"All right, settle down," the teacher (Dick was pretty sure his name was Mr. Morris) said over the excited whisperings of the kindergarteners. "I'll be counting to five, and when I get to five, I want quiet mouths and listening ears."
Dick held back a giggle at the phrase "listening ears." What else were ears for, really? Well, maybe wearing earrings on them, or wiggling them if somebody could do that, but listening with them was the main idea. So why say "listening ears," anyway?
"One, two, three, four," Mr. Morris said slowly, and the class began to settle, getting almost entirely quiet but not entirely paying attention by the time Mr. Morris said, "Five! Good job, everyone. Now, we have a new student joining us today."
"Just for today, hopefully," Dick said as cheerfully as he could manage.
Mr. Morris coughed awkwardly.
"Sorry," Dick said. "You can keep going."
"Right. Well, we have a new student joining us for at least a little while," Mr. Morris said tactfully. "Class, this is Richard Grayson-Wayne."
"That's kinda a long name," one boy muttered with a frown as several students started looking away from the teacher, appearing to be getting bored.
"Call me Dick!" Dick said. "It's shorter."
Mr. Morris blinked at him, then he sighed with only a small hint of resignation. "Of course. We're glad to have you joining us, Dick."
"Glad to be here!" Dick said, with a smile. "Kindergarten, right? Love it."
"Why?" A girl asked.
"Why what?" Dick asked.
"Why love it?" The same girl asked, apparently paying attention even when most of the kids in the class were already fidgeting or looking away.
Dick shrugged. "It's simple, isn't it? I mean, I didn't really do it before, I was traveling too much for public school. But homeschooling is good too, just pretty different, I think, especially when you do it at a circus."
That got the attention of the whole class.
"A circus?" A boy said.
"Whaddya mean?" A girl gasped.
"He doesn't mean he got homeschooled in a circus," a different boy said with a voice that sounded doubting.
"I do too mean I got homeschooled in a circus," Dick said. "It was great!"
"Nuh-uh," the same doubting boy said. "My daddy says the circus and homeschooling and stuff is for people who aren't smart enough for-"
"Lars," Mr. Morris cut in. "What have we talked about in kindergarten?"
The doubting boy, apparently named Lars, paused. "Uh. Lots of things? Like counting?"
Mr. Morris shook his head. "What have we talked about in kindergarten on the topic of using our words, Lars?"
"We use our words to build up, not to break down," Lars said slowly, like he was reciting something he'd heard a bunch of times before, a tone Dick knew very well from having to recite rules back to B all the time. Lars frowned. "Oh. Yeah."
"You might want to say you're sorry," Mr. Morris prompted.
"Yeah," Dick said. "Especially 'cause you should be sorry, 'cause the circus was great for being smart, 'cause I learned all kinds of things!"
"Like what?" Lars asked, looking interested.
"Like, I learned how to do this!" Dick said with a grin, and he bent forward, put his hands on the carpet, and lifted his feet up straight in the air.
Mr. Morris made a strangled sound, but most of the kids burst into excited chatter.
"Oh, that's a handstand!" A girl squealed loudly over the rest. "I wanna learn how to do that in gymnastics! But my teacher says I'm too little, but I'm not little, really."
Dick walked on his hands in a circle to turn and face the class. "I don't know, your teacher might be right but might be wrong too. You don't look that little to me. Mostly you just look upside-down."
All of the kids laughed, and Dick grinned up at them.
Moving her weight back and forth from one hip to the other in her seat, Cass glanced around.
Most of the other kids were already clustered together in a bunch of small groups and one bigger group, talking and giggling and working on the math assignment the teacher had handed out. A set of three girls were secretively passing a phone between them, glancing around urgently, shoulders tense and hands moving quickly as they tried not to get caught. Across the room, one boy kept getting up from his seat to walk to the pencil sharpener every minute or so, but the way he fidgeted as he passed the teacher on his way showed Cass he had a different reason to keep getting up. Due to the crooked set of his lips revealing his uncertainty, he probably had a question about the math problems. Four other students were making encouraging faces from a distance at the boy who kept going to the pencil sharpener as they looked at him. Nobody was looking at her. Nobody was noticing her. Nobody liked her, not anybody, not at all.
Cass sighed and looked back down at the sheet of math problems on the desk in front of her. How did this happen? What was she doing wrong, and what was wrong with her? Why did nobody look at her, and why did nobody notice her, and why did nobody like her?
…And why did she care about whether anybody liked her?
