"Is it supposed to smell like that?" Maria asked doubtfully, wrinkling her nose up in disgust.

We stared down at our apple pie. At least, that's what it was supposed to be. The beautifully brown pastry, golden apple filling, and artfully crafted crust, topped with a thick glob of cream that was pictured in our textbooks bared no resemblance to the monstrosity in front of us. Our blackened pastry was cracked, the apple filling oozing out of it like pus. It was clear that no amount of whipped cream or custard would be enough to make it look remotely appetising.

"I don't even know what that smell is." I admitted, biting my lip.

Okay. I hadn't tried baking anything remotely more exciting than rice-krispie buns in years. But even so, this was just a whole other level of bad. I cast my eye over to the girls at the table next to us - a tall, auburn-haired chipmunk, and a light-brown lynx with long black hair - who were adding the finishing touches to her own pie. It looked like the Instagram-version of the one in the book, heavily filtered, expertly edited, hashtag-foodporn, hashtag-aesthetic. Ours was clearly the Dark Web edition. "Just how did we get this so wrong?"

Maria shrugged nonchalantly, busy tracing patterns in the flour dusting the tabletop, calm as you please. Me? Ha. I cast an eye out for our teacher, Ms Barony. She was making her way across the room, her long skirts raised - making her way to our table, I realised, my stomach lurching involuntarily. I'd never really outgrown that phase of being terrified of teachers and getting in trouble with them.

"Maria! It's so good to see you cooking again, I know how much you've been missing it." she said in a tone that was just a little too exaggerated to sound totally sincere. She looked over at me, smile frozen in place. "And I'm happy to see a new face in the classroom!"

I looked down at my shoes. "Thank you Ms Barony." Gah. She was a nice teacher. I honestly didn't know if that was worse or not.

Pros: Won't shout at me and make me cry in front of everybody. Probably won't give a lot of homework so I can maybe start watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend this weekend.

Cons: Automatically feel like I should start apologising everytime I see her because of how inept I am, both as a Home Economics student and as a person in general.

Ms Barony glanced down at our pie. Her smile didn't waver, but her eyes widened slightly. "Ah girls, what a … valiant attempt! Truly!"

Maria and I exchanged a glance, Maria clearly struggling to hide her smile.

She bravely stooped down and sniffed it, immediately choking from the warm, sour pong. She quickly covered her nose with a gloved hand and backed away from the table, almost tripping in her haste. Maria stifled a giggle. I bit down - hard - on my tongue, my face flushing. Not for the first time in my life, I wished that a hole would appear in the ground and swallow me up.

Clearly at a loss for words, Ms Barony quickly moved on to the next table. Her cries of relief and over-the-top praises at the sight of the masterpiece belonging to our neighbours sent Maria into a further spiel of giggles.

"Ah … poor Vanilla." she said softly, when she'd finally recovered, shaking her head slightly. "I'm so bad at cooking. But nothing else works with my timetable."

"Vanilla?" I echoed.

"Ms Barony to you. But she's Cream's mother, and given all of the time we've spent in her house over the years, it's hard to think of her as a teacher-teacher."

"She's Cream's mother?"

The eyes should have done it. Wide, earnest, chocolate-brown.

"Yep! She used to babysit me when I was younger as well."

"Oh?"

"So I've known Cream since I was six, I guess. But I mean, most of us were in the same elementary and middle schools. I've known Shadow for almost my entire life, and Rouge and I have always been pretty close too." She smiled slyly at me. "That's Station Square for you though. I'm sure that Mobius was a whole other story."

I nodded. Not that I had a whole lot of experience from within the social scene back in the city, but I had almost seventeen years of observations in my belt. "Yeah, I mean, there were five other highschools besides mine, and twice as many middle and elementary schools. I can barely remember the names of anybody I went to elementary school with."

