A/N: Trigger warning for bulimia and references to underage sex. We're now in the second half of Part III, the S7 era.

Main POVs: Bianca, Alli, Jake.

January

The snow had stopped heavily falling to the ground by the time the bus arrived at her new school but the wind was still blowing harshly in her face when she got off the bus.

But to Bianca DeSousa, the dark stares she and the other fellow Lakehurst transplants were getting from the Degrassi kids were way harsher than the winter wind.

"Excuse me," she said to a student who was in her way in the hallways. She tried to sound as polite as she could. The student, who looked like a senior, turned around to face her with a scowl on his face.

"Excuse yourself bitch," he replied with a sneer before roughly shoving past her. Bianca's eyes narrowed into thin slits before grabbing at his arm.

"Hey asshole, maybe don't shove past a girl who's half your height when she's asking you to move," she said angrily.

"What are you going to do about it, stab me?" He questioned dryly before shaking her off and continuing on his way. Bianca glared at the back of him, hoping that he slipped on something wet and broke a body part.

She found it really fucking stupid how everyone at this school acted like all of Lakehurst participated in the stabbing of that senior. She didn't even like Drake Lempkey, she only hung around him because she liked his friend, Johnny DiMarco. The guy was a creep that was constantly hitting on her.

Bianca found her locker right next to the principal's office. Of course it was considering her reputation at Lakehurst. She was in the middle of unlocking it when she felt a strong arm wrap around her. She almost jumped until she realized it was her best friend Owen Milligan. He always wore the same axe body spray every day.

"One of these days you're going to get punched if you keep doing that, idiot," she warned him as she turned around and faced him.

"It's not like it's going to hurt coming from you," Owen replied with a smirk. Then he looked around. "You seen Fitz yet?"

"No, he's probably going to be late knowing that brother of his," she answered. Fitz was both of their best friends and he had a crappy older step brother that treated him like shit.

"Already gonna get detention on his first day," Owen said while shaking his head, "So how many of these idiots have given you death stares? I got like five."

"Some asshole with the face of a horse shoved me when I told him to move. So far us Lakehurst kids aren't getting a warm welcome," she grumbled.

Their high school, Lakehurst, mysteriously burned down over winter break and the students had to transfer to Degrassi for the time being. It was a decision nobody wanted due to the recent war between the two schools that came to a head with the stabbing of J.T. Yorke. However Degrassi was the only high school in the district big enough to accept the large flux of students due to Northern Tech being too small.

Considering the tensions between the two schools on the first day, it would only be a matter of time before another person got stabbed.

"Well they're about to be even more mad when I manage to smash one of the hottest girls in school in the first week," Owen replied before looking at a cheerleader down the hall from them applying lip gloss in her locker mirror. Bianca looked at the girl and recognized her as the black girl Owen was dancing with at that ill-fated party.

"You and your dumb cheerleaders," she said while rolling her eyes. They were the only type of girls her friend was interested in having an actual relationship with.

"Can you blame me when they look so sexy in those sexy skirts?" Owen asked while continuing to stare at the girl. "And I like them dumb. Makes it easier for them to do anything I say."

"I guess that's why you're never bringing me home to your mom," she replied.

"Can you imagine? My parents would ground me for life if they even knew I was hanging out with someone like you. If we actually dated, they would die of cardiac arrest at the same time," Owen said with a chuckle, "What we have right now is perfect."

They weren't just friends but fuck buddies with no strings attached. They hooked up at the beginning of the school year and decided to keep doing it with the friendship as an added bonus. Owen was a better option to lose her virginity to than pretty much every other guy at their school, but they were never going to be anymore than that. And she was fine with that. She didn't have any delusions that she was going to meet some Prince Charming in high school.

She wasn't some fairy tale princess after all.

After doing warmups for cheer practice, Alli called for a brief break as she pulled Jenna aside to talk.

"I do not want to do this stupid pep rally," Alli complained. To welcome the Lakehurst students to Degrassi, Principal Hatzilakos suggested a pep rally after school with both cheer teams performing.

"I don't know, maybe I think it's a good idea to encourage some positivity between the two schools," Jenna reasoned.

"The last time we threw a pep rally to welcome Lakehurst to our school, a fight broke out and a kid got stabbed two weeks later. Lakehurst kids are the worst and it's not fair that we have to interact with them every day now. Plus, now I can't even avoid my stupid brother at school now," she replied.

"Well, there has to be a bright side to this. There's some cute boys that you can date from Lakehurst…..," Jenna said with a sly smile.

