Good Morning Grand Line High!
You let out a sigh, slowly starting to give up hope that Vivi would turn up at the place you guys agreed to meet while hundreds of kids pass. A school administrator, who was using a megaphone to remind students to keep moving towards the gym, had already sent you several glares in the past few minutes. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, is he walking over here?!,’ you think to yourself. He was definitely approaching you at a rapid pace. You really do not want to take the chance and get in trouble on your first day of high school, so you hang your head in defeat and walk towards the gym along with everyone else. You hoped you could find a seat with someone you knew in the freshman section of the bleachers and maybe save a spot for Vivi too.
Vivi had been your best friend for a while now, practically since the day you met in middle school, however, you were aware you weren’t necessarily her best friend. You were okay with that though, but sometimes it hurt when you saw how close she was to her lifelong family friend, Koza. This past February, you had put an embarrassing amount of work into making a several page handmade birthday card with two pages completely dedicated to telling her how much you appreciated her kindness and being your best friend even if you weren’t her’s. It was honestly a lot for you to put your feelings out on the line like that, it’s pretty out of character for you to put your heart out on your sleeve, but it ultimately paid off as the two of you became even more inseparable than before. It’s probably for the best that Koza lives in Yuba and doesn’t go to school with you. Otherwise, you’d probably end up making his life a living hell; Vivi might have shared a few too many embarrassing stories of him as a kid, but that’s just more blackmail for you.
You enter the gym, getting herded towards the freshman section with all of the other students that seemed to be gawking at the size of the gymnasium. The bleachers were humongous, seemingly several stories tall and taking up the size of a basketball court on either side of the center court. You guess that’s what a gym for the several thousand student population of Grand Line High looks like. You look up into the crowd as you near the stair steps of the bleachers, thankfully seeing a familiar face not too high up with two open seats next to her. You thank the lord above and make your way towards the redhead waving enthusiastically sitting right next to the stairs.
Nami and you met at tryouts for the high school’s cross country team back in the 7th grade; kids from either of the two junior highs were allowed to compete in some sports at the high school level if the school didn’t have their own team, and if you were good enough. Even though you were friendly to each other, there was a secret animosity between you two for a while for no apparent reason. You joked about it later on about that period of time where you both secretly hated each other for no discernable reason now, but there was always a scary feeling that animosity would come back to her that you’d be oblivious to. You shake your head slightly as if trying to physically rid yourself of the thought as you reach the final step to the row she’s sitting in. She greets you with a smile and a hug as you pass her to sit down, taking off your bag and laying it on the open seat next to you.
“You saving a seat for someone special?” Nami asks in a teasing manner, poking you in the side. You roll your eyes before saying, “You know my best friend Vivi? We agreed to meet by the concession stands outside the gym but some admin person was about to get me in trouble unless I moved. I’m just going to text her to meet me inside and that I have a spot for her, if that’s ok? You weren’t saving these for someone else, were you?”
“First day and you already have beef with the admin, that’s a record, at least for you I think. Is Vivi the girl with the blue hair from Alabasta? And don’t worry about the seats, if anyone else I know comes, they can find their own seat,” Nami responds.
“Hey, I’m just trying to get my friends in one place, but according to admin it must be way too disruptive to stand off to the side waiting for someone. And yep, that’s the one, I still think you two would hit it off,” trailing off as you pull out your phone to text Vivi. Despite both of them being your friends for the past two years, they hadn’t met since Nami went to the other junior high. Despite the fact you’d been trying to get them to meet, you weren’t really the one to host things like birthday parties, especially since… well, let’s just say your family’s dynamics don’t work well with having company over. After pressing send, you look for Vivi in the crowd full of confused faces all searching for familiar faces on the bleachers. You spot her looking down at her phone, seemingly reading your text, nodding, and returning your gaze and smile with just a quick search.
You look back at Nami and ask about her schedule for the semester as Vivi makes her way to you both. You compare and find you have history as your 4th block with her. As Vivi takes her place beside you, you introduce them. You continue that you already know you share your lunch period with Vivi, and you invite Nami to join you two for lunch since her 3rd block class also has the same lunch period. “Definitely better than getting my lunch stolen by the doofuses I was planning on eating lunch with, so of course I’ll join you, for today at least!” Nami says, rolling her eyes while saying ‘doofuses’ but finishing her sentence with an unsure smile. She continues in a more serious tone, “I’m actually going to head to the guidance counselor’s office once they dismiss us to get this random elective they stuck me in changed to geography, which could work because it only has the one section during 3rd block. God, I really hope they have space, I don’t want to be stuck in...” she trails off, looking down and squinting at the paper schedule as she brings it closer to her, “...hospitality and tourism,” she finishes with a groan and with her head in her hands.
