A/N: Seriously. I was out of my skull. Some call it Senior year, others call it hell. I, however, can happily assert that IT'S OVER!!!...until August, when college starts anyway. Congrats to my fellow Class of '09 Graduates. We survived! Somehow.

And that means, for the rest of you...here goes!

Chapter 11

"Oh no..."

The fountain pen she held dropped to the floor, a few drips of ink escaping the cartridge. She picked up the notebook on her desk and examined what she had failed to see, just a line above her own slightly legible writing-the untidy, familiar scrawl that could only belong to Klaus.

Isadora wracked her brain in a panic. What could she do? She could tear the page out.

"No," she whispered to herself. "He'll definitely know..."

She could cross through it and hope he thought it was his mistake. Sure enough, as she flipped frantically through his notebook, too fast to wonder at how he'd managed to fill it so quickly and not even reading, there were cross-outs and slashes galore.

"Still not an option. He'll still be able to see it's my writing..."

She could ask Sunny to steal a bottle of white-out from the secretarial desk.

"Nero'll be taking inventory tomorrow! I can't do that to her..."

Isadora shut the notebook and lay her head on her desk. How did she miss that? She proverbially kicked herself for her error- wasn't the adage "Don't judge a book by its cover"? And what had she just done? She finally got up from her desk. She knelt to the floor, picked up her pen and attempted to wipe the ink from the floorboards with the hem of her skirt, but it had already stained. Oh well. It's not like this was home, anyways, she thought. She proceeded to put on her pajamas and get ready for bed, hoping that when she woke up she'd have a way to tell Klaus just what had happened.

But the notebook. It looked so inviting, so tempting to her...she had to know. She picked it up and gently lifted the cover.

"I can't," Isadora said, dropping the cover. "He trusts me."

But how did she end up with Klaus's notebook in the first place? Did he want her to read it?

She lifted the black cover, begging his forgiveness in her head and silently vowing never to breathe a word of what she would read.

****

The next day...

****

Isadora walked to class with the carriage of a dancer, the confidence of a buissinesswoman...and the resolve of a garden snail. She knew he'd ask her questions and wonder why things had ended up as they had. She was eager to believe that's she'd be ready and brace herself for this, but she couldn't find it inside of herself. Why did she find this so difficult? She knew the truth after all. Klaus was in love with her. She decided that this would be easy. But now, delivering his journal, knowing his secret, threatened to ruin everything...

Klaus waited outside of Mrs. Bass's room. As Isadora walked up and expected a tumult of questions, Klaus pulled her to him and kissed her before she was able to eke out a single explanation or hand him his journal. She wrapped her arms around him and skillfully dropped the once-incriminating journal into his bag, relieved at once that he felt the same as she had and didn't have to explain herself.

The two, though swiftly broken apart and ushered into class, were happy for the first time in a while since the fires that had shattered their lives forever.

A/N: As I am now the proud owner of a MacBook, when I import this, I expected that NeoOffice (awesome as it is so far) would lie to me and make it look like I had typed more than i actually did. this is about one and a half pages of text right here. However short it is, I've graduated. So email me and tell me to stop being so freaking lazy and WRITE, WOMAN, WRITE!!! No more foolin' around. You're either gonna update or not. Ten dollars or BREAK LEGS!!! YARGHYARGHYARGH!!! *coughhackcough* ...Yesh. I believe you get the gist. Please review. And if you can tell me where "ten dollars or break legs" comes from, you get extra credit.

P.S: Macs will one day save the world. :]