Naruto went to the Academy as Tsunami the first day. Both of him were in a new class together. Sasuke was also in the class as were a few others from his old class. Sakura, the pink-haired girl, and Hinata, the pale-eyed girl, were both in his classt oo. The other kid that stood out was a boy with red marks on his cheeks who walked around with a puppy on his head.

The first day went better than school usually did. The teacher treated everyone the same, although Naruto, watching as Tsunami, could tell that he was wary of Naruto. The teacher's aide was very friendly—although when the Naruto clone was not looking, he sent hateful looks his way. Tsunami wrote left-handed, so that their handwriting would look different. Naruto was grateful that his mom had made him become good at writing with both.

Most of the kids treated Naruto like kids always had, the exceptions were the boy with the dog, Inuzuka Kiba, a lazy-looking boy with a pineapple haircut, Nara Shikamaru, and a large boy with swirls on his cheeks, Akimichi Chouji. There was another boy in the class who was also a loner, Aburame Shino. Shino did not really ignore him like kids usually did; he was just very polite and aloof to everyone.

He hung out with Shikamaru and Chouji sometimes, but they did not seem to want to do anything but look at clouds, so he found them pretty boring. At other times he hung out with Kiba, but Kiba was too bossy to be around all the time.

At this age, the boys and the girls had segregated themselves. Yamanaka Ino, a loud, blonde girl, pulled Naruto as Tsunami into her orbit. Ino was friends with Sakura. Both of them did not care for Naruto in his real form, but it seemed to be mostly because they found him loud and obnoxious. Naruto found that he liked the girls, but that he could only take so much of them. Ino and Sakura mainly wanted to talk about boys, and they both quickly settled on Sasuke as the most desirable of them.

When Ino and Sakura got too much for him as Tsunami, he sought out Hinata. Hinata was friendly, but very shy. She did ask him a few questions about his "brother," but spent a lot of that time red-faced and stuttering. When Ino and Sakura's fawning over Sasuke and Hinata's shyness got too much for him, he sought out his other self, who was usually tired of Shikamaru and Chouji's laziness and Kiba's bossiness by that time.

As far as schoolwork went, Naruto noticed a pattern. Tsunami quickly assumed a position near the top of the class. She floated between number four and six, switching positions with Ino and Hinata, but consistently behind Sasuke, Shino, and Sakura. Naruto, however, found himself at dead last, which was lower than he was in his old class. Part of that was due to the people who had been worse dropping out, but mostly it was due to sabotage and the fact that a lot of the standings depended on the written tests since there were more of them than the practical ones. His tests were different than Tsunami's and his shuriken and kunai frequently bounced off the target. When he complained to the teacher, the teacher said he would look into it, but nothing ever happened. He did pretty well in his taijutsu spars against most of the boys. Sasuke still always beat him. Kiba usually beat him and Chouji sometimes did. In fight against the teacher's aide, however, the aide seemed to fight him harder than he did anyone else. Afterwards he always seemed friendly with a "better luck next time," but Naruto knew better. He thought about talking to the Old Man about it, but decided to stick to their wager.

Occasionally, when it got too boring, he would start a fight with his clone over who would be Hokage. He would always win, of course, regardless of whether he was Tsunami or himself.

The big new skill they learned this year was Replacement, which Naruto had just learned with his mom's help. Naruto still could not do the normal Clone Technique. He asked the teacher about it, but there were always two students who appeared and started badgering him whenever Naruto tried to get help from him. Naruto suspected that the aide was paying them off somehow, based on how he looked whenever it happened.

He attended the kunoichi class as Tsunami, but in his opinion it was a waste of time. Most of it had to do with things like flower arranging that were only valuable for infiltration missions. Despite the aptitude that his special Disguise Technique would give him for those, he had no desire to specialize in them.

Naruto eased up on the classroom pranks, because he did not want to foul the wager with the Old Man. He did not stop completely, however, because he found it fun. He was still never caught, but he got the blame every time because of his reputation.

In his mindscape, his mom taught him chakra sensing using the Mind's Eye Technique in addition to teaching him Whirling Tides taijutsu and seals. It took him two months of meditation to get to the point where he could sense anything. Once he figured it out though, he steadily got better at it.

"Why do I feel different when I'm Tsunami," one of his clones asked while he was sparring with his mom. The clone was practicing the Mind's Eye, while several other were doing water walking on the stream in the meadow.

"It's because you turn into a real girl and have more yin chakra," his mom replied, stopping the sparring.

"My chakra signature is different?" Naruto asked. He had noticed something odd about it, but had not yet put it to words.