A big purple cat clutching a stuffed froggy toy. A pink fairy with a dreamy smile. An echidna with a zigzag marking on her forehead. Footfalls in the sun-kissed grass. The sound of laughter. The red plastic slide. Blackberry ice-pops.

Happier times.

I didn't know if I remembered their names or not. I tried not to think about it too much, to be honest. It gave me a headache. Truth be told, I couldn't really remember anything that had happened during elementary school. Middle school was much more vivid.

But Maria didn't have to know that.

"Wow! That's crazy!" Maria laughed, breaking my train of thought. "Like, take this class for example -" she gestured around the room. "There's about sixteen other kids in this class apart from the two of us, and I went to elementary school with almost everyone."

"Really?" I asked, feeling my chest tighten. I probably should have realised that the dynamics in a small school would be completely different to those back in the city, but for some reason my overactive brain hadn't picked up on this obvious issue. I placed my hand on the table, trying to keep my balance as the room tilted around me.

No, no, no.

I forced myself to breathe slowly - inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Not deep enough breaths to draw further attention to myself, but regular, rhythmic. The ground below my feet seemed to expand before my eyes. I forced myself to focus on a small piece of apple peel that I must have dropped.

"Yeah, everyone except Sally, I think." Maria said, from somewhere a million miles away.

"Sally?" I echoed weakly.

Maria nodded at the table next to ours, where a small group had gathered. I glanced back at the chipmunk I'd noticed earlier, who was now cutting her pie into slices and handing them out to people, flushing with pride.

"She went to an elementary school in Knothole. But even then I've known her since middle school. Hey Sally!"

Sally looked up at us and smiled. "Hey yourself! Do you guys want some pie? My mother's on a weird macrobiotic diet, so it won't get eaten at my house."

She quickly wrapped up two generous slices in clingfilm and handed them over to us. I accepted mine with shaking hands.

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it. Consider me a Welcome Wagon representative. You're new, right?"

"Yeah … I'm Amelia."

"Well, welcome to Station Square High, Amelia!" Sally smiled. "I'm Sally Acorn. That's my friend Nicole."

Nicole didn't react to her name. There were a pair of rainbow-striped earbuds poking out from under her beanie hat and she was bopping her head to the best of the music. Sally rolled her eyes and turned to look at Maria instead. "Hey Maria, anything new with you?"

Maria shook her head. "I've got ballet practice after school, but that's the height of it. I'm so glad that it's almost the weekend!"

"I know!" Sally laughed. "I can't wait!"

(Is it ridiculous that I was jealous of how well they could do small-talk? I mean seriously, how did people just have conversations with people like this? It was completely beyond me).

Ms Barony clapped her hands together from the front of the room. "Alright everyone, pack up your things! I want you to have this exercise described in your journals for Tuesday."

Sally pulled a face at us before going back to her desk. A crackly arpeggio sounded through the room - the bell, signalling the end of the day. Everybody automatically surged towards the door, slinging their bags across their shoulders. Ms Barony stood by her desk, wishing us a good weekend as we passed her. I waved sheepishly as Maria and I left the room.

I hoped, for her sake, that there was still time to switch classes.

I paused for a second outside the door, taking in the sea of students with wide eyes. Nowhere near as vast as at my old school, but it was all oh-so unfamiliar ...

Maria stopped as well, looking at me quizzically. "Do you need any help finding your locker?"

"Oh, um, no, I'm fine - "

Of course I wasn't fine. Far from it. Maria clearly picked up on this, because she insisted on walking down the hall alongside me. Even this was a foreign experience - I usually hung back from crowds, or anyone else really. Honestly I was itching to plug in my earphones right now and listen to whatever mix Spotify had come up with for the day (thank goodness that this school had free WiFi, honestly). It was all just so overwhelming. I couldn't remember the last time that I'd spoken to as many people in a month, let alone in a day, or the last time so many people had stared at me …

Though in fairness, even my own irrational brain was pretty sure that people were actually staring at the pie Maria was holding, rather than me myself.

