Twin Madness - FOLIE À DEUX

viii - potins

The phone rang just as Harry's head hit the desk for the fifth time. He, Jin, and Jackie were in school for the first time in a week and a half, and hating every second of it. Harry was a big proponent of truancy, because there honestly wasn't a single part of the school day at the ludicrously underfunded J. Fenkin Elementary School that he enjoyed. English was just grammar, grammar, grammar, Phys. Ed. was keeping an eye on the big kids, recess was just Wool's but with significantly more graham crackers and significantly less teenagers, and don't get him started on y = mx + b.

Mrs. Thompson (though Harry couldn't imagine who would ever want to marry her, she was old and evil) was droning on about coordinate planes and Harry was eyeing Jackie as he fiddled with a Gameboy he'd gotten his hands on somehow under his desk (he was across the room with the alphabetically seated L's) while Jin next to him was stabbing pencils into a big pink eraser when the phone went off.

The old goat stopped from where she was drawing dotted lines on the board and scowled at the old landline phone as if it, like her, should respect the sanctity of linear equations. Harry watched, head on his folded arms, as she crossed the room, long skirt (which looked more like a pair of curtains than an actual cut with a discernible pattern) swishing around her legs. The insistent ringing cut off halfway through a tone when Mrs. Thompson snatched it from its mooring and put it up to her ear. "Thompson," she groused immediately.

A few moments passed as she listened. "Yeah." Her beady eyes swiveled around the classroom and caught for a moment on Harry and Jin. "Yes, they're here. Yes. I'll send them down. Uh-huh. Yeah. By - oh. Yeah, he's here too. I'll send them down. Got it."

She hung up the landline with a final click. She jerked her chin at Harry and Jin. "Potter. Both of you. Office."

Harry got up slowly and hesitantly, wracking his brain trying to think of what he did other than skip school. Were they going to send him to the counselor? He didn't even know if J. Fenkin had one.

"You too, Lettiere," she grunted, pronouncing it like Let-ear. She was bent over her desk as she filled out a small white hall pass with a large pen scrawl. Harry shot Jackie an alarmed look, who just shrugged and got up as well. The three took their hall passes from Mrs. Thompson, and before the door had even shut behind them they were talking.

"What do you reckon this is?" Jin asked immediately. "For skiving?"

"I've skived every week for years," Harry protested, brow furrowed in genuine confusion. "Can't be that. Not now,"

"Jeez, you guys just hate school, huh?" Jackie observed, strolling down the hall, all the time in the world. His gameboy had disappeared, no noticeable bulge in either of his pockets. There was no doubt about it, Jackie was an illusionist. Whatever it was they three could do, Jackie did it like breathing, so out in the open, yet never caught.

Harry snorted. "Didn't see you complaining when you cut with us."

Jackie gave him that wicked, all-teeth hyena smile of his. "What can I say? I was a good student until I met you two. Bad influences, you are."

Jin actually barked a laugh at that, her short hair brushing against her shoulders as she shook her head in incredulity. "Yeah, good one, Lettiere."

Jackie pouted, but before he could reply Harry spoke up, "What do you guys think it is? Seriously," he added, spotting Jackie's impish expression.

Jin shrugged as they rounded the corner to the main building where the office was. "Dunno. Could be anything. Probably skiving,"

"You don't reckon it's about the Dragons, do you?" Harry asked, thinking hard. He was a lot less studious than Jin, who was a lot less studious than Jackie, of all people, and he knew Wool's kids weren't really required to come to classes. Truancy laws, whatever, only if someone took it all the way, which no one really cared to do once they saw the address on his record.