Jesus. Aureus mentally scolded herself. She'd been trying very hard of late not to take the Lord's name in vain, even in her head. But looking down the corridor and seeing the very clearly closed and locked door of her third-period chemistry class was enough to make her forget her efforts. Crap. Her second day of school, and she was already locked out of a class. She puffed air from her mouth in frustration and switched her heavy books to her other arm. There was nothing else for it; she supposed she'd have to head to the office and take whatever punishment was coming her way. In her last school, a lockout had meant automatic detention, but things seemed a little more relaxed around Sandton High.

Aureus had a lot of experience with schools. Sandton was her sixth, no seventh, one since middle school. She didn't count elementary grades, because they were before. Aureus divided time into Before It and After It, and anything before didn't count. But her dad had promised this was going to be the last move. She was in high school now and needed stability, he'd said, and that was that. No more packing her life into boxes. No more making new friends. They were in Sandton to stay. She was unsure as to how she felt about the fact, particularly now she was set to make a fairly inauspicious start to her Sandton High career.

Her feet clicked in the empty hallways as she turned a corner she thought might lead her to the school office. She wasn't a bad student. Though her grades weren't always stellar, she was rarely in trouble, and having to go to the office so soon gave her a sick feeling. When she reached the desk, she gave her name.

"Third-period chemistry, Thomson, right?" asked the secretary, a plump woman with what looked like a penchant for sequins. Her t-shirt twinkled in the overhead light.

"Yes, ma'am," said Aureus.

"Fine. Take a seat over there, please."

The secretary nodded to a row of chairs against the light gray wall, two of which were already occupied. The motion made her sequins twinkle all the more aggressively. Aureus wondered if they would give an epileptic a fit, and decided they just might. She took her seat and figured she might as well get started on her English assignment, so she pulled her book out of her bag. Thoroughly embroiled in Macbeth, she started when someone spoke.

"Howdy, neighbor."

Glancing up, she saw a thickset, dark-haired boy standing next to her. Once she was looking at him, he flopped into the seat beside her. His leg, encased in carefully frayed khaki shorts, touched hers; instinctively she moved slightly, preventing him from getting any closer.

"Third-period lockout, chem, right?" He raised his hand to rub at the awkward tangle of uneven hair on his chin.

"Yeah," said Aureus, lowering her book. "You, too?"

He nodded. "Don't care, though. Chem's boring, and Thomson's an ass."

She tried hard to look non-committal about this statement, not wanting to offend or encourage the boy. "So, what happens now? I mean, do we get detention or something?"

"Nah, we're cool," he said, leaning back confidently. "Just a demerit. You gotta collect three of them before you get a detention."

Well, that's some relief, anyway, thought Aureus. Although the prospect of spending the next forty minutes or so sitting next to this guy was hardly appealing.

"You're new, right?" he continued. "Saw you sitting next to Ladybird in class yesterday."

Ah. That was why he seemed familiar. This was the guy who had knocked John over in the corridor. The nickname pushed all of the pieces together, and Aureus remembered him.

"You know, you don't have to sit with a creep," said the boy, leaning towards her now. "I can always make room at my bench for you tomorrow."

"And why would I want to move?" asked Aureus, more tartly than she'd intended.

The guy raised an eyebrow. "Well, he's a bit of a freak, you know? A little weird. Known him since elementary, and he's always been kind of off. But, I mean, you're new and stuff. You weren't to know that. It's just . . ." He trailed off.

"It's just he doesn't have any friends?" asked Aureus, innocently.

"Yeah, I mean, no, no, he doesn't. We tend to, you know, stay away from him."

"Seems like all the more reason for me to sit next to him, then," said Aureus, debating whether or not to lecture this kid on Christian charity or even the basic principle of being nice to people.

He shrugged and scratched his thigh with big, fat-fingered hands. "Yeah, well, you change your mind, you just let me know. The name's J.P."

Aureus nodded. "Aureus," she said.

"Weird name."

She rolled her eyes. Like it was the first time she'd ever heard it. No use explaining things to the cretin, though, so she let it go, instead holding up her book. "You mind? I gotta finish this by tomorrow."

"Whatever."

He stretched out his legs, crossing them at the ankle. Leaning his head back against the wall, he closed his eyes. Aureus studied him for a moment. He could, she supposed, be quite handsome if he shaved off his ridiculous chin hair. But he was also kind of a douche bag. She sighed and went back to Macbeth.

***

The one good thing about meeting J.P. was it had reminded Aureus she'd asked John to have lunch with her. So a few minutes before the bell, she made her way to the chem lab and was waiting when class got out. He was the last to leave, as she thought he might be, choosing the protection of remaining in the room until the others had more or less emptied out of the corridors rather than having another run-in with J.P. or whoever else might choose him as today's victim.

"Hey," she said as he came out the door.

She caught the look of fear, followed by surprise in his eyes. Obviously he hadn't expected her to show up.

"We've got a lunch date," she reminded him.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, right."

He'd stopped still in the corridor and now looked from left to right. The poor kid thought he was being pranked, she realized. She stepped away from the wall and grabbed his arm, linking hers through his and propelling him towards the dining hall.

"So . . . what do you normally have, then? I've heard the pizza is pretty good."

"Um, yeah, I guess. I just, you know, I just usually have a sandwich or something in the library."

He was a half head or so taller than her, and the arm in hers felt thin and delicate.

"Ah, the mysterious type," she said, laughing, hoping to make him more comfortable. "Well, it'll be even more mysterious when you suddenly appear in the dining hall today, then, won't it?"

Finally he laughed, too. "Yeah, I guess it will." His feet picked up the pace somewhat.

They piled mini pizza boxes onto trays, and Aureus picked up two bottles of water. "Brownie?" she asked him.

