Snippet #2478497

There are some people who come to school early because that's just when they get dropped off. There are others who arrive early in an attempt to avoid their home lives, which is, indeed, very sad. There are even others who come to school before the first bell in an attempt to catch up with friends. There are only a few, however, that come to school early in order to double check homework answers and/or for meetings of the intellectual club kind. The small group sitting at one the tables helpfully located just outside the school doors were doing just that. Just a glance at them, even ignoring the fact that they had homework and calculators out, laptops and planners spread haphazardly around the surface, and most people could tell that they were of the braniac variety, or, less kindly put, were complete nerds.

Only one person really stood out, binder shut and laptop stowed away as he leaned on the table, drowsy brown eyes glancing idly around the school grounds. His brown hair was a tousled mess like he'd simply ignored it when he'd rolled out of bed that morning, and stubble was, not unattractively, starting to show. He wore a navy sweater with black slacks and nice black shoes that didn't tend to fit the description of what high school boys wore. He didn't need to check his homework- why would he? He knew it was right. Call him cocky, call him smug, or, as he would prefer, call him Avery.

Whoever had uttered one of the single most idiotic phrases "High school is the best years of your life" had obviously never gone to high school. At least that was the opinion of Avery Maes, resident high schooler and overall grump, who'd long since realized that as long as he was in the public school system, life was never going to be particularly nice. It came with being labelled as a nerd, and a defiant nerd at that, not the sort of person you could goad into doing your homework for you. It didn't quite help that the memory of his less than manly past still loomed large over his life, raising its ugly head whenever someone was particularly displeased with him. So, yes, he did fall into the category of unpopular and, honestly, he was just fine with that because he didn't much care about the people surrounding him in the daily drudge and longed for the day he could leave them and their associated memories behind. Some memories more than other.

Speak of the devil… He grimaced and stopped his perusing stare the moment a certain dreamy-eyed girl made an appearance, wandering towards the school with a disturbingly blank expression on her face. Oh, yes. He'd really like to forget her. It wasn't just her, of course, because all of the people he played with in his childhood fell in his "do not like" list in big, block letters and underlined several times for emphasis. Helena the school's resident weirdo, just so happened to be the only visible source of his dislike right now.

"Isn't that that one girl?" One of the boys at the table asked. Apparently Avery hadn't been the only one to notice.

"Oh, right, that crazy one. The one who drags that creepy doll thing around. I saw her holding it in class once," Another noted.

"Didn't you hang out with her or something, Avery….?"

"Yes." His words were sharp and with clear malice. "But that was a long time ago, so drop it." And they did because once Avery Maes said to drop it, you dropped it unless you wanted to find yourself verbally ripped apart. He wasn't like that with a lot of things, but anything that involved Helena Neverwinter, Taja Okoro, Jonathan Morgan, or Alex White was taboo for the testy student council president.