"Monday Mornings Suck"

Maurae groaned and stretched when her alarm clock, rather, the Banks' alarm clock in the guest room, went off at six on Monday morning. She loved spending the weekend at the Banks' but it usually meant she was worn out by Monday, which wasn't good for her early classes. At least Orion hadn't called practice for this Monday morning; that was a small blessing.

She had her jeans on and was pulling on a t-shirt when Adam banged on the door and shouted for her to hurry up or they'd be late. She yanked the door open with one hand as she straightened the shirt with the other. "Honestly, you'd think I'd been in the shower for an hour or something," she said reproachfully. "We aren't going to be late. We're never late. No matter when we leave, your dad always seems to get us there on time."

"That's the problem this morning," he groused, running his fingers through his already messy hair. "Mom's driving us this morning." She froze in the act of reaching up to fix his hair and stared at him.

"Why didn't you tell me this last night?" she asked, regaining her composure and trying to flatten the stubborn spikes with her fingers. "I'd have gotten up an hour earlier." She licked her lips and pressed a particularly stubborn hank of hair down.

"Ro..." he murmured.

"Hmm?" she said, distracted.

"Ro, stop it," he said, his voice low. She met his eyes but was unable to keep them and blushed, looking down swiftly and stepping back.

"Sorry. But I fixed it," she added defensively, as she went back into the room and grabbed her hastily re-packed bag. "Let's get going." He agreed heartily and followed her as they thundered down the stairs.

"Mom! Mom, we're ready to go!" Adam's mother, a lovely woman to be sure, save she was a little scatterbrained, emerged from the kitchen, holding two plates of eggs and sausage. Maurae tried not to blanch. "Mom, we don't have time for that!" Adam exclaimed. "Besides, Maurae doesn't eat eggs, remember?"

"Oh, of course! Sorry, Rae. But you two need to eat something!"

"We'll have some Pop Tarts in the car. We've got to get going!"

"Daniel took the last Pop Tarts with him yesterday," Maurae reminded him, shutting up when he shot her a glare that said clearly, 'you aren't helping!' She smiled in return. "Well, I'm sure your mom made toast. Come on, we've got to hurry if we're even going to ge there before the first bell!" Adam nodded.

"Come on, Mom, hurry up."

"So impatient," Kelly teased. "All right, all right! Come on, then." Sighing softly in relief, both teens hoisted their bags and led the way out to the car, throwing their things in the back and jumping in after them. Neither dared to really look at the other, for fear of laughing out loud, so they kept their bags piled between them and looked out the opposite windows. Exactly thirty-two minutes later, the car pulled into the school's parking lot. Before it had even completely stopped, both had their belts unbuckled and were bounding from it.

"See you next weekend, Ma!" Adam shouted as they ran through the front doors of their dorm building. When he stopped at the elevator, she waved and headed for the stairs. "Are you insane?" he grumbled as he followed reluctantly. "That's five flights up!"

"Four for me, Ads, and nobody said you had to follow me, you know." She took the stairs at a run and was already halfway up the first flight by the time he, shaking his head, started up at a slightly fast walk. She reached her floor, breathing hard, long before him and darted through the door to run down the hall.

"Slow down, Ro!" called Russ, amused as she flew past him. "You've got almost twenty minutes!" She literally skidded to a stop and turned to look at him incredulously.

"Twenty- ADAM!" She dropped her bag in the hall and ran back to the stairs, where Adam had just reached the fourth floor landing. He smiled sheepishly and saluted, jogging up the last flight to the Varsity floor above. She shook her head, not sure whether to be furious or amused and decided to be both.

"Have a good weekend?" Charlie asked, coming up behind her, with her bag slung over his shoulder. She nodded absently, pulling her keys out of her pocket and leading her human packhorse to her room, which she quickly unlocked. Taking the bag from him, she chucked it at her bed and picked up her backpack, neatly packed as she'd left it. Then she remembered that she'd left some of her French homework in her overnight bag and went to grab it, stuffing it into the binder in her backpack.

"How was yours, after the movie fiasco on Friday?" she asked when she'd rejoined him in the hallway.

"Cool, I guess. I actually did my homework I was so bored."

"I'm so proud of you!" she teased in a singsong. "Our little Charlie's all grown up now!"

"I wouldn't go that far," he protested with a laugh. He didn't want to tell her about Linda yet. He'd only just convinced the girl to come to that night's game, and he wanted to savor that victory, if that was what it turned out to be, before he went bragging to his friends, even his best friends. (AN: I know the game was supposed to be on a Friday, but it never made sense to me that the Varsity asked the JV to dinner on FRIDAY, when the day before had, ostensibly, been a Friday). "I'm still mostly the same old Charlie."

