Chapter Two: This isn't normal puberty!
Sakura Chiba hated going to class at Juuban Junior High School. She was bored by the long lectures, the dull group discussions, and the even duller busy work that always followed. Frequently, she found herself going to sleep, and when the teacher discovered this, Sakura would always have to go out in the hallway and hold buckets of water in her hands. Because of this, she had strong arm muscles, but that wasn't the point. The point was that she hated class. She envied Reiko and Keiko, who told stories of how great T.A. Girls' Academy was. Apparently, there you could choose your classes yourself and your teacher helped you to do whatever you wanted. Granted, that was because T.A. was an elevator school, so there were no standardized high school entrance exams to worry about, but Sakura was enthralled by that kind of freedom.
Freedom, she thought as she sat in another boring lecture, twirling her pen around in her hand. I really want to have some freedom. She looked up at her teacher, who was busy writing on the board and had his back turned to the class, and then looked at the door, which was open. Sakura checked her surroundings—most of her classmates were asleep, except Suzumi Mizuno, and that was expected—and hurriedly packed up her bag. She could smell the freedom.
She snatched up her bag and flew from the classroom, fast as a comet, through the empty hallways, and it took her a moment to realize that her feet weren't making any noise on the loud linoleum floors because she was looking straight ahead towards the door that led to freedom. When she looked down, she realized that she wasn't walking upright. She was flying.
"Oh my God!" she stage-whispered, which caused her to stop flying and land hard on her feet. "Ow!" Her eyes darted around, searching out anyone who could have possibly seen that, but nobody was looking. "Was I flying? Or am I having a terrible, terrible dream that I need to wake up from?" She reached out and touched the glass door, looking at her reflection in it. Generally, she had dreams of looking differently than she does now—she doesn't like the style (long) and color (black) of her hair and wants to dye it like Sayaka does—but her black-haired self stared back at her. "I'm not dreaming…"
She darted into the nearest girls' bathroom, which she thought was empty, and looked at herself in the mirror. She imagined her finger to be a hair-dye gun and jabbed it forward at the mirror, imagining that her hair was now a lovely auburn shade, but instead a small sparkle shot forth from her finger and cracked the mirror.
"Ahhh! 7 years of bad luck! How do I reverse this?" Sakura cried, digging around in her bag for the lucky rabbit's foot she bought once, but instead finding a good-luck scroll that Reiko gave her.
"Sakura, is that you?" asked Aiko Kaiou-Tenou, who was inside one of the stalls.
"Umm, yes?" Sakura said in a squeaky voice.
"It's just me, silly!" Aiko exclaimed, kicking open the door. Aiko had beautiful wavy black hair and blue eyes, but she was building muscle from all the fighting she presumably did. She was also wearing eyeliner, which was against the rules of Juuban Junior High.
"Aiko-chan, you're wearing eyeliner!" Sakura pointed out.
"Yes, I am," Aiko replied defiantly. "Doesn't it look good?"
"It does!" Sakura chirped.
"Ah, the mirror's broken," Aiko muttered, moving to the mirror next to Sakura.
"I did that," Sakura confessed.
"Did you punch it?" Aiko asked, brightening up.
"No, I didn't. I, um, I…" Sakura tried to remember how she made that sparkle shoot from her finger and did it again for Aiko's benefit.
"That is so cool!" Aiko cooed. "Check out what I can do." She put her hand in the sink and pushed it forward slightly, which made a small stream of water gush forth. "Pretty cool, huh?"
"Whoa! Do it again!" Sakura commanded and Aiko did it again. "I did something else," she added. "I flew."
"No you didn't," Aiko insisted.
"I swear I did. I was running down the hall, or I thought I was, but my feet weren't making any noises. That's because I was flying!" Sakura insisted. Aiko's eyes widened and her face changed to one of terror, but that wasn't because of Sakura, it was because the hall monitor, Hanazawa-sensei, had just shoved the door open and come inside.
"Takagi-sensei told me that you two were missing from class," she growled in her low, dog-like voice. "Chiba! Kaiou-Tenou! DETENTION!"