Thoughtfully, Cass tapped the eraser end of her pencil against her cheek. Had she cared this much about what everyone thought and felt about her before now? She tried to remember, because it didn't sound right, but it also didn't sound wrong.
Blurry and less-blurry memories floated through her mind, mixing together. Cass could recall the previous few days clearly, but she could also clearly remember being twelve when she was first about at this age, much more clearly than she thought she remembered it just a few days ago. Things happened in her mind at the same time, things that had really just been real and things that were years ago in reality, both popping up with the same amount of clear memory.
Cass frowned at the worksheet in front of her. It felt like she was adrift, lost between her true age and this false age, being tugged back and forth along her own life's timeline.
In one way, she knew exactly what was likely happening, that she was twelve years old in development at the moment and so she was probably getting hit with all kinds of strange emotional and social signals. She knew what Damian was like at age eleven at the moment, or rather, how he had been at age eleven before the moment and how he would be when he returned to age eleven. So she knew a lot of the pressure he felt he was under, and it made sense that she would feel a lot of the same pressure at a similar age.
In another way, though, she didn't know what was happening at all. Her heart sped up its beat every time a student glanced her way, even for a moment, and her head spun whenever a glance lasted longer than a moment. Cass found herself holding her breath, hoping against hope that someone would look at her, notice her, like her.
Cass sighed, letting out the breath she was holding. She leaned down on the desk she sat at, resting her forehead on its surface. The cool of the tabletop spread into her. Her shoulders dropped down from their tense, tight, up-near-her-ears position, a position she hadn't even known she'd been keeping. Cass sighed again and reminded herself that being twelve wouldn't last forever.
After all, it hadn't lasted forever the first time, and this time was going to go much quicker.
Damian wasn't hiding. He really wasn't. He was… Being strategic. Yes. That was it. He was being strategic and hanging back by the wall behind a chair, keeping an eye on the exits and an ear open for any threats. He wasn't hiding.
To keep up pretenses, he fiddled with the odd objects in front of him. They were squishy things, brightly-colored and blocky. He picked one up with both hands, noting with displeasure how hard it was to handle due to his abnormally small body, and held it close to his face, observing it.
"What are you doing?" A voice asked from far too close.
Damian flung the odd thing in his hands instinctively at the source of the sound.
The child standing there flung her body to one side, narrowly avoiding being hit by the squishy thing as it flew toward and then past her. "Oh!"
"Oh," Damian repeated, feeling a bit of guilt wiggling around in his belly. That was a civilian, and a young civilian at that, maybe about three or four years old, which made sense, given that Damian was currently seated at the back of a preschool room. He shouldn't have thrown the thing at her. He should've been calm and alert, noticing her as she came closer and being ready to interact.
"Hey, not nice," the girl said, shaking her head. "You need to say sorry."
"Apologies," Damian said.
The girl tilted her head to one side, her stringy hair falling half in front of her face.
"That means sorry," Damian corrected himself after a moment.
"Then why didn't you just say sorry?" The girl challenged.
Damian frowned. "I did say sorry. I just said it by saying apologies instead."
The girl laughed. "You're silly. We're gonna be friends."
"I just threw something at you," Damian said slowly. That did not sound much like how he imagined civilian children formed most friendships. It sounded much more like his own childhood.
"Throwing a block at me wasn't nice," the girl said. "But saying sorry is! So we're being friends. I'mma teach you to be nice, and you're gonna teach me to throw blocks."
Damian squinted at her. "Blocks?"
"Yeah, blocks," the girl said, pushing one foot out and nudging the box that the odd squishy things had come in.
Now that Damian was looking at it, the box did say "blocks" in big letters on it, which made sense in a very simplistic way.
"You want to learn to throw blocks?" Damian asked.
The girl shrugged, blinking her beady eyes. "Sure, if you wanna teach me."
Damian thought about that for a moment. "And you'll teach me… What again?"
"How to be nice," the girl said confidently. "You need it."
"No, I don't," Damian said.
"Yeah, you do," the girl said.
"No, I don't," Damian said again. "Ask my siblings. They already were the ones to teach me."
"Then they must wanna have you get teached more," the girl said.
Damian paused. That… That was something to think about.
The girl pushed out an arm, dangling her hand by Damian's own hand. "So we're gonna be friends, forever and ever. Okay?"
Damian stared at the dangling hand, then at the beady eyes, then at the stringy hair, then at the girl's mouth, curved in a smile the entire time they'd been talking. Something about this felt…
Right. It felt just right.
Slowly, Damian reached out his own hand and gave a handshake. "Okay."
