A/N Some dialog taken from transcripts forever dreaming dot com.
######
"Hey, Chris." Willow said to her fellow science nerd as she picked up the sign up sheet for the Science Fair.
"Oh hey, Willow, what's up?"
"Oh, I was just wondering what you were going to do this year for the Science Fair."
"Why?"
"Because every year you win and I place second so I just thought I'd see what I was up against for this year's Science Fair."
"You know what the key is? If Dr. Clark doesn't understand your experiment he gives you higher marks so it looks like he understands your experiment." He leaned over to read Willow's entry. 'The Effects of Sub-Violet Light Spectrum Deprivation on the Development of Fruit Flies'?" He smirked. "That should do the trick."
Further down the hall, Cordelia was complaining to Alex. "Why is participation in the Science Fair mandatory this year? Only science nerds and geeks have any interest it. Not even scifi geeks like you have any interest in it."
"Because Ms. Norton, our favorite new Science Teacher, thinks it might spark interest in science if everyone participates and the other Science Teachers agreed."
"She's only the favorite for straight guys, bi girls and lesbians. The rest of us object to our significant others ogling her enhancements."
"I've been very careful not to ogle." Alex protested. "You're still a Lahini and there are so very many reasons why I don't want to upset you. Thus being careful not to openly ogle other women. But she's working on the 'not trying to seduce everything male' thing and needs to address her wardrobe because she's not making it easy."
"She's not a succubus! She has no interest in seducing everything male, just virgin males and she is trying to stop doing that, but you're right, she needs to update her wardrobe, I'm not sure how anyone manages to get through her class."
A boy walked passed and snapped a picture of Cordelia and continued down the hall snapping pictures of others as he went.
"I thought the yearbook nerds didn't come out of hibernation until Spring?" Cordelia muttered, playing Queen C. "Hello, we're under fluorescent lights!"
"You could make a potato sack look good, Cordy and you know it." Alex told her, glad someone else was the target of her current mood. On the other hand something was bothering his girlfriend and he needed to figure it out. He might be a teenage male, but he was also a wolf and they tended to mate for life, so Cordelia couldn't actually be worried about a roving eye, right? Because he really did try not to let his hormones dictate his actions. Wasn't always easy, especially when the Science Teacher wore low cut blouses or the Sociology Teacher wore tight sweaters. Honestly, sometimes he wondered if they did it on purpose, dress like that in front of hormonal teenagers. Ms. Norton did it out of habit, but other teachers, what was their excuse? Hoping boys built up a tolerance or testing if they could remain civilized or did they not understand they were standing in front of kids who's brains were flooded with hormones they often had no idea how to handle?
'Get your mind out of the gutter!' He ordered himself. 'Cordy needs you to focus on her right now! Figure out what's bothering her!'
"Something's bugging you, Cor, I can tell." He went for blunt because it was what she respected and because it was more natural for him too.
"I'm not really sure." She answered honestly. "There's a faint smell in the air that smells familiar, but it's so faint, I can't place it. And that's bugging me. I feel like I should know what it is."
"That means barely there, probably coming from far away or has faded quite a bit given how well we can smell." Alex said thoughtfully, inhaling and trying to find an usual smell himself. Male and female wolves had a sense of smell that was on par with each other, but human woman tended to have a better sense of smell than men, so as a female Wolfblood, Cordelia could probably smell better than he could. He caught a variety of smells, but couldn't really pinpoint anything off. "Or maybe it's out of context, you'd recognize the smell if was somewhere else."
"That might explain it, given there's something familiar about it. Anyway, about the Science Fair and it being mandatory, I was thinking of doing something simple, like the Tomato, Vegetable or Fruit?'
"It's used as a vegetable, but it's a fruit." Alex answered. "Someone already did that a couple of years ago, remember? If it comes from the flowering part of a plant and has seeds, it's a fruit. If it comes from the plant itself, like it's roots or stem and doesn't have seeds, it's a vegetable. We usually think of fruit as sweet things, that's why tomatoes are confusing, they're definitely not sweet."
"Damn, than I'll have to think of something else." Cordelia complained. "Repeating other people's Science Experiments doesn't go over well with the teachers."
Alex's cell phone rang and he pulled it out and checked the display. "It's your dad." He told Cordelia and answered the phone, after listening for a few minutes, he acknowledged the instructions and hung up. "We need to get Jesse and Aura and we should let Buffy know what's going. You're dad has an assignment for us regarding the mystery Buffy and Johnathan stumbled on."
Cordelia nodded and followed Alex, glad to have something else to focus on.
A/N Credit national institute of health on the fact that women have a better sense of smell than men and sciencing dot com for male and female wolves sense of smell.
Cordelia really did consider doing her project on the tomato in the episode, so I left it in,