“I didn’t know they offered that as an elective, but that sounds perfect for you! Geography, I mean, not whatever that other class is,” you say rubbing her shoulder as some sort of consolation. “Yeah, maybe I can bribe the counselor to let me in, even if they don’t have space,” she replies with a sigh, head still in her hands.
“Well, be sure to update us at lunch,” you say before a hand from someone on the stairs reaches over Nami, ruffling her hair while pushing her head down a little with a playful shove. “Keep your head up Nami, it’s only the first day. We need to keep our heads held high for our next great ADVENTURE!” a boyish voice says, getting louder so she could still hear him as he continued up the stairs. After checking on Nami for a second, you turn up towards the noise as he finishes his ‘pep talk,’ or rather, ‘pep shout.’ Although he didn’t look back towards Nami, the fists raising in the air emphasizing adventure told you that the boy in the straw hat was the perpetrator. He was followed by a small entourage of 3 boys, the blond one stopping with an apologetic face, but before he was able to mutter a word out, was dragged along by the one with green hair. The last one, quickly saying “sorry Nami,” before continuing along, nervously telling the blond, "we don't have time for you to gawk and compliment Nami as an apology, we gotta sit down before they start.”
After a long deep breath, Nami says, “speak of the doofuses, and they will appear,” under her breath. “Seems like it’s going to be a long day?” Vivi asks. “Maybe long semester?” you add. “More like a long high school experience, I can’t wait for this shit to be over already,” Nami says with a huff. “I can see you counting the days til graduation already, Nami,” you reply.
Yeah, at the very least, it’ll be a long day.
The principal taps a microphone at the center of the gym to test it and it effectively quiets most of the gym as the remaining students file in silently. He welcomes everyone and gives a vague speech about making the best of the time that we have, and how he can’t wait to see what the students of Grand Line High accomplish this year. Then he releases everyone but the freshmen. “Ugghhh, why did we sit through that long, boring orientation a week ago if they were going to make us listen to this BS now anyway?” Nami groans.
‘Oh, her mood is really sour already, if she keeps complaining, I just might call her an extreme sour warhead,’ you think to yourself, ‘hope her mood gets better by lunch.’
“To get our schedules?” Vivi answers the rhetorical question politely. ‘Oh, I’m going to need to remind her not every question needs an answer, specifically if it’s asked in that tone of voice,’ taking the mental note for later.
With another long boring speech aimed specifically at the new arrivals to the school out of the way, and a reminder for all students who hadn’t picked up their schedules to go to the lines forming on either end of the gym, you are finally dismissed.
“Do either of you know where hall E would be?” Vivi asks. “I get A, B, & C are the three floors of the academic building, D is the performing arts section, and F is where the gyms are, but what’s E?”
“Ahhh, right, I forgot that most people haven’t snuck around the school for water breaks when it’s too hot outside…,” Nami says with a mischievous grin as she looks at you. “Well, most people aren’t on the cross country team,” you reply with a wink. Looking back to Vivi, “I’d walk you there, but my class is really far since they haven’t fixed the breezeway… sorry Vivi. But it’s down that hall,” you say, pointing ahead to a hallway that goes to the right.
“Tell you what,” Nami swings an arm around Vivi, “I need to thank a certain moss head for something, so I’ll take you. Bribing the counselor will have to wait, I’m sure there’s already a line going outside their offices anyway. What’s your room number?” Nami says as they veer off.
Great, now a trek to what is essentially the other end of the school. How many minutes did they give you between classes? At the very least, you can use the all too common excuse of ‘I got lost.’ But you don’t want to be that person do you? Nah. You settle for a brisk walk, ‘but not too fast, I can’t seem too excited to get to class,’ you think to yourself.
“You know, you should stop overthinking being too worried that you look like an overexcited freshman, I can practically see the gears in your head short circuiting,” you hear a familiar voice behind you say. “I’ll give you that partially, but don’t you mean you can see the gears turning in my head? Gears don’t short-circuit, wires do,” you say with a sigh. “Nerd,” Ace says with a chuckle, hitting your arm playfully.
You roll your eyes at his pretty childish insult. You’re aware you have a weirdly extensive knowledge about a lot of random topics. At this point, you don’t really care if you’re a nerd, just if you get made fun of for it; why is knowledge such a bad thing to have? “Summer conditioning was pretty boring without you, you know,” you say, trying to shift the conversation.
“Aw, you missed me, that’s so cute,” he says, patting your head like a dog. You shove his hand away. He pretends to act offended for a second, but then smiles and gives you a little wink. You roll your eyes again, a common occurrence around Ace; you didn’t care for him patronizing you, but you kind of accept that it’s just part of his cocky personality. “Tell your brother to meet me in the park after school, still got to keep our bodies in peak condition if they ever let us back on the team,” Ace says, taking a right towards one of the stairwells.
