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Group presentations. The thought alone was enough to make Keren shudder with memories of Crystal and Knightside and doing far more than her fair share of the work, but Horizon was different. Horizon was a school for the gifted, full of enterprising young minds ready to work! And group projects still sucked.

Keren had picked Layton for her partner because she knew the other girl well enough to know they could tolerate each other, and because she knew Layton would pull her weight. "It's like the Hunger Games," she said, without preamble, when she found Layton outside the library. "Everyone pair up and fight to the death. May the chromosomes be ever in your favor. Anyway, let's head in."

Dropping her satchel onto a reading table, Keren pulled out the slim laptop that she'd gotten over winter break - her parents had called it a combined birthday and Hannukah present, because of the expense, which was bullshit in her opinion. It wasn't like they couldn't afford to give her separate gifts, and besides, there was like a whole two months between Thanksgiving and her birthday. Tragic.

"So, uh," she said, flipping the computer open and booting it. "If we want to make quick work of this, we should pick something with simple mendelian inheritance and make a really nice powerpoint. You know, Tay-Sachs, Sickle Cell, Cystic Fibrosis?" Then again, there'd probably be four different projects on Sickle Cell. Keren frowned. "5-Alpha-Reductase Deficiency would get us points for obscurity, but it's still simple autosomal recessive inheritance."

That just wouldn't do. She leaned over her computer, waiting for it to boot, and wracked her brain for all the random articles she'd read last weekend in her father's latest pediatric pathology quarterly. "Angelman and Prader-Willi syndromes are kinda neat," she said, after a while in thought, and launched her laptop's browser. "They're caused by the same mutation, but it depends whether it's on the maternal or paternally contributed chromosome. So, like, the chromosomes remember where they came from. Cool, right?"

The smile that Keren shot Layton sure made it clear that she thought it was cool.

Keren frowned. She'd been hoping that Layton would have some kind of opinion, but this she could work with as well. "Okay," she said, clicking over to Google scholar. "So we'll run some searches, pull some research papers, split up on making the power point. It'll take like, two hours, tops, and we've got all weekend."

Sort of. "My birthday's on Sunday," she added, typing into the search box. "We'll do Angelman's and Prader-Willi, because it looks impressive and if I get anything less than an A in the genetics unit, my dad's gonna skin me alive. But anyway, if we get the research done today and work on typing it up and making it pretty... Party at my house on Sunday night."

Well, that would happen whether or not the presentation was ready. It had been planned for weeks. "You should come, okay?" Keren suggested, skimming over an abstract. "This'll do," she said, entering her Horizon login credentials. She loved going to a school that could get her past practically any paywall in the world.

"You know," she said to Layton as she hit download. "I had a near-death experience with your brother once. Back when we all got abducted by aliens?" Which was one of those big elephants in the room about going to Horizon, because Keren was pretty sure that most of the student body had been there on the Surrounding, yet none of them ever talked about it.

For a moment, Keren stopped and considered that maybe she had chosen the wrong partner after all. But then she reassured herself: she could basically do the entire project by herself, and she could delegate things to Layton. Like typing. "Well," she said, "The trick is, it's not really about being good at genetics. It's about going through the rubric and finding all the things we need to be sure to include, and then including those things. So..."

She trailed off, digging through her bag, and pulled out a trapper-keeper. "Should be right on top," Keren announced, flipping the notebook open. Indeed. "So. Inheritance pattern and cause, symptoms, treatment options. Easy-peasy."

Keren didn't want to roll her eyes, necessarily, but she also couldn't help it. Was Layton's overwhelming insecurity an act, or was she really just that much of a shrinking violet? "It's not like inviting you's a chore. I bet you're fun at parties," she declared. "It's gonna be like fifteen people from school. We're going to eat pizza and play Mario Party and Cards Against Humanity. Good clean fun." Followed by underaged drinking. Probably.

By now, she knew that the Surrounding wasn't exactly the same thing as being swept away by little green men - after all, Keren had managed to get herself back to space all on her own ******** around - but 'Abducted by Aliens' had a certain flippancy to it that she enjoyed. About Callum, though.... "He got knocked out on the rainbow road and I had to drag him the whole way back to Virgo Outpost," she deadpanned. "So, uh, fun times. Let's print this. Do you have a laptop with you?"

It was sort of a 50-50 shot whether a HITS student was carrying a computer, she figured. Maybe 70-30. Decent odds.

"Okay," said Keren, trying not to sound frustrated. Maybe Layton's laptop was really heavy and she didn't bring it to school regularly. "We'll get what we can get done here, and I'll email you PDF copies of these articles so we can keep working at home if we don't get it all done." She figured she could get Layton's email off the school server - everything else she had to ask. Keren dug her heavily-bedazzled smartphone out of her satchel and passed it over to Layton.

"Program your number into my contacts, okay?" she said, looking back to her computer screen. "I'll text you the info for the party. Can you go get this out of the printer in a second? I'm going to find another source."

She sighed, not wanting to come off too aggressively. Layton was a good partner, she told herself. Better than working with someone who was actively distracting, and she did want to help. "Does your stutter get any better if you practice what you're going to say?" she asked. "We could type up a script. We've already got to type everything up for the powerpoint, so it wouldn't be much extra work."

Or, she supposed she could just do most of the speaking... but that would probably make their teacher think they'd missed the group part of group project. So not really a workable solution.

"Oh," said Keren. That was, well, unfortunate about Layton's speech therapy, but there was nothing that could be done about it before their project was due. "I think you should talk to her," she said, worrying the papers Layton had set in front of her. "And maybe she'll let you off the hook for public speaking."

Keren leaned over and clicked print on another document, then dug a highlighter out of her bag and began to mark up the pages in front of her. "I'm just marking all the information we need," she explained.

"If you really want to type it up and organize it, you can," she continued, flipping the page. "I'm decent at graphics and my dad's got a ton of medical journals I can scan pictures from, so just email it to me later, I'll doctor it up and make it look cool." Which was a pun and she hoped Layton appreciated it.

Pausing in her highlighting, Keren glanced over at Layton. She seemed... less than certain. "We're going to kick this project's a**, okay?" Keren asked, holding her fist out, clearly requesting a fist-bump. "Okay."

Keren smiled at Layton, happy to have a partner who was agreeable and could see reason. "I won't let you mess up," she said reassuringly. Like she was going to present any kind of work she hadn't checked over herself! Keren was too much of a perfectionist for that.

She blushed a little bit at being called a genius, trying to be a little bit modest but not entirely. What could she say? It was nice to have her intelligence given its proper due! "No, no," she said, with pretend dismissiveness. "I've just got weird hobbies." Which was, admittedly, true, but it didn't mean Keren was any less smart - and she knew it.

Settling herself into a chair, Keren set her legs on top of the table and crossed them at the ankles. She pulled her laptop into her lap and gave Layton a go on sort of look. "Yeah, that's fine," she said. "I'll do my best to answer them." After all, the point of the projects was to learn the subject matter, was it not? "Go on."