The stars will sing

Ten years worth of dust and neglect.

The slow, rhythmic ticking of the clock suspended over Mrs. Gilbert's empty desk was nearly drowned out by the murmuring hum of conversation from groups of students clustering together by the desks. It had been nearly 15 minutes since class was supposed to start, and yet no-one seemed to be concerned. There were jokes, there was laughter, and no-one looked twice towards the empty desk, only occasionally shooting a glance at the entrance to make sure they'd avoid getting into trouble.

It wasn't the first time Mrs. Gilbert had been late to her own class, but it was the first time she had been so late without a warning. Usually she would send someone, her TA, a student on break, something to let the class know that her absence wasn't completely unacknowledged.

From where William was slumped over his desk, hood pulled up over his head to muffle the sound of teenage muttering, pencil tap tap tapping against his opened journal and eyes fixed on the clock, there was a rising (though almost ever present,) anxiety. With every fruitless glance between the shifting hands and the large desk there was a growing sense of worry and curiosity, and he had nearly talked himself into going to investigate when the door slammed open with a loud crash.

The room fell silent as a red-headed blur darted over to her desk, wild-eyed and dishevelled. She slammed herself down into her seat, and with a low grinding sound, dragged her chair across the floor to smile at the unmoving clusters of students.

"Good morning, students!" She chirped, as everyone shuffled back to their proper desks. She reached forward to grab at a pile of scattered papers littering the surface of her table, scrounging them into a pile as she addressed the room.

"We're running a bit late today, but that's a-ok! We'll just have to do a bit of curriculum circumvention, let's see..." With a dismissing flick of the wrist, she tossed aside a couple papers, leaflets drifting down as her eyes darted across the pages. With another screech of her chair, she was up, motioning up a nearby student to hand out the revised stack of papers, launching into an impassioned speech about the relationship between magicians and the planets.

William nodded along, scratching a couple cursory notes down in his journal, and the day trickled onward with little issue. The subject matter was interesting, if a little basic, but it had practically no real-life application, to him specifically more than the shifting mass of students around him. Holding back a yawn, he teased the edges of the book with his pencil, propping his head against one of his arms. With half-lidded eyes he watched as Mrs. Gilbert etched a diagram out onto the chalkboard of the five primary planets and the sun.

"This," she called, pointing to the one furthest, "This planet is called Erd, and as you can see, it has the largest orbital cycle!" With a wide sweep of her arm she drew a wide circle piercing the centre of the circle. She took a second to focus on her and divided the solar system into five separate, even, wedges.

William glanced down at his notes, zoning out for a moment as she listed the other planets. He could hear the general murmur of a class not quite paying attention surrounding him, and he quietly flipped to the back of the book, opening it up to his personal project. Now that Mrs. Gilbert was here, he didn't have to worry about people looking over his shoulder. Not as much, anyway. The world almost seemed to fall silent as he pulled the journal closer, leaning over it to shield it from whatever prying eyes there may have been. He could hear as Mrs. Gilbert called on a student, answered a question, but as he focused on his book he found he really didn't care much about re-learning the basic principles of magic.

Turning the back cover of the book, he stared down at the news article he had scanned over and over again, squinting down at it as though the faded picture and off-handed text would reveal something on a 30th, 50th, maybe even 100th read through. Beside the clipping, there was a photo tapped inside. He traced the words with his off-hand, glancing between the paragraph and picture.