Ace was known for pulling stunts. Everyone was well aware of this, including the cross country and track coaches. But, damn was that kid fast, so they could use him on the team again. Unfortunately, the stunt he had pulled this summer, although justified, at least in your humble opinion, was not appreciated by the coach, even less so by the athletic director and the school board. It was an act of protest for the unfair treatment of your brother, and while you applauded them for it, it got them both banned from participating in sports for an entire school year. And stricter enforcement of a new dress code during practice for the rest of the team.
In no time, you reach your first block class. The walk seemed quicker than you thought, but the bell rang just after you found your assigned seat. The teacher drones on about the syllabus, how you need to get the required books for each unit, and what the class is going to cover. It’s English, so you know, English. While you do recognize that sometimes ‘the curtains are just blue,’ most of the people in here don’t even know how to properly structure a sentence, use a semicolon, or let alone have the slightest grasp on media comprehension, despite the fact that it was an honors section. You still hate the monotony of it though, but you guess helping your peers is the best way to reinforce what you know, so maybe this won’t be too bad.
Along with your vast yet random knowledge, you seem to have a knack for English, specifically grammar. Once grammar made sense to you, it kind of just unlocked and you never really had to think too hard about it. It wasn’t that you loved English, it just made sense, despite the rules and even the all-too-common exceptions. However, you start to think about the times where this 'knack' was more annoying than useful.
Back in elementary school, when deciding who would compete in what event at the Junior Beta Club convention, one of your teachers just completely threw out your list of preferences to compete in the creative/ art competitions and just forced you to take the English test instead. She justified it by saying you had the highest score on the standardized English test your school took every year, but why did that mean you have to spend all of this money for a school field trip where all you were doing is taking another test? So lame. It didn’t help that the people who ended up competing for your school in any of your preferred choices did not do well with their atrocious creations. Pointing it out was mean though, so you kept quiet, but there was some heavy resentment on the fact that people couldn’t even put in the effort you would have for something they got that you wanted. You break the pencil you were holding just thinking about it.
You put the pieces in a side pocket of your bag to throw away later as you walk out. You then think about middle school English. Your older brother recommended taking regular English because he heard that honors was a lot of work. You listened, but maybe you shouldn’t have. There were times when you had to correct the teacher’s grammar on the slideshow presentation she had. The first time you thought it was on purpose to see who was paying attention but it wasn’t. You ended up falling asleep on the regular but still had over 100% in the class. With the teacher’s approval, you were able to switch to the honors section the next semester. Maybe she advocated hard for you to switch because she just wanted to get rid of your annoying self.
Your thoughts about your history with the language you speak must have kept you entertained in your head for a while because before you know it, you’re heading towards your next class: creative writing. You were really excited. Hey, just because you didn’t love analyzing stories doesn’t mean you don’t love creating them. That’s where your knack for English comes quite in handy.
Before you know it, you end up in… the computer lab? ‘No, that can’t be right,’ you think to yourself, checking the room number on your schedule and then the door once more. “Hi, is creative writing an online class?” you ask, walking up to the desk of the person you assumed to be the administrator. The computer lab’s administrator looks up to you, extremely unimpressed. “Yeah, you can expect that for a lot of the half-semester classes,” she says, completely monotone, pointing to the white board “directions are up there, find an empty seat and get started.”
Hm, well an online class it is. You just hope that whoever makes the curriculum for the creative writing class doesn’t hate their job as much as it seems like the computer lab administrator does. You sign into the computer using the instructions on the board and log on to the online class portal.
All you have is a short discussion assignment to introduce yourself to the class with a funny story from your childhood. Funny and childhood don’t really exist together in your past, so you wrack your brain to come up with something. Sure you had things that you laugh at now, but they sure weren’t funny at the time, and honestly if you share trauma, even the stuff you joke about now, it kind of sets a dangerous precedent for the future.
You end up writing about how at a summer camp, you got a splinter, and while you were heading to the camp nurse, a wasp got stuck in your hair and stung you repeatedly. So, easy to say, you kind of forgot about the splinter until you were bandaged up. The nurse looked at you like you were crazy, and said there was nothing there. Your cabin mates looked at you the same way until you pulled a hair thin piece of wood out of your hand 3 days later after picking at it excessively.
You include dramatics into the story, trying your best to make it lighthearted enough to gloss over the fact that your health and wellbeing were neglected in a way. They took care of you far more than your father would have if it had happened at home after all. It really wasn't that deep to ever truly be upset over; it was like comparing a kiddie pool to the Mariana Trench of experiences you've been through. ‘Oh well, it’ll have to do,’ you think. You then realize the introduction assignment was due at the end of the week. ‘They have really low expectations for productivity in online classes don’t they? Well, it gives me more time to think of a story that's actually funny,’ you think as you log out of the computer, actually being prepared for the end of the class period this time.
You hope your 3rd block and lunch go better than the rest of your day thus far.