"Hey, I never even asked, how did you find lunch?" Maria said.

"Oh … " I didn't know how enthusiastic I should sound. Was it cooler to sound detached and unimpressed? Why didn't they teach these things? But Maria's face was so open and earnest, that while my head was telling me to keep my distance, my gut feeling was to match her honesty.

As well as I could, anyway.

"I had a great time." I told her, genuinely. "Really. It was so nice of you to invite me over."

Maria shook her head. "Don't even worry about it, Amy. It must be hard, you know? New school and all that."

"Mhmm …" Ha! Understatement of the century.

Maria led me to the Sophomore locker area, a modestly sized alcove facing a notice board covered in colourful posters. The area was pretty clear, with everyone eager to get home for the weekend. Blaze was rummaging around for books, Silver leaning against the wall beside her. He caught a glimpse of us approaching and smiled.

"Hey guys!"

Blaze glanced at us too. "Oh good, Amy, you're still alive."

"Blaze," Maria huffed. "My cooking is not that bad."

Both she and Silver glanced down at the pie in Maria's hands.

"Okay, I will confess that today's attempt did not go according to plan." Maria admitted.

"I can't even tell what that's supposed to be." Silver said, in a tone which conveyed both high levels of disgust and curiosity.

"Apple-pie. Kind of." I answered lamely.

"I hope that for your sake, Amy, as well as Vanilla's, that you're making salad next week." Silver told me. It wasn't until Blaze staggered back from her locker, weighed down by the amount of books in her arms, that he managed to tear his eyes away from it. "Hey, Blaze, let me - "

"It's fine Silver, thank you." She interrupted, closing her locker door shut with her elbow. Silver looked as though he wanted to argue with her on that, but he let out a deep sigh and stayed silent as she side-stepped awkwardly past us.

"I'd love to stay and chat, but I've a huge Geography project that I'm behind on." She said apologetically. "I'll see you guys. It was nice to meet you Amy!"

She was halfway down the hall before what she said had fully sunken in. Silver scooped his bag up from the floor.

"How did you find Algebra, Amy?" He asked. "You were kind of thrown into the deep end there."

"I felt like Dany when she was brought to the Dothraki." I said. A weak reference, but Silver laughed in a way which seemed genuine.

"Mr Pine's a good teacher, though his methods take some getting used to." He confided. "But I'm sure that you'll catch up in no time."

That didn't seem very likely. Maths was like an alien dialect to me. I felt too awkward to say any of this, so I just smiled shyly in response. After throwing a few more jabs at Maria's culinary skills, he started jogging down the hall until he caught up with Blaze, and the two of them turned the corner together, disappearing out of our line of sight.

It was 4.10 PM - classes had been over for an entire ten minutes. Maria easily opened her locker and grabbed her books, while I fiddled with my own combination.

"Hey," Maria said, in a strange voice. "I'm sorry for kind of forgetting you at lunch."

"Oh …" I remembered her guilty expression from earlier. "No, it's really fine. You didn't owe me anything - "

"It wasn't really fair, though. It's just, I guess I get very caught up in my boyfriend when I'm with him."

"Shadow?"

"Yeah, that's him." In spite of her discomfort, her tone took on a lighter note when she mentioned him.

(Cute!)

"It's really fine!" I insisted, feeling guilty. I'd known that this would happen, that I'd inconvenience people … And of everyone that I could have done that to, Maria was the worst, because of just how nice she'd been to me.

Even if it was only because she felt sorry for me or something, she'd still tried. How could she possibly know how much that that meant to me?

She didn't look totally convinced, biting her lip, blue eyes wide. For a split second, the tables had turned. I was the one trying to put her at ease.

I found this oddly reassuring and grinned at her, "So, how long have you two been together?"

A little light returned to Maria's eyes - this was clearly a question that she loved to answer. "It'll be two years in February." she said shyly.

