Welcome to Gaia! ::

When school started again, I was really unprepared. I mean, I'd braced myself for the whispers and the stares, I'd prepared myself for the rumors and the gossip, but walking into my first class without Brennan by my side left me shaky for reasons I still couldn't come to grips with. I thrust my shoulders back and strut my way into the class, sliding into a seat just before the bell rang, not giving anyone a chance to talk to me. Smile. Nod. Pretend. My personal life motto.

I repeated the process for the next three classes until lunchtime, wondering the whole time why I bothered. I was lightyears ahead of my classmates, and sometimes I wondered if I wasn't ahead of the teachers, too. But Brennan had asked me to come back and spend the remainder of freshman year with him, so I guessed that was enough reason for me to waste my time in classes. I was notoriously generous with my family, and blood or no, Brennan and Chris were my family.

Still, I sighed, sauntering lazily into the cafeteria, I was almost hoping for a fight already and that wasn't good. I'd have to run it off later. Giving a largely mental shrug, I scanned the area in front of me quickly for my best friend and spotted his jacket hanging on the back of a chair with the most popular kids in the school. Brennan was sitting, currently, flirting with a Sophmore girl at their year's royalty table. My eyes flicked briefly over that group and then the Juniors and Seniors before disinterestedly taking in my own particular hell.

The freshmen elite, I sighed unhappily and thought on my feet, running through what they could possibly throw at me and figuring out ways to make myself calm down again. Great, I thought, he couldn't just make it easy on me and sit with the stoners. At least if they had to speak, they entertained the hell out of me. I rolled my eyes, but grabbed what I assumed was another freshman and told him to go get me a smoothie and a salad and bring it to that table.

Then, resigning myself to an hour of pain, I made my way over to Brennan's table, sliding into the chair next to his like it'd been mine all along. The blonde in front of me narrowed her blue eyes and snapped her gum before flicking her hair over her shoulder and smirking at the other girls at the table. I was still trying to remember her name when she spoke.

"Oh, it's you. I thought I heard thunder." she yawned. Predictably, the clones in cheer skirts next to her giggled like it was the wittiest damned thing they'd ever heard. Sadly, it might have been.

Raising my eyebrows, I delicately sniffed the air instead of giving her the response she'd been looking for and looked at my manicure. She was expecting a retaliation, some kind of violent outburst. The old me would have punched her in the face for the insult. There was still a part of me that growled and whined with the need to draw her blood. I counted mentally to a hundred, then two hundred and then three hundred. Then I wondered why the hell I bothered counting. It never did s**t to ease my temper. That place inside me that was clamoring for her blood would not be soothed by numbers. Instead, I played the anywhere but here game for a few minutes.

"So tell me, thunder thighs, who was your plastic surgeon? My mom's thinking of a face lift, so.." she shrugged.

Her annoying voice interrupted a very nice fantasy about an abandoned Greek island and someone tall and dark and skinny, with wiry muscles, who made me laugh. This girl was not going to let up, and she must have been stupid because no one else had forgotten so far that I might have been chubby back then, but I was also terrifying when angry. Instead of punching her though, I simply smiled and reached over to grab her boyfriend's apple before taking a bite out of it. I remembered the face, vaguely, but not the name. Her boyfriend, I raked my eyes over briefly before remembering his deal and smirking.

"Well, actually, she already seems to have a pretty good surgeon on speed dial these days. I mean, between her boobs and your nose, fantastic work, by the way…" I shrugged.

"What the ******** ever, Kay. At least I didn't have to have liposuction before I was even out of highschool. Or into it, for that matter." she smirked.

"Aw, no, you just stuck your finger down your throat." I laughed. "Anyway, don't get it twisted, sweetie, this is called having a growth spurt and spending hours working out. you should try that, rather than attempting to give a boyfriend a blow job. Although, on second thought all that practice with your finger down your throat has got to do wonders for your gag reflex. How is the seduction attempt going, by the way? Get him to bone you yet or is he still in the closet and desperately clinging to the purity pledge excuse?"

She blushed a deep, embarrassed red and I knew I'd hit a mark that she wouldn't be able to recover from for a moment. She wasn't used to people fighting back with words and I got the feeling she wasn't the brightest bulb in the box, anyway. Not wanting her to get her balance back just yet, since I deeply resented being made to feel ugly or inferior to anyone, I just let out a gleeful laugh and took my smoothie from whatever unfortunate soul I'd made get my lunch. I'd have to figure it out later, cause he certainly had excellent timing. I decided to toast to predictable bitches remaining predictable bitches.

"Well, I for one think it's nice to be back and see nothing's changed." I smiled, holding my drink up. "Cheers to predictability. May Bulimic Betty forever be a Bulimic Blonde b***h, and Closeted Charlie forever be stringing her along by pretending not to want the p***s." I laughed again and shook my head, ignoring the unhappy faces around me. Words were becoming my new favorite weapon of choice, I decided as the part of me clamoring for blood and chaos and misery sat back for a moment and drank in their reactions.

"Kaylyn." A happy voice sang out my name. "Oh, I'm so happy the latest gossip was true. Well, you know, not all of it, cause well, we're going to have a talk about that later, but I'm so glad you're back. Why are you sitting with the cheer sluts?"

