The Situation

The first and the last.

Bare feet made no noise against the freshly polished school-floor as Aini strolled aimlessly to her locker. It was quiet. No-one was around yet. Not many people were as crazy as her, getting into school at 6 a.m.

The stout Asian girl, on the other hand, was always there as soon as the clocks hanging on the walls of the school ticked to the sixth hour. She'd never been late in her life, it was as if she didn't know the meaning of the word.

She enjoyed the peacefulness that the desolate building gave her in the morning, some might have found it eerie, but not her. It was different and more welcome to what she was used to at home, what with her dad's dogs yapping devilishly at her whenever she passed them, as if they'd never seen her before in their life. Her dad ignored her though, hardly said a word to her, even if she stood right in his face. That was fine though, at least he wasn't yelling at her like he used to.

"She's here again, Jaq." she heard a cleaner on the other side of the corridor say.

"Let her be, she's doing no harm." another voice, a man this time.

Aini brushed her hair behind her ear, opening her locker and grabbing the single note-book that she used to write her notes in. There were only a few classes she was interested in attending frequently, so one note-book lasted her a while - three months or a little more. When they ran out, she would just steal one off of an unsuspecting student, it wasn't as if they would take it back off of her. People here didn't talk to her much either, they were like her father. Cold and unknowing.

She really did hope that she would make some friends this year. It was her tenth year at this school, she had to talk to someone eventually, right? Even if she couldn't touch them. Aini already had her eyes on someone, a boy with scruffy brown hair and a face that was always flushed as if he'd been running about outside in the cold for a good amount of time. His name was Dorian and Aini thought him to be beautiful.

Walking past the cleaners, Aini frowned as they shivered. It wasn't cold inside, so she assumed that they were just acting like they didn't like her. They did that frequently but it still hurt whenever they flinched away from her. She was a sensitive girl.

Padding down the still-quiet hall-way, she spotted her class-room door come into view. Her teacher would probably be there by now, though even if he wasn't she could always help herself in. Peering through the little window on the top of the door as she stood on her tip-toes, she found herself tumbling inside, and the girl let out a soft yell. Aini landed on the floor in a comical fashion, legs spewed out and bent awkwardly at the knee.

"Oh darn, I always forget not to lean on things." she muttered to herself, pushing herself up in a haste as she brushed her pinafore dress down.

"Ahh. Aini, how are you?" her teacher asked, not looking up from the files he was sorting out as he spoke to her. His half-moon spectacles sat just behind the large hook of his nose, eyebrows raised as he skimmed through the writing he was reading.

"Very good, thankyou." Aini said, "Just a little confused about yesterdays math lesson... didn't we learn the same thing last year?" And the years before that, she wanted to add.

She didn't get an answer.

Standing there dumbly for a while, Aini frowned. She still wasn't used to this.

She raised her shoulders into a shrug, guessing that he was just too busy at the moment to answer her questions - that didn't explain why he never answered them during the class, however.

Aini slid into her chair, her pinafore crinkling against the wooden frame. This was her usual seat, right at the front of the class. She'd been sitting there for the past ten years now, and her class-mates knew never to steal her place, even if she wasn't sitting in it at the time. They had learned their lesson from the last time the girl had had a tantrum over something as small as a seat. That hadn't been a particularly nice day - it was probably worse than every second year's first day.