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"No volunteers? Anyone? All right, time to test this in practice," said Mr. Gordon. "For your noses to hit the grindstone. The midden hit the windmill. The compost heap to hit the chainsaw. However you like to put it. There really is no nice way to put it," he said reflectively to himself, and possibly apologetically to the classroom at large. "I'm going to have to call on someone."

At 10:25 in the morning on Fat Tuesday, Ray Gordon was seated on -- not at, on -- his desk with a plethora of blue, green and gold Mardi Gras beads around his neck, a number large enough to suggest that he was in fact a drunken sorority pledge who'd just watched a parade go by. He looked pleased with them. He was spinning another string of purple beads with two of his right-hand fingers; next to him on his desk was an even larger pile of plastic Mardi Gras beads, dumped unceremoniously such that his normally austere desk was dripping with them. Well, austere apart from the Kate Beaton comics and the Demotivators. Normally it wasn't drenched in beads, anyway. It was drenched in beads. He was drenched in beads.

Mr. Gordon had evidently decided to start off Hamlet with a bang.

He sighed a little and spun the purple beads around his fingers again, and then unspun them. "Are all of you giving up reading for Lent?" He didn't sound really annoyed, just vaguely disappointed. That was about as negative as Mr. Gordon got. "Last chance to salvage classroom dignity, wanted: one brave soul to tell me the first character who speaks in Act 1, Scene 1. Going once. Going twice."

[[ORP: any Meadowview student who might be sitting in Mr. Gordon's 10 AM English class, feel free to join and answer all the questions, ask all the questions, pass all the notes, talk to all the classmates and fly all the paper airplanes you like! Only things to keep in mind -- this is an ordinary high school English class, so behavior out of place in an ordinary high school English class is probably out of place here. ]]

Tallulah Cowden, bright eyed and bushy tailed and totally irreverent of any prizes being offered, was seated front and center with her arm halfway to the ceiling. By this time in the year most teachers had learnt to ignore her Hermione Granger-esque stylings and call on any student at all who looked even remotely close to maybe, possibly knowing the answer, and it seemed to her that Mr. Gordon was starting to go the same way. At any rate, someone with less regard for hand raising, or who simply wasn't as much of an over-achiever, answered first.

Her correct answer had just been sniped out from under her by Tate. Tallulah lowered her hand, but remained ready to pounce on the next question. She had her copy of Hamlet out and well-highlighted and dog-eared. She'd already been through it three times, and dropped it in the pool once (accidentally, of course).

Next to the book was balanced a large tumbler of coffee, her fourth for the day. At the beginning of the year she had relied significantly less on caffeine, but any teacher could tell you that her habit had been steadily increasing for months now. It was hard not to notice after all, she sat front and center in every class.

They were classic symptoms. Any veteran of the high school system could tell you, Tallulah Cowden was headed for a Junior Year burnout.

It was not Tate's lucky day. "Nay," said Ray with a grin, "answer me. Stand and unfold yourself," and he tossed her a ring of beads. Gold. They clattered to a halt on her desk in front of her. "Thank you, Tater, I was beginning to worry you'd all given up SparkNotes for Lent too. Very Catholic crowd here today, us. Though I'm going to have to ask you for one additional act of devotion," he held out his hand. "Your cell phone, please. Thank you. Portia Magna, this is not a group project -- if you wouldn't mind?"

If he'd noticed Tate's semi-cheating he didn't say anything, though Corinna Grant a few rows back glared iron through Tate's desk as if she was accusing her of something. He walked back to the front of the classroom and turned his back on them all, resting his hand on his hip like he was regarding something and thinking again.

"Lula," he addressed the front-center-seated girl -- elsewhere, a few students rolled their eyes at her -- "would it trouble you to be Horatio for a moment? I promise it won't hurt."

Tate let her head fall to the desk with a thump. Ugh, the world was just so incredibly injust. Unjust? Unjust. It sucked, in laymen's terms. Not only had she had to answer the question, he'd used that terrible nickname (could she sue him for harassment) and caught her not even doing anything with her cell phone besides having it out! She let herself look at the 'message waiting' screen before bringing the phone to the teacher, a poorly disguised scowl on her face. That message was from Ladon. She was kind of curious as to what could make Ladon text her before lunch, and now she wouldn't know until lunch.

Damn you, Ray Gordon, you and your magical teacher powers.

She eyed the beads on her desk like they were going to bite her, gave the window a very obvious look (How much would it hurt if I jumped?) and then sat back at her desk. In exchange for the minor victory over Tallulah Cowden--how were they even in the same class?--she picked up the beads, put them around her neck, and stayed quite firmly inside the four walls of the classroom.