I laughed and looked over to find a girl with brilliant pink hair sliding into the chair on my other side. Her ripped jeans and beaten up converse matched her hair that day. It was a different look than I was used to, but the nose ring, haughty eyebrows and distinctly lovely laotian skin gave her away.

"Animal." I snorted, slinging an arm around her shoulders and slanting her friends a quick look before dismissing them entirely. I wasn't surprised when she waved her hand absently in their direction and they disappeared. They might have been new to the school and to her presence, but I gave them props for understanding their place in our lives.

"I'm not. But apparently Brennan is." I shrugged "You know anything about that?"

"He's a football stud. Apparently that makes him school royalty now." Leighanne laughed.

I wrinkled my nose, but stole one of her fries and dipped it in my smoothie anyway. As I popped it into my mouth, I wondered what the hell had happened to my friends while I'd taken a year off.

"Where are the rest of the misfit toys?" I asked, sighing before finally really looking at Leighanne.

She was lovely, as always, strangely attractive for all her wild, silly hair styles and dramatic makeup. The Laotian blood made her tiny and young looking, despite everything else. Still, in her eyes, there was a genuine happiness to see me, more than that, there was a hope that my reappearance meant something. I didn't know what, but now that I saw her here and didn't see the rest of our group, I wondered.

The misfit toys had been together for as long as Leighanne, and I had been in school. It had started with me, the loner, the outcast, the smart girl with an even smarter mouth and a hair-trigger temper. Then Antonia Giordanna had come along. I hadn't had friends before. People were cool until they opened their mouths. Then they inevitably said something stupid and it pissed me off. Antonia was no exception to the rule. She'd told me, at the age of seven, that I wasn't wearing my outfit right. That the skirt I wore was all wrong for my pudgy frame. I bloodied her nose for it, but she'd just shrugged and calmly insulted me again. Some time later, we'd fought and bonded.

I yelled and she just brushed off my anger like it was nothing. No one else wanted to be friends with her, and everyone else was afraid of me. When Leighanne came along a year later, it was perfect. Everyone else was afraid of her and her penchant for saying things, knowing things, that she shouldn't. I couldn't care less what she knew or said, as long as it didn't piss me off. Neither she nor Tony were afraid of my right hook. And while she and Tony didn't ever quite warm up to each other, they had to appreciate each other's style. Enough so that they didn't snipe at each other too much.

While I was thinking about that, Leighanne was just smiling uncharacteristically mistily at me.

"What?"

"Nothing." She grinned and then wrapped her arms around me in a really surprising hug. "I just missed you. No one else calls me Animal, or them the Misfit Toys."

I just laughed at her, a little baffled at how I'd been missed so much. I wasn't ever accused of being nice. And Leighanne wasn't the type to hand out hugs or sentimentality on a whim.

"So, ah, we kind of went our separate ways when you left." she shrugged at me, finally returning to my question.

"What do you mean?"

"You were… you were like the only thing keeping us together, really. You knew our dynamic. We didn't really mesh well. We tried, but without you, it just didn't work."

I sighed. "Well, this wont do."

"Sorry, Kay." She ducked her head a little, but then looked back up and smiled, like she couldn't help herself.

"Well, where is everyone then?" I tapped impatiently at the table with my pinky finger while I thought.

So far, no one had said anything about the crap that had gone down in California. But I sure the hell wasn't going to wait for them to say something before I had a certain amount of protection around me. For the moment it was okay because of Brennan and Christopher, but a college freshman and a freshman JV quarterback weren't going to be enough to cover my a**. Not with my temper and the quality of people that I was most likely going to be pissing off.

"Starting with? I mean we really…scattered, you know. Brenn's with the cheer sluts and the football ********. Caine's with the stoners, if he bothers to show up to classes." she raised her eyebrows and left it at that, giving me a largely imagined shrug.

"Let's start at the beginning, I suppose." I smiled, Tony was a Junior, it'd help to have her on my side before anyone else. No one else really seemed to know what to do with her criticisms and mostly didn't want to risk her paying attention to them.

"Antonia is in the theater props room, working on costumes."

She rolled her eyes while I stood and beamed at her, ready to collect my friends and get on with life. If I was giving up Princeton to sit in high school and relearn things that had been boring in elementary school, it was certainly not going to be without the entertainment of my friends beside me. And I was sure the hell not going to play by the rules the rest of them played so nicely by. The school psychologist I'd been saddled with last time had told me I had an authority problem after my third session. I'd wondered what kind of moron they were employing that it had taken him that long to figure out what everyone else staffing our school already knew.

Not entirely satisfied yet with this chapter. Groundwork is laid, but it's going very slowly and I still don't know if we're going immediately to Antonia or if we're going to come back to the present for a bit.

Thanks for the thought! it helps my decision-making process. I was probably going to return to the present for a moment anyway, but it helps to know that I'm not alone in the idea.

It's mostly important to the past. To Kaylyn and her relationships with the boys and the school and why she makes Chris leave. The past here is equally as important to Chris as the present. I'm still just not sure if I want to try that interchanging past and present thing that I've been thinking about.