088. School
Van doesn't understand school, no matter how many times Hitomi tries to explain it to him. His education wasn't nearly so strenuous or long as hers, and he can't understand why she has to spend 6 hours a day, 5 days a week learning things she probably won't ever use any way. In part, his objection to school is not that he doesn't aprove of learning, but rather that he hates that it takes up so much of her time, leaving so little to be divided between him and her family.
Even when she isn't in the school builiding itself, it still manages to follow her home. Numerous are the times when he slips into her room to visit and finds her sprawled on the carpet, surrounded by books, paper, and pencils, working on something she calls homework. It annoys him to no end, as if her school was deliberatly trying to keep them apart.
"Why do you bother? You don't need to know half of these things," he tells her.
She shrugs. "Its important to my family that I graduate high school," she explains.
He frowns. She won't agree to come back to Gaea with him until she has completed, another reason to hate her school. "I didn't go to school half as long as you do, and I turned out fine."
Hitomi laughs. "That's because you were being raised for one thing. You already knew what you were going to become, so there wasn't any reason for you to have so many lessons. Our world provide so many choices for us, the schools try to cope the best they can. Besides," she adds, tapping a finger against the end of his nose, "Don't you want Fanelia to have a well-educated Queen?"
Van turns crimson. He hasn't even asked her yet, and she already knows that he's planning to. "You're already smart enough," he murmurs.