"Of course you are," she said distractedly, watching the Varsity boys crowd Adam down the stairs. She watched her friend wistfully for a moment before she shook herself out of the daze and followed Charlie down to the first floor. They walked across campus as a team, and filed into biology the same way. Maurae took her seat between Julie and Adam and pulled out her homework, setting it in the corner of her desk for pickup when the bell rang in five minutes. Then she turned and grinned at Adam.

"I need to talk to you this afternoon," he said. "During detention, maybe, but before your game this afternoon, okay?" She raised an eyebrow at his ambiguity, but didn't comment on it for the moment.

"Sounds good to me. I'll wait for you until three. After that, though, I've got to get ready and out on the ice. Orion will bust my ass if I'm any later than that." He nodded and fished around in his own backpack for the homework they'd completed together on Saturday morning, with Daniel in the background, shouting out Aerosmith lyrics. He set it on his desk just as Madigan whisked by, pulling the first row's homework into a pile and moved onto the second row.

"Pull out your pencils and nothing else. Practice quiz time!" she barked. Maurae restrained herself from rolling her eyes, though she really, really wanted to. She'd probably get detetnion for it, knowing the witch woman. She glared at the paper packet placed in front of her and wrote her name and the date on the lines provided. "You have a half hour. Begin."

First question. Name the full formal Latin name of a gray wolf, an African elephant, and a lily of the valley. Off the top of her head, Maurae knew Canus lupus, but couldn't remember the other two right away. She moved on to the next question.

Diagram the first four offspring of a homogeneous blue-eyed parent and a heterogeneous brown-eyed parent. Brown eyes are a dominant characteristic. Maurae easily filled in the diagram and moved on. Twenty questions later, she felt relatively confident about her answers, but still couldn't, for the life of her, remember the Latin names of either the African elephant or the lily of the valley. She shrugged and left both blank, still hoping to run across the answer somehow.

"Pencils down, time's up," Madigan said briskly, following her words with a sweep to pick up the tests. "Back rows, pass them forward. Front row, pass them to the left." Maurae obeyed when Julie handed the sizable pile to her, and added her four tests, passing them on to Adam on her left. He grinned at her and passed them further along. "Now, today, we continue today with our lecture on the latin naming system. By the way," she added as she picked up the tests, "The first question was a trick question, as we've not done that yet." Half the class groaned. "It will be worth six extra credit points, to any who correctly took a stab at it." Maurae smiled. That meant two extra points for her. "Now..." Maurae took notes dutifully, but her mind started to wander to what it was Adam wanted to talk to her about.

She was shaken out of her musings when Julie elbowed her as she stood up to leave. "Oh, is class over already?" she asked dumbly, quickly packing her stuff in her backpack and got up. She waved goodbye to the others as she and Julie hurried to catch up with Russ and Ken, so they could walk to math class together.

Monday passed in a flash and then it was Monday afternoon, and Maurae was leaving detention. Adam gave her a 'go ahead' motion, along with his mouthing of 'I'll catch up with you,' that it took true talent to decipher. She nodded and hurried off towards the ice rink to suit up. She would give Adam the ten minutes she'd promised him, but when he hadn't shown up by ten to five, she took one last look around and ducked into the JV locker room, shaking her head ruefully. She'd just have to track him down before his game, right after the JV match.

"There you are!" Charlie exclaimed when she walked in. "You'd better hurry up and get changed. Orion was in here about ten minutes ago and wanted to know where you were. I told him you were probably getting the rest of your gear from your room. Where were you?"

"Waiting for Adam," she replied.

"You've gotta remember that he's on Varsity now," Goldberg commented. Maurae whipped around to look at him.

"He's our friend, Goldberg," she retorted sharply. "Remember that!" The chubby boy blanched and looked away from her fierce glare. "It doesn't matter what team he's on. He's still Adam."

"Right. I know that," Goldberg muttered to apease her. "I just meant that..."

"I know what you meant, Goldie," she replied softly. "I know he's on the other side now, but that doesn't matter in this game, so..." The others nodded in agreement. They all thought it sucked that Adam had made Varsity without them. Maurae smiled and started to change at warp speed, seeing as the others were almost completely changed.

"Sit," Julie commanded, appearing with a brush and elastic band so she could braid Maurae's long hair before they went out. Connie, Julie, and Maurae usually switched off braiding each other's hair, but since Maurae had been late today, Julie was going to have to do hers as well as Connie's. Maurae sat and let the blonde brush out her ponytail before beginning to quickly and efficiently braid it.

As she tied it off, they heard the buzzer, signalling that they had twenty minutes to warm up before the game started.

"All right, Ducks," Charlie said with a grin. "Let's do this."