Meanwhile Carmine was sitting in math class taking notes. She had worked hard to get into honors, while Caz hardly had to work and still got honors, but underrated himself into the standard classes. She felt bitter about this from time to time, but she knew that it wasn't his fault he was naturally smart and didn't care, or that she wasn't so much but did care.

"And then the value of x is inserted into the logarithmic formula, giving you the square root of i to the fourteenth power and finally (he scribbled some numbers and symbols)...we have the value of pi to the sixteenth! Now we just reduce it to the first power, and voila! We have pi." He smiled at the class. Carmine looked at her paper. She thought she understood it, but knowing her she was just a tad off on the calculations and such, and that meant a sad face from the teacher and pity: she was so close, it just needed a little work... but it didn't matter. She had gotten this far on the honors track, hadn't she?

Now was the class that was the highlight of Caz and Carmine's day: English. It was the only class for which Caz agreed to take the honors level. They met on the way to the class, and walked together in comfortable silence.

Finally they arrived to the classroom and took their usual seats in the back. They surveyed the room as they did this. There was a wide range of people in this particular class, everywhere from the honors track nerds with straight A-pluses to cheerleaders and jocks who needed an honors class for their sports scholarships to kids like Caz and Carmine, who were in the honors because they were smart.

"Okay class," the teacher said. She was a short and lean woman right out of college, one of the best teachers in the school as far as most of the students were concerned due to her humor and age. "I'm going to assign you partners for the upcoming project. Let's have…" she looked at her list of students, " Emma Brandon and Steve Douglas, Chris Englewood and Isabela Fang, Jonathan Horton and Melissa Jameson, Carmine Perez and Jake Marshall, Caz Northwood and Charlotte Kim, Sofia Quinn and Joe Shan, Owen Thornton and Skylar Vaughn, Albert Jennings and Iris Wu, and lastly, Bethany Graham and Richard Zabinski."

Caz and Carmine shot each other the same look. A look of fear.

"Okay, now meet with your partners, and we can go over the project."

Carmine tentatively walked over to sit next to her partner. Jake Marshall was the quarterback on the football team and was dating the head cheerleader, about as cliché as it could get. Rumor had it he got a scholarship to Stanford as long as he got a B or above in this honors class due to bad grades in previous English courses. He looked at her meanly. "Um." Carmine said awkwardly. He just looked at her. Carmine shut her mouth.

Over by Caz, it wasn't going too well either. Caz had a small crush on Charlotte in fourth grade, and as the years went on, so did his feelings for her. Nobody know, not even Carmine. Caz admired how perfect Charlotte was. Charlotte Kim was the debate team captain and led the school to nationals, whatever that meant. She was the also captain of the mathletes team and led the middle school's Model UN club. She volunteered at a homeless shelter every day of the week and still got straight A+'s on every homework, quiz, and test. She was fluent in Korean, English, and French and took honors Latin literature. Every summer, she went off to some city to study the cello as an intern for a famous cellist, according to the gossip. She was in all honors classes and took college calculus on the weekends. Needless to say, she was the teacher's pet in every class. And on top of that, she was one of the nicest kids in the school. There were worse people for Caz to be paired with, but he knew that he was nothing and a total idiot compared to her.

When Caz walked over to Charlotte, the first thing she said was, "Please don't ruin this for me. I have a 106 in this class, and I'm not planning on ruining that because of a partner who is in all standard classes. Not trying to be mean, but. Don't. Ruin. This."

Slightly offended, Caz replied, "I have a 102 in this class, and I would be in honors for everything, but I demoted myself."

"Why? Too hard?" she said with a smug look, though she did look surprised by his high grade.

"I don't really want to talk about it."

Sensing his tone of voice, she let the subject drop.

"Okay, then. I guess we'll do this together."

He smiled at her happily, having gotten his way. She just looked at him.

Carmine and Caz went back to their seats. No words were exchanged between them. Caz was about to say something, but then the bell rang. Carmine picked up her stuff, and walked away briskly. They usually walked back to their lockers together, but Carmine seemed different. Because Caz had no other friends, he waited for Charlotte. She was still gathering her supplies.

"Hey." he said.

"Hi?" Charlotte said in response, obviously a little confused as to why he was talking to her.

"So, when do you want to get started on our project?" Caz asked awkwardly.

"The sooner the better. I'm free tonight. The homeless shelter wanted me to take the day off today. I had originally said no, but I'll tell them I changed my mind."

"Okay then."