Tina Cohen-Chang didn't expect much from her fourth period Home-ec class. Junior year is going to be a hard year for her, with five APs, and one honors class (Because McKinley didn't offer AP language courses. It had taken Tina hours to explain that to her parents.) All Tina wants out of Home-ec is a period when she can relax and not need to worry about her grades. With the amount of money the school district spends on arts programs, she is surprised the school even offers Home-ec. So, she isn't expecting much out of the program.

She also isn't expecting to walk into the classroom to find a sleeping teacher. The woman (Tina's schedule said the teacher was Ms. Manderly) looks to be about eighty or ninety years old. She has frizzy white hair, and a wide open mouth. She is snoring. On the blackboard behind her are instructions:

Split into groups of three or four.

Take a recipe from up front.

Ingredients are in the kitchens.

Make brownies according to the recipe.

Tine stares for a moment at the directions and the sleeping woman, before shrugging, and walking up to the front of the room to grab a recipe. Brittany is standing in one of the room's mini kitchens, holding up an eggbeater and staring at it, so Tina walks over towards her.

"Hey Brittany."

"Tina! How was your summer?"

"Good. Mike and I-"

"Tina do you see this? It looks like a robot bunny!"

"Umm… yeah. I guess it does. Do you want to make brownies together?"

"I love Brownies!" Brittany grins at Tina, who hands her the recipe. Brittany looks at it for a moment. "Recipes confuse me…"

Tina takes the recipe back. "How about I just give you stuff that you can mix with the robot bunny?"

Brittany grins. "Cool!"

Tina isn't really sure why she's even bothering to make brownies. Only one other group of kids has decided to cook that day. One of the guys is a hockey player and the Tina thinks that the two others hang out with the Skanks under the bleachers. Tina measures flour and cocoa powder and butter as she watches one of the guys pull a plastic bag out of his pocket, and show it to the other two. It's full of something that Tina can't see, but she (correctly) assumes is pot. She turns away to measure out ¾ cup of water, and then hands the bowl over to Brittany to mix, who is chatting about unicorns.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tina sees a girl watching the three guys in the other kitchen. She's got short blond hair and glasses, and is wearing a dark purple dress and cowboy boots, and she doesn't look familiar. Tina wonders if she's from the south like Sam was. The girl walks over to the guys, and her voice is a lot clearer that the three guys', so Tina can hear some of what she's saying.

"You're not seriously going to just pour the weed into the brownie batter and bake it. Are you?"

The two guys look at her like she's nuts. "What would you know? That's how you make pot brownies!"

The girl laughs. "Not if you want to get high it's not. And they'll taste bad anyway. If you want to make pot brownies, you have to make…" The girl starts whispering, and Tina can't hear what she's saying, but just watches as she boils a pot of water and adds butter and the contents of the plastic baggie to it. Tina turns away. A new skank is in town. She wonders if Quinn knows this girl yet, because she's been hanging out with the skanks all summer. Probably.

An hour later, when the period ends, and Brittany and Tina are cutting their brownies and putting them in a plastic bag to take home with them, Tina looks over to the other group again. The girl is sitting down again, at one of the tables near the front of the room, reading a heavy book. One of the guys comes up to offer her a square of brownie, but she shakes her head.

"I don't do drugs"

Tina giggles from where she is, and the girl looks over to her. "What's so funny?"

"The expert on making pot brownies doesn't do drugs? I totally believe that."

The girl shrugged. "I don't. I just know how to make the brownies, and I couldn't just sit and watch them doing it the wrong way. Gotta help others and teach them to see the light and all that."

Tina raises an eyebrow, and then shrugs. Maybe the girl isn't so bad after all. Tina glances at the cover of the book the girl is holding. It's the complete works of William Shakespeare. Yeah, maybe not such a skank after all. The skanks aren't big on reading. Tina smiles at the girl. "Do you have lunch next? You can have a drug free brownie and sit with me."

The girl looks her up and down for a minute, and then nods. "Yeah. Sounds good. I'm Katie."

Tina holds out a brownie. "I'm Tina" The two of them grab their backpacks and munch on the brownies as they walk to the cafeteria.

