Welcome to Ninjago Academy

Chapter 2

"Welcome all students! How about we go around and say our names and tell the others something about ourselves," Ms. Kathy said to her class once everyone was seated.

Great

Seliel thought to herself as she fiddled with her earbuds in her hands. She wanted nothing more than to put them in and escape from this boring environment by drifting into the music. She couldn't care less about the fact that Sandra had three cats or that Jantel broke his arms five times in one year.

And she sure knew that no one wanted to hear about her parents' messy divorce last summer that left her in a foreign city, knowing no one other than her caretaker Ms Humber, who was sweet, but couldn't understand the mental stress she was under at every waking moment of every waking day-

"Selina Grace Thompson?" Ms. Kathy said. Seliel snapped out of her thoughts.

"Yeah?" She answered.

"It's your turn."

"Oh um, I'm Selina Grace Thompson, but you can call me Seliel," She said. Her voice is soft and quiet, yet audible. "And I like to make music."

"Well, that's very nice Seliel. What types of music do you make?" Seliel felt anxiety creeping up on her, but she held it down. She couldn't ruin her first impression on everyone.

"I DJ if that counts?" Seliel said, her fingers gripping the earbuds tighter.

"Oh that's amazing, Cole don't you also DJ? Maybe you guys can collaborate sometime and make some cool bangers for the rest of us." Ms. Kathy said to the muscular black-haired kid in the back corner of the room.

"That's great, but please never say 'bangers' again. Like ever," The kid said, plucking out his earbuds hiding behind his large afro.

"Oh, um okay," Ms. Kathy said before moving on to the next kid.

Her name was Harumi. Seliel remembered seeing her at the auditorium with the blonde mayor and principal's kid. Harumi's weak attempt at flirting caught Seliel's eye when she was listening to her music on her phone.

Harumi liked to dance. That was something that Seliel was great at. It might have been the fact that her mother herself was a famous ballet performer and was off doing shows every month, leaving her only daughter alone without any motherly guidance, or it was that her mother enrolled Seliel in dance classes from a very young age and Seliel had gotten used to them, it's not like she wanted to dance at her free will, but she had a legacy to uphold. Alicia Grace had left big shoes for Seliel to step into and Seliel's feet were small, really small.

Either way, the conclusion was that Seliel had to become a dancer whether she wanted to or not. It was in her blood, her genes, her mind. Plastered over all her thoughts and memories of the times spent with her mother in their ballet room with the shiny floors and reflecting mirrors while her mother pointed out every single one of Seliel's flaws and forced her to repeat the same moves over and over and over again until they were 'perfect enough' in her mother's eyes. But Seliel knew her mother would never view her as perfect; it was either her movements were too slow, her arms too weak, her hair out of place, her face too-

"Now let's start with our first Math class of the year. Pull out your textbooks and complete problems 1-30," Ms. Kathy said before sitting at her desk. "I'll give you all twenty minutes."

Twenty minutes for this? Seliel questioned her mind. The problems on the pages were filled with numbers, symbols, and letters. There were more letters than the numeric system! Seliel was in eleventh grade but how was she supposed to find the tangent of a flag pole if there were three imaginary numbers? She wasn't taught this in her old school.

Seliel didn't seem to be the only person struggling; the other DJ kid was staring at his paper with wide eyes while his jaw dropped. Shrugging, he popped in his air pods and began listening to who-knows-what, leaving the thirty problems to solve themselves–which they won't because math doesn't work like that.

All the other students were working away with their pencils, calculators, rulers, and erasers.

Wait, rulers? Seliel was frozen in confusion. She didn't see any measuring problems on the worksheet, so why were they pulling out twelve-inch rulers?

Seliel sighed to herself. This was going to be a long year.