Natsumi Aino's class was changing into their P.E. uniforms in the locker rooms at the time of Sakura and Aiko's apprehending. Natsumi was stationed in a mildewing shower stall that hadn't been used in over twenty years, which thoroughly grossed her out. She didn't want anything of hers to touch the tile floor, though she was balancing her normal uniform in one hand, her P.E. uniform in the other, and her bag's handle was in her mouth. Purely by accident, she let her P.E. uniform fall to the floor, which caused her to exclaim in shock and drop her bag.
"Aw man," she muttered, trying to figure out where to place her school uniform while she got her other belongings. She wished she had some sort of rope or something to bring her items back and held her free hand out, pretending that it held a rope. However, something even more surprising came forth from her hand—a chain made of glowing orange hearts. It snatched up her belongings and faithfully brought them back to her hands, but she was in shock. She looked around to make sure nobody was looking, because how would she explain that away? She put on her P.E. uniform shortly afterwards, but she was so eaten up about the chain that she was hit in the head with a volleyball during P.E. class.
After classes were over, Suzumi and Sayaka waited for Natsumi, Sakura, and Aiko to appear at the school gates because they all walked home together every day. Natsumi appeared a minute or so later, holding an ice pack to her head, but Sakura and Aiko didn't show. The smaller group deliberated about what to do for a few minutes before deciding that Sakura and Aiko knew how to get home by themselves.
"Hey, you guys, check out what I can do," Suzumi said, taking a bottle of water out of her bag. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and touched the water bottle, which caused the water within to crackle as it immediately became ice. Sayaka and Natsumi gasped in shock.
"Yeah, I did something weird today too," Natsumi added. "I made this chain from my hands when I dropped my clothes on the floor of the locker room showers." The way she was grinning about it, though, led her friends to believe she was lying.
"Ah, Natsu-chan, you're lying!" Sayaka said, pouting. Suddenly, though, she grew very quiet and looked towards the sky.
"What's wrong, Saya-chan?" Natsumi asked cattily, raising her eyebrow. The sky was growing darker. The weatherman today, after all, had placed a thunder cloud eclipsing a sad cartoon sun over the Juuban area on his trusty map and warned that it would look good in the morning but grow worse in the afternoon. The wind started to blow pretty hard, making the leaves fly off of the trees nearby, but some of the leaves were attracted to Sayaka and began to swirl around her. Confused, she shooed them away; however, they attracted an electrical charge as they dispersed and hit a stone wall, leaving a scorch mark. Natsumi and Suzumi stopped dead in their tracks and glared at Sayaka, who was at a loss of words.
"I just told Yukiko what I'm telling you now, Reiko. She said that Mom's job is stupid and antiquated and she thinks you shouldn't want to be the head priestess," Keiko Hino explained to her identical twin sister Reiko as the two got ready to leave T.A. Girls' Academy. Reiko's dark eyes were flashing with anger.
"Yukiko's the stupid one! What kind of girl aspires to be nothing more than a housewife? In this day and age, women have so many more choices!" Reiko shouted.
"Reiko, what about Usagi-san? She's a housewife," Keiko pointed out, always one to defend both sides of a debate.
"She's an exception," Reiko grumbled. "But, man, do I hate that Yukiko!" She made a fist and then broke it, but Keiko saw small flames jump forth from her twin sister's hand.
"Reiko, you're not going to believe me, but I saw that coming," Keiko said with all seriousness.
"Shut up! You did not!" Reiko insisted.
"Yeah, I did," Keiko answered. "I can do it, too. Shhh." She put her finger to her mouth and a small flame flickered on her fingertip.
"We need to tell Mom about this," Reiko said, her eyes wide.
"Okay," Keiko replied, agreeing with her sister for once, which was a rarity. "Let's go home."
Home was a place Sakura and Aiko wished they could be at more than anywhere else. They, along with a few other assorted troublemakers, were suffering together in Juuban Junior High's detention center, writing "I will not skip class" over and over until their hands ached.
"What should we do about these weird things that keep happening to us?" Aiko wrote in a note that she furtively passed to Sakura.
"Tell our mothers," Sakura answered immediately. "Don't pass any more notes or we'll get in more trouble."
"What if they laugh? I don't think Haruka would believe me," Aiko wrote, even though Sakura told her not to send any more notes.
"She'll at least listen," Sakura said, drawing a smiling face. "Now seriously, don't write me any more notes. My hand hurts!"