"Are you new here?" Tina asks.

Katie nods. "Yup. I just moved in with my Aunt and Uncle and cousin."

"Who's your cousin? Does she go to McKinley?" Tina asks, interested.

"No. She's at The Math and Science Magnet school." Tina raises an eyebrow.

"You know McKinley's academic team beat them last year."

Katie laughs at the expression on Tina's face. "A little bit of a rivalry going on?"

"Only on academic team. We wipe the floor with them in every sport, including football, which is saying something, because until last year we'd won a grand total of four games."

"My old school had a horrible football team too. I think they're still on a five year losing streak…" The two girls finish their brownies, and get in the lunch line. Katie is examining the food curiously. "There's real food here? Like.. is it good?"

Tina nods "Yeah, usually it's pretty good. I'd stay away from the beef stroganoff… but.. otherwise it's actually not bad. Spaghetti is today. That's always good."

"I'm a vegetarian so I wasn't going to eat stroganoff anyway." Katie replies, and Tina nods. "My old school's lunches were practically inedible…"

The two girls grab lunch and then sit down at a table and begin to scarf down food. About five minutes later Mike shows up, and gives Tina a peck on the cheek. She giggles and turns her head to capture his lips again, and the two of them make out for a good minute, before Katie clears her throat. "Not that you're not a cute couple, but I think that entire table is staring at you."

Tina turns around and, sure enough, an entire table of nerds is staring blankly at the couple. Jacob Ben Israel looks like he's starting to drool. Mike sits down in the empty seat next to Tina.

"This is Mike, my boyfriend." Mike kisses Tina again, and then turns to grin at Katie.

"Hi! And you are…?"

Katie smiles back, "My names Katie. Katie Chew."

Make looks confused for a minute. "You're not Asian are you? You don't look Asian…"

"It's spelled C-H-E-W, not C-H-U. And no, I'm not Asian."

"Weird last name."

"I like it," Katie smiles and shrugs, and the three go back to eating their lunch.

-X-

It's Kurt Hummel's first day of senior year, so it's absolutely essential that he looks perfect. He spent hours yesterday, putting together his outfit, and woke up a half hour early for his moisturizing and hair routine. He has to look his best.

Kurt is absolutely horrified, however, when he walks into his sixth period Ceramics class and is told that today- Yes, today, the first day of school- everyone will be starting work on a potter's wheel. His clothes are going to be ruined. When he raises his hand to tell the teacher that he can't possibly work with clay today because his outfit will get ruined, he just tells him that he won't get messy if he's careful. Kurt doesn't believe the man, partially because Kurt has worked on a potter's wheel before, and knows how messy semi solid mud is, and also because the teacher in question has half dried clay up to his elbows, and grey smudged across his face and neck, and all over the front of his T-shirt.

Kurt crosses his arms over his chest, and decides to simply refuse to participate, until someone taps on his shoulder. There is a hand holding out an oversized button down shirt that is already home to more paint stains then Kurt can count. He looks up to the face of the person holding out the shirt, and it's an unfamiliar one. The girl is probably about 5'6", and has dirty blonde hair that's been cut into a bob (which Kurt has to admit is a fabulous cut on her). She is wearing an indigo sundress that falls to her mid-thigh, and compliments her body beautifully. And she's also wearing a pair of beat up, dark brown cowboy boots that Kurt knows could easily look cheesy, but this girl has pulled them off by wearing them over a pair of fuzzy grey knee socks, which are visible about an inch and a half over the top of the boots. This girl looks fabulous. If fact, she might even be dressed more fabulously than Kurt is, and it doesn't even look like she's got a designer thread on her body. Kurt smiles. "Thanks… but what are you going to wear over your dress?"

The girl shrugs. "I don't care. Clay comes out of clothes, and I don't mind looking a little messy after art class. It's supposed to be messy." Upon closer examination, Kurt does see a smudged sharpie drawing on the girl's arm, and some blue and brown paint stuck onto her fingertips in places.

"You have any other art classes?" Kurt asks.

"Painting, first period." She replies.

"Oh. My friend, Rachel is in that class. Did you meet her?" Kurt asks.

