Hiyas everyone! A BIG wave to alla' y'all out there! Yo! Whoa. Why am I talking this way? Hmm… Anyway (will I ever stop saying that?) how are you all? Yeah. I'm fine. What? You didn't ask! Arg… Well folks I finally got my lazy butt up and decided to posty another chappie for this story! Enjoy! Please review everyone! It makes me feel much joy!

Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Sure I don't. --runs off with Blizzard stuff-- But I will one day! Bwahahaaha. Yeah right…

Lunch, for the first day of the school year, was exceptionally disgusting. Well, that's what Nick thought anyway… There were only two places you were allowed to eat: Either sit in the cafeteria where the air forever smelled of questionable meat and bleach. Or out in the middle courtyard in the center of the rectangle created by the three, long main buildings that were the Three Branches of the school, where you'd have to face the music of Mother Nature. Since the autumn weather promised an imminent deluge soon, Crow and his group decided to sit inside rather than face the wet, soaky doom of the outside world.

"So how was the first half of the day for you all?" Amanda chirps, munching on an all-vegetarian sandwich.

"Physics is just great," Asia says sarcastically, eating a rather unhealthy lunch consisting of soda and a small bag of chips. "I just got acquainted with the wonders of mesons."

Pat looks up from a book titled 'Bling'. "It was a'ight," he says absently.

"Gym was cool. Oh hey, guess who we got for Calculus," Brad states, chowing down on a rather full foam tray of school-processed foods.

A horrified look crosses Drew's countenance. "Oh no…"

"Not him," Pat drops his book.

Brad nods, the center of attention now. "Nick's fav, Mr. Isagal."

The group gives a collective whine, save for Nick, who is too busy pondering about the Calculus incident and whether or not this was an omen for things to come, and the loveable Sonya, who doesn't mind having a dictator for a teacher.

"I don't know why you all hate him," Sonya implies, a Spanish accent hinting in her voice.

"Why you like him, I'll never know," Asia says, crushing her empty bag and tossing it away without a care about what or who it lands on.

"That's jus' cuz' you got straight A's last yea'," Patrick chimes, trying to practice his affected 'gangsta' talk.

Crow tried his best to ignore the current issues being debated at the table. Chatter, chatter. He was beginning to feel a loss of appetite, replacing his fork back on his tray. The decision of whether or not to inform his friends about his strange vision was swimming around in his mind. The pile of mashed potatoes on his tray stared back at him with unseen eyes, lying dormant like some kind of amorphous creature. Now he lost all his appetite. Sure, he'd told his friends, eventually, about the revival of his undead grandmother a very strange tale indeed. But this was different. He was talking about Mr. Isagal, not some long dead junkie who decided life was better on the other other end of the tunnel. Mr. Isagal, the professor who seemed to have watchful eyes and ears all over the school.

Something stops Nick. His friends had ceased their senseless chatter. In fact, the whole cafeteria was eerily silent. Scratch that. The entire area was silent. Even the indoor air conditioner for the cafetorium had silenced it's normal granny humming. No rustle of paper, no ringing of the cash register, no lively and colorful conversations being held. Not even cars honking out in the street.

Silence. Just silence.

The bewildered teenager looks up from his normal focal spot on the tray before him. All of a sudden, he jumps, startled. Everyone had their eyes trained on him, unblinking, the whites of their eyes showing like milky crescent moons. This scared him quite a bit. But the strangest thing, above the eerie silence and ghoulish stares, was that everyone was smiling. All the student's and even the cafeteria staff's cheeks were upturned, their teeth visible beneath stretched lips, mouths forming upturned U's.

Not entirely different from that of Lewis Carroll's Chesire Cat grin.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking at even his friends who seemed to be sharing in this odd, sinister prank.

"Wh-Wh-" Crow managed to stutter before a lean shadow outside the cafeteria caught his attention, a moving figure amidst the frozen, still world. A dark stain that walked across the field of his vision through the lunchroom window, shifting through others that did not move an inch, before melding in with the crowd. Had that been the principal?

In the blink of an eye, Nick Crow Mancer found himself amongst the normal, everyday commotion of an average lunch period once more. He turned this way and that, searching for any sign that the strange occurrence had actually happened and that he wasn't slipping into the maw of insanity. His friends were busy eating and conversing, the lunch staff no longer looking rawboned and smiling fiendishly. The different 'clans' of students were all minding their own businesses. No silence. No silence. The teenager's midlength, white hair was plastered to his scalp with by billions of beads of sweat. Perhaps it was the food that had created this twisted, dream-like hallucination. He picks up his fork and stirs the dirty-looking, green Jell-O coagulated on his tray. Suddenly, Crow does a double-take.

Were those ants swimming around in his Jell-O? Sure enough, upon closer inspection, little, black insects were crawling about on the surface of his food. In fact, his whole tray. Crawling around like moving quotations along his potatoes, bread, and pizza. Dropping (more like tossing) his fork, he gets up from his seat abruptly.

"What's wrong Crow?" Asia looks up, drawing the whole group's attention.

"Yeah, what's with you?" Patrick adds, book closed now.

Looking around in embarrassment, Crow suddenly was aware that he'd just about gotten everyone in the cafeteria to stare at him, not because they were some mindless, smiling zombie horde, but because they had just seen a peer freak out over the very same food they themselves were eating.

"Ants," was all Crow could mutter, pointing to his infested tray, before finding that nothing was wrong with his food. No ants. They were gone…

"What are you talking about?" Brad says, a French fry hanging from his mouth.

"Nick, where are you going?"

Maybe he was having a mental shutdown or something. That was it. He could see fear and concern mirrored in his friends' eyes.

"Sorry," Nick told his worried comrades. "I-I just have to check on something."

Backing away from his table, Crow fought his way through the hordes of teenagers lining the cafeteria doorways, crowding the stuffy hallways of the school building, Section 1, clustering about in his path. 'That's it', the flustered teenager thought, fiddling with his locker combination. 'I need to go home' His hands release the unopened lock. His attempt to leave the school been thwarted even before it got started by the notion that he didn't want it to show on his already loaded record.

Sighing in defeat, the white-haired teen made his way down the hall with no particular driving force, save to be away from his friends for awhile. The men's restroom came up to his left so he decided that it would be his first stop. 'What's wrong with me?' he thought, feeling a sense of vertigo overcoming him.

Once inside the foul-smelling room, Crow could feel the vertigo growing upon him. The quality of the restroom didn't help much either. Spider webs bloomed like wild bracken in the corners where the floor met the walls. Water dripped in a rhythmic tune from one of the faucets, reminding him of Chinese water torture. He vaguely remembered wondering at the age of ten, if teachers ever used the water torture on bad students. The sink basins were stained by God knew what and the floor tiles were prestigiously uneven. The reflection that stare back at him from a cracked mirror made him look haggard, worn, and weary. He sighs, leaning toward the sink, then to his surprise, he vomits…