Valor: The Crystal Of Valimor

Prologue

"Valorie?" Allie asked, tapping the soft wool of her friend's cardigan gently. "Are you okay?"

"Hm?" Valorie blinked, her blue-grey eyes moving away from her open book and fixating on her best friend. She pretended to look as if she'd been reading when really she'd been zoning out. "Oh, yeah." She tucked a long strand of brown hair behind her ear as she shifted to face Allie. "I was just thinking about what we're going to be doing today."

She closed her book, the first in a series about an alien prince that fell in love with a genius from a neighboring planet—it wasn't actually as gross and romantic as it sounded, seeing that the two planets were at war and the series ends with both of their deaths—like Romeo and Juliet, but if Romeo was a weird prince of an alien planet and Juliet was a sarcastic super genius that was obsessed with Earthen culture.

"Okay?" Allie raised an eyebrow, sounding skeptical.

Valorie just shrugged and moved her gaze out to the window, watching the trees skim past her line of vision as the bus moved forward.

"You're going to get motion-sickness from doing that." Nick, Allie's twin brother, commented from his seat across the aisle. He had previously been staring out the window like Valorie, so she thought he didn't have much room to talk.

That day was what educators called Shadow Day. Basically eighth graders at Silver Middle School—and every middle school in the district—got to miss school for a whole day, just to tour the high schools. In other words, a complete waste of time.

Not that she wanted to sound like a study addict, but spending (wasting) five-plus hours reviewing for a test that ends up getting canceled last minute would aggravate anyone with a right mind.

And if she weren't already annoyed, to make matters worse, her father was their chaperone. He had basically jumped at the idea of accompanying her and utterly refused to listen to reason.

Valorie understood that he was a little bit clingy to her after she had blatantly ignored him for the first seven years of her life, but she thought it was well after the appropriate time of him acting as such. For goodness sake, it had been seven years since!

She debated craning her neck over the seat to spy on the old man near the front of the bus, but ultimately settled for sliding farther down in her seat as she concluded the action would expend too much of her energy.

"So," Valorie's brother, Cody leaned across the narrow space between the bus seats, "is Valorie still wallowing in misery from missing that test?"

"It appears so," Allie answered, a smile on her face. "Seriously, why are all try-hard kids like this?"

Nick snorted in amusement, "This is why you should have taken Algebra with us. What's the point of getting that far ahead? You'll be so bored when they run out of classes for you to take. You do know that you're only supposed to take four math classes, right? You've already taken two, Valorie. I mean, you could spend the next year in a coma and still not miss anything."

Valorie glared at him halfheartedly, "Dual credit and IB exist for a reason. Besides, what would bore me is sitting through a class that I already have sufficient knowledge in."

"What a first world problem!" Allie sang, shaking her head in mock-disappointment.

Cody let out a loud snort of amusement, snickering with laughter.

"What?" Valorie gave the brunette an expectant look, "Don't make me elbow you."

Cody stuck his tongue out in an immature fashion. "No, I'm just thinking about what you'll say," he said, tapping Valorie on the head. "'It will look good on my resume!'" He declared dramatically, using grand arm gestures as he spoke.