"What does she look like?"

Kurt begins to describe her and as he does, the girl's face begins to change, at first maybe annoyed, but then just amused. "Yes, I know her. She was sitting next to me. She seemed to think that painting wasn't worth her time. She didn't make a particularly wonderful first impression, but if she's not so bad… I'll take your word for it." She laughs.

"She can be a bit… abrasive… sometimes." Kurt admits. "She's also a fabulous singer though."

"She's in choir?" the girl asks.

"We call it Glee… but yeah."

"I'm signed up for that ninth period."

Kurt's smile widens. "Me too." The teacher begins to hand out blocks of clay for everyone to work with, and Kurt slips on the smock that the girl has lent him. "What's your name?"

"Katie," she replies, and then begins wedging her clay on the heavy metal table in front of them. The two of them chatter for the next forty five minutes as they each turn their lumps of clay into little ceramic vases. Or at least… Katie's looks like a vas. Kurt's still pretty much looks like a lump of clay when he walks out of the class, wondering if he'll ever get the moisture back in his hands again. Even if this class doesn't ruin his clothes, it's going to kill his skin.

-X-

Puck didn't actually sign up for autoshop. In fact… he never did turn in his schedule request form at the end of the previous year. Aside from being in remedial math (Which he'll continue to not attend), Puck's classes aren't very academic. The school has probably decided to forgo graduation requirements just to give him classes they think he might actually learn something from.

Because Puck is not getting into college. Even he knows that. So he has autoshop, and woodshop, and Spanish, and personal finance, and a few other classes that Puck has either forgotten, or didn't bother to look at in the first place.

Puck doesn't think he'll mind autoshop. He knows a bit about cars, and all the guys he sees in the class with him are cool dudes, and Puck has heard that the teacher doesn't care much what people do in his class, as long as they learn Something.

Puck turns his head to look at someone coming through the door, and can't help the surprised look on his face when he sees that it's a girl. Puck knows she's new the minute he sees her, because he makes a point of knowing every girls face so that he can keep a running tab in his head of who he's fucked. "You must be lost new girl. Need me to show you to your class?" Puck asks her, flexing his biceps, as she walks in. No girls ever sign up for shop classes. Ever. They just don't.

The girl holds up a piece of paper that's probably her schedule. "I'm supposed to be here dickface." She heads to the opposite corner of the room as if she's going to find a seat there, but the only ones available are near Puck, so she drops her bag and sits down next to him, arms crossed over her chest. He smirks, and she sighs and pulls out a book. The teacher walks in a few minutes later, and the girl looks up.

"Your schedules probably say Mr. Davis on them, but you guys can call me Mike." The teacher goes through the attendance, and a few names in he hits "Chew, Katie". He looks up and searches for the source of the "here."

"You sign up for this class?" he asks.

"No. I didn't sign up for anything. I'm a transfer. I just moved a few weeks ago."

"Do you want to switch out?"

"No"

"You sure? We get pretty messy in this class. I don't want to hear you complaining about getting grease on your Calvin Klein jeans or anything…"

"I'm the last person who'll complain about getting dirty. And I don't own a pair of designer jeans anyway." She looks at him as if to challenge him to say anything else.

He doesn't. He just continues down the list. When he's done he goes over an endless list of safety rules that Puck doesn't really bother to remember. Mike goes around asking them to repeat the rules, but he never ends up calling on Puck.

Puck watches the girl the entire time, the way the bites her lip a lot, and she's humming a tune he recognizes from somewhere, and her eyes keep wandering around the room, and the way he can see a bit of cleavage because her dress is cut just low enough. He probably stares at her boobs for about ten minutes trying to figure out if they're real or not. Probably not. No one has real boobs anymore. Santana got hers done last year, and even though they look nice, Puck wishes that she still had the old ones. Fake boobs just don't feel right…

Halfway through that thought the bell rings, and Puck is pulled out of his stupor by the teacher's voice. "We're all going to be starting oil changes tomorrow, so I hope you were paying attention to my demonstration."

Puck probably wouldn't worry even if he didn't already know how to change the oil in a car.

Because Puck doesn't care about school.

Really.