Arcene sat in the back of the class with her notebook open. A week had passed since school had begun and since then one window or more have been broken five times.

The first time was because a kid named Henry Prasanth lost control of an echo spell that caused all the windows to shatter. Luckily, the glass shattered outward so nobody was hurt by it, however, the sound did cause Elodie Weiss and Kol Jaëger, the bunny girl and wolf boy respectively to freak out and turn into an actual rabbit and wolf. Kol crashed into a few desks which caused a few of the other students near them to freak out. Fortunately, Chase Woodman, the kid in the red hood and cape, didn’t start shooting, which would have just added to the mayhem. When everyone calmed down, Henry was able to fix the glass with a quick wave of his wand.

That was the day Arcene learned that Elodie and Kol were something called Faunis and had the abilities and weaknesses of whatever animal they were. They also could transform into said animal.

That was also the day that Arcene learned that the kid who looked suspiciously like Harry Potter but with a crescent shaped scar and dark purple eyes, Henry Prasanth, was a wizard.

‘You’re a wizard, Henry!’ thought Arcene in a deep man’s voice and she sketched a picture of the brown caped boy in her journal. Above it was his name in purple letters. Arcene touched the soft pages of her new journal. She had gotten it a while back as a gift from her grandmother¹ but had found no reason to use it. Until now that is. Arcene had the feeling that this year, she’d actually have something interesting to write in it.

She figured that one of the first things she would put in the book would be the names and pictures of her classmates. Arcene had never been the best with names so she figured writing down her classmates’ names would make things easier.

Arcene couldn’t help but feel a bit proud of herself. In a week, she had memorized eight of her classmates’ names and well as her teacher’s.

Outside of Babe-Sensei, Arcene remembered Marcella Gervasio, Lyra Nightingale, Chase Woodman, Allen Noble, Elodie Weiss, Kol Jaëger, Mesi Bahr, and Koobla Stpan².

Arcene glanced to her right at the boy next to her. Koobla was an odd character that brought a lot of questions to Arcene’s mind. By now she had figured out that he was a ghost, hence why he was able to disappear whenever anyone looked directly at him so the first question that came to mind was how he had died. The questions that came after that could have possibly caused her to have an existential crisis, so she tried to keep them out of mind.

Looking at him as he stared forward at the teacher who was instructing them, she briefly wondered if he could see. His light fluffy hair covered the whole upper half of his face, obscuring his eyes. She briefly considered waving her hand in front of her face in hopes of getting a response from him but kept her hand to herself.

‘I wonder what color eyes he has…’ she wondered as she stared at him from the side.

In her journal, next to the picture of Henry, a picture of Koobla began to materialize. She wasn’t quite finished with Henry’s picture but her mood had changed and she was already taken in by her attempts to draw Koobla’s fluffy hair. Though her drawing would ultimately become a simplified caricature of him, she tried her best to portray him the best she could.

Outside of the pictures she had busied herself with drawing, inside her journal was a recollection of the events of the previous week. Outside of her core classes, she had art, creative writing, and Japanese classes³. Of those, she only shared two of those classes with any of her strange new classmates.

Though she couldn’t recall all of their names, they had certainly done more than a few things to catch her attention.

There was the short girl who pulled up to school in a limo⁴ everyday. Then during lunch, there was a blond kid trying to eat a hamburger with a fork and knife after tying a napkin around his neck. There was the short girl who pulled up to school in a limo everyday⁵. There was a girl who couldn’t be less that 6 ft tall in a cowboy hat that rode onto the school campus on a chestnut colored mare every single day.

Even the teacher was weird. At one point, we came to class after lunch to see her in a white ballerina get up, tiara, and an orange wig doing pirouettes on top of the desks. When asked what she was doing she replied by leaping back to her desk, striking a pose, and saying it was a Princess Tutu cosplay. Apparently that was the introduction to what we’d be learning in English that day. It was about how fans of a work express their love for it. We ended up learning about fan fiction, parodies, the use of primary sources to make an original work, copyright laws, as well as paraphrasing and summarizing. She even went as far as to say Pilgrim’s Progress and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy were Bible fanfics.

Though unorthodox, Arcene couldn’t deny that she learned a lot from it. However, she continued to question how nobody outside of the class seemed to have noticed the horse on campus or the teacher doing ballet on the desks.

Arcene shifted her attention from her journal to the room around her. The Babe-Sensei had written instructions on the board and voices began to fill the room as the students began working independently. Though only a week had passed, groups had already begun to form in the class.

Of course there was Elodie and Kol, who were either really close friends or boyfriend and girlfriend.

Arcene watched as Elodie leaned over Kol’s desk and explained a problem to him. She made a mental note to draw them together when it was their turn in her journal.

Then there was Lyra who seemed to have made quick friends with the green haired girl and the green skinned girl⁶. The three of them were chatting amicably until Babe-Sensei warned them to start their work.

Koobla seemed to have made a friend despite his quietness. Leaned over his desk was the silver haired boy.

