Twenty-three students filed into the classroom and took their seats noisily. One year after the nightmare began and they still had the same seating arrangement and the same teacher. Some found it to be a personal conspiracy against their graduating class; others thought it must be karma. Everyone agreed that their crazy, and suddenly absent, classmate was probably the reason for it.

Mrs. Bitters seemed to hang mid-air at the front of the room, watching each greasy body with the glare of her pupiless white eyes. She scanned each seat, taking a mental roll call and stopped with an even bigger frown at the empty chair in the front of the classroom nearest the windows.

"Where is Dib?" she asked with the sharp edge of annoyance in her voice. "Last week he was sitting in that seat there and now there is NOTHING."

"Dib's crazy," Zita offered from the opposite side of the classroom.

"Dib moved," Zim corrected her absentmindedly as he picked at the thin plastic running around the wooden edge of the desk. If he could get a sample of this he might be able to produce some of his own as a suit for a rainy day. The paste worked well enough, but it was so uncomfortable when he tried to get up after sitting for a while and his thighs stuck together. It always made him trip. But with a suit of plastic that the water couldn't get through he might not fall over when the bell rang at the end of class. This was worth looking into…

"In that case," the old woman was talking through the alien's thoughts in her deep, scratched voice, "Zim!" Innocent white and purple eyes looked up as his gloved hands folded over themselves until Zim was the picture of perfect human attention. "You are to be the new student who is alienated from the rest of your classmates at every possible moment of the day. Enjoy your demotion."

"Zim's crazy," Zita responded mechanically from the desk behind the green boy.

"Why would you do that?" His voice was soft with the question but Zim's red eyes flashed dangerously at the ghastly old bitch.


Every face turned forward in unison and necks craned as the new boy with the big glasses and even bigger head walked into the room and stood self-consciously at the front of the classroom. Shifting, the wrinkles in his favorite shirt caused the face on the front to frown.

"He's cute," he heard the whisper and then a group of girls to the left giggled.

"He looks weird," another whisper and two boys high-fived each other in the back.

"I bet he's crazy. Crazy like Joe." At the displaced voice a boy in the front row blushed in anger and continued to draw what looked like a crop circle on the brown book jacket that said "Science" at the top in neatly blocked letters.

"Class?" The teacher, a younger woman (although compared to Mrs. Bitters even Dib's grandma was a younger woman) with dark shapely glasses and short red hair called in a quiet but powerful voice. "Class, I would like you to meet Dib, son of the famous Professor Membrane, and the newest addition to our growing school family."

Dib raised an eyebrow at the woman who was obviously meant to be teaching grades much lower than his own 7th grade class. So far everyone he had met in this town had been overly pleasant and naïve. It was a nice change from the caustic jackasses back home, but it was still pretty creepy.

Laying a gentle hand firmly on his shoulder, Ms.Green pushed Dib closer to the hungry eyes of his classmates. "Go on Dib, tell us a little about yourself."

Well, I come from a town full of stupid, self-involved jackasses; my father is famous for inventing a joke called Super Toast; I want to study paranormal sciences - you know bigfoot, nessie, ghosts, that sort of thing; and the only person who doesn't believe that I am insane is an alien who lives in a short, thin house with a "I 3 Earth" flag that never moves in the breeze. Yeah, that would go over well.

Taking a deep breath, Dib let it slowly slide out between his thin lips. He didn't want to be crazy anymore. He didn't want to visit the local graveyard and have conversations with its ghostly inhabitants; he didn't want to try to convince people that crop circles were not real.

He didn't want his sanity to be dependant on the existence, or not, of a house.

No more "insane son", no more "stupid kid", no more "crazy Dib".

"Dib? Son? You ok?"

He looked up again at the tidal wave of faces leaning towards him. "Huh? Oh, sorry." A pink blush crept up into his pale face as he tried to smooth back the cowlick that always stood up on his forehead.

"I'm Dib. I just moved here from another state, and uh, I'm excited to start this new chapter in my life…"