Skylor's POV

My dad told me transferring into public school after being home schooled my entire life was going to be hard. It's a big jump from being taught by Clouse on our island to being out in a classroom full of other students.

I thought I would be prepared. I watched all of the big high school movies, the Mean Girls and Sixteen Candles type movies. Even with that, I didn't expect everyone to be so cliquey. I thought that was exaggerated for the sake of the movies. However, every group seems impenetrable.

In the center of the quad, the "popular" kids sit. It's easy to tell. The boys are loud and don't care if they bother the people around them. The girls in the group are all on their phones, not caring about actual socializing. My hope is I can walk past them without getting made fun of.

I'm planning on sitting near one of the trees for all of lunch. I'll try to make some friends. I start my walk across the quad at a normal pace so I don't look weird. I set my eyes on a tree in the distance with a girl sitting underneath it peacefully. That's my destination.

"Hey, new girl," someone says right beside me as I walk past the cool kids table. My heart starts beating in my chest rapidly as I turn to the owner of the voice. A girl a couple of inches shorter than me stands with her hip popped out slightly, facing me. Her hair is a shade of white I've never seen before. All of her features are dainty, but its clear that she's the leader. She should not be underestimated. "Want to sit with us?" She gives me a smile.

"Sure," it's either say yes, or piss off the queen bee, and I'd rather not make enemies my first day. She brings me to the center of their section of tables and sits down. I take the seat next to her. On my left, there's a girl with purple hair tied back like the rest of them. On the queen's left, there's another blonde, but not to her degree.

Across from us, there are four boys. Furthest to the left is a boy with a white track suit on. His hair is brown, and he's wearing red sunglasses.

Sitting next to him is a bulkier boy. He looks as if he's all muscles. He has black hair that is swoopy, but he looks like he's in a bad mood, so I move on to the next guy.

The next one is obviously their leader, the one all of the girls in the school swoon over. He has brown hair that floofs up. His eyes are concealed with black sunglasses, and he has a slight smirk on his face that surely makes a lot of girls throw themselves at him. I have to admit, he is attractive, but I'm not going to make a fool out of myself going after him.

Finally, the guy furthest right looks a bit more mischievous. His hair is jet black, shoulder length, with a single streak of green. His smirk is more obvious than the other boy's.

"Everyone," the girl who brought me over here gets everyone's attention, even though she already had it,"this is the new girl..." she drifts off.

It takes me a second to recognize she's waiting for me to say my name,"Skylor."

"Skylor," she says again as if she knew it.

"I'm Kai," the leader introduces himself, taking off his sunglasses. Predictably, his eyes are brown. "The others are Griffin, Cole, and Morro."

"I'm Harumi, and my girls next to me are Chamille," she gestures to the one with purple hair,"and Mackenzie." The two of them wave from both sides of me.

"What school did you come from?" Kai asks me, resting his chin on his own hand.

"Home school."

Harumi seems shocked,"Really? I thought home school kids were supposed to be losers."

"My dad ran his business off a private island. I grew up there. We moved here so I could have a normal last year of high school," I briefly explain my backstory. On purpose, I exclude the part where my dad was forced onto that island as a jail sentence and wasn't allowed back into Ninjago until last summer.

I glance over at Griffin. The look he's giving me makes me want to go back to the island and never come back.

"So you were in isolation for your entire life?" Cole stops brooding to ask a question.

I contemplate the answer. I never came into contact with anyone my own age, but I got a bit of outside contact. "Well, I was isolated from Ninjago. There was never anyone my age where I grew up, but I always had my dad and his workers. I had to keep myself distracted though, so I picked up several hobbies."

"Like?"

"Well, I've trained in several martial arts. I can do level 4 to 5 tumbling skills because my dad thought that was important to get me into that." Everyone at the table looks impressed, besides Harumi.

"Does that mean you can do a full?" Mackenzie asks. I nod.

Griffin looks confused,"what's a full?"

"It's a flip, but instead of having your body curled it's straight, and your body also rotates while you do it," Kai answers. He looks up and sees the curiosity on my face as to why he knew what it was. "Before my parents were always gone on business trips, I would go with them to my sister's competitions. She almost got her double full, but then she stopped competing."

