~Chapter 2~

Sam twitched as she sat uncomfortably in the movie theater. She was finally able to hang out with her two best friends and now her body wouldn't stop acting up. Those society lessons were so long and boring that she couldn't even remember what happened there. Thankfully they gave her no homework, but unfortunately the classes took too long.

"Sam?"

She heard someone's voice. Maybe it was her name. Yeah...that had to be it. Her name was Sam, right? No, yeah, no...yeah, it was. Sam Manson. ...What did "Sam" stand for anyway? Why did her parents name her Sam? Or wait, was it "parents" or "parent"? Which of the two was the plural version? Maybe it was "parents". Well...no, that just didn't sound right.

"Hello?"

She snapped her head around to find Tucker's concerned expression.

"Oh, hi," she said.

He only looked at her. Looked...that wasn't the word. No, wasn't it something else? It was a different word she was looking for. Wait, looking? Looking and looked... They would equal look. Or maybe they wouldn't... Well then what would they equal? Wait, this sounded like a math problem. She wasn't very good at math. So why was she trying so hard to solve it? It shouldn't be that hard, it was like adding one plus two. Er...wait a minute... One plus two...what did that equal again...?

She used her fingers to count, but kept losing track and couldn't stay on the number line.

"Sam, snap out of it," Tucker whispered as the movie played.

"Quiet!" she hissed. "I'm trying to do some math here."

The geek calmly sat back in his seat and began watching the movie, slowly shaking his head. Sam had been acting weird. She would say the most random things and stress herself out over things that didn't even matter, sometimes things that didn't exist! Take, for instance, the time when she swore Lancer had given her extra homework. It was a Saturday when she started rambling on about it. There was no way Lancer could assign homework if nobody was in school. She had managed to get herself so worked up about it that she wound up banging her head against the wall; any attempts to calm her down were a waste of time.

What he would give to figure out the cause of all this. At first, it was all blamed on stress. But now... Well, there was just no way stress could cover this kind of behavior. No matter how you looked at it, it wasn't normal! Even Danny was starting to worry. Sam had never once acted like this before. Not until she'd taken up "princess school", that is. But how would a school cause this? Any amount of stress wasn't good for you but this...this was insane! Literally! Sam was literally going insane! But why? It didn't make any sense. One day she was perfectly fine. Sarcastic. Willful. Stubborn. The next day she was hardly even human. Spacey. Confused. Disoriented.

It was like she didn't know what she was doing anymore. Something was going on to make her like this, but what? Maybe this was her way of getting back at them for something they did wrong...? No...no, that just wasn't Sam. She would only do this kind of thing to prove a point. But there was no point to be proven! What the heck was going on with her?

The next day, Sam sat down as usual in her classroom. There were desks, chairs, teachers, whiteboards...everything a regular school had. The only difference was that she could never remember what happened here. Sometimes it was hard to find her way back home. Sometimes she got too dizzy to walk and had to sit down. Both memory and balance were becoming a big problem for her. It felt like she couldn't function properly. It felt like she couldn't function at all...

The rest of the day passed like that. One second she was in the class trying to listen to her teachers and the next thing she knew, she was walking out of the school to go home. She literally had no idea what had happened. She couldn't even remember what she'd learned. Had she learned anything? Hm. Learned...it was such a weird word. Learned. It didn't even sound like English. Maybe it was...Latin? Chinese? French? Possibly Spanish?

"Hey, Sam," Danny called out as he caught up to her. "How was school?"

School was also a weird word. It wasn't spelled right.

"Sam?" he repeated.

She wasn't listening. Either that, or she didn't hear him. Sam wasn't herself anymore and something was going on. He didn't know what, but he knew it was pretty powerful to turn Sam into...this. Tucker told him about what happened at the movies last night, about how she told him to be quiet and let her do her math. It was a weekend. Lancer never assigned homework on weekends, considering no one was at school on weekends. And Sam was...she was just not right. Something was messing with her mind, and it seemed to be getting worse with each passing day.

He never thought to question the new school she attended.

A/N

Yeah...I don't have the energy to write a longer chapter. Plus, I have the ACTs tomorrow morning at 8:00am sharp and a school dance (same day) at around 6:00pm. So for now, short chapters are all I can do. :( I'm going to sleep... I'm sorry this chapter sucked and was so short. I'll be easing into longer chapters but for now, short chapters of about 1,000 words will have to do. I'm also working on three other stories...so...yeah... Anyway, I hope this piece of crap I dare to call a chapter was tolerable for you. Now...I have to rest up for probably the most important test of my life. Any questions should be asked on a review because my inbox fills up rapidly. I'll answer questions in the next chapter.