Chapter 3

"Welcome to Bret Hart High School."

Strange words, but not unwelcome. I stood in front of the doors of the school and let the sounds and smells of the place soak into me.

The start of school was still a week away, but my new and temporary guardians and I, along with a half dozen other new students and their parents, were here for a scheduled orientation session. Students who had already been in the Angels Camp school system the year before had already had their chance for a tour of the place a few weeks earlier. Our group was met at the front of the school by Mrs. Delino, a small, thin woman with graying hair and glasses. We shook hands then and I found she wore a warm smile, behind which I could see a pair of no-nonsense eyes locked on mine.

"Let's begin, shall we?" She asked. Without waiting for a reply, she waved her arms, gesturing at the entrance and the parking lot in front of it. "There are three parking areas around the school. This is of course the main entrance, and its the one you parents will probably be most familiar with if you are dropping off or picking up students. The school buses use the east parking lot, as do most staff and visitors. On the west side of the school is the student parking area. Will you be driving yourself to school Skye?"

I looked at Cole and Melissa, trying to wrap them in the image of my parents. I wasn't really expecting any sort of reassurance on this from them, but it felt right to look their way first. "Yes, I'll be driving myself, or walking. The school's not that far from our house, so I may walk on nice days."

"Good for you dear, we struggle constantly to keep our young people active and fit, and walking is probably the best thing you can do. We'll get a better view of the student parking area from the some of the second floor classrooms, but the same road that brought you here curls up and around to the west parking area. Shall we go in?"

So we did. The school wasn't all that big, three floors that looked like a stack of oddly shaped blocks — not all the same size and shape and not sitting squarely atop each other, more like someone had been playing the old game of tetris and playing it poorly. There was a large multi-purpose gymnasium on the north end of the school that might have qualified as the fourth block, but it wasn't a part of the main stack. Behind that was the football field, soccer field and track.

The first floor was home to the music rooms, metal and wood shops and pottery shop. It also was home to a good number of student lockers — freshman lockers mostly, I learned later. The second floor was split about evenly between administration offices, including the nurse's office and one of the two student counselor's offices, and classrooms for English, history, and civics.

"There are language labs upstairs, for those who might have problems with English as a second language," Mrs. Delino commented as we walked through the World government and International Law classroom. "Younas, I know you are scheduled for some classes. How is your English?"

"I do well," A boy my age replied, "though I have trouble with idioms and ... what is it ... slang? Words?"

"Well a few weeks in school surrounded by your peers should take care of that. Anyone else?"

"Actually the slang might get me for a little while too," I volunteered.

"Oh, of course," Mrs. Delino tittered. "I suppose the teenage slang on Islandia is much different than it is here."

"I think it is mostly absent, rather than different," Cole commented. "Life on Islandia is very rural, outside of the capitol, and they all live very much closer to the edge of wildness than you do here. Teenagers there are full participants in society at a much earlier age than here."

All that was true, of course, despite the fact that none of the three of us had actually spent any real time there. With the gifts, doing background research for our cover story was a snap. It helped that this was true of Arborian teens to an even greater degree.

The third floor was the largest of the three and was made up of three wings separated by the school cafeteria. The southern wing was mostly science and math classes, including the chemistry, biology and physics labs. The eastern wing was made up of art rooms, the three kitchens that made up the cooking classrooms, and an open area for displaying student artwork. The western wing had a few classrooms for the theater, speech and drama classes and the school library. There was no north wing to complete the pattern, because that was where the gym was.

With a week to go before the school year started, the halls were not empty. The place was alive with people, staff, maintenance men, you name it. Grav carts laden with supplies were moving in an endless stream up and down every hallway we were in. We only met a couple of teachers, and them very briefly, as we passed through their classrooms, but none who were on my schedule of classes for the first quarter. Most of the teachers were off at a school district mandated training and orientation session of their own.

This whole education system would have seemed strange to me, having grown up on Arbor, if I hadn't at least seen some variations of it on Meadow and Taluat. Still, for someone used to a world where education was dominated by a system of guilds and apprenticeships, concerns about what it would be like left an uncomfortable fluttering feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was a McKesson. I could face down a raging Ur-beast or conquer a mad coercer while barely breaking a sweat — well, in theory at least, I'd never actually done either of those things - so I should have been able to face this situation without the slightest qualm, but surprise, I was suddenly feeling like the teenager I actually was! Then again, that was by design.