Summer: oh, my Gawd! I'm so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so sorry!! It's been months since my last update! I deserve to be locked in Erik's torture chamber.

Erik: I tried. She knows all the ways out.

Summer: Anyway, I'm back now. Extra special thanks to Love of darkness, Kelsey, Brooke Blue, Broadway Geek, Ana, Courtney Hale, Evony Shadow, Gray Seal, I Am The Phantom Of The Opera, and Falling Stardust for reviewing. Another extra special thanks to anyone else who put up with the eternity between these chapters.

Erik: Summer doesn't own Phantom of the Opera. Or a social life.

"Beverly!" Sam managed to regain my attention. I'd spent most of the past five minutes watching Sandy/Christine and Joe/Raoul pretend not to be fighting. Erik seemed more cheerful than usual... or I guess 'less depressed' would be a more accurate term, but you get the idea.

All the same, I barely managed to respond in an intelligible way. "Wha... oh. Sorry, I was spacing you out. Didn't get much sleep last night because of nightmares and stuff. You were going to say something?"

'Do you realize how unconvincing it sounds when you say your attention is faulty due to lack of sleep, yet you were staring at Monsieur White with unabridged alertness?' Erik had been staring at Joe/Raoul also, possibly trying to burn holes in their head with his eyes. Unfortunately, the death glare isn't very affective when the victim can't actually see it.

'Compadre, if you knew something better to say, you could have said it.' as it happened, he knew at least five better things to say, but I had opened my mouth first. I turned my focus back to Sam.

"We're here," he told me, "the bus is stopped. I know you hate to accept it, but we actually have to go to school once the bus ride is over."

I frowned. "Really? Because honestly, I'd rather just ride home now." We reluctantly climbed off the bus.

'At least it's almost summer break,' I thought, trying to identify this morning's silver lining.

'Your school term has barely started.'

'You're so depressing.'

Aside from life being a little better after Lola's apparent decision that we didn't deserve to be driven insane (more so than we already were), nothing much had changed. Just an average Tuesday, after an average Monday, after an average Sunday. Saturday hadn't been very normal even if we had all walked out of the meeting thingy unscathed. But anyway, life was still life, once you get used to the fact that I had a guy talking to me in my head.

Of course, Sandy and Joe's worsening relationship was a nice touch. I had personally been expecting them to last much longer than the month or two they'd managed so far, but I wasn't complaining. We weren't sure yet how Christine and Raoul were feeling about this, but if Erik decided to put any of his own strategies into action while I was asleep, that was easily going to be remedied. As long as I didn't wake up until it was over. Even if they all did break up though, that kind of left us in a what-do-we-do-now predicament for obvious reasons. Truth be told, we hadn't worked out what we were going to do once they were separated. We didn't think we would get that far.

The first half of the day drifted painfully by without much happening. My French teacher, as usual, refrained from teaching us anything we hadn't already known for ages, so instead of paying attention to her, I started telling Erik jokes in our head to see if I could get him to crack a smile. It didn't work (even without his cheerful disposition, the fact that he could see my thoughts killed the punch lines).

The bell signifying that French class was over always seemed to sound like someone telling me I'd won the lottery. After that we had math class -we usually had that right after lunch, but there were some inspector people here or something and the school schedule was all screwy. Erik had made me actually finish my homework last night. As it happened, the inspector people, whoever they were, never showed, so I spent most of that class telling jokes as well.

'Okay, so Angelina Jolie, the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and Shrek all go have lunch together and Shrek says... Oh, wait you wouldn't like this one. Never mind.'

'You would do well to pay attention to your teacher. It might help you with the exam you're scheduled to take tomorrow.'

'Seriously? I have a test tomorrow?'

'You would know that if you had payed attention.'

'Oh well, I'll fail whatever happens. Anyway, there's this prospector in a small town in southern Texas...'

'This story takes minutes and ends completely pointlessly.'

'You know, you could at least pretend not to know every joke I tell you.'

