Fangirl School (Percy Jackson)

Back To School - For Real This Time

"Guys, I want you to meet a friend of mine," Jeveskia said as she came toward our table.

It had been two months since the reenactment. It was November now. This Halloween, the entire group went trick-or-treating together; me as (your favorite character [A/N: I'm Leo]), Fiona as Annabeth, Delphine as Rachel, Lucas as Percy, Jeveskia as Silena Beauregard, Brandon as Nico (which surprised me), Giovanni as Tyson, and Antonio as Frank.

Oh, yeah. Antonio rejoined our group. He had an argument with Janet and decided she wasn't worth schist, and he came back to us. It took a little convincing from Xavier (Lucas, of course, had no idea what had happened), but eventually, we let him sit.

Anyways, back to it. Behind Jeveskia was a girl with dark blond hair, blue eyes that caught the sunlight streaming through the windows perfectly, a splash of freckles on her nose, and a whole lot of mascara and lip gloss.

"This is Rita," Jeveskia said as her friend waved. "Rita Vainhart."

Everyone greeted her. I noticed Antonio eyeing her, and Rita wasn't exactly hiding the looks she sent in his direction either. Jeveskia invited her to sit down, so she did, right between Antonio and Jeveskia.

We started to talk like we normally did. Rita seemed to be one of those fans like Maya Platten or Fiona's sister Freya; read the series, low-key enjoyed it, but not obsessed.

Rita elbowed Jeveskia playfully a lot and slapped her on the back sometimes. We did that too, but Jeveskia winced every time Rita did it for some reason.

She was nice, though. Pretty talkative. She said some out-of-pocket things, but not a lot.

Antonio had clearly caught her eye. She seemed to have caught his, too, because they were talking like old friends by the end of lunch, the ecavt same way Antonio spoke to literally no one.

Lucas caught up with me. He'd trimmed his blond hair over the summer, although it had already grown back and he had returned to shaking his head to get it out of his eyes. Lucas and I had always had something. Nothing particularly big or romantic, but he knew me before anyone else in our group, so that had always stuck between us.

We talked like we usually did after lunchtimes. It's kind of like a routine at this point.

The seating arrangement, I found when I came back from the reenactment, had changed from individual desks to groups of four. Lucas and Fiona had seemingly taken it upon themselves to make sure I got a decent seat among friends. I was next to Fiona, across from Lucas, diagonal to this girl called Bliss.

Mrs. Golde told us about our new writing assignment. She said we'd be starting OC fanfictions, and we needed to use at least one of the characters we'd made up in OC class. I hadn't been there yet, but I used one of the characters I'd made last year. It was going to be a long project, Mrs. Golde said, and we would be given some class time to work on it.

First, she said, we had to list the OCs we'd be adding, how everyone felt about them, et cetera. She'd give us the rest of the week to do that, then we'd start outlining the plot.

At the end of the double period, everyone was exchanging characters and plot ideas as we all headed out to recess. Usually, we all used our phones in recess, but with the new principal, we couldn't do that anymore, so Lucss and I took one of our walks we usually had in recess. I'm not sure when it even started, but it's been a tradition since last year.

We hadn't walked like that in a while. The first time we did, I asked him about why he seemed off after the Games. He'd simply shaken his head and said, "I just didn't expect it to happen like that." I wasn't sure if he meant he didn't expect me to win or what, so I tried to pretend the interaction never happened. Without meaning to, I hadn't walked with him in a while, since I was usually hanging out with Jaqueline and her friends and sometimes Walker would  join us, so really the only times we'd talk one-on-one was after lunch. Only after we started walking around again did I realize I kind of missed it.