24. Dawn

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"What are you doing here?"

Nami looked up at the girl who had thrown her under the bus in her freshman year of high school. She hadn't changed. Not one bit.

Nami looked back down and continued her work.

"I'm talking to you."

She kept writing, pouring all her energy into stabilizing her hand.

"Hey-"

"Give it up, Kalifa," another girl said. "She's not worth our time."

Kalifa shot her another glower. "So that's how it's gonna be, huh? Okay."

No matter what she did, Nami was always going to be a target here. Despite being a rigorous prep school, many students here didn't care about their grades or academic integrity. The handful who did treated others like lesser beings for being "dumber". She even caught herself thinking like this at one point.

Now, she was in neither of these two categories. And spending a year at Grand Line High School would work against her favor here.

But it didn't matter.

All she had to do was keep her sights forward - ignore the noise around her.

It was her first day of school as a senior, and the first thing she decided to work on a weather and nature journal. She'd been trying to relieve herself of pressure for grades and extracurriculars. All of that was important to some degree, but she'd come to realize that other things took priority.

The first order of business was circling back to those days in elementary school when she still viewed the world through rose-colored lenses and all the days looked saturated. When she was eight, she drew trees and animals and plants on loose sheets of paper, coloring them with the cheap, waxy crayons she got from the "Italian" restaurants her mother took her to.

She used to be naturally curious about things, driven by a passion that had somehow been lost over the years.

During this last summer, she encountered an odd phenomenon in the sky. It was hazy and orange, but it wasn't fog. After coloring it out on the first page of her book, she did more research. Just as she had suspected, it was a result of smog from city pollution. Lately, she heard the environment was collapsing due to fossil fuels and carbon emissions.

After that, Nami made sure to look around for things that could pique her interest.

With this journal before her now, she hoped to spark some inspiration within herself. There wasn't any other meaning behind it; it was just a side hobby that she needed to pick up. She didn't want to tell other people that she studied for fun.

Her math teacher walked into the room and cleared his throat.

The room went silent.

"I hope you all have had a great summer break," he began. "However, just because this is the first day doesn't mean I'll be spending the whole class doing icebreakers."

A wave of disapproving whispers blew through the class.

He simply smiled. "You better have done your summer work, because for this lesson, we're jumping right into parametric equations!"

After an hour, the bell rang. It was a soft, reserved ring with a fine tune. Nothing like Grand Line's screechy, discordant alarm.

Before she could leave, her math teacher called her to talk to him.

"I'm aware you just transferred from Grand Line High," he said.

"Yes, I did."

"Are you familiar with the material we're covering?"

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