"Miss Redmond," it looked like my math teacher wasn't going to let me finish the joke either. "Have you been paying any attention since the beginning of this class?" Ladies and gentleman, Erik was right again.

"Uhh..."

"What have we been discussing so far today?" The man knew I hadn't been listening, why did he have to make me admit it?

I looked down at my textbook, which was lying open on my desk. I read off the first three words that caught my eye: "The quadratic formula?"

"And that is...?"

I actually knew this one. "Theorem eight point two."

"I don't want a synonym, I want specifics. If you have been paying attention, you will easily be able to tell me the quadratic formula."

"The opposite of the middle term of an equation plus or minus the square root of the middle term squared minus four times the first term multiplied by the last term over two multiplied by the first term. But only if the result of the problem being square rooted is positive." (A/N: true story.)

The math teacher nodded grudgingly and returned to ranting about a confusing jumble of letters and numbers scrawled on the chalkboard.

'I owe you.'

'That you do.'

With renewed determination, I resumed my quest of undepressicating him. However, it was lunch time by the time I actually succeeded: I pictured Raoul and that, naturally, didn't help much. Then, I pictured Raoul getting flattened by a truck and Erik actually perked up a bit. I was quite proud of myself (but a bit puzzled as to why I hadn't thought of that before).

We were sitting with Nora and Sam again. Just like always. Sam was reading something for some class he was taking that I wasn't while Nora was contentedly picking apart another sandwich. To amuse myself, I pictured more undesirable things happening to Raoul (falling out of an airplane, getting locked in the same room as the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, etc...) Just to see if I could brighten our phantom friend up a bit more.

I was halfway through the process of imagining him being eaten by a ravenous billy-goat when Evony joined us. "Good morning, Miss Gray," I acknowledged happily. Erik nodded a greeting, but, needless to say, didn't say anything out loud.

"Hi," she said and sat down next to Nora. "Are you guys taking French this semester?"

"Beverly and me are," Nora answered for us, "Sam's taking some weird language that he had to test into because normal freshmen usually aren't capable of it."

He looked up from whatever he was reading. "Latin," he corrected, "and freshmen are allowed to take a Latin course, but I'm doing a harder class because I already knew some of it." He turned his attention back to the book.

Evony shrugged and directed her conversation towards me and Nora. "I heard your French teacher gave you some pretty epic homework over the weekend. I was talking to Bailey Lowe and she said it took her about four hours on Sunday night."

Nora grimaced. "It took me five." They both looked at me expectantly.

"I actually thought it was pretty easy..." I mumbled, "but I had some help."

Evony shook her head sadly (probably discouraged over my inability to keep a secret for more than a minute) as Nora asked, "From who? No one in your family speaks French."

"Um," I replied hastily, "May does. Yeah, she took the same course I'm taking now last year. When she was in third grade." Smooth, Berly.

'Miss Redmond, next time we come upon a situation in which we are required to deceive someone, I believe it would be in both of our best interests if you would simply remain silent.'

'Right. Sorry."

Nora sighed impatiently. "Beverly, who were you really talking about?"

"You know what? Ask me that same question in twenty years, and I swear I'll tell you," I conceded.

She looked skeptical, but Evony came to our rescue. "She probably just won't answer you because she doesn't want to admit that it took her twenty hours." (I couldn't remember the last time I'd even been awake for twenty hours, but I decided to take Erik's advise and not contradict her.) And then the bell came to our rescue as well.

Time for another class I didn't plan on paying attention to.

A few hours later, we were walking home from the bus stop with Evony. The snowflakes had stopped free falling, but they had built up to form a miniature Great Wall of China on each side of the pavement. Walking through or over it wasn't immensely easy and when the blizzard had trudged away, it hadn't bothered to bring the cold with it, so the chill lingered here and took its rejection out on the three of us. We were all quaking like puppies at a vet convention.

I was curious as to whether our mouth was too frozen shut to ever speak again, so I experimentally said, "Hey, Evony. What were you going to ask about at lunch this afternoon?"

