Chosen: The Path of Heroes

Three

Zuri's classes passed like cold molasses the next day. They weren't difficult really; his mind muddled over the incident with the pen yesterday. There just had to be an explanation.

The curly-haired boy fiddled with that pen now, twirling it between his fingers while sitting in his fourth class—trigonometry. Much to his delight, he'd found out yesterday when he entered Mrs. Wahlberg's room that this was Claira's trig class hour too. He also found out from Claira that she was a junior.

Class would begin in less than two minutes.

The cheerleader occupied the desk to Zuri's left. She watched him fiddle with his pen, staring intently at the thing. She smiled softly. "Are you okay, Zuri?"

He snapped from his thoughts and looked at her. Aside from being fixated on the pen incident, Zuri pondered last night. He'd gone home and done some reading, trying to put the incident out of his mind. When Thomas Jones, his father, got home just after five, he, Victoria, and Zuri had dinner. Afterwards, Zuri opened his birthday gifts—a higher capacity iPod, a couple of video games for his PlayStation, and twenty-five bucks. They all had cupcakes baked by Mrs. Jones. Well, Zuri had two. Then he and Mr. Jones headed off to see the new Avengers movie. And even through all that birthday goodness, Zuri found his mind wandering right back to the pen.

He smiled faintly and nodded. "Yes, I'm okay. I...stayed up a bit late playing some new games."

"I see." Her grin intensified. "Anything cool?"

"Horizon: Forbidden West and the new Dead or Alive ."

"Oh my god, I love DOA. The best fighting game series ever."

Zuri blinked at her, and his own smile broadened. "You play games?"

"Yep. Been playing video games since I could walk. So, who's your favorite character in Dead or Alive?"

It took more than a few moments for the question to register in Zuri's mind. He liked Claira from the moment she bumped into him yesterday, and her coolness meter had just jumped another five notches. She was a gamer; that rocked.

"Jann Lee," he answered. "Though I can use pretty much all the characters."

"Me too. I usually go random all the time."

The two chuckled and smiled at each other.

Then the trilling tintinnabulation of the second bell filled the halls. Class had started.

Mrs. Wahlberg stood promptly from her desk, tucked her bobbed hair behind her ear, and instructed everyone to open books to chapter one. She turned to the whiteboard, popped the cap off a black erasable marker, and wrote the words Pythagorean Theorem.

"As you all learned in algebra and geometry, this is one of the key theorems in all math equations..."

And she went on and on, even dishing out a geometry-level refresher quiz, before starting the lesson.

[*]

After class, all the students filed out quickly, chattering busily. Lunch time. Zuri started for the cafeteria.

"Zuri! Zuri, wait!"

He turned to face Claira. "Yes?"

"I just wanted to say that you're really smart. Back there in class up at the board, how you answered Mrs. Wahlberg's solution—that was great. It looked pretty difficult."

"It wasn't that bad. I just applied coefficients to the Pythagorean Theorem to solve it," he answered.

Mrs. Wahlberg wrote the equation on the board and said she would give five extra credit points to whoever solved it before class was over that day. Four other students attempted before Zuri raised his hand.