"I don't want to date any of those guys," Alli replied with a shudder at the thought.

"Come on, all of them can't be dirty scumbags, Alli. There's a diamond in the rough waiting for you," her best friend encouraged, "Then you guys can go on cute double dates with me and K.C."

"How are you guys by the way?" Alli asked.

"Better than ever! It feels like we're even closer than before and not just because of the sex we're having," Jenna answered cheerfully.

"Is sex really that great?" Alli asked again. She wasn't sure if she would be ready to have it yet when she was in a really serious relationship with someone. It seemed…scary. And she was only fourteen.

"Well it hurt a lot when we first had it, and it still does sometimes because K.C. is a little rough but other than that it's…nice? If that's the proper thing to describe it. I feel so warm the entire time."

"How did you know that you were ready?"

"There was something motivating me to make K.C. happy. I'll say it pretty much worked," Jenna explained.

Alli pondered her words. It was important to make your boyfriend happy, wasn't it? But at the same time, she dumped Mo because he wasn't making her happy and she sure as hell couldn't see herself sleeping with him to keep their relationship good.

The guy would have to be really special for her to even consider losing her virginity to him.

In class, Jake tried not to stare at Katie as the teacher gave his lesson for the day. She was looking healthier than she was before, but she was still eerily pale and quiet. She was usually the first person to volunteer to answer a question in class, but now it was like she was barely there. The girl in the row in front of him wasn't the girl he loved, it was a shell of a human being.

He still loved Katie after months of not being with her. It was difficult to drop these feelings for her despite their awful breakup when she was so special. He had never liked a girl as much as he liked Katie Matlin. A girl that was tough as nails, bright as a whip, but strikingly gorgeous was a rare breed. And he lost her.

He missed seeing her smile, the way her blue eyes sparkled when they held hands, running his fingers through her ginger hair, hearing her laugh at his jokes, and how her lips felt when they kissed. He even missed how she smelled after soccer practice or karate class.

He wondered if she missed him to or did she hate him for reporting to Ms. Sauvé that she was bulimic.

The teacher passed around sheets of class work for them to work on, and he took it as an excuse to stop looking at his ex. However he couldn't stop the racing thoughts about Katie, especially with how boring the learning material was for the day. It was the worst math of them all: polynomials. It felt it was all they freaking learned in math sometimes.

One of Jake's pencils fell off his desk, and after he picked it up, he looked up to see Katie staring at him. There was no hate in her eyes, but there was no emotion in them. He sent her a quick smile, to see if she would light up.

She just continued to stare.

Her first lunch at Degrassi was interesting so far. Lakehurst's wannabe queen bee Holly J Sinclair attempted to pick a fight with some junior over something stupid. If it wasn't for the other girl's name being called over the loudspeaker to go to the principal's office, then a catfight would have happened. Bianca would have preferred to have witnessed the catfight, considering how fucking boring her morning was at Degrassi.

The teachers here were all stuffy, and they immediately judged her for her appearance. She wasn't even wearing anything remotely controversial ( just a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers) but she must have had "future troublemaker" tattooed on her forehead from the stares she was getting. Was she about to make their life a living hell? Maybe, since they were asking for it.

Bianca inserted a fork into her tray of chicken nuggets, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn't soggy. If there was one thing Degrassi had over Lakehurst already, it was the food. While eating it, she listened to Fitz and Owen talk.

"I'll bet you ten dollars I'll fuck one of these girls by the end of the month, tops," Owen challenged. Owen had a (very accurate) reputation at Lakehurst of being a player, and he was determined to keep up that reputation at this school. If these girls were smart, they would stay away from Owen since he was a shitty boyfriend, but she knew most girls weren't. They saw her friend's handsome face and muscles and fell in love. It wasn't a problem that she could relate to because she knew what she meant to Owen.

"I doubt. All the girls here look like stuck up bitches with sticks up their asses," Fitz replied.

"You know me, I always find a way to pull those sticks out," Owen replied with a smirk as he looked around. "The best thing about our schools merging is that these Degrassi girls are innocent. They have no idea what I'm about."

"Poor girls," she dryly said as her friends laughed. In a way, she did want to feel bad for the inevitable amount of girls whose hearts he was about to break. Fitz was a shitty boyfriend too with a terrible attitude but at least his appearance gave it away so he only attracted burn out girls. The prissy princesses, however, were easily fooled by Owen because he was a handsome jock from a well off family.