"Really?" I was genuinely impressed. I had no idea how long highschool relationships were supposed to last, but based on the kids in my old school, things tended to fizzle out within five months. Two years was an eternity in comparison.

She nodded, smiling widely now. "But we've been friends since forever, basically. We've lived on the same street our whole lives."

"That's … really cute."

Maria beamed at me. I smiled back. I waited for the voice in my head to say something to trigger my anxiety, to force me to retreat … but I only felt warmth.

It was then that Maria's phone began to buzz loudly.

"Ah jeeze, that's my grandfather. I have to run." Maria said, sounding genuinely disappointed. "I'll see you on Monday, Amy. Have a great weekend, okay?"

"Yeah … okay. You too" I smiled. She smiled back, taking a small step forward. For one wild moment I thought that she was going to pull me into a hug, but she was still holding the pie.

"I'm going to chuck this in the bin as soon as I get home." She vowed solemnly. "It was great meeting you, Amy. I'll see you next week!"

"Yeah … Goodbye Maria!"

"Bye!"

She began to run down the hall, buy before reaching the corner she turned back to look at me.

"Amy?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for being my partner today. Nobody ever wants to cook with me."

With that, she ran around the corner and out of sight.

I stood there for a couple of minutes, struggling to process how I felt …

It was only then that it really hit me. My first day was over. I'd survived my first day at my new school.

In fact, I did better than just survive it.

I could have taken advantage of the WiFi and listened to some music, but the thought didn't even cross my mind. I wandered down the long-empty hall without really seeing it, without really seeing anything.

I didn't see anything at all, in fact, until I stepped outside. There were only a few stragglers hanging by the gates, the kids whose parents were late picking them up or who were waiting for busses. A leopard and fox shared a cigarette while perching on a bike rack, and a couple of guys kicked an old Coke can around. My timing couldn't have been more perfect, because my bus arrived as soon as I walked out the door. I scurried towards it and clambered on after two studious-looking Seniors.

It was small and dark, and the seats were covered in stained red upholstery, but it wasn't crowded, so I could secure a window seat by myself. I made myself as comfortable as I could in the scratchy chair and turned over to grab my seatbelt. As I did, I caught a better glimpse of the guys messing with the coke can.

Specifically, one guy. A hedgehog whose eyes met mine through the glass while he was mid-laugh.

He smiled at me.

I didn't know what to do.

So I turned away, as the bus began to move out onto the road, leaving the school - and Sonic -behind.

I'm sorry for the delay, but in fairness, this chapter alone is almost three thousand words long!

I've also been pretty busy lately. My drama group is putting on High School Musical in May and I've been cast as Ms Darbus, which I'm honestly so excited about! But between auditions/rehearsals and my other commitments, it's just hard getting around to writing (my boyfriend has also gotten me into Skyrim, I am obsessed with it, so yeah, blame him if you must).

You'd think that doing it on the phone would make it more convenient, but I honestly cannot write without paper/a laptop. I just find the formatting weird on the phone, hence why half of my AN was cut in the last chapter. I actually went back and noticed other similar errors, so I'll have to go back and remedy those before the next chapter is published.

I'm really happy to see that people who read the original are reviewing! Obviously it's been seven years so it would be silly to expect everyone who read the original to remember it, or even be a part of the website community anymore, but it does make me happy to see that some of you have and ahhh you guys are amazing.

On that note, I've been thinking … I never finished the sequel to the original. I posted a summary of what would happen before deleting the whole story entirely. But recently I've gotten a couple of reviews from new readers asking about the sequel, so I was thinking about posting a full summary of the sequel for people. But let me know what you think, it doesn't really apply to this version of the story, but if you're curious about what happened to the ISITC characters, then I could post it!

Anyway. It's just turned 1.00 AM now, so I should really get to bed. I volunteer at an English language class for immigrants on Tuesday mornings so I need to get some sleep!

Scarstar xxxxxx