"Does she do cheer?" after I ask that, Harumi starts laughing next to me.

"She did as a freshman, but then she quit, and now she's a loser," she gestures over to the tree where I was going to go sit. Kai sighs, and Cole's face lights up with rage.

"Hey Harumi, what level is that thing you do that you always gloat about?" Moro asks with a smirk on his face. Harumi's face falls.

"My back handspring is level 2," she glares at him.

Morro laughs. "So what I'm hearing is you shouldn't be talking because Nya was a way better cheerleader than you."

"Just because she was better two years ago doesn't mean she is now. Besides, she's a loser now. She gotten all 'save the Earth' and 'everybody has a voice'. Not only has she reached gang kids low," she gestures over to some kids hanging out in the corner, all in leather jackets,"but she's also reached Zane and PIXAL low. Like gosh do you really have to say the answer every time?"

All of them just sit and take what she says. Kai even lets her when it's his own sister. Cole looks like he's about to go off at her, but he refrains. I look at Nya in the distance. She looks peaceful, being by herself and just enjoying what's around her.

They keep talking afterwards, Kai changing the conversation to something less controversial. All of them chime in, but Harumi owns the conversation, shutting it down if she doesn't like it. She seems as if she owns every one of them. It's sad to see, really, because they don't seem like bad people. Harumi just seems like she tries to bring out the worst in them, turning the conversation back to gossip at every chance she gets.

"Oh my gosh Sky, you should so come to cheer practice tomorrow. We already had tryouts, but I'll let you be an exception because you just moved," Harumi suggests, holding onto my arm.

Two options are in front of me. One is to decline, but I don't want her to hate me and turn me into one of her hated like she's done to Kai's sister. The other is to accept, but I don't want to turn into one of her followers.

"For sure, I'll just need the details."

She looks down at her phone,"What's your instablock? I'll dm you through there."

"I don't have one. My dad doesn't want me to," I explain. Harumi giggles.

"So tomorrow at practice I'm totally making you one," she informs me before a loud ringing echoes through the quad. Everyone around me groans, standing up and putting on their backpacks.

Kai slides on his backpack, which is a shade of red that matches his t shirt. He walks around the table until he's next to me. "What's your next class?"

"Economics in room 403," I read of my schedule.

He smiles next to me. "We have the same class. Wanna walk together?"

"Actually Kai, I need to talk to you," Harumi steps in between us.

"That's fine. Thanks for the offer. Tomorrow I'll take you up on it," I inform him.

A genuine seeming smile crosses his face,"Yeah, that'd be great."

With that, I walk off. That lunch went pretty well. Even though I might have slightly maddened the queen of the school, all of the others seemed to like me enough. Kai in particular was a lot nicer than he seemed from afar. At first glance, he seemed like a jerk. Now though, he seems like a genuinely cool guy, not one who I would date, but still a cool friend. I think I'll really like it here.

---

Jay's POV

The colossal failure of this morning fuels all the anxiety that is draining me. The moment I walk into the speech classroom, I want to leave. One step into that room and everything feels like too much. My head is pounding, as if it wants to explode. The tension goes down my neck and fills my entire body.

It's reached the point where the constant tightness in my chest never goes away. Sometimes it gets worse or lessens, but it's always there. It always feels like there's a struggle to get air in compared to how it use to be, as if every breath is harder.

I take a seat in the middle of the class. The kids in the back of the class always get called on for the sake of being in the back of the class, and the kids who sit in the front of the class want attention from the teacher. In the middle, you can blend in. No one bugs you.

As I sit down, I take a glance at the girl next to me. She has on a black leather jacket, but not the one that the gang kids wear. Her hair is tied up messily, and she is focused on sketching in her notebook. The drawing is of some type of flower. It's beautiful.

Of course I'm not going to start a conversation to telll her. I'm a bundle of nerves waiting to explode. I'd say one word to her and freeze up as soon as she looked at me. She also looks like the type of girl who doesn't want to be messed with.

