The next morning, Kori hopped in the passenger's seat of Bee's yellow VW Beetle, wearing a t-shirt tied up in a knot in the front and a pair of high-waisted dark-wash jeans that she had borrowed from her new roommate. This was only her second time riding in a car, and she had to control herself from pressing all of the tempting buttons that were lit up on the dash. When they arrived at the school, Bee led her to the counselor's office so she could register for her classes. "Make sure you get the second lunch period. That's the one that the guys and I have," Bee said, as she ducked out to head to her locker.
In her meeting with the counselor, Kori got signed up for marching band, English with Mr. Parsons, biology with Mrs. Leach, gym, second lunch, algebra 2 with Mrs. Hahs, world history with Mr. Justice, and home economics with Miss Asher. By the time she was done in her meeting, first period was already half over, but she received a hall pass and a school map and headed towards the band room. She noticed that Gar was standing in the back row with a large drum sitting beside him on a stand. He was one of four who had these drums, his being the second smallest. The smallest one was occupied by a petite girl with blonde hair. Kori was assigned a pair of crash cymbals, and took her place next to the other cymbal player on the back row. He was a red-headed freshman named Wally. Kori followed Wally's lead on how to play her cymbals very carefully, and caught on quickly. The sheet music was easy enough to read; it was the same notation as was used on Tameran when she had been learning how to play the Gorka Pipe.
After band, Kori walked with Gar to English, since his class was right across the hall. "It's so cool that you joined the marching band!" he said as they navigated the crowded hallway. "The first home game is next Friday, and we'll be performing the halftime show."
"Home game? We perform at people's houses? And why is the time being cut in half?" Kori had so many questions. Earthly customs were so strange. "My apologies. I am not from here, so I am not familiar with the things of your culture."
Gar flashed a smile at her. "Hey, no worries. The home game is just a football game that is played on the field here at this school. The marching band doesn't attend the away games. Those are the ones where our school's football team goes to another school's field to play. Halftime is the break in between the second and third quarters of the game, and that's when we take the field and perform the show that we're working on. The rest of the game, we sit in the stands and play pep music to get the crowd excited."
Kori tried to soak in all of this new information, but there were still so many things that she didn't understand. "Where I come from, such games would end with the losing team being mauled by the wild grishnicks. In this game of football, would the losers perish?" X'hal, she hoped not.
"Nah, the only thing that would perish is their pride," Gar laughed, stopping in front of a classroom door with the name 'Mr. Cox' above it. "Well, this is my class. See you later, Kor!"
Kori turned into her own class, and was delighted to see that Rachel and Vic were both in this class, and she happily took a seat by them. "Friends! It is most wonderful to see you!"
"Hey, Kor!" Vic exclaimed. "I didn't know you were enrolling at JCH. Glad you're here!"
"I am, too, glad to be here. I just hope that I don't have too much of the catching up to do," Kori said, feeling a little nervous for her first day.
"Don't worry about it. We're only a couple of weeks into the first semester. I'm sure you'll do fine," Rachel said in a monotone voice.
Kori gave a small smile and was about to respond when….
"You're in my seat!" a blonde girl dressed all in pink screeched, glaring down at her.
"Chill, Kitten," Vic said. "There are like six other open seats. Go claim one of them."
Kitten turned and slowly, but deliberately approached him, placing both hands on his desk and bending down to get right in his face. Then in a menacing whisper, she hissed, "I don't want just any seat. I want that one that I've been sitting in since the first day. And I'm not about the let her steal it from me." She pointed a sharp manicured finger at Kori. "New girl has to learn about how things work around here. Everyone knows that the cheerleaders always get what they want, otherwise Daddy will hear about it. Then he'll stop funding this stupid shithole of a school's football program, and you'd," She used that same finger to jab Vic in the chest. "Be out of a scholarship." With that, the girl straightened up with a cocky grin on her face and her arms crossed over her chest.
Vic shrugged his shoulders. "Guess it's a good thing I've already been drafted to play for the Oregan Ducks."
Just then, the bell rang signaling the start of class. Kitten huffed loudly, stomping away to a desk on the other side of the classroom. "What the hell does Dick see in that girl?" Vic grumbled. Rachel just shook her head.
"She is… rather unpleasant," Kori said quietly.
Vic chuckled. "Understatement of the century."