Marcella was talking to the girl in the cowboy hat and separately, a few other kids were talking quietly together.

Arcene stared at all the heads in front of her, tapping her pencil on her notebook. At least she wasn’t the only one alone. The cliques hadn’t officially formed yet and there were still kids that hadn’t yet been pulled into groups. There was still hope for her.

Arcene smiled sardonically. The fact that she even had to think that was sad.

She pushed the thought out of her mind and tried to busy herself with her math work until the period ended.

She gathered her stuff and hurried out the door. Arcene had quite a distance to go to get to her next class. Sketchbook and pencil bag clutched tightly, she made her way through the crowded hallway towards the art wing of the school. It was a really good thing that there was a lot of time in between periods for travel because if there wasn’t, it would be impossible to make the hundreds of yards trek in between classes.

As Arcene journeyed towards the art wing, less kids crowded the hallway. Arcene trotted down a staircase and turned around a corner.

“Ah!”

Arcene’s books fell to the floor. She stumbled backwards. Upon regaining her balance, she looked up to see a black eyed, bespectacled boy standing in front of her with an open book in hand.

“Oh, pardon me!” he said as he crouched down to pick up her books. “Sorry, about that, I wasn’t paying attention.”

Arcene knelt down to pick up her books as well. “I-it’s okay,” she managed to stutter out. She reached out towards her journal, only for her hand to brush up against the boy’s as he reached for it at the same time. Heat rushed to her cheeks and Arcene’s eyes moved to meet his.

The boy didn’t move his hand and at first looked down at her with a smile, but as he took in her features, his smile slowly turned into a disappointed frown.

“How disappointing,” the black haired boy said as he stood up straight. “Crash into hello meetings usually result in meeting a pretty girl, yet you’re plain as dirt…”

Arcene looked up at him from below, shocked at his words. He dropped the books he had picked up flat on the ground in front of her.

“I would have told you my name but it appears that you are not the heroine or even one of the heroines of my story, thus are of little importance to me. Good day.”

The strange boy tucked his book under his arm and took his leave. Arcene watched him as he left. Stunned by his words and his behavior. It wasn’t until the late bell rang when she regained her wits and hurriedly picked up her stuff and ran to class.

She slipped into the classroom before the teacher could close the door and took her seat in the back of the class. She leaned herself back in her seat and stared at the ceiling. She felt a groan begin to fight its way out of her but she quickly shoved it in the closet where she kept all her other feelings.

The Universe had chosen to be needlessly cruel to her just then. To dangle a scenario right out of a high school romance novel right in front of her only to turn it into a bitter attack on her already low self esteem.

So the guy wasn’t drop dead handsome like he usually was in the stories, Arcene would have been fine with that. She would have been fine if the encounter only resulted in friendship. But to outright confirm that she was too plain to be a heroine? Sure she already knew that but having someone else say it was a blow below the belt.

‘I guess it’s wrong to think that could have been the beginning of a rose-tinged high school life. Might as well suck it up and take it, it’s not like the universe is going to suddenly make me a protagonist…’ she thought as she buried her disappointment away from her conscious mind.

………………..

Arcene was back with her main class for history. Their first unit was about ancient civilizations. The topic was interesting enough to keep Arcene from dozing off or daydreaming. However, her eyes were seriously bothering her. She had to resist the urge to rub her eyes for fear that doing so would mess up her contacts. She pulled her eye drops from her pencil bag and raised her hand.

“Babe-Sensei!” she called out.

“Yes?”

“May I go to the bathroom?”

“After we finish the slides.”

Arcene sighed. There were still twenty more slides to go and her eyes were itching like crazy. She rubbed underneath her eyelids in an attempt to alleviate the irritation to no avail.

“Darn it,” she murmured. She pulled up the face camera on her school laptop and began removing her contacts. It wasn’t like she needed them anyway, at the moment, they were just nuisances.

She placed the contacts in their case and furiously began to rub her eyes, not stopping until she felt her eyes begin to water. Gaining some relief, she blinked a few times and turned her attention back to the board. However, now that her attention had been diverted briefly, she found herself with the urge to move, or at least spread herself out a bit.

She extended her arms and stretched backwards, then, not quite satisfied with that, she leaned forward and stretched across the desk. As she stretched, her fist connected with the eraser resting on her desk, sending it bouncing across the floor, far away from her.

“Ah, excuse me,” Arcene tapped the student that at across from her, a black boy who had a white eyepatch over his right eye and a cross around his neck, “can you get my eraser for me?” she whispered.⁷

The boy reached over the other side of his desk and turned back with the eraser in hand. “Here you go,” he said.

“Thank you.” Arcene took the eraser and put it in her pencil bag.

“Can you look towards me again?”

Arcene turned towards the boy again, to see his brown eye staring intensely at her.

“Silver…” he murmured.

‘Silver…?’ Arcene thought. Her body stiffened as he realized what he was referring. Her cheeks grew hot and she turned her head towards the window.

