#Schooled

Prologue

This part is just going to be about how Jack finds out he's going to school in the first place. If you want to go straight to the first story (and Jack's first day) then you can skip this and go to chapter one :)

***

"I feel bad for regular kids sometimes." Jack said one day. He and Tooth were at the Tooth Palace, sitting in the main platform room, with faeries whizzing by through the open air. 

"Why's that? The world is so bright and full of life for them." Tooth answered, busily writing down several addresses onto a long scroll.

"Not for the older ones. They have to go to school every day, and from what I've seen, that place crushes their dreams." He said, then added, "Plus, math is just... Yuck. I saw this math problem on a kid's sheet of homework, and I almost choked."

The tooth fairy looked up from her writing. "What was the problem?"

Jack could sense something in her voice, but decided to ignore it. She was probably just sick or something.

"Something about finding a slope and then doing the same to both sides of an equation. Then after that, I stopped caring and made the wind blow the paper out of the kid's hands." He said simply.

"First off, don't do that to people; that poor kid probably had to dig around through the snow to find it." Tooth said disapprovingly, "Second, that's a very basic level of math for the average freshman. Even an eighth grader."

Jack shrugged. So what if an eighth grader could do math he couldn't? He didn't want or need to know how to do that stuff, and not just because he was a spirit. Even though people didn't always believe him, he took his job as a Guardian very seriously, and defending the children of the world came before numbers.

Besides, Jack knew he was smart. You didn't need to know about numbers and letters and shapes to be intelligent.

"I don't need to worry about math, Tooth. I'm all set."

"Just to be sure... What kind of math can you do?" Tooth asked. "You can multiply and divide fractions, right? Can you find the area of a shape? What about- "

"Ahh, stop! You're making my head hurt!" Jack flopped onto the ground dramatically and sighed. "It's really not that important. All I said was that I felt bad for teenagers because high school sucks. I didn't ask for a lecture."

"If you say so... " She said, but she still looked worried.

When the time finally came for Jack to say goodbye and spread winter elsewhere, Tooth gave him a hug and sent him in his way. As he was leaving, he cast a glance over his shoulder, and saw that the tooth fairy was biting her thumbnail, her eyes cast downwards. She only stood like that when she was thinking really hard about something.

What was Tooth planning?

***

Later that day, Tooth had called a semi-Guardian meeting. It didn't quite qualify as a plain-old Guardians' Meeting because Jack wasn't there, he couldn't be, not when what she planned to discuss was all about him. He would never agree to it if he was there.

Within fifteen minutes, Bunny, North, and Sandman had all arrived at the Tooth Palace, looking a little annoyed and probably wondering why she had sent a fairy to deliver the message instead of using the signal.

"What is this about, Toothy?" North grumbled, "It is very late. We were all asleep!"

Sandy pointed at himself, a letter 'z' with an 'x' through it appearing over his head. The Guardian of Dreams didn't need to sleep.