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After biology, which Kori was grateful she shared with Bee, Kori stopped at her locker to drop off her textbooks. She wouldn't be needing any of them until after lunch, and decided it would be best to come retrieve them then. As she was fumbling with the combination lock, not exactly knowing how to work it, a voice came from behind her. "Turn it right, stop on the first number. Then turn it left, pass the second number, then stop on it the second go around. Then turn it back to the right again, and stop on your third number." Kori did exactly this and pulled on the lock, and it popped open.
"Glorious!" she exclaimed, turning to the person who had just helped her. "I thank y—"
Upon turning around, she saw the voice had come from none other than Xavier. "Well, hello pretty lady," he said with that cocky grin. "Didn't know I'd be seeing you here. I believe you and I have some unfinished business."
Kori redirected her attention to her locker, calmly placing her books inside and locking it shut. "I have no business with you. If I do recall correctly, I ended any business that we had before it really got started." With that, she turned on her heel and started towards the gym.
"Exactly," Xavier sneered, jumping in front of her and blocking her path. "You didn't really give me a chance! Don't you owe me at least that?"
"I do not owe anything to anyone, especially not a clorbag such as yourself." Kori pushed past him, as he stood there trying to figure out what the hell a clorbag was.
Once in gym, Kori was assigned a locker and gym clothes by Coach Medlin. After finding her locker, she changed into the clothes she had been given and exited the locker room. It didn't seem as though any of her friends were in this class with her, so she just stood next to the wall and awaited instructions from Coach Medlin. Halfway across the gym, she could see a group of girls stretching and chatting excitedly about something indistinct. Off to the right near the bleachers, two guys were taking turns throwing an orange ball through a hoop overhead. Still other students were slowly trickling out of the locker rooms when Coach Medlin blew her whistle sharply.
"Alright, class. Today we'll be doing laps around the court. So, make sure you take a few minutes to really stretch out those quads and hamstrings. Then get a move on. I want thirty laps from each of you before the end of the hour." With that, Coach Medlin blew her whistle again, signaling that the students should get to work. Several students groaned, but Kori wasn't concerned. Her Tameranean genes made endurance easy to come by, so she started off, the first one on the court.
Kori had made it about halfway around the court when she heard footsteps running up on her left, until the person responsible for them appeared next to her, slowing down briefly to catch her eyes.
That nearly knocked the air out of her lungs. He had the most striking blue eyes she had ever seen, with jet black hair, and a half smile playing across his face as he passed her. He was the most gorgeous specimen that she had ever laid her eyes on, and as she was staring at him, she suddenly lost control of her feet, the ground disappearing from under them and reappearing directly in front of her as she tumbled downward.
Kori could hear some chuckles coming from across the gymnasium and flushed lightly. She rubbed her hand on the side of her head where it had connected with the ground. Just when she was about to help herself back up, a hand appeared in front of her face. "Hey, you alright?" the beautiful boy asked, as she took his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet.
"I am okay, thank you," Kori replied, feeling an electrical charge run up her arm at his touch, so strong she had to really focus on not pulling her hand away.
"You hit your head pretty hard. Are you good to keep running? I can help you to the nurse if you need," the boy said.
"Umm…" Kori hesitated, unsure. She now had a pounding headache, but otherwise felt okay. "I believe I just need to sit for a minute."
"Anders!" Coach Medlin hollered, jogging over to her. "Here, take a seat on the bleachers. Grayson, go get her some water." Kori watch him take off in the other direction as Coach Medlin was talking to her. She just distractedly nodded her head, not really hearing anything she was saying. Eventually he came back with a bottle of water in hand and passed it to Kori. "Will you stay here and just keep an eye on her through the rest of class? If she shows any signs of getting worse, just take her straight to the nurse." Then Coach Medlin hurried off to continue watching the rest of the class finish their laps.
Kori took a sip of her water. "I thank you," she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead, not daring to look at the boy sitting beside her.
"Glad I could help. You're new here, aren't you?" he asked.
Kori nodded. "I came a long way. The customs you have here in Jump City are… quite different than I am used to."
"It's a strange place, I can't deny that," he chuckled. Kori liked the sound of his laugh very much. It was warm and comforting. She allowed her head to turn slightly in his direction and saw that he was looking at her with a thoughtful look on his face. He didn't avert his gaze when she caught him staring. She gave a small smile.
"What is your name?" Kori asked.
He hesitated for a second, as if debating with some voice in his head, then said, "You can call me Richard."
"Richard," she repeated, loving the way the name rolled off her tongue. "And my name is Kori."