"Kind of," his mother replied. "It's the same whether your Naruto or Tsunami, except that Tsunami has more yin chakra. This makes for an interesting scenario where you look different to human sensors, but not to seals that look at chakra—unless the seal specifically looks at the yin-yang balance."

She pulled out her ink and sealing paper kit and drew two seals. "This first seal is a standard security seal linked to a storage seal. Once activated by someone's chakra it can only be unlocked by that same person. Pick up a rock and put it in the seal."

Naruto as Tsunami did so.

"Now, I want a Naruto clone to unlock it," she said.

The clone that had started the conversation did so. The rock came out.

"This other seal is the same, but modified to sense yin-yang balance," she said. "Give it another try.

Naruto sealed the same rock into the seal, but the clone could not remove it.

"Why don't all security seals check for yin-yang balance?" he asked.

"Because it's not stable," she said. "Most people's yin-yang balance changes over time. Puberty effects it. So does menopause for women. But even outside of those, everybody's changes slightly over time. There are other markers in a chakra signature that remain stable and are much better for security seals. The changes are usually gradual and small, so the changes don't register to a human sensor, even though yin and yang stand out brightly to a human sensor."

"Is that why Jiichan didn't know it was me when they discovered me as Tsunami?" he asked.

She nodded. "They certainly would have had a sensor look at you."

"I still have more yang chakra than yin chakra when I'm Tsunami," the clone said.

"That's because of several reasons, primarily. One is that you're an Uzumaki. We naturally have more yang chakra than normal people. The other is that your father split the Kyuubi in half when he sealed it into you. He put the yang half in you and sealed the yin half in himself and took it with him into the Shinigami's belly. The Kyuubi's yang chakra would cause you're body to make more. The last is that studying is what naturally increases yin chakra and you would rather work out. I wouldn't worry about it though. While women tend to have more yin chakra than men and vice versa with men and yang, there are many exceptions both ways."

"What does this mean for me as Tsunami?" Naruto asked.

"You might be a little better at genjutsu and have a little less stamina," his mom said.

"You mean I could finally do the Clone Technique?" he asked.

She laughed. "Probably not. I never could and I am more balanced toward yin chakra than you as Tsunami. I'm actually pretty even between yin and yang and you still have more yang even when you're Tsunami."

"Will having less stamina as Tsunami hurt me?" he asked.

"Probably not. Not only are you balanced toward yang, you have tons of chakra. You still have a massive amount of stamina as Tsunami."

Towards the end of the year, the Academy teacher, Iruka, seemed to soften toward Naruto. He decided to give him a chance. Iruka invited him out to dinner at Ichirakus a few times, which Naruto enjoyed.

Iruka tried to be brotherly or fatherly, but he still failed the test his mother had made for him. Whenever he tried to talk to him in class about the Clone Technique, the aide's henchmen distracted him. Whenever he mentioned it outside of class, Iruka said it wouldn't be fair to give him extra help outside of class.

When Naruto tried to talk to him about the discrepancy in how he and Tsunami were treated, Iruka brushed him off.

"I looked into it, Naruto-kun," he said. "The tests are the same."

Naruto thought about pushing it, but decided to not to rock the boat and keep to his wager with the Old Man.

Iruka's focus on the outings seemed to be to try and make Naruto feel accepted enough to stop pranking. His teacher admitted that he had been a bit of a prankster when he was a kid because he had felt lonely. Naruto thought about letting Iruka catch him in his pranks in order to build more of a bond with him, but discarded the idea since his teacher was still failing the Clone test.

In the final normal year of the Academy, they learned about genjutsu and how to dispel them. Naruto struggled with this as much as he did with the Clone Technique. He was supposed to stop his chakra flow and then restart it. The problem was that he had so much chakra that it was difficult to stop. There was also a small current in his chakra that made stopping it even harder. He thought it must be related to the seal that kept the Fox prisoner.

It did not help that the teacher's aide always seemed to be the one that applied the genjutsu on him and made it harder than the one that Tsunami got. Tsunami managed to dispel the genjutsu about a third of the time, but Naruto never managed it.

In his mindscape, his mom taught him another method for dispelling genjutsu. By flaring his chakra, he could force the foreign chakra out of him. Unfortunately, since his mom did not know any genjutsu, he could not test the method out on a real one. She recommended that he not use this other method in class, because it was likely to scare the teachers based on the amount of chakra needed to do it.

The other thing that his mom taught him were her chakra chains. Unfortunately, he did not have her special chakra, so his chains, which she called Adamantine Attacking Chains, did not suppress chakra. They were still pretty cool though.

