Chapter 1. Sarcasm

"Fantastic." I grumbled to myself after I had been told I had the wrong room. For the third time this morning. I had to take out my map again and look at the rooms that were circled. "You've got to be kidding me." I mumbled under my breath. I was on the wrong floor. Now if I could find the stairs, that would be perfect. The map said that they were somewhere behind me. I backed up and turned around. Straight into someone's elbow.

"Oh my gosh I'm so sorry!" I heard a high voice say. I waved them off.

"It's really fine." I replied. "I hardly even felt anything." Now that was a lie, but I'm not going to make her feel guilty about something I'd forget about tomorrow.

She scoffed. "Liar" I was a bit taken aback by that. But I was still able to hear someone laughing, and looked in their direction. It was a tall guy, he actually looked really similar to the girl standing in front of me now. He walked up to me and shook his head, still chuckling quietly.

"She's not trying to be rude, I promise. She just thinks she's being brutally honest." He looked at her and smirked, "Although it's usually just painfully blunt". She glared at him.

"I just call it like I see it." She stated with an eye roll. She noticed my map then.

"Do you need help finding a classroom?" She asked, gesturing to my map.

"Yeah, actually, do you know where room two-twelve would be?" I asked them.

"Oh, do you have Ms. Harrison for English next?" He asked me. I nodded in response. "I have her too. I can show you where it is." He said. I smiled at him.

"Would you mind? This map is truly terrible." I shook the piece of useless paper in the air.

"It's no problem." He shrugged.

"I'm Allison." I looked up at him expectantly, but the girl answered instead.

"I'm Kate, and this is my baby brother Mason." She had a wide smile painted across her face, and she put her hands behind her back glancing at her brother. He rolled his eyes.

"We're twins, and she just so happened to be older by a few minutes." She shook a finger in his face.

"The key word there is older." She smirked at him. Mason quickly checked his watch and looked back to me.

"We should probably get going now." I briefly nodded my head and grandly gestured down the hallway.

"Lead the way, Mason." He gave me a lopsided smile and put his thumb over his shoulder.

"Yeah, the stairs are that direction." I looked at the ceiling and gave a dramatic sigh. I waved at Kate when I passed her and started walking off with Mason. I would have taken the stairs two at a time, but the slowpoke ahead of me stopped me from bounding up. I resigned myself to walking at a snail's pace but still mumbled.

"Come on, just a little bit faster would be great. Don't you have a class to get to?" Mason's quiet laughter beside me made me look back to him. "I'm not a very patient person." I explained to him.

"I wouldn't have been able to tell otherwise." He claimed, but I could hear the sarcasm.

"Well, I'm glad I could clear up that misconception." He just gave me a flat look.

I gave a little bow at that. Ahhh. The joys of ignoring sarcasm. Don't get me wrong. I use and enjoy sarcasm, probably more than I should. However, I do have a habit of ignoring it when it's directed at me. I heard the warning bell ring, so I picked up my pace just a little bit. I didn't think I was walking fast, but Mason must have.

"You can slow down, you know. That was just a warning bell. We still have two minutes to get to class. It's right here anyways." He waved at the classroom just off the stairs.

I turned to look at Mason, and the step I took backwards was a step straight into a wall. I must have been stronger than I thought, because the wall fell over. For a school with this many students, you'd think it would at least be structurally sound. I landed on top of the wall, and heard it grunt. Oh, it was a person. Oh shoot! I just fell on someone! I know for a fact that my bag is at least half my weight right now, so I feel terrible for the kid I just fell on. Apparently so did Mason, because his eyes flashed with fear for a minute before he rushed forwards to pull me off the ground.

"Oh my goodness! I'm so sorry!" I turned and offered my hand to the guy I just knocked over. He was kind of cute. He had short blond hair and bright blue eyes. But his highlighter yellow glasses demanded attention and I could barely focus on the rest of his face.

"It's fine. I'm going to go ahead and blame your backpack anyway since it rammed into me first and probably weighs more than you do." He smiled and laughed lightly at his own observations. He stood up, shaking his head when he saw my hand, and noticed Mason for the first time.

When Mason noticed he was seen, he nodded his head at the other boy. "Hey, Ryan. What's up?"

"Not much." He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Had an academic team tournament on Saturday though, second place." He said proudly.

Academic team? I guess Ryan was a nerd then. I got nothing against nerds though. Nerds go places. My prime examples are probably: Einstein, umm, struggling to find geniuses other than Einstein, but you get my point. Mason then strode into the classroom after Ryan and I followed behind them. Ryan took his seat, and Mason leaned against the table.

"I sit right behind Ryan" Mason nodded his head at the stool in the back of the room. "Since the only empty seat is right next to me, I guess you will too." Mason gave me his lopsided smile again. I looked at the seat next to Ryan, and Mason followed my eyes. He looked to Ryan, then back at me, before standing up straight and quickly making his way to his table.

"Someone sits there, right?" Instead of following Mason, I moved into his spot at the edge of the table. Ryan quickly glanced back at him. Apprehensively, he answered. "Well, I guess not now. She moved last quarter."

"Mind if I take it?" I put my hand on the stool to drag it out from under the table, but waited patiently for once, for his answer. He paused, but as I watched him, he slowly shook his head. "Well, I don't mind." I moved the chair out, and the squeak from the metal grabbed Mason's attention and he looked to see me sitting in the empty seat next to Ryan.

Mason's eyes flashed, but he looked back at his notebook and put in a pair of earbuds. I hope I didn't offend him somehow. It's nothing personal. My grades in English just tend to dive like professionals sometimes so might as well sit next to a nerd. Maybe intelligence is contagious. We'll never know until we try. For the sake of science, I guess I must.

Another bell rang, and a woman walked to the front of the room from her desk in the back. When she arrived at the whiteboard, she turned and addressed the class.

"Welcome back class! I hope you all had a Merry Christmas!" The whole time she spoke a wide smile was sitting on her face. "Alright, to get us back into the semester I'm going to assign a partner project from your reading books. You must create a visual representation of the themes from the novel." She kept talking about the project, and I took notes like the good student I was. When she was finished, I noticed a lot of heads go up and start looking around the room, probably for their friends. Yeah, sure. Like she's going to assign a project with such loose requirements and let us choose our partners. Very likely.

"Your partners for this project will be the person you're sitting next to. You may begin now." Called it. Most of my new classmates seemed disappointed, but I got paired with a nerd, so here I was shouting for joy from the rooftops. In my head of course, yeah, definitely just in my head.

"What are you doing?"

"Deleting a video of me shouting on a roof." He paused for a second. I turned my screen towards him and he took off his glasses to wipe the lenses on his shirt.

"I must still not be seeing that right. Why do you have a video of yourself on a roof?"

"For celebration purposes of course." I looked at him like the answer was obvious, but it was so hard not to smile.

"Yeah sure, obviously. What sane person doesn't have a video of themselves on a roof?" He still looked confused, but amusement was obviously winning out.

"Exactly my point Ryan! Finally! Someone understands!" I probably should have told him I was joking though.

"I was being sarcastic." He explained.

"I know. I choose to ignore sarcasm."