Games of the Gods

                                      Chapter One 

"No." Lea stated the word firmly as she crossed her arms over her chest. "Logan, you are not sitting here again." She said the words loud, hoping to draw the attention of a few of her fellow students in the classroom. But she didn't have any such luck. Sitting in the back corner had its benefits and consequences, and one of those consequences happened to be being alone and vulnerable when a pot head tried to sit next to her. 

"Come on Le-Le," Logan said with a smile. He sat down at the desk next to hers and leaned toward her. "You know you want some company." 

She examined his expression. His smile was relaxed. Too relaxed. She nearly groaned when she found his pupils covering most of his iris. "Company would be nice," she said. "A guy as high as a kite is most definitely not." 

He rolled his eyes. "I'm not that high. Only a little bit." 

"You just admitted you're high, Logan," she hissed. "On school grounds." 

A daring smirk lifted his lips. "Want to know what else I do here?"

"No!" 

He chuckled, and she realized he'd been expecting that response. Logan leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. He was wearing a black t-shirt that was just tight enough to show off what muscle remained after his unceremonious removal from the football team--there was still quite a bit, she noticed. She also saw he'd taken the black tips out of his hair. It was now just a sandy blond. 

"You're staring at me," Logan said with raised eyebrows. 

Lea jerked her attention away from him. "You're high," she muttered. 

"I'm hottt," he said, drawing out the word. 

Lea opened her mouth to give his ego a lecture, but a piercing siren interrupted her. The first time she'd heard that siren, it had been her first day at Havard High. She'd run for cover, certain that a bomb was about to impact the school any second. As it ended up, Havard was just too sophisticated for bells. They preferred blaring sirens to signal the beginning of classes.

Lea turned her attention to the front of the classroom, where her teacher was standing from his desk.

"Everyone shut up!" he shouted from his desk. Apparently, Mr. Lampert didn't think the siren was a loud enough beginning to his class. His face pulled into its usual stern expression. Lea had learned early on that this was the customary expression of most of the teachers at Havard High. Stern, serious, gruff. They all acted like they'd been through military school, not Ivy League universities. 

And she couldn't blame them. The kids at Havard acted like they were attending a party eighty percent of the time, and spent the other twenty napping off their good times. They could use a kick-ass military teacher. 

When the class quieted, Mr. Lampert said, "We're beginning a new project today." 

The class was instantly in an uproar, and, for once, Lea was tempted to join in. She knew Mr. Lampert's projects; they weren't "artistic" assignments, where you could just glue a bunch of pictures stolen off of Google Images to a poster board. They were serious mathematical projects that needed to be completed in an actual diagram creator, the type that even hardcore geeks had difficulty understanding. 

"I'm passing out the directions to the project," Mr. Lampert said over the objections. He paused for a moment to give a stern glare to the entire class. "Remember, kids, it was you who decided to take Math Analysis. I'm just teaching it according to the standards."

This quieted the class to an extent, but most of the students in the small class continued to glare at their teacher. Lea resisted from doing so, and instead turned to Logan to see his response. He had his book propped up on his desk, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the class wasn't currently using it and hadn't used it all year, and was napping behind it. 

She nudged him when she saw Mr. Lampert's eyes wander over to his desk. "Logan," she whispered, "stop being a lazy idiot." 

"Ms. Mares," Mr. Lampert said, his focus whipping over to her. "Do you have something you want to share with the class?" 

"Um, no," she said quickly. 

"Well, you obviously had something to say to Mr. Kale," he said. "Why don't you tell it to us? Or would you prefer a citation of conduct?" 

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her mind just kept tripping over the fact that she'd just gotten herself in trouble for a overly-unambitious pot-head. She looked to Logan. He was the one who should be getting in trouble. Not her. 

With his head still on the desk, Logan suddenly stuck his hand into the air, his index finger raised toward the ceiling. "An ordinary differential equation is a differential equation in which the unknown function is a function of a single independent variable," he read from the textbook.  

Mr. Lampert went quiet for a long moment. "Well, thank you for that, Logan," he said slowly. "But I don't think we've quite gotten that far into the book." 

Logan didn't respond, but he lowered his hand. And he'd done his work. Mr. Lampert turned away from the back corner of the room altogether, too confused to continue his scolding. He went on to explain the project further. 

Lea drowned out the rest of her teacher's words and shot Logan a grateful look. Then she remembered he was the reason she had received the teacher's anger in the first place. So she replaced the look with a glare that was met with closed eyes and a slight snore. She was pretty sure the snore was fake, so she rolled her eyes.

She turned her attention back to her teacher just as he was wrapping up his explanation and beginning to pass out a piece of paper with more information on the project. "You'll be working in pairs," he said. "And I'm not letting you pick this time. That turned into a disaster last time. So pair up with the person next to you. They're your partner." 

Lea slowly turned to face her snoring "partner". She groaned and reached up to rub her temples. With a hard nudge on his shoulder, she woke him up. "Logan," she snapped. 

"What?" he muttered. 

"We're working together on this," she said. "And yes, I just said the 'w' word. I'm making you work. No excuses." 

He smiled and rested his chin in his cupped hand. "Have I ever told you that excuses are my specialty?" he asked. 

She smiled back. "Have I ever told you have electric cattle prods are my specialty?"