"Well, Kori." Kori's breath hitched slightly at the sound of him saying her name. "What brought you to Jump City?" Richard leaned back, resting his elbows on the bleacher behind them.
Kori thought for a minute about how to answer that question. She couldn't tell him the truth about her past or that she had escaped an intergalactic enemy and just happened to land here of all places. She decided instead to tell him a version of the truth that left out all of the evidence of her not being human. "I arrived here only yesterday when I was looking for a place to stay. And I met a friend who is letting me stay in her guest bedroom."
Richard smiled at her. "Well, I'm glad you're here," he said. That made Kori's heart beat just a little bit faster.
"I'm glad I'm here, too."
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At lunch, Kori found Bee, Vic, Gar, and Rachel seated at a table near the stairs. She brought her tray, filled with a few strange items that she had never heard of along with a heaping pile of mustard packets, over and placed it at an empty seat. "Greetings, friends!" she exclaimed with a big smile on her face. At this point, her headache from gym was all but gone, and she was in high spirits after meeting Richard.
"Hey, girl! How was gym?" Bee asked.
"Glorious! Although, I did trip and hit my head pretty hard. But I made a friend who made sure I was alright." Kori beamed. She could not wait until she could see Richard again.
"You think Dick will be joining us today?" Gar asked the group, propping his feet up in the last empty seat.
Vic rolled his eyes. "Doubt it. He's probably making out with his girlfriend. I will never understand what he sees in that girl."
"Probably just good sex," Gar said, shrugging his shoulders.
Kori, having listened in on a conversation a few girls had near her locker earlier that day, was starting to catch out to how earthly relationships worked. So the words that they were speaking that would've gone over her head just yesterday, now were starting to make sense. On Tameran, casual relationships were unheard of. But here on Earth, they were normal. And though Tameraneans use lip contact only for linguistic assimilation, here it was a means of showing affection. Similar to Tameraneans though, it seemed that most earthlings were monogamous. But here, it appeared that humans chose who they would be in relationships with. She grew up with only the idea of arranged partnerships. She definitely preferred this new way of thinking.
"Kori, have you met Dick yet?" Bee asked.
Kori shook her head. "I have not, but if he is a friend of yours, then I would love nothing more than to meet him."
Bee whipped out her cell phone, a device that Kori had noticed almost every student had and used to communicate with each other and play an odd game called Candy Crush. "He has this lunch period. Let me shoot him a text, and maybe he'll come over."
"God, I hope he doesn't bring Kitten," Gar grumbled. "She's unbearable!"
A few minutes later, as the friends were chatting with each other and Rachel had her nose buried in a book, Bee perked up, looking past Gar's head. "Ah, here he comes!"
Kori looked, but the only person she saw approaching the table was Richard. A smile spread across her face as she waved at him, and he waved back. "Hey, Kori," he said. "So Bee, who was it that you wanted me to meet?"
"Kori, I thought you said that you hadn't met Dick yet," Bee questioned, with a confused look on her face.
"I have not. Where is he? I would be delighted t—"
"Oh, right," Richard said. "Sorry, Kori. Dick is what everyone calls me." He flashed her an apologetic smile.
"It is okay. Though, I think I like 'Richard' better," she said. "Please, join us!"
"Well, I would bu—"
"DICKIE-POO!" came a high-pitched voice from behind him, and he cringed, as did Gar. Kitten came skipping up and threw her arms around his neck. "Lunch is almost over! Why don't you and I find a janitor's closet and…" she whispered the rest of that sentence inaudibly in his ear, and his face flushed.
"You know, I'm not sure this is a great time," he grumbled, scratching the back of his neck.
Kitten giggled. "Of course, it's a good time, Dickie-Poo. Unless you want me to tell daddy that you broke his little girl's heart…."
His eyes narrowed. "Fine," he growled. And with that, Kitten grabbed his arm and dragged him down the hallway.
"Um," Kori said, feeling a little sad, though she wasn't sure why. "Who is this Kitten, and why does she call him 'Poo'?"
Gar slammed his head on the table, then sitting back up, he said, "She is only the worst girlfriend that Dick's ever had. And as for the second question, trust me, we'd all like to know. She's awful!"
Kori finally put it together. Richard had a girlfriend. And though she wasn't sure why that made her so upset, she still felt her heart sink at that realization. "Oh. Well, I must go to my locker and collect my books of text for my next class." So, she sauntered off with her head hung.
Once she was out of ear shot, Rachel muttered, "She totally likes him."
"Yep," the whole table said in agreement.