She stood up quickly, almost knocking her seat to the ground. The teacher stopped her lecture and everyone’s eyes were on Arcene. Arcene kept her eyes downcast and thought fast.

“May I please be excused to the bathroom? It’s an emergency.” Arcene placed her hand on her stomach for emphasis.

Babe-Sensei nodded. “You’re excused…” she said slowly.

Arcene grabbed her contacts and eye drops and sprinted out of the room. She made a beeline for the bathroom and didn’t stop until she stood over the sink, in front of the mirror.

She stared at her reflection. Grey eyes stared back at her. The color was jarring against her dark skin. Perhaps there was a time when Arcene didn’t mind her grey eyes but somewhere along the way they they were put onto her long list of insecurities, somewhere under her hair and weight. There wasn’t a single member of her immediate family who had eyes like hers and Arcene resented it⁸.

Arcene stared at her eyes, silently wondering if it was possible to permanently darken her irises before resigning herself to them. She picked up her eye drops and leaned her head back.

………………..

“Dinari didn’t make a mistake.”

Babe-Sensei stopped in the middle of her lecture. “Excuse me, Damien?”

The boy with the eyepatch spoke again. “Dinari didn’t make a mistake. The girl who left, the one who sits in the far back corner against the windows, she’s the one we’ve been looking for. She has silver eyes.”

Everyone in the room glanced at the now empty seat in the back. It was hard to believe that the person they were looking for had been right there amongst them the entire time and they hadn’t realized.

“Can anyone tell me the girl’s name?” Babe-Sensei adjusted her glasses. “Her name currently escapes me.”

Silence fell across the room.

“You mean to tell me that not a single one of you even has an idea of what her name is?” she asked quizzically.

“You’re the teacher, and you don’t know it either…” replied Damien.

“Fair enough,” she said evenly.

Babe-Sensei walked over to her desk and pulled up the school’s database. She pulled up the list of students’ names. She scrolled down the list, looking for any names that she couldn’t match a face that was currently in the room to.

‘Mesi Bahr, CRAI, Damien Cross, Raphael DeFranco, Charmant Elric, Primrose Fairfield, Marcella Gervasio….Ah ha.’ she thought.

“Is there an Arcene Grey currently in the room?” she asked, looking up from her computer.

She was met with shaking heads from her students.

Babe-Sensei stood up straight and addressed the class. “Well that settles it. The girl’s name is Arcene Grey. Like myself, all of you are here in this classroom from wherever it is you came from, as a favor to Dinari. For whatever reason, that girl is of incredible importance to him. Be aware of that as we move forward.”

The girl in the cowboy hat raised her hand. “But what d’ya suppose we do? The Star feller’s instructions were mighty unclear. ‘I have a friend that’s heading down a really bad road. I want you to save her.’ How d’ya reckon we do that?” she asked in her Texas twang.

“We asked the same thing, Annabelle,” said Elodie, rubbing a lock of her snow white hair between thumb and forefinger, “the only reply Dinari gave was to ‘live a rose tinged high school life’.”

“Whatever that means…” added Kol.

“He said something similar to us,” said a blond haired boy near the front. The girl sitting next to him nodded in agreement.

“Same,” agreed Lyra.

“Well then, I guess that is all you guys have to do. As your teacher I’ll do my part too,” said Babe-Sensei.

The door knob squeaked and the door began to open.

“Act natural, children,” she said as she plastered a convincing smile on her face. “Back to what I was saying- Many civilizations were only able to be created due to their close proximity to water, in this case, rivers.”

Arcene walked into the room and closed the door behind her. She quickly made her way to the back of the room. Although Babe-Sensei kept on talking as if Arcene’s entrance was of little importance. She made sure to get a good look at Arcene’s eyes before the girl turned her back to her. Seeing her brown eyes, she locked eyes with Damien who, understanding her tacit question mouthed the word “contacts” to her. She discreetly nodded her head.

As Arcene walked down the aisle between the desk towards her seat, the others watched her as she passed, asking themselves this question:

What could possibly be so important about this girl that a Wishing Star would ask all of us, people so different, people from so many different places, to be in a class with her?

1. I thought about elaborating on Arcene’s relationship with her grandmother. I was on the fence about having her be the cause of her parent’s mistreatment of her or having her be loving towards Arcene.

2. There it is! The stupid name!

3. I think I was going to use this as an excuse for Kaage to tutor her at some point.

4. Might change this to a black Mercedes-Benz or something.

5. This is why proofreading is important. I already said this.

6. Again, I need to better differentiate here. The green-skinned girl is an alien. It would have been easier to Arcene realize this.

7. The chapters I wrote don’t go far enough to give his name, but he’s Damien Cross (his last name is a bit on the nose; I think now I would change it)

8. At some point I toyed with the idea that the reason she has gray eyes is that she has a different father than her siblings, but scrapped the idea because it would be too much drama.