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Azzo watched almost curiously the actions taken. Had he half a wit that this class would be this insane he probably would've just stayed out of school till he could manage to finish his high schooling in an environment of something a little more.... college like. He mentally shrugged it off though.

Watching as Charys and Genevieve got called to do charades. Which wasn't his favorite game, however when it came to the reassurance of 'your mom's a whore' Azzo couldn't help but to think back to the Renaissance Man movie. Perhaps things might be more interesting than he'd first thought among joining the class.

He shook his head and tried to not think about the other movies he'd seen that had this play in it. Much less a movie known as Dead Poet Society for the more he attended the class the more Mr. Gordan reminded him of Robin Williams who was John Keating in the movie. He had this odd urge to call the English teacher 'Oh Captain, My Captain' when he passed Gordon in the hallway as well.

If Vanessa had had it her way, she would have been busily at work behind the till of Big Willy's Record Store, and racking up hours so that she could pay for those eventual drum lessons, but John Rae, like parents in general were prone to do, insisted that she go to school. Arguing about work and classes and reading with her father, a man who wrote children's stories, had become something of a tradition in their household. Much to her chagrin, Vanessa always lost.

The auburn haired girl sat at the back of Mr. Gordon's english class. Her copy of Hamlet, crisp and untouched like a virgin, lay underneath her pencil case, which was stitched together with dental floss and covered in everything from paint to white-out graffiti. A myriad of pens and pencils and erasers and tape dispensers had been tipped out of it and Vanessa, glancing up every now and again and hooting with laughter whenever it was appropriate, was busily screwing the caps off of all her pens.

Hamlet wasn't really her thing and, for that matter, neither was English, but she appreciated Mr. Gordon's Mardi Gras beads and his attempts at making the class more interesting. He was an intriguing teacher, whose humour and quiet confidence seemed to command a certain amount of authority, and Vanessa respected him for that. So far, for a girl who liked to be loud and the centre of attention, she'd been on astonishingly good behaviour- minus the unopened copy of Hamlet and the curious contraption she was currently building.

Her brow furrowed in concentration and her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she worked; easily slipping the skinny sticks of ink out of their plastic shells, taking said plastic shells and, after lining them up end to end on her desk, carefully taping them all together.

The concluding result was an impressive spit-ball gun, about four pens long, and a positively delighted student. Vanessa was a practiced spitball veteran, and she enthusiastically took a shred of paper, rolled it up, sucked on it, and then loaded her brand new weapon. If she was smart, she would have realized that the length of her gun meant it would be nearly impossible for the soggy spitball to pass through it without several vicious blows- but Vanessa wasn't smart, and simply impressed with the size of her new toy.

Grinning, she placed the end of it to her lips and aimed it at some poor, unsuspecting classmate- or maybe said classmate was suspecting, since the spit-ball gun was pretty conspicuous.

Genevieve had no idea what was going on. The only thing she knew for certain as she swung her folded arms back and forth was that Mr. Gordon would look positively dashing in a headdress. She scrunched up her face as the calls of 'baby' continued, but did her best not to stamp her foot and fall apart into a full on tantrum. Instead she just squared her shoulders, let out a loud hmph, and went on rocking until she realized that Charys was no longer pushing her arms from side to side and that she was no longer uncomfortably feeling the older girls chest pressed against the back of her shoulders.

Instead, Charys was-

Charys was touching Mr. Gordon.

There was a special place in her heart where Genevieve shoved the burning jealousy she felt every time Charys Murphy touched Mr. Gordon. Its doors swung open to welcome the newest load as Charys spun Mr. Gordon around. She didn't ball her fists, but simply stared in slack-jawed horror as Charys mimicked... what? A lollipop? A mouthful of mashed potatoes? Her brows lifted and the expression shifted from horror to one that should have been in the Urban Dictionary under the header of 'Does Not Get It'.

Only when the answer was called out did understanding wash over her like a tidal wave. A tidal wave of red paint, if her cheeks were any indicator. What she would have given to go one day in Mr. Gordon's class without her face looking like a ripe tomato. Fortunately, Tallulah Cowden's pointed stare drew her attention from her coveted front and center seat. Clearly she was jealous. Jealous of the attention that she was receiving from one Ray Gordon. Well, she would show that Tallulah Cowden!

By show, she obviously meant thumb her nose and blow a loud raspberry, which is precisely what she proceeded to do. Genevieve smiled all too sweetly and clasped her hands behind her back. She rocked back and forth on her heels once as Raaaaay dropped the beads around her neck, and all but floated back to her seat.

Genevieve picked up her marker, flipped the notebook over, and added 'Faith' to the list of possible names.