By this time, he had gotten pretty proficient in the Whirling Tides taijutsu as Tsunami. He started incorporating aspects of it into his taijutsu as Naruto too. His sealing skills had gotten into what his mom called the Intermediate range. He'd gotten good at making sealing scrolls and explosive notes.

The major thing that happened at the Academy early in the seventh year, that did not relate to schoolwork, was the falling out between Sakura and Ino. The two girls blew up at each other over who was "worthy" of "Sasuke-kun." Unlike other arguments between the two, this one did not blow over. This strained the friendship he had with the two as Tsunami but, as one of two girls in the class that did not fawn over the Uchiha, he became a sort of neutral party since neither of them liked Hinata. They thought Hinata was stuck up when she was just incredibly shy. The whole thing rather disgusted him, but he valued his friends.

As Tsunami, he visited a shinobi equipment store that his mom had recommended to see if it would buy some basic seals from him. When he told the proprietor, Higurashi-san, his alias, the man asked if he were Kushina's daughter. He responded that the Hokage had asked him not to talk about his parents. Higurashi-san then asked him if he were related to Naruto.

"Yes, he's my brother," he said. "Is that a problem?"

"No, no. Not if he's her son," the proprietor said with a wink.

"Good, because he made half of these," he said.

This gave him a nice source of income and a fallback career.

A couple of months after his twelfth birthday, he found an unpleasant surprise when he changed into Tsunami in the morning. He quickly changed back and meditated until he found himself in his mindscape.

"Mom!" he yelled, running into the house.

"What is it, Naruto-chan?" she said. "Shouldn't you be going to school?"

"I'm bleeding from my private parts!" he yelled.

"What?" she said, surprised. "Right now?"

"No, as Tsunami!" he responded.

She relaxed. "Ah, that's normal for a girl, although I'm surprised you're going through it."

"It's normal?" he asked incredulously.

"Haven't you had health class as Tsunami?" she asked.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I think that was the year before I started attending as Tsunami."

She sighed and explained to him the monthly cycle. She made him turn back to Tsunami and showed him how to use feminine hygiene products.

His mom snickered. "You know this means it's likely you can get pregnant, don't you?"

He blanched.

"I will tell you something that has saved a few high-level Konoha kunoichi when they ran out of certain supplies," she said.

"What?"

"Shadow Clones don't bleed during their periods," she said.

"They don't!" he said.

"They still feel bloated and crampy, but they don't bleed," she said.

Naruto thought about using Shadow Clones for Tsunami during the days that Tsunami had her period.

"I know what you're thinking," his mom said, "but remember your deal with the Third. No cheating!"

He pouted.

His mom hugged him. "It'll be okay. Half the world deals with it. You can too."

When he left his mindscape, he sent a Shadow Clone for feminine hygiene supplies. While he was waiting, he had an evil thought. There was no way he was going to the Academy today anyway. . .

"Jiichan!" he shouted as he ran into the Hokage's office as Tsunami. "I'm dying!"

"What!?" the Old Man exclaimed worriedly. "What happened?"

"I'm bleeding from down her for no reason!" he said, pointing at his crotch.

"Are you serious?" the Hokage asked, stunned. He sat in his chair for a few moments and then activated the privacy seal on the office.

"Well," the Hokage hemmed and hawed for a few long moments and then finally said, "You should talk to your mother about this."

Naruto couldn't hold it in any longer and busted up laughing.

"Naruto," said the Hokage sternly, "are you pranking me?"

"Kind of," said Naruto as he struggled to control himself. "I really am having my period and I really had no clue what was going on when I first changed to Tsunami this morning, but I already talked to my mom and she explained it to me."

The Old Man shook his head. "I can't believe your Disguise is that real. I assume you know what this implies, right?"

Naruto nodded his head soberly. "Yeah, Mom already warned me that it was possible I could get pregnant."

The Old Man got an evil glint in his eye. "You remember our deal, right? No passing your period off to Shadow Clones when it's the real you's turn."

Naruto sighed. "I figured. I am going to play hooky today though. I feel like I have a mild case of the flu, even disregarding the bleeding."

"I'll let it go this time," the Hokage said, "but only for today. Okay?"

Naruto nodded.

By the end of Tsunami's period, Naruto stopped thinking of himself as male when he changed into her. The period was disgusting and unpleasant, but it was a sort of rite of passage. Naruto felt like he was not pretending to be a girl anymore. His outlook did not really change—Tsunami was a huge tomboy and she did not like the girly things that Sakura and Ino occasionally tried to talk her into doing.

Author's Note: Higarushi is probably the most common fan fiction family name for Tenten (either naturally or adopted), although she is never given one in canon. I'm using it here for the proprietor of the shinobi supply store as a tribute to that.