The ten AM gym class was doing pushups. It was mildly entertaining.

Nora Merlin was seated at another one of the desks at the front of the room, her hands folded loosely over her assigned copy of Hamlet Abridged, notebook open, pen sitting ready on top of the lightly lavender-colored pages (she color-coded for her classes, but went a little too far into it for the aesthetic value). She was wearing an engaged, encouraging smile -- really, she looked overall more like she was a therapist at a group session than she did a student in an English class -- but her classmates had gotten accustomed to that look by now.

They also got had accustomed to the fact that she sometimes brought homemade muffins to the class, but that was something that had been accepted much faster than the previously-mentioned observation. No baked goods today, though, unfortunately.


Janice Fitzpatrick was seated right next to the rose-eyed redhead, the arrangement on her own desk as crisp and stark as Nora's was organic and aesthetic. She clicked her pen idly; her own notebook was already cramped with bullet points she'd taken before the class; underneath her copy of Hamlet Abridged she had open a copy of the not-abridged Hamlet she'd bought of her own volition.

She looked a little worn, which was pretty normal -- ever since she'd gotten out of Barren Pines she had always looked a little rougher around the edges. Ockham's Razor suggested she must have been traumatized, and that was the explanation most people went with. At the moment she was peering over towards Vera Valentine's desk with an somewhat disturbingly intense raptor gaze -- Vera was another Barren Pines survivor; the two of them had a connection that could only be defined as "creepy ESP," and it was entirely possible that look was because she was sending the other girl a telepathic message.

Yvette Weaver was not a talker. At least, not in a classroom setting. When questions were asked and the teacher was looking for someone to answer, the girl always looked away insecurely. Obviously, avoiding eye contact with the teacher meant that you were trying to hide or avoid being called on. It wasn't that Yvette didn't know the answers. It was more along the lines that she was always second guessing her responses. And even after that, there was always the embarrassing factor of how quiet her voice was. It would just result in the teacher asking her to repeat her answer three of four times before the teacher moved onto someone who could actually talk at a normal volume.

She might have been a senior, but she seriously acted like a freshman at times with how skittish she could be. Hoping that Mr. Gordon would not call on her, she carefully kept her eyes in her notebook. Her pencil was moving, and it would have looked like she was working or taking notes. To the untrained eye that was.

Rather than volunteering to do anything in class, her pencil roughly sketched out some gesture drawings of the others in the class. They weren't very impressive sketches, seeing as most of the students were sitting down. That wasn't the point of the gesture drawings. They were meant to be loose and somewhat scribbly. Later on was when she added the details to make the drawing a little more presentable.

Every so often, her deep purple eyes couldn't help but glance up, mostly due to beads that her teacher was wearing. Each time, she couldn't help but wonder if she could make an outfit that incorporated lots of beads in such a fashion. Maybe in her next class she could draw something along those lines. Just not in Mr. Gordon's class. If she got caught, he'd comment. Teachers always commented, but gesture drawings weren't nearly as embarrassing as drawing pictures of the teacher themselves.

Yvette could already feel her cheeks growing red at the notion of being mortified.

Damian Cole was late. While he was usually late this time it really wasn't his fault. He had just come from his counselor's office, and he had two slips of paper in his hand. One was a transfer form, the other was a note explaining why he was late. Due to him picking up a Teacher's Aide class he had to rearrange his schedule mid year.

Pushing the door open he glanced around, gray eyes looking over the class, spotting a couple people he knew by face if not by name. Spotting Mr. Gordon he held up the slips a question mark on his face, not wanting to verbally interrupt the class until he was spoken to.

Now that the 10AM gym class had gone back indoors, her attention returned to the class at hand; more importantly, to the synchronized pen clicking and pencil tapping, Madison Heller's painfully loud voice, and the silence from Portia Hathaway. She waited through the green-haired girl's 'dibs' on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, waited until she shut up, and then Tate was bored of waiting.

She raised her hand, and without waiting for recognition, said, "Sir," drawing out the ir to a ridiculous length. "I don't think Portia's going to answer. Sir, I think Marcellus has left Horatio hanging."

But that was okay; if Horatio looked like Tallulah Cowden, acted like Tallulah Cowden, she would have left him hanging too. AP English was not worth the suffering of Tallulah Cowden. The pimping out of her miserable grade point average was not worth dealing with Tallulah Cowden. Someday, Tate would get Tallulah Cowden and beat the s**t out of her--just not in English, under the watchful eye of Mr. Gordon.

Just in case he had any ideas, she said, "I'm not replacing Marcellus. I would rather strangle myself with these lovely beads." Emboldened by Madison's flashy entrance? No!