PERIWINKLE POV

Chapter Four: Lunch and Study Hall

"How was your first session?" I ask Sophie as I hand her a large tray and move a little to the side so she can join the lunch line.

"Oh, fine - except I was almost electrocuted." There's a quiver in her voice as she speaks and she looks at the ground bitterly. The hairs on her arms stand on its end and there's a crease in between her eyebrows, telling me that this has not improved how she feels about her sessions, nor that it's a good start to her year at Foxfire.

"That's elementalism for you," I say, taking a bright yellow bowl and putting it on my plate. Sophie looks at it, then hastily copies me. "Wait till they make you catch your first tornado. They're not easy to catch." I failed at least a dozen times before I finally succeeded - and even that was hard. Of course Wonderboy got it in six tries. 

Sophie sighs at this, looking close to rolling her eyes. "Why do we have to learn to bottle that stuff, anyway?" She seems bothered by it - I doubt that she learned how to handle this stuff wherever she grew up.

"Mastering all the elements is one of the steps toward entering the nobility," I say, shrugging.

"Why?"

"No idea," I say, taking another piece of brightly colored food. Sophie rushes to copy me. "Neither of my parents are in the nobility, so I don't know much about it." Because for one, we like Slurps and Burps too much - the entire point of it is to make stuffy nobles uncomfortable, and then they would be becoming one of them - and two, my parents are a bad match. I doubt they'd be allowed to be in the nobility after that decision.

"Hey, what are you doing here? I thought you had detention?" Sophie asks

"I still have to eat," I grumble, taking several more pieces of food. I notice that Sophie is reaching to copy me so I give her a hand and take some more of what I took and put it on her plate. "Sorry I got detention on your first day. Are you going to be okay without me?"

Stupid me. Of course she's going to be okay without me. She doesn't need me. "Sure," Sophie says with the smallest of shrugs. "See you later."

With a sigh, my shoulders slump and I move toward the detention room.

Stina rolls her eyes when she catches sight of me. She sits in the far corner of the detention room. I chose the desk in the opposite corner of hers because of this. Her two cronies sit near her, and I can't help but study them. Did they already have detention? Or do they just so blindly follow Stina that they signed themselves up for detention just so they could be with her for lunch? Whatever it is, I don't understand it. I dig my teeth into the neon yellow piece of food and try not to think about Stina.

"You survived," I tell Sophie as she walks toward where I saved her a seat and plops down next to me. I don't know how I survived detention with Stina, though. The consequence was that we had to memorize a song about the planets. Our exit ticket was to sing it at the top of our lungs in front of the entire class. When I had to do it, I made sure to do it after Stina went - so I could hear her awful singing, and so that she couldn't make fun of me.

"So far," Sophie says, but smiles as she digs into her backpack and pulls out her Universe homework. I suck in a sharp breath - two pages on her first day. I'm alright, but the Universe is a struggle for me. Just as she puts her pencil to it, a boy in a green Level Four uniform clears his throat. Sophie's head shoots up, and I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Wonderboy.

"There you are," Wonderboy - or Fitz, I guess - says, leaning against our table. He doesn't spare a glance at me and has his gaze fixed on Sophie. My back is rigid and I tense up. "Why didn't you sit with us at lunch?" I curse in my mind. If Wonderboy and the Vackers are trying to get Sophie to sit wit them, then I have no chance of continuing to sit with her.

I do notice that Sophie pieces her next words together carefully. Yet her eyes brighten as they meet Wonderboy's in a way that makes me roll my eyes. "Jensi invited me to sit with him, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings." I get the feeling there's something else, though.

"Ah. Well, maybe tomorrow, then," Wonderboy suggests. I scowl at my food. "Oh, and -" he takes a neatly folded piece of paper out of his pocket and hands it to Sophie. He does not show me, and Sophie smiles as she reads the words "- my dad asked me to give you this." Her eyes read the words over and over again, and her eyes light up.

I clear my throat. I don't want to appear petty, but this exchange is concerning me. "Oh, sorry." Sophie stuffs the note into her satchel before I can ask what it says. "Do you guys know each other?" Her eyes dart from Wonderboy to me, Wonderboy to me.

"Yes," I say, my words cutting sharply through the air at the same time that Wonderboy shrugs and casually says, "No." A long silence fills the air as I look at Wonderboy and he looks at me. His eyebrows bush together as if he's trying to figure out how we know each other. If he even is trying, he's failing miserably, because he doesn't say anything after this.

"Well," Sophie says, shifting her weight, looking uncomfortable. "This is Dex."

Wonderboy nods toward me. "Nice to meet you." He extends a hand.

"Right," I snort, shaking my head. I look at his extended hand, but make a point not to reach for it. I have no interest in siding with Wonderboy - being introduced to him or shaking his hand.

"What?" Wonderboy asks. He sounds genuinely confused, while he was the one who just forgot about me. We've met before. Obviously, Wonderboy just doesn't care to remember me.

"Nothing, apparently," I snarl, glaring at Wonderboy. He frowns at me and Sophie just watches the exchange, her eyes darting from person to person. 

"I should get started on my homework," Wonderboy says after a second, glancing at me once more and then turning to Sophie. He smiles at her, and you know what? She lights up. She beams. "I just wanted to check on you. I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Sure," Sophie says. Her eyes follow Wonderboy as he turns around.

"Oh, and uh, nice to meet you, Deck," he says with a hasty nod over his shoulder as he turns away. Deck? DECK?! My name is not Deck.

"It's Dex," I growl after him. He doesn't hear me.

"What is up with you?" Sophie whispers, looking at me, her eyes alarmed.

"Me?" I do not believe Sophie at the moment. "'Nice to meet you, Deck,'" I repeat, imitating Wonderboy accent perfectly.

Sophie looks like she's fighting a smile. "I'm sure that was an innocent mistake," she debates in Wonderboy's favor.

"Please. I see him all the time - not that his royal highness bothers remembering. But he remembers you." I can't keep the bitterness out of my voice. I get a new friend, and she's about to be stolen away by the Vackers. "Why is that, by the way - and why did he give you a note from his dad?" Sophie seemed pretty happy to receive it.

"I stayed with his family my first night here, and Alden promised to get back to me on something," Sophie says, and she can't even keep the sigh of annoyance out of her voice. "It's about my old life." The old human life it seems she can't talk much about. Sure enough, she adds, "I'm not supposed to talk about it."

"Figures," I sulk.

"What?" Sophie asks, sounding a lot like His Highness Wonderboy.

"Nothing. I just hate that family. Everyone thinks they're so cool and talented. But they're totally overrated. 'Deck,'" I mutter. If they're so cool, so talented, then they should at least be able to remember me - and hear me right when I tell them my name. Deck? 

"Maybe Fitz just heard me wrong," Sophie suggests.

"Yeah, right," I say sarcastically. "Listen to you defending him. You're just like all the other girls, you know that? I saw what you did when he smiled at you. You lit up."

"I did not!" Sophie cries out.

"Yes, you did," I insist. "You were beaming."

"I wasn't beaming," Sophie says stubbornly.

I roll my eyes. "Girls."

Author's Note: Personally, I find that Dex was being extremely sexist in that last part, but this was the script! Thanks for reading, updates will come soon! Sorry for the short chapter.