Many of the girls at this school don't have real beauty. They try to fake it behind masks of makeup and filters. The girl next to me, she has natural beauty. Her eyes perfectly set apart, and her nose is nice and petite. I've noticed her before walking through the halls. She's always herself, and I appreciate it.

"Hello everyone," our teacher strides through the door extravagantly. "Welcome to speech class. Through this course, we are going to be focusing on different types of presentations and debates to help you all prepare for the future. Who's excited?"

Zane Julien raises his hand at the front of the class. No one else moves. "I am."

"That's the spirit!" the teacher cheers, pointing at Zane. "I'm going to give you guys a quick warm up assignment to help everyone warm up. You will pick a partner, any partner in this room, and give a quick presentation on them. Sample questions are on the paper I'm handing out. Tomorrow, you'll present your partner to the class. Any questions?" Everyone is silent. "Great, now you can begin."

I watch as the people around me all get their partners. Group work is terrible, especially when you get to choose the partner. Since I don't really have any friends, I typically get stuck with the kids who don't want to even do the project, so I do it all myself.

Once the people around me move, the only people left are myself and the girl sitting next to me. I wait for her to acknowledge me, but she doesn't.

My head starts to pound more, demanding my attention. I try to push it away.

"L-looks like we're partners," I stammer out nervously.

She keeps focusing on her drawing,"Guess so."

"What are you drawing?"

She still keeps focusing on her drawing, adding details to the petal of the flower,"A water lily."

"It's-it's really pretty," I tell her. Even at the smallest conversation, my heart is beating like crazy.

She looks up from her drawing for the first time since I've seen her today. Her eyes examine my face before looking back down at her drawing.

"Nature's really pretty, too bad we're destroying it all for money," she finishes what she was doing with the petal before closing her notebook. "I'm Nya."

"I'm Jay."

She looks closer at me once I say that,"Aren't you the ASB president? Why would you need a class to work on presenting?"

My mind goes back to this morning,"I-I'm not good at them. I thought this would help."

"Let's go over these questions," she changes her focus towards the work, grabbing the paper in front of her. "What's your favorite subject in school?"

"Science," I answer, ready to get made fun of. I've always like science, but people have teased me for it ever since elementary school.

She gets a little smile on her face,"me too." When she says that, I smile a little too. It makes sense looking at her. She likes nature, and that type of stuff is in science.

"What's your favorite color?" I ask her now, a little more at ease.

"Blue," she answers automatically.

"Me too."

"Who knew we had so much in common?" she laughs quietly, mostly to herself. "How many siblings do you have?"

"None, I'm an only child. You?" I notice the pounding in my head has lessened, so I let out a sigh of relief to myself.

"I'm the youngest. I have an older brother."

"I've always wanted an older brother," I admit. She sighs.

"We can trade. I don't want him," she responds.

I can tell it's a touchy subject by her response, so I switch the conversation,"Where do you want to be in ten years?"

She looks up as she thinks. After a minute or so, she responds,"I want to have made a difference somewhere in the world. I want my existence to have really mattered and to have achieved something. I don't know what yet, though." She talks passionately, and I admire it. She has drive.

"I want to work at Borg Industries, not manufacturing, but inventing things. It's been a dream ever since I was little," there's something about Nya that makes her easy to open up to. She seems accepting, like she won't judge me. It's calming.

"You invent too?" she asks me. I nod, and she gets a big smile on her face. "This is insane. We can't have this much in common."

"What do you like to work on?" I ask her.

"I prefer vehicles. They're fun to work with, especially if you think outside the box."

"I helped my dad repair a motorcycle he found one time. It was really fun. I prefer little around the house inventions to make things more convenient."

The two of us keep talking the rest of the period, sometimes focusing on the questions, and sometimes on random tangents. When the bell rings, I'm actually sad the class is over.

"Work on your presentation at home. We're going to kill it," she gives me a smile before walking out of the room.

Maybe speech class won't be so bad after all.

A/N: finished, this chapter is longer than usual so yay

FOR THE RECORD: the "as low as Zane and PIXAL" comment doesn't reflect how I feel about them. It's  because they're more "nerdy" that Harumi looks down on them cause she views herself as above them

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Thank you all for reading it means a lot to me