John shook his head, his eyes anxiously scanning for something. Aureus thought he was scoping out the dining hall, looking for potential troublemakers, looking for what could go wrong and where. She desperately wanted to tell him to calm down, not to worry, because he was with her, and everything would be all right. But she didn't dare in case he got insulted or imagined she thought he needed a girl to protect him. Instead, she confidently led the way to a table with empty seats at one end, close to a window overlooking the school parking lot. She made sure he sat with his back to the room, thinking it would give him less to worry about if he could see only her.

"So . . . I got to meet the wonderful J.P. during lockout," she said, picking up a pizza slice. "The experience was a joy."

John frowned and opened his pizza box. He seemed uncomfortable with her criticizing J.P., despite the fact that the boy obviously bullied him. Aureus decided to let the matter lie.

"What's the info on Sandton, then?" she said, taking a bite and waiting for an answer. When he looked puzzled and didn't reply, she swallowed and added: "You know, the latest gossip. Which teachers are great, which are awful, the general stuff you tell the new kid on the block?"

John shrugged and bit into his pizza, chewing slowly. "I dunno," he said eventually. "I've never met a new kid before." He paused. "Been to a lot of schools?"

Aureus nodded. "A fair few."

"Ah."

Another pause. He was obviously not used to carrying on a conversation with a friend. Aureus resolved to give him a little time to think, rather than to dominate their discussion, so she ate. After a while she was rewarded with a question.

"How come all the schools?" he asked.

"My dad's job. He works in IT, so he gets around a bit. But he says this is the last time we're going to move," she answered. "Which means you're going to be stuck with me, at least until graduation." She smiled.

A flash of something crossed his face—maybe anger, maybe confusion—and for a second he looked as if he was going to respond to what she'd said, but the moment passed. His face cleared, and slightly more confidently, he said: "Aureus is a strange name. Unique. Where does it come from?"

Happy that he was showing curiosity in her, Aureus actually answered the question, rather than rolling her eyes and ignoring it like she did most of the time. She was more than used to comments about her weird name. "It was the name of a coin in ancient Rome," she said. "My mom chose it. She was a historian."

He caught it immediately, and Aureus almost regretted letting her mouth run away with her. "Was?"

She felt the familiar cloud pass over her, though it wasn't as black and dark as it used to be, before she nodded. "She died." Feeling her reply was too blunt and to take some of the sting out of the finality of just those two words, she added: "The summer after the end of elementary."

John looked down, then back up at her, and she saw sympathy in his face. It wasn't the pity she normally got, and the sentiment pleased her. "I'm sorry," he said simply. "Your loss must be very difficult."

She liked that he'd used the present tense. He could have said "That must have been very difficult" like the event was over, finished, but he hadn't. He instinctively knew what had happened still continued, that you couldn't simply shut the door on death and have it be over.

"I think Thomson is probably the strictest teacher," he was saying, letting the subject of her mother go and getting back to her original question. "And Best is pretty awesome; she teaches honors English. Avoid Casey if you can—he's math and as boring as watching paint dry."

Aureus grinned. She had been beginning to think John was severely lacking in social skills, but apparently he was only so unused to speaking to other students that he needed to practice. He was warming up nicely, though, and she liked his soft smile, the way his light blue eyes sparkled when he was interested in something. He was a handsome boy. Not in the same way as J.P. but more delicate, with high cheekbones and thin features.

"Well, you can help me decide which classes to take next semester, then," she said, finishing a slice of pizza. "Make sure I don't take anything awful."

Again a flash crossed his face, and again she couldn't quite pinpoint what emotion it was. And now he was silent, leaving Aureus feeling like she'd somehow screwed up.

"You don't have to help if you don't want," she said, thinking maybe she'd overstretched the boundaries of what she hoped might be becoming a friendship.

John sighed and closed his pizza box.

"Look," he said, "this is all very nice. It was kind of you to invite me to have lunch with you, and it's nice of you to talk with me. But you're just not getting it."

"Getting what?" she asked, closing her own pizza box.

"This is temporary. All this." His eyes flashed with anger. "You're not going to be my friend, so you should stop thinking you are. In a couple of days, a week maybe, you'll be just like all the others. Then, you'll stop talking to me and stop noticing me and . . ."

Aureus unwrapped her brownie, waiting to see if he would continue. When he didn't, she asked: "And why would I be like all the others?" It seemed pointless to deny no one else liked him—he knew they didn't, and to say anything else would be patronizing.

"Because I'm me. Because I'm different." He spat the word bitterly, like an olive pit that couldn't be swallowed.

She looked at him. He was different. She could see it. He wasn't the typical teenage boy. He was definitely not macho. Idly, she wondered if he was gay, not as if she particularly cared. But he did seem smart enough and nice and in need of a friend. And truth be told, she'd had enough experience with the cool kids in all her other schools to know they weren't necessarily the nicest people in the world. No, she'd take a genuine person over a cool person any day of the week.

She split her brownie in half. "There's two things you need to know if we're going to be friends," she said calmly. "One is I like different. And the second is I'm not like everyone else. Brownie?"

She held out half of her dessert. Like a dog that had been kicked, he cowered back from her offering; she could see that he wanted to believe her, wanted to trust her. She placed the brownie on his tray.

"How about this, then?" she asked. "Take me on a trial basis. That way you don't need to make any commitment. Let's be friends for two weeks. Then, if you don't like me or you think I'm like everyone else, you can ditch me, and there will be no hard feelings."

She heard the quiet sound of his laughter. He picked up his piece of brownie and finally looked her in the eye. "Okay."

Later, she would tease him, reminding him of the probation period he'd forced her to undergo in order to win the position of being his friend. It always made him grin. But for now, Aureus thought, watching John wolf down the chocolate cake, we seem to be off to a fair start.

*****