Kindergarten

Age: 5

"18, 19, 20. Ready or not, here I come!" Stiles uncovered his eyes and looked around excitedly for Scott. They had been playing hide and seek at recess for the past few days, but to not much success. Stiles couldn't wait in his hiding place without being distracted by something else long enough for Scott to find him, so Scott was forced to hide all the time if he wanted to play the game with his best friend. This was fine with Stiles, because now he had an excuse to run around the recess grounds and yell. However, Scott wasn't good enough at hiding for the game to last very long.

"Scoot," Stiles groaned dramatically. "You already hid there!"

Scott poked his head out from behind the clump of pine trees by the tether ball poles. "What? No I haven't!"

"Yeah huh!" Stiles protested. "You hid there yesterday!"

"That doesn't count!" Scott argued. "Yesterday doesn't count!"

"It does too!"

"That's not fair! There's not enough hiding spots out here!"

"Well, if you keep hiding in the same places, the game don't last enough to have fun!" Stiles whined.

"That's not my fault!" Scott pouted, pulling at the hem of his blue striped shirt. "You're too good at being it."

"I know!" Stiles shouted suddenly, grabbing Scott by the shoulders and shaking him. "We should have some more kids play with us. The game would be so much funner if we had more people playing! I wouldn't have to be it all the time or I could still be it and there would be more people to seek."

"I don't wanna play with anyone else," Scott mumbled. Stiles was the only person beside his mom or dad that he felt comfortable talking to. Everyone else in his class was pretty nice, except for maybe Jackson, but he didn't really talk to Scott much.

Stiles ignored him. "We should ask Lydia to play with us. Do you think Lydia would play with us? Oh my God, it would be so cool if she played hide and seek with us. Do you think she'd be it with me? That would be awesome. We should ask her." Lydia wasn't ever really mean to anyone, but she made Scott feel stupid. Stiles was obsessed with her though.

"C'mon, Scoot! Let's go ask her," Stiles said, dragging Scott towards Lydia. He dug the heels of his light-up sneakers into the grass, but Stiles pulled him along all the same.

Lydia was sitting in the wooden pen under the big blue slide on the other side of the playground. A shy girl with wavy brown hair and a small, quiet boy sat behind her, looking bored. Lydia ignored her friends completely as she was immersed in drawing numbers in the loose gravel and taking notes on her hand, using her diminutive finger as a pen.

"Hey, Lydia!" Stiles called as he marched over to her, towing a quietly protesting Scott behind him. "Lydia, hi." The redhead continued her work of furiously scribbling on her palm with her forefinger without looking up at the newcomers, though her two friends perked up at the possibility of a new game. "Don't be rude, Scoot," Stiles whispered loudly over his shoulder. "Say hi or she won't play with us." Scott didn't want to play with Lydia or her friends at all, but he waved hello nonetheless.

"Hi," Allison answered when Lydia continued to pretend Stiles wasn't there. The boy beside her smiled and waved.

"So, what are you doing?" Stiles asked, crouching down in front of Lydia and leaning his head down, trying to catch her eye.

"Playing house," Danny said miserably. Lydia finally looked up from her work at Danny's comment and sighed, exasperated.

"You don't get to talk, Danny. You're the dog, remember? You have to bark. And you," she rounded on Allison. "Don't talk to strangers," she shook her finger in Allison's face. "If you talk to strangers, you'll get kidnapped and never see your mommy again. And don't take candy from anybody you don't know, even if you really, really want it. Besides, we're not playing," she said as though it were a dirty word. "I'm doing the taxes. It's very serious." Lydia was very grown up.

"Oh," Stiles said, straightening up. Scott dug a hole in the gravel with the tip of his shoe. "Well, can you be done doing the taxis? Because me and Scoot want to play hide and seek and we want more people to play so we can play longer. Do you wanna play with us? You can even be it first if you want to. Or me and you can be it together and we can look for everyone else. It's real easy, Scoot always hides in the same spot. Or do you want to hide first? I know a lotta good hiding spots. Hiding in the slide is hard though, 'cause you have to hold on the sides like this," he spread his arms and legs like a starfish to demonstrate, "and other people get mad at you 'cause they can't go down the slide when you're in it."

"No, Stiles," Lydia interrupted. "I have a lot of important work to do. Good bye."

Stiles opened his mouth to protest, looking hurt, but Allison cut him off. "Mommy?"

"Yes?" Lydia went back to her scribbling.

"Can I go play outside with the other kids? We'll stay in the yard."

"Where's the yard?" Stiles asked.

"Anywhere that's not in the house," Allison said, gesturing to the little pen she was squatting in.

"You'll stay in the yard the whole time?" Lydia asked.

"Yeah. Oh," Danny nudged her. "Can I bring Danny with me? He'll keep the strangers away, won't you, Danny?"

Danny barked in agreement.

Lydia made a show of pondering this for a while. "Fine," she eventually allowed. "Only if you take Danny with you and stay where I can see you."

"But we're playing hide and seek," Stiles said in confusion. "She has to hide if she's not it."

"Shh!" Allison hissed. She took Danny by the hand and led him out of the playpen, her arm acting as his "leash" until they were far enough away from Lydia to let go.

"Thanks for asking us to play," Danny said, wiping his hand on his shorts to get off any girl cooties Allison might have passed along. "Lydia always wants to play house, but I have to be the dog every time."

"Why don't you be the dad?" Scott asked, piping up for the first time.

"Lydia says she's too young to get married," Allison answered. "She wants to focus on her career."

"Oh," Scott was utterly confused.

"I'm it first!" Stiles yelled. "The middle pole on the swings is base. You only get to run after I find you though, okay?"

Soon the four of them were running around the playground, shrieking and laughing as they went. The noise disturbed Lydia, who was trying her best to ignore them. She lost count of her figures as Allison went zooming past the "house," Scott hot on her trail. A few minutes later, she heard Stiles shouting about some discrepancy in the rules he had made up that allowed him to choose who was going to be it if he didn't catch anyone. Danny was yelling back at him.

Lydia stared down at the marks she had painstakingly made in the gravel before wiping them out with her hands. She wasn't going to get any work done with all this racket. She crawled out of her playpen, dusted off her skirt, and stomped over to the scene of the argument. "No, you're playing wrong. If you're going to play hide and seek, you have to do it right."

A/N: Thank you for following this story and please leave a review if you enjoyed it. As always, if you have any ideas for adventures you'd like to see Scoot and Stiles go on please feel free to leave them in reviews or send us a PM. For those of you following our other story, In Exchange, we just wanted to let everyone know that the next two chapters are underway but will take some time to get out because we want to finish both before posting. Thanks again!