Author's Note: As always, I want to thank everyone for the positive feedback. This will be the third chapter I upload today! YIPPEE!!!! I promise to get more up tomorrow, but tonight I'm off to a baseball game… In the meantime, please keep on reading and reviewing and letting me know what you think of the story as it develops. As always, praise is good, constructive criticism is okay, but please NO FLAMES!!!! Flames are mean, and mean people suck… hehe…

Cassandra was happy to finally get the peace and quiet she had been looking for. Once she had left the rec room and returned to the quarters she was sharing with the other girls, she had been able to curl up on the couch in the common room and immediately began tearing through Wuthering Heights. She had already read it during the school year in her Nineteenth Century Literature class, but she had wanted to read it again without having to analyze the meaning of every word on every page.

Sometimes she truly wondered why she even tried to tolerate the other kids. She was well aware that their parents were all friends with her parents, so whenever they met with one another, it was inevitable that the children came along. But she hated when they came. They were childish, immature, and she suspected that none of them had any appreciation of the finer things in life- theater, gourmet dining, classic literature- their ideas of these things were catching a movie at one of those multiplexes, eating a Big Mac at McDonald's and reading the latest Harry Potter novel. She was probably not being too fair to them- she didn't really know any of them very well. But whenever they were all together, she just knew that she had nothing worth saying to them.

Cassandra heard a knock on the door then, and got up to answer the door, first asking who was there before opening it. When she heard her mother's voice- or who would be mother- she opened the door and ushered her inside.

"Hey, what are you doing here by yourself?" Lady Jaye asked her once she stepped inside and closed the door.

"Oh, just doing some reading," Cassandra told her. "I needed some quiet time and I just couldn't get that in the rec room."

"You don't want to have some fun with your friends?"

"I wouldn't consider them friends," Cassandra said. "And I suspect, on their part, the feeling is quite mutual."

Lady Jaye looked confused. "Why's that?"

Cassandra took a deep breath to think about how to phrase an answer to her question before saying, "We don't have anything in common. They insist on being completely childish. I would much rather read a classic novel, have a cup of English tea, and discuss international affairs with dignified business personnel than dance on tables, singing nonsense songs, watching plotless action movies at dirty movieplexes, and eating loads of artery clogging fast food."

Lady Jaye sat and looked at Cassandra for a minute, thinking of a response. "Cassandra, how old are you?"

"Excuse me?"

"How old are you?"

"I'll be sixteen in August," Cassandra told her.

"So you're fifteen."

Cassandra nodded her head. "Yes."

"Has it occurred to you that maybe they're just being kids. You sound like you're fifteen going on fifty and I suspect you don't know how to have much fun," Lady Jaye told her.

"I know how to have fun!" Cassandra said indignantly. "I have fun when I get to dance the Nutcracker Suite in ballet class and playing field hockey and I like to debate with my peers in class-"

"And what about friends your age?"

"I have plenty of friends. My housemates at Andover are a great deal of fun. And I have my field hockey teammates as well. We do our homework together and have highly stimulating conversations-"

"And what about Carla? Don't the two of you go to school together?"

"Oh. Her," Cassandra said with a sneer. "She's a day student. A financial pity case no less. Oh, she's smart but just doesn't fit in with my group."

Lady Jaye sat with her jaw hanging open from the shock of hearing what this young girl was saying. Her words sounded very much like something her own mother would say. No doubt that her mother had a heavy influence upon this girl's view on life. "That's a very… harsh… way of stating things. I'll bet you barely know Carla," she said calmly.

"What's there to know? She's getting a free ride to the best prep school in this country while the rest of us are paying our way there and she acts like a complete child. She can't even dress properly. Now, granted, we don't have a uniform or anything at Andover, but one would think that she and other day students could wear something a little more dignified than blue jeans, a tee shirt, and a pair of sneakers to school. At least put on a nice blouse and a pair of decent shoes."

"She's dressing her age," Lady Jaye said. "I see nothing wrong with that. And as for a free ride… have you considered perhaps that she earned a scholarship and she's just not taking loan money?"

"Either way, it's a free ride," Cassandra stated.

"Something tells me you have no idea how to relate to anyone your own age," Lady Jaye said disgustedly. "You spend a lot of time with your grandmother?"

"Why, yes? How did you know?"

"Just a hunch. Look, Cassandra, I know this is going to sound completely unfathomable to you right now, but sometime in the near future, you're going to have to go out into the world, and deal with people who are very different from you and your friends. And that includes people like Carla and the other children."

"I'm very well aware of that," Cassandra said.

"I don't think you are. You've spent your entire life acting much like an adult- I'm willing to bet you're constantly surrounded by adults when you visit your grandmother- but you never really learned how to be a kid. Or you forgot how to be a kid; I'm not sure which it is."

Cassandra gave the woman who was going to be her mother a strange look. "And what do you propose I do about it? I'm at school nine and ten months out of the school year. I don't come home a lot- mostly I stay with Grandmother if I leave campus- and outside of school I'm only with people who are older than I am. The other kids- and I'm talking now about the ones in the rec room- they invite me to their parties and such, but only because their parents make them do so, not because they want to. And I go to these parties, because my parents make me, and I feel completely out of place mainly because I don't have anything in common with any of them."

"Have you given any of them a chance?"

Cassandra sighed. "Perhaps not. It didn't matter much when we were five or six years old but now that we're all a little older…"

Lady Jaye nodded. "Every single kid down there is a very different unique individual yet every one of them seems to get along with one another beautifully."

"All of us have grown up together," Cassandra told her. "We're all on that sort of common ground where, for the most part, we understand where each person is coming from- with the exception of me."

"Never too late to change that," Lady Jaye told her.

Cassandra hesitated. "I… I don't know." She sighed. "I doubt that I can just go in there and say, 'hey, I know you think I'm a wench but let's be friends.'"

"Just try to be nicer to them overall," Lady Jaye suggested. "Rome wasn't built in a day and they probably won't forgive you overnight. But… maybe in the long run they'll get to like you. And you have to learn how to relate to them too. Stop listening to every little thing your grandmother says. Lord knows I stopped years ago. Just don't be afraid to be a kid."

Cassandra considered this for a moment. "This is going to take some getting used to."

"Yes it is."

Cassandra nodded. "All right. But you're going to have to help me learn how to understand them."

Lady Jaye smiled. "I don't know how much I can help, but if you need anything- anything at all- just let me know."

!!!!!!!!

To be continued…

Author's Note: Okay, I understand that was a bit of fluff but now we have to get into the meat and potatoes of the storyline… next chapter, the childrens' parents finally get themselves back to 1986… stay tuned and keep reviewing!