School Days (3)

The bell rang as the two girls rushed into class, all eyes on them immediately. They both forced themselves to remain calm and collected on the outside even though internally they felt as if they were going to collapse from their embarrassment.

As they walked to their assigned seats in the back of the classroom, Aika glanced around at the classmates they walked past, trying to memorize her classmates faces. After they sat down, the teacher, Ms. Lonston, cleared her throat and looked at the two girls for a moment.

"As much as I would like to give you both detention for being late... school rules only say you must be in the classroom. But be earlier next time, girls."

Everyone in the room turned and looked at them, some of them snickering and others looking at them in pity.

"After that huge commotion yesterday..."

"Yeah, I can't believe they'd be late."

"Right?"

Whispers spread through the classroom and made the already annoyed teacher ready to snap. She slammed her textbook down onto the table and glared at the entire class.

"The next person who speaks without raising their hand and being called on first is getting detention. Am I understood?"

"Yes Ms. Lonston."

With the incident passed, the class sped by. In the end, one of the other students sitting in the back of the class had assumed that Ms. Lonston wouldn't be able to hear him and started whispering to the boy next to him. Sadly for the boy, she heard him very clearly and gave him detention for that day, adding to his already impressive 3 weeks of detention for leaving class the day before.

The next class went extremely smoothly in comparison, the only difference from usual being several curious glances at the new student now that they were witnessing her up close for the first time. Before it could cause any disturbances, Mr. Smith had had Aika introduce herself properly and that calmed the class because they knew they wouldn't get anything more while in school.

When it came time for lunch, Aria showed Aika the way to the cafeteria and they both got the freshly made cheese pizza. Maple-leaf academy offered many different higher class lunches to make the students more comfortable, but most of the students ended up getting basic food like pizza anyway.

Most of the students were not interested in eating more upper class food after having spent their entire lives eating it and were far more interested in the comfort of eating cheaper foods like pizza and hamburgers.

The majority of the people who got the more luxurious lunches were scholarship students who hadn't spent their entire lives around such food and wanted to take the opportunity to eat it for free.

Their good luck ran out when it came time to sit somewhere as every table had somebody sitting at it and they had to return to their dorm to eat without sitting down next to strangers.

"Is the cafeteria usually that full?"

"No, usually I have an entire table to myself in the corner."

Aria thought back on the situation she had seen going on at her usual table. There had been nearly the entire student news club hovering around it and a number of well known gossip bloggers were sitting at it directly. Even when the sugaring rumor had been floating around, no one had reacted like this.

She figured that it must have to do with how large scale the events this time were in comparison.

With a sigh, she decided to explain the situation fully.

"All of the students who were around the table in the back were from either the news club or were gossip bloggers."

"Ohh. Fun."

After they finished eating their lunches, there was still nearly 30 minutes left of the lunch break and Aria decided to check and see if the school forums had calmed down. When she logged on, she saw that she had received several messages but they were only from students who wanted to ask how she felt and a couple of them were even cheers of support from other scholarship students.

Moving on from checking her personal messages, she looked at the forum itself and saw that it had gone back to normal and the threads that had incited the day before's incident had been deleted by the school staff.

The rest of the day passed rather smoothly with only a small bump occurring when one of the boys in the last period was overly interested in finding out more about the new student.

As the day ended, they were both relieved that the day went as smoothly as it did. In all honestly, Aria had expected to be harassed by the more curious students during class when they got the opportunity, but the teachers had kept the classes reigned in and no one had even spoken to her.