As for her, good boys didn't want to associate themselves with her, at least outside The Ravine. She was consistently attracting losers and bums, and sometimes she believed that that was what she was doomed to be stuck with forever.

After all, her aunt told her on multiple occasions that girls like her were a lost cause.

"Pair up with the person next to you and quiz them on the material we learned so fair," the science teacher ordered, and Alli turned around in her seat to face the boy next to her, Drew Torres. He flashed her a charming smile and she smiled back as she felt her body heat up. He was very attractive and she couldn't help but stare at him in class some days.

"Hey," he greeted.

"Hi," she greeted back, fluttering her eyelashes flirtatiously. She hoped her outfit, which was a flashy red blouse, black jeans, and red heels was attractive enough in his eyes.

"I'm not the brightest person in this room so do you want to go first?" He offered.

"Sure!" Alli accepted without hesitation, eager to please him. He handed her the paper, and she noticed that the words on his worksheet were printed in a larger, more bold font than anyone else's.

He took his time slowly reading out loud each question on the practice quiz, as if he was tasting each word on his tongue. She answered every question correctly without any difficulty. It was embarrassing to think about but science was her best subject.

"Sorry about that. I'm dyslexic and I have to read things slowly to understand them better," he apologized. She shook her head.

"No, no, it's fine," she assured him as she held up her worksheet to read to him the questions.

It wasn't any shock that he got most of the questions wrong. Drew wasn't the best student in class. However, the ones he did get right, he had a big, proud smile on his face when she said "correct".

"It's clear that I'm going to need more time to understand the material better," he lamented when they were done.

A plot immediately formed in Alli's head.

"Thankfully, I'm always here to be a tutor if you need it," she replied, smiling suggestively as she rested her head on her fist. She fluttered her eyelashes again flirtatiously.

Drew smirked, and that's when she knew she won.

"A beautiful girl like you tutoring me? I would be really dumb to pass this blessing up."

They were playing dodgeball today for gym class and as always, Jake didn't put much effort into playing. He didn't even try to dodge the red ball coming at him before it hit him in his stomach and he was out for the round. Shrugging, he went to sit on the bleachers with the other out people on his team.

His team only had two people left while the other people had ten. It was because Katie was on the other team and was quickly wiping everyone out with great brutality. Despite how sickly she was still looking, she was still a pro in her element.

When her and Marisol knocked out the final two people on her team, Marisol held her hand up for a hi five, and he watched as Katie reluctantly smacked her palm against hers. Marisol told him that over her time in the rehabilitation center, Katie was mad at the world and was rather distant these days, even from her best friend. It made Jake worried that the bulimia was only the tip of her mental health issues.

A new round had started back up, and he was forced to get out of his comfortable position on the bleachers. He didn't even bother getting into a fierce, determined stance like everyone else on the team. There was no way they were winning with Katie as an opponent. As soon as the game started, he was hit in the face with a dodgeball by Marisol. "Sorry!" His friend apologized but he waved to her while going to sit back down to signal that it was no problem.

Imogen tried to hit Katie, but his ex only caught the ball smoothly, and Imogen kicked the gym floor with a huff as she went back to the bleachers. In the next round Katie proceeded to knock out two people without even breaking a sweat. It was the hottest thing Jake had witnessed.

He noticed that by the end of the period, some color had finally returned to Katie's face.

At the pep rally, Bianca sat on the stands with the other crowds as the cheer teams came out and did their routines to wow the audience. She personally didn't find the dances they were doing to be anything impressive. She performed better dances herself while copying artists in music videos.

She didn't like to admit it much but she enjoyed dancing in her private moments. It was weirdly calming. But if Degrassi had a dance team, she wouldn't join because the idea of being forced to interact with girls who would look down on her sounded lame.

From next to her, Owen was looking at the black girl he was watching earlier with a hungry, lustful look in his eyes that kind of threw her off. It was uncomfortably similar to some of the looks her aunt's boyfriends gave her when her aunt wasn't looking.

"I'm definitely going to smash that at some point," he declared as the black girl was flipped up into the air by some weird quirky looking girl. When she came down, she threw her arms up into the air with a bright, cheerful smile on her face.

"She seems boring," Bianca replied dismissively, and she wasn't sure if she was saying it because she genuinely felt that way about the other girl or because she didn't like the idea of Owen going after her.

"With the way she can stretch those smooth looking legs of hers? I don't think so," Owen argued, "Imagine what I can do with that."