Azzo's attention span was not short enough to keep up with all the happenings however he bit the inside of his lip to keep from even cracking a chuckle at Vanessa. The puppeteer was use to kids and spitballs, but he thought it a shame that high school kids still did such a thing.

Azzo however was boredly now thumbing through the rest of the collection in the book. As the class seemingly left the book behind as it needs for attention were drawn other places. He paused on the sonnets and started reading them through, keeping one hand ready to flip back to Hamlet when the time came. It was things like the sonnets that kept Azzo from going insane, normal English books didn't have them. So perhaps in that light the kid that threw his old book away did him a favor.

The main thing stopping Corinna Grant from grabbing Vanessa's spitball gun out of her hand and slamming it down on her desk, and roaring "I BEG YOUR PARDON!" directly into her face was that Vanessa sat three rows of desks over and two seats back. It was a logistical issue.

Corinna had it in mind to raise her hand and offer to volunteer to do whatever next class participation thing they were doing if, in exchange, Mr. Gordon sent Vanessa down to the principal's office for attempted spitballing. Unfortunately, past experience in Mr. Gordon's class bore out that this was probably not going to happen, and would just result in Corinna having volunteered herself for whatever her teacher's preferred form of torture was for the day. Not ideal.

"What do you think of Hamlet?" she'd asked, stretched out across Dylan's bed at Hillworth, the book folded open on her stomach.

"Cocksucker," said Jesse from across the room.

"Terrible playwright," Dylan followed this up, waving a hand as though to dismiss the collected works of Shakespeare from existence. "The play he writes for the king and queen's more than a bit ham-handed -- he should've stuck to moping."

"Like a cocksucker," confirmed Jesse.

Corinna nodded. "I meant the play."

Dylan shrugged. "All of the above," and went back to eating around the raisins that had infiltrated his Raisin Bran.

What Corinna did end up raising her hand for was different -- the question Mr. Gordon had actually asked. "Marcellus saw a ghost that was real, not just because they all might've had a shared hallucination but that Hamlet's play later on confirms it, when Claudius freaks out? I mean, pouring poison in someone's ear is pretty specific? If anyone was smoking something, it was Ophelia -- her boyfriend turns out to be a nutjob and that's somehow cause for 'can't cope, throwing myself into the fiery pit of Mount Doom?' I don't buy it."

"Corrinna," said Charys Murphy, who had slumped back in her chair but was not using Hamlet as a pillow. Sometimes, the things that Mr. Gordon said, worked. It was sort of irritating to her best friend that although she would literally ball up her jacket and use it as a pillow in history, math, biology and social studies, Mr. Gordon could somehow shame her (where did Charys have a sense of shame? Where did she even keep it) into peering myopically into the hallowed hall where Vanessa was trying to give everybody bird flu. Usually it was Charlemagne Boyle who called upon the tiny mustardseed of Charys' shame. All the English teacher had to do was call her "Cherry Valance" and rock her desk back and forth.

But Charys had always thought that Mr. Gordon was some kind of space alien sent down to make English bearable, he'd supplied Charys with reading material since first year. Charys had previously only read comics. Not even good comics: Simpsons comics, MAD magazine. Then she turned up one day reading Joseph Heller, prompting Charlie to check her lymph glands, temperature and ear holds for signs of Yeerks or other brain parasites.

"Corrinna," she was saying now, lazily, her voice always hitting the rin. "I hypothesise: Hamlet and his your mother sucks dicks in hell, Karras -- " ("Please only use Hamlet in direct correlation with oral sex in Act Three, where this happens," said Mr. Gordon. When some students said 'wait, what,' he said, "Just checking.") "He is the ruv of her rife. Then he's all 'wait I bet your chaste treasure unopen’d is seal popped,' and nags at her like a crazy b***h."

It also meant she'd actually -- apparently -- flipped through Hamlet.

Veronica Harvey could care less for Hamlet. Not that Mr. Gordon wasn't a fun teacher to have around (hell, compared to the other old farts teaching, he was a godsend), but even the English teacher couldn't compel her to take interest in the ancient play. No, she'd been idly watching the teacher in between scattered doodles on her notebook, but her ears had perked when Corinna made her comment. It was a good comment, and not just because it was her best friend who had said it (though that was also a very good reason to listen).

"But then again, it was a guy who wrote the play, so of course he had a woman go off the deep end over Prince Emo. Like, majorly off the deep end. The times might have sucked to be a woman, but she didn't have to kill herself over a guy. I'm sure she'd have had other options. Suicide was retarded. Shakespeare was retarded. He wasn't even real and he was retarded."

Ronnie was all for death and mayhem, and old Shakespeare (or whoever had been parading around using the name as a pseudonym) had plenty of chaos and death in his stories. Romeo and Juliet's deaths amused her with the irony. Macbeth had been full of nutters too. But to die like Ophelia had? Talk about lame.