She looked at us anxiously and said, "Nothing. Just the French homework."

"No. You were about to say something else before you said the French homework thing, but you didn't. And then for the rest of the day you were giving me the there's-something-I'm-not-telling-you look. I did notice it... or at least, Erik did."

She blushed a bit and frowned. "I was going to tell you that Sandy and Joe broke up, which also means that... yeah. Anyway, I know that's a good thing and all, but I wasn't sure how you guys would take it because-."

"Hang on, I need you to stop talking for a moment, so I can make a sufficient mental note to sing the jingle from the Fruity Cheerios commercial all the way through as soon as I'm out of public."

"I'm glad to know you're pleased with the situation." She smiled. "But what are do you two going to do now?"

"Evony," I announced proudly, "I have no idea!"

"You know, I think you, Beverly, should just stop chasing after Joe. Imagine going out with Raoul," she advised.

The three of us simultaneously grimaced. With that kind of disturbing logic in mind, I couldn't help but agree.

"You know who you should go out with?" she went on, "Sam Harper. The one who's taking a Latin class. I know he likes you."

I averted our eyes by observing a clump of snow that seemed set on sticking to the toe of our left shoe. "Why does everyone think that?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Does 'everyone' include you?"

I grumbled incoherently and made no reply. Erik responded for me: "Her opinion on that subject varies from time to time, depending on what kind of mood she finds herself in and what Monsieur White is wearing on the day in question."

"Good luck with that," she replied, smirking and turned in the direction of her own house as we approached mine.

"Hey," I called her back, "do you want to come over?"

She turned and walked backwards in order to address us and continue towards the direction of her own escape from the cold at the same time and said, "Thanks, but no thanks. My dad's out of town and I'm determined that as much of his stuff as possible should disappear before he gets back!" She turned around again and made her snow paved way back to her parents' house.

'I think Evony's right about the Joe thing at least. He's nice, but Raoul's just too Raoulish,' I thought when we could no longer see her. 'Feel free to keep reeling Christine in though. As long as whatever you do doesn't involve violence or things the fourteen-year-old mind shouldn't be comprehending.'

He flitted through some very depressing thoughts about how it was pointless and she could never love him anyway, nor could anyone else for various reasons that were also depressing. I interrupted these thoughts with one of my own: 'Just stop. You're so depressing all the time and I bet you didn't even look that bad. Anyway, it doesn't matter at this point because right now, your face is my face, so if you keep thinking bad stuff about yourself, I'm going to start taking it personally! You think my threats are empty, but whether you do or do not believe it, I'm capable of getting Highschool Musical songs stuck in our head at any given time!'

The most awkward silence I have, to this day, ever experienced. And that's saying a lot.

After about a million hours, he asked, 'Why should it concern you?'

'Well, usually, the only time you're not depressed is when you're angry. Most of the time at me. So I decided to get mad at you so you would get mad at me, as a sort of twisted way of cheering you up. Except it didn't work 'cause you're not mad at me and you're still depressed...'

After contemplating the situation for a moment or two, Erik came to the unchangeable conclusion that I was, in all fact, insane. He started rifling through the thoughts shoved unceremoniously to the back of my mind, trying to locate when exactly it had been during my infancy, that I had been dropped on my head. I let him wander around a daydream about what would happen if Indiana Jones met Harry Potter and the joke about the prospector from Texas before going 'Hey, stay out of that one, it's personal!' when he came to close to a Joe vs. Sam debate. I didn't want anyone figuring out that at that moment, Sam was winning.

Erik decided that I was possibly not crazy, but extremely and remarkably naive. 'Anyhow, you are only an adolescent.'

'I thought we established back in Chapter Three that I'm not an adolescent.'

'No. It was established that, while you indeed were an adolescent, you were unable to accept it as a fact.'

'Whatever. So one day the prospector from Texas is looking around for something to prospect...'

Summer: Not my best work, but please review anyway, just to let me know I still exist to the world of FFN!

Erik: Flame and-

Summer: Just flame, I don't even care.