"I'd rather not because I don't like girls," Bianca rejected dryly as her attention fell towards a guy on the basketball team as they came in. She immediately recognized him as the drunk kid at the party who stepped in to defend her from some loser. She wasn't going to forget those innocent blue eyes of his for a while.

He flashed an adoring smile at everyone, and something inside of her twitched. He was very attractive, that couldn't be denied. He probably had loads of bimbos at Degrassi lining up to date him. But would he go for a girl like her? Probably not.

Despite that, when their eyes met for a brief moment, something in Bianca kept twitching.

After the pep rally, Alli waited until she saw Drew pass by her in the hallways. "Drew!" She exclaimed as she grabbed his arm to get his attention. He turned around quickly to face her.

"What's up?" He asked.

"What we talked about in science class. When do you want to meet up for 'after school tutoring?'" She questioned, making a quotation mark gesture with her fingers for the last part. The tutoring was a mask for what she really wanted to do with Drew.

"Well, I don't have anything to do tonight so why don't we meet up at The Dot and get more acquainted with each other?" He offered with a wink. Alli felt her cheeks burn in desire. He wanted the same thing she did.

"Sounds lovely, I'll see you around Drew," she replied with a wink before moving past him, looking behind and giving him one last flirty smile.

While walking down the hallways, she saw K.C. and Clare talking to each other by his locker. K.C. was a little closer to Clare than usually. It made her pause in her tracks. She shouldn't find anything weird about them interacting because they were close friends. The only person K.C. was closer with other than obviously his girlfriend was Clare. But on the other hand, she knew Clare still liked K.C. and was holding in her feelings for Jenna's sake.

But Clare would never act on those feelings, would she?

Jake was getting a snack from the fridge when he heard a knock on the door. He went to open the door up and was surprised to see it was Katie.

"Can I come in?" She asked timidly.

"Of course," he answered, stepping aside to let her in. She quietly did without making a single noise. She sat down on his couch, and he sat down next to her. "What's up?" He gently asked.

"I'm sorry for how I ended things between us, Jake," she apologized, "I was angry and didn't react rationally."

"Well I did read your journal, but only because I was worried about you. You were spiraling bad and I would have been a terrible boyfriend if I just let it continue," he reasoned. He expected her to argue.

"I know," is what she replied instead, "I was just too angry at you to understand. I still am, but only because a part of me still wants to keep doing it," she admitted. His eyes widened.

"Binging and purging?"

"Yeah, but it's not going to happen again with everyone watching me like a hawk so no need to worry," she assured him with some gruffness in her voice. Then her eyes turned soft.

"I still really like you Jake, but I don't think it's best if we get back together for the time being. I'm not in the best place mentally and you deserve better," she said. Jake felt his stomach drop at her words but he nodded while swallowing.

"I understand," he replied, "But you deserve peace with yourself and I hope you get it."

Katie smiled sadly at him before leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. She got up from the couch and headed towards the door. Jake got up, followed her, and opened up the door for her.

"Have a good night, Jake," she said.

"You too," he said back and they shared a tense silence. Both of them wanted to kiss the other but couldn't. It was probably for the best that they didn't interact at school from this point on.

Jake watched Katie leave with a heavy heart.

Later that night, Bianca was putting her clothes back on after another round of sex with Owen. They were in some tent at the Ravine, and Fitz was blocking the entrance so no one would walk in on them. Their friend wasn't pleased to do so, but he had to.

She straightened out her hair as Owen re-buckled his pants. "Awesome as always, B," he complimented her with a wink.

"You were thinking of that cheerleader while fucking me, don't even deny it," she bluntly accused. Owen seemed to be in another world the whole time he was inside of her, and it made sex much less fun tonight.

"If I say it, are you still going to bitch at me?" Owen wearily asked.

"Common courtesy when fucking is to not make it obvious that you're fantasizing about someone else, jackass," she said while folding her arms. She fixed him with a glare.

"Come on, B. You can't be really this upset. It's not like we're dating or anything," Owen replied. He placed a hand on her shoulder. "You know what our relationship is. That's why I like you."

For some reason, that didn't make her smile. "And if I say some other guy's name during sex? How would you feel?" She questioned.

"Well first you'll have to find a guy for that, and no offense B, but you're not girlfriend material," Owen answered dismissively, "But I wouldn't give a fuck personally."

The comment about not being girlfriend material struck an unpleasant cord in her, but she brushed it off with a chuckle.

Owen was right. She knew what this relationship was and what she was. So she shouldn't be offended.

But she was.

A/N: Both Alli and Bianca like Drew, but will things stay the same as in canon or will things be different this time?