Lost Cause

[sivilia]

[spoili]

Zac Harper, 17[/spoili]

When Zac arrived to class, he was already twenty minutes late, but he didn't care. He hadn't even arrived come to school the day before because he was too high in the morning, and he had spent the rest of the day buying clothes. Now, his dad, who had received an email from the school regarding Zac's absence, had forced him to go in this morning, even if he himself hadn't wanted to.

It was his first day at Evans' Woods High, and he didn't really feel the urge to make new friends and meet new people, and would rather have stayed in bed all day with a bag of marijuana and some good music, but he supposed he had to conform eventually. To some extent. He had already planned his big entrance for later on. Making friends was the easy part, all he had to do was to do something big and showy which would attract a mass of attention at some point in his first week, and everyone would flock to meet the new kid.

"Zachary Harper," the teacher said with a stern look. She was a woman in her early-thirties, and apparently his new chemistry teacher. "I'm Mrs Swanson. I am also your form tutor, so can we try to be on time from now on?"

"It's Zac," he corrected her, walking to the back of the class and taking a seat next to a girl with long red hair. "And I'll think about it. Maybe."

 

[lxngdon]

m a r g o t

Margot watched as the new kid stumbled into class late and that sassed the teacher. She sighed and shook her head. Margot didn't understand how home people could handle being rude to teachers. She shuddered at the thought of disrespecting anyone, let alone an authority figure.

The boy sat behind her, next to Kasey, and Margot tried her best to ignore him. She attentively listened to Mrs Swanson's chemistry lecture and took careful notes until she was instructed to hand out the experiment sheets. Margot did as she was told. When she reached the new kid, she muttered to him, "Luckily for you, timing isn't very important for this experiment."

A few minutes later, Mrs Swanson told Margot she was to work with Zac. She sighed but obliged.​

 

[sivilia]

Zac was barely focusing in that lesson, spending the majority of time flirting with the redhead next to him, whose name he discovered to be Kasey. When he heard the voice of an Australian accented girl standing to his right, he looked up and frowned. Looking down at the sheet, he didn't have enough time to respond to her comment before she had walked off.

Only minutes later, Mrs Swanson had apparently told all of the students to pair up with others, because Kasey had stood up and walked over to sit next to someone else, while the girl with the Australian accent had come over to sit with him. He sighed, wondering why he couldn't have had Kasey as his partner for the activity, but he didn't want to seem rude to her so he smiled. The worksheet that she had given him minutes ago was still untouched.

"What lesson are we in?" he asked jokingly, looking at the girl.

 

[lxngdon]

Margot scowled. "Chemistry," she replied in an irritated tone as she finished her worksheet.

She rose and began to set up the experiment. "We're burning these different chemicals and observing the reactions that happen," Margot explained to Zac. "Can you do that?" she added snarkily. ​

 

[sivilia]

"Fire," he grinned, finally interested in the lesson for the first time since he had arrived. "Sure, I'll go and get the bunsen burners then, just point them out."

Standing up to go and fetch it, he looked down at her and nodded her head for a second, before frowning a little. He didn't know whether she would regard his following question as stupid or not, so he was decided against saying it, but he suddenly had the urge to ask anyway.

"Do we get to blow anything up?"

 

[lxngdon]

Margot sighed deeply as she dipped a strip of aluminium in a small dish full of potassium chloride. "No, we're not blowing anything up." She used a pair of tongs to hold the metal in the flames, which turned a pale shade of yellow.

"Would you mind doing the next one?" Margot asked. As much as she suspected he would mess around, she wanted him to partake in the experiment, at least a little bit. She hated it when she was the only one working.​

 

[sivilia]

Zac watched as she burned the strip of aluminium in the flame and then rolled his eyes. It was slower than he'd have liked, and less interesting. He was essentially just watching powdered metal change colour.

"Sure," he shrugged in response to her, taking the tongs from her hands and lifting up a new strip of aluminium. "Why do you look like you find this enjoyable? This is the least interesting thing."

 

[lxngdon]

"Who said I found this interesting?" said Margot. "Believe me, I would much prefer solving complex chemical equations or, as you mentioned, 'blow stuff up', but I'm stuck doing this. I was meant to be in AP chemistry but I had to choose between it and AP legal studies."

