actually learning what made the word his name.

"English is phonetic, right?" Marco asked. "Can't you just teach me the letters' sounds, useless and all?"

"How about we start with the letters in your name?" Star suggested. "Like a compromise."

Marco looked down at the paper, where his name was written 3 times, and nodded. "It's a good place to start."

Star smiled giddily and pointed down at the paper. "The first letter is M. It makes an mmm sound, like Mmm-arco, or mmmagic, or, uh, nammme." She wrote down the first symbol and Marco copied it.

"Okay, so it'd be at the front of 'magic', and in the middle of 'problematic' or 'punishment'," Marco said, trying to get a feel for the placement. In Riradesh, it was a jumbled mess if you went with the phonetic glyphs, because you just combined the phonetics into the same glyph, which led to a lot of meanings for the same glyph.

"Uh… yeah!" Star had apparently spelled out the larger words in her head. "Exactly. The next letter is A." She pointed to the next letter in his name. "A's a vowel, so it has, like, a bunch of different sounds it can make?" She shrugged for emphasis. "It can be an 'ah' like M-ah-rco, or an 'ay' like p-ay-per, or probably a bunch of other ways it can be pronounced, especially when it's mixed with other vowels."

"Sounds confusing," Marco said, trying to figure out how the hell this was supposed to be his first lesson.

"Yeah, okay. Maybe that's stuff we don't have to worry about yet. Let's just say that A makes an 'ah' or 'ay' sound for now." She wrote the letter down on the paper and Marco copied it. "Good! M and A make a 'mah' sound, see? Like mah-rco."

"Yeah, I get it." Marco tried to not feel like a little kid. Star was kind of switching between using too loose and too complex terms and just treating him like a baby. Even though it felt dehumanizing, he'd rather the baby terms than the complex ones. It hurt his pride even more if he felt lost in the lesson.

"The next letter is R, and that makes an 'err' sound-"

"As in Mah-err-co," he interrupted.

"Yeah!" Star wrote the letter down. "See? It's the third letter in your name."

Marco copied the letter and looked up at her. "What's next?"

"C, which makes a 'cuh' sound."

"Got it. M-ah-err-cuh-o. Makes sense so far." Okay, maybe this wouldn't be too hard. "What's the last one?"

"This one's O, which can be pronounced as 'oh' or 'oo'." Star wrote the last letter down and Marco copied it. He looked down at his name again.

"So, someone could think my name is either Marco or M-ay-rc-oo, if they had never heard it before?" Star frowned and looked at his name again and then laughed.

"Yeah, I guess so!" She had probably never even thought of it that way. "My name has an A in it, too, so I guess I have the same problem. It could be Star or Stare."

Marco smiled and was glad he'd gotten it so easily. It might not actually take years if he could get the basics down alright. It would still probably take a few months though, and he didn't know if he could survive that long without being able to read and write.

An idea hit him. "Star, isn't there some sort of spell you could use to teach me English all at once?"

Apparently it wasn't as good of an idea as he'd thought it was. Star's smile fell and she scratched awkwardly at her arm.

"Probably... but, Ludo has the spellbook and Glossaryck, remember?"

It took a moment for Marco to realize what she'd meant. He wracked his brain for the memories of a large spellbook getting taken, but it was just a fragment of a memory that remained, where he had an image of Star sobbing on his shoulder after she'd lost them. He realized that they had never gotten them back.

"Oh… uh, sorry," he whispered. He hadn't meant to dig up what was probably a fresh wound for Star (when had Glossaryck been kidnapped? Was it months or days ago?) but apparently the damage was already done.

Star opened her mouth to reply, but the words were overcome by a loud bell ringing through the halls. As the sound died out, she said, "Um... we have to go to second period."

Marco sighed. "I don't suppose you can stop time so I can learn this frustrating language before class?"

Star looked at him like he had three heads. "You don't remember that at all?"

"Remember what?"

"The last time we stopped time, it was a huge hassle to get it restarted again. It was like, this whole thing."

Marco thought back. Yeah, nothing was coming up. "Nope. Don't remember. I'll take your word for it though." He shrugged. They'd gone through so many random adventures that most of them kind of blended together across the years. He probably had some sort of memory of the adventure she was talking about, like a terrifying moment or something, but he didn't remember the part of it that specifically involved time.

Something seemed to click in Star's head, though. He could see it on her face. Her lips made a silent 'oh' and her eyes went wide. It was like she had really taken in the fact that Marco was gone for 16 perilous years, the fact that their adventures had become his childhood memories, blurred and far away in his mind, and just how deep this all went.

"Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry," she whispered, her eyes tearing up. Marco wanted to say it was okay, but she pulled him into a hug and squeezed him like she was afraid of losing him, and Marco felt a couple of tears pool in his own eyes.

"I-It's okay, Star," he assured, barely able to breathe through the hug. She loosened up a little.

"But you were there because of my stupid scissors! You have to deal with all that because... because-"

"Because I'm stubborn," Marco interrupted, "Don't put this on you. Playing her game was my choice." Granted, it had become a forced choice after the only time Heckapoo had offered him a way home, but he'd still made the original decision. Marco slowly pulled out of the hug to look her in the eyes. "I can deal with the repercussions. Besides, I have a great teacher to help me."

A blush spread across Star's face. "Really? You think so?"

"Really." She wasn't the best at teaching, but Marco knew that most people would've given up on him already. Her dedication made her irreplaceable as both a tutor and a friend.

"Are you gonna be okay for the rest of the day, though?"

"I'll manage somehow," Marco said, trying to look as confident as he could. "What's the next class?"

"Miss Skullnick's Trig. I'm in that one, too," Star said. Good. She could help him through the class if he needed it. What was trig again, though? The word bounced across his brain and he couldn't place it.

"Thank god."

"Are you sure you don't wanna just call out sick?" She asked. Marco shook his head.

"No. It'll be awkward and uncomfortable no matter when I go to class. I might as well get a feel for them now."

"Well, okay. But just remember, if anything bothers you, find me. I'll help you through it."

Marco smiled. "Thanks. Will do."

Star stood and reached a hand out to him. "We should go. We're gonna be late." Marco took her hand and they walked out of the cafeteria and into the crowded hallway. Even though it would be tough, they'd make it through alright.