We Are Heroes

1

School.

Do you know what I hate the most about school?

The first day of school.

You got to break the summer habits, get up early, adjust with a new schedule and new teachers, and deal with the huge homework load of the first day of school.

When the bell rang after my zero period class, I flew up to my first period class: Chemistry.

Now from my experience from eighth grade science, I loved the chemistry unit because everything made sense and I aced all of my quizzes and the tests on it. So I figured that I was also gonna be awesome in this class.

I ambled into the science class room-slash-lab and sat in my assigned seat, which was in the front row, right in front and facing the teacher's dark jade green lab table.

I pulled out my iPad since I didn't know what else to do. Believe it or not, but one of the cool things about my school is that iPads are they're required. Why? Because that's where we hold our textbooks in and school apps.

But before I was able to do anything else, my teacher came in and told us to put all of our iPads away.

The teacher was a young, quite short man with brown hair that was neatly groomed and hazelnut eyes; he talked in a harsh, Philadelphian accent, since he told us that he was from there. He introduced himself as Mr. Jekyll and told us for a 'first-day-of-school' exercise, we were to interview our table partner and write down their answers of the questions he wrote on the board on a small whiteboard.

Ugh...I hate talking to my classmates..., I thought to myself as a small whiteboard was passed between my table partner and me.

I zipped opened my back compartment of my pink pencil pouch and pulled out a blue whiteboard marker. I turned to my table partner, realizing that he's a new kid.

He had deep blue eyes that reminded me of water in a really pretty water fountain, a pointy nose that reminded me of how I draw my noses in my cartoons with a bump on his bridge, sharp facial features, blonde hair that was combed to one side, yet had lots of volume on top because the bottom half was buzzed off, but it did look pretty good on him, and he had really nice eyelashes.

"Okay..." I uncapped my marker and drew a line in the middle of the whiteboard.

"What are we doing?" my table partner asked me.

I turned to him. "We're gonna interview each other. I ask you the questions on the board and write them down. Then you are gonna do the same thing to me."

He nodded. "Okay."

I looked at the board, reading the first question; I turned back to my blonde table partner. "So, what's your name?"

"Alek."

"Alex..." I wrote that name down.

"No, no 'x'--it's a 'k,'" he told me, pointing to my writing.

"Oh whoops..." I erased the 'x' and put in a 'k.' "Errr...last name?"

"Soldatov," he told me.

I made a shocked look. "And how do you spell that?"

He told me the letters to his name and I wrote them on the board.

After I was done, I looked at the board. "Okay..." I gazed back at him. "Where are you from?"

"Russia."

I froze for a moment. OMG, he's from Russia! I got a Russian sitting next to me! "Ohmygosh, really?"