Margot recorded the change of colour Zac's chemical made on the flames. "So, judging by your accent you're British. What part of England, if I may ask?" Because the experiment was so mind-numblingly simple Margot had no problems talking to her partner while they worked.​

 

[sivilia]

Zac nodded along as she spoke, half-interested, although talk of what subjects she was supposed to study bored him a little. He rolled his eyes as she began to take notes of the change of colour of the chemical and flame. Did she really care? He could have googled it to find out, rather than sit through the boring experiment.

"London," he said in response to her question, without looking at her. "What part of Australia are you from then?"

 

[lxngdon]

"Melbourne," Margot replied. She sighed deeply as she remembered her home city. "I miss it a lot. Do you miss London?"

"Margot," said the teacher as she passed their work station, "what have you and Zac got down so far?"

"Just changes in colour, ma'am -- peach for sodium, yellow for potassium, bright red for calcium."

"Good work. Now, can I trust you to make sure Zac here gets to the rest of his classes today? We don't want him getting lost."

Margot's nostrils flared in protest but she agreed anyway. "Sure."

 

[sivilia]

Zac was about to tell her how he didn't really care whether he was in London or the US, but the teacher had reached their table before he had a chance to speak. When she had told her about the changes in colour that they had noted, he frowned slightly. He didn't even know what chemicals they had burned, yet alone remember the colour they had changed to.

Once the teacher walked past, he turned to her and smiled. "Your name is Margot? Unusual, but I kinda like it." He then looked down at the flame in front of him. "You know you just made a promise you can't keep? I'm going home after lunch. Philosophy can wait until tomorrow."

 

[lxngdon]

Margot smiled when he complimented her name. People usually glanced over it because they thought it was just an Australian thing, when the name was actually French. "Thank you. I got it for my birthday," she joked. "Sorry. That was pathetic."

She looked up, shocked, when he announced he would be ditching. "You can't ditch, it's your first day!" she whisper-shouted as she worked through the rest of the chemicals. "What will your teachers think of you? Come on, you have to at least finish your first day."

 

[sivilia]

Zac couldn't help but to find himself smiling at her joke. It was awful, but he had found it funny at least. As she suggested that he stay in school for his first day, he sighed. His home sounded far more appealing than school did. At least his home had TV and a bed. These chairs at school were uncomfortable as hell and instead of TV, he had to watch sleep-inducing teachers prance around classrooms.

"Who cares what my teachers would think of me," he shrugged. "Whatever conclusion they make about me by the end of the day will only get worse regardless of what I do." Pausing, he turned to look at the cabinet of different chemicals and smirked, turning back to face her. "I'll tell you what. I'll stay for the whole day if you give me a tour of the place at lunch."

 

[lxngdon]

Mrs Swanson instructed the class to pack up and Margot bit her lip. She had been planning to go to the art room at lunch and finish the painting she had been working on for the art show ... but she knew that if Zac didn't show up to his own classes, his teachers would hold it against him.

"Okay," she agreed as she finished packing up. "What do you have next? I should probably take you so you don't get lost. Or run away. Wouldn't put it past you."

 

[sivilia]

"I wouldn't put it past me either, to be honest," he laughed, as he took the worksheet that Margot had handed him earlier and scrunched it up into a ball, tossing it into the bin across the classroom.

"I have maths, I think," he said, in response to her question, as he pulled out his phone and went to a picture of his timetable on his phone, and then nodded in confirmation. "And psychology after lunch."

Standing up, he went to the back of the classroom, taking four test tubes and then pouring several different chemicals into each one, before grabbing a rubber bung and sealing the test tubes. He then went back to his bag, slipping them in there, and then turned to Margot, hoping that she hadn't seen him.

"Ready to go?"

 

[lxngdon]

Margot nodded. She peered at the photo of his timetable. "C3. That's on the other side of the school but I'm going there anyway."

She kept pace with him as she sorted through the books she kept in her schoolbag. Swapping her Chemistry textbook with The Taming Of The Shrew and her Literature exercise book as she walked, she wove her way through the compressing crowds of the school without looking up. This had become a talent of Margot's.

"Right, this is you." She nodded to his classroom. "I'll meet you here in fifty-three minutes for your tour of the school. See you then."