"Wake up," a voice yelled in Rebel’s ear the next morning. She simply groaned and tried to ignore the young girl, "It’s time for school!"

"I know," Rebel muttered, opening her eyes slightly to see Pillow’s face inches from her own. She sighed and rolled over to face the other direction. Suddenly, she felt something slam into her.

"I think Spot forgot to mention something," she mumbled to herself. That’s also when she noticed the absence of something soft underneath her head.

The object came into contact with her a second time and another seconds after. Before another hit could come, Rebel turned again and blocked it with her hands, grabbing the soft object from Pillow’s hands.

Pillow simply stuck her tongue out at Rebel before literally bouncing to the next bed. Rebel sat up to see the young girl poking Dani and giving her no mercy. The girl didn’t stop until everybody was awake and at least attempting to move from their beds.

"Don’t touch me," Smartass warned her as Pillow moved for her bed. Pillow looked like she wanted to argue, but shrugged her shoulders and ran to get ready.

"There’s gotta be something wrong with that girl," Dani commented, "She’s way too hyper for this early in the morning." The other girls nodded, still groggy from their interesting and somewhat rude awakening.

"That’s what my brother says," Pillow came in happily, "Now, who’s walking me to school?"

XXX

About an hour later, the girls watched with relief as the 10-year-old skipped off to class. They entered into their classroom, the usual yelling seeming like whispers compared to the lodging house. Scribble immediately found a seat next to Specs, a friend of hers for years.

"Thanks," she told him, pulling the chair out. He had saved it for her because he knew how she wasn’t always the most comfortable around people.

"I wish you were in Manhattan," he whispered over to her, "It would be nice to know at least one of the girls there. And they’re loud."

Scribble laughed at this. After Specs had lived with a bunch of rowdy boys for most of his life, he thought that girls were loud, "They can’t be any louder than you guys. What happened?"

"One of the beds collapsed," he explained, "They’re a floor above us so all we heard was this loud thump. A bunch of the guys went up there, and there were cards everywhere. And this morning…" He trailed off, looking like he was blushing slightly. Scribble noticed this and started to laugh slightly.

"What," she asked, eager to hear what he was going to say.

"We found out that we have to share our washroom with them," he finally said. Scribble looked at him, wondering what was so bad about it. He must have known what she was thinking, because he answered, "Let’s just say that now you have to knock before entering."

XXX

Joseph sighed and looked at the pages in front of him. Out of all the subjects, English was the one that he hated with a passion…and he had to do it at nine in the morning.

Now math and science were easy to him. That his brain could handle. But start asking him to write a paragraph and his mind just blanked. He glanced over at his desk partner, Aqua, and scowled upon noting that she was writing unceasingly and never looked up from her paper.

This was just embarrassing because she was a year younger than he was and had more English skills than he did. Sighing, he picked up his pencil and started to write, but had no idea how it would turn out.

When the bell finally rang for English to let out, Joseph was one of the first to the door. He caught up with a few of his friends as he exited, and all of them complained about the work they had to do that day, a horrible invention that they called homework.

Chapter 8