Tuesday

Tuesday…

Juniper didn’t want to get out of bed after the amount of studying she had done. After the Ruins class with Shaylee, she was dragged from one corner of the school to the next. She had six classes: runes, human and dragon history, dragonology, herbology, geology, and the subject she could never escape — math.

Aside from the math class, she felt unable to get enough of the information taught to her. The problem was that 10 hours of lecture and studying were just inhumane.

She had tried to get Kai to at least remove the math class, but he frowned at her telling Juniper her level was already way too low.

After her classes yesterday, she had dinner with Kai. This time alone on a lovely balcony area that overlooked the palace, the dragon stable, and the city. It was a breathtaking view, and she couldn’t help but feel it was a date.

However, it was short-lived. After the dinner, Juniper and Kai were interrupted by urgent means, and she was sent to her tutor— an older gentleman who walked and talked just like her runes professor Morris.

He ensured she knew her subjects in class, spending a miserable amount of time on math. That was when her mind finally had time to process some things, and she thought back to the alley where she was jumped.

It was probably silly to daydream about her attacker’s embrace and the scent emanating from him; however, she also pondered over who the scale was and what exactly it meant.

She was so enthralled in her thoughts she thought her tutor even said. “You have a friend in the scale.”

She had to shake her head and register what he was actually saying, scales…like weights.. as in a math word problem.

Juniper’s tutor also taught her castle etiquette and answered every question she had as long as she promised not to say she heard it from him, and the most important thing he taught her was how to read and write.

All of this was cool and all; however, definitely overwhelming.

Kai was already gone this morning, and when she went to open the door to greet Teresa, she found a much younger maid named Janet. The girl looked barely 14 and was equally shy as Teresa.

Juniper was deep in thought about Teresa and the scale. She scrubbed her eyes as she walked the halls to her next class, math. She turned the corner of the hall and ran into two of the girls Shaylee sits with at lunch. Trina and Copper.

Juniper practically cringed at thinking about how snobby these two were at lunch yesterday. She dared even to say worse than Shaylee.

“I mean, he’s clearly going to tire of her so fast.”

“Right, and as soon as he does, I bet he will call the ladies gala.”

“I hope so!”

“He will. She’s only human. She won’t be enough for him.”

“Right, and if these riots continue, he will be forced to dump her in a pit of lava.”

Juniper watched them as they spoke and walked into class, unaware of her standing there. Someone who did notice was a dark-haired girl with bangs split at the center of her forehead. She gave Juniper a teeth-clenched smile.

“let’s ditch,” was all she said in response to Juniper’s upset face.

They practically scurried to the lady’s restroom. “I’m Kacy, by the way,” she mumbled as she dumped all the contents of the trash out, hastily flipped it over, and climbed up.

She fidgeted with the window and growled in frustration. She pushed her shoulder into the window and was rewarded with a snap. The window was a tight squeeze, but luckily for the girls, they wiggled through.

Then they were in a half run to the edges of campus, where a hole in the wall was just large enough to put your foot in and hoist you over. Juniper went first and found herself in the woods.

It was eerie. Nothing was alive, yet everything was still dense with the burned trees and bushes. You couldn’t see much farther ahead of you. The fog covered most of the view.

The screeches hid in the unpromising land. Most likely to be animals from this realm. She silently hoped they were all cute and friendly critters, but knowing the fierceness of the dragons, she knew better.

“Come on. The hangout is this way!”

“Hangout?”

“Yeah, we’re not the only ones who fuck school.”

As she said that, Juniper could hear a man shout, “Fuck you! Gosh, damn teachers here, I swear!”

They walked to an abandoned armada. “Dane, what trouble did you get yourself into this time?” Kacy called out to him. He froze, mesmerized by the girl following behind Kacey.

“No fucking way!” he squealed in excitement. “You got the princess out of the castle.” He let out a bellow of laughter.

He stood on the bench and his friend, who he was shouting to, lay on a bench across from him. His ginger hair fluttered around his eyes as he quickly half-sat up to see who else was coming.

“Hey, finch.” She said nonchalantly.

Finch turned to Juniper, dazed. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You are a fucking badass, Kacey!” Dane said, still excited to see Juniper ditching class, and grabbed Kacey’s hand as if he were shaking the hand of a legend.

Then he gentlemanly reached for Junipers and bowed, kissing the top of her hand gently. “Dane.”

“Juniper.” She felt awkward that his eyes had not left hers.

“Wow, it’s so wild to see eyes without the life of a dragon flowing in them,” he said with pure amazement.

“Dane, don’t scare her day one, sheesh! She already has it hard enough as is.”

“Sorry, my bad. Come sit.”

Kacey then went on to tell the boys how she got Juniper to ditch math.

“Shaylee is like the biggest attention whore in the school. She has had flings with Seargeant Dayton and, some say, Prince Kai.” Flinch butted in.

“Dude?” Kacey said as she pointed to Juniper.

Juniper felt a pang of jealousy, but she swallowed it down. “Wait.” She said, putting the puzzle pieces together. “Did her boyfriend recently cheat on her?”

The group suddenly burst into laughter. “Oh shit, even the princess for one day knows about it!” Dane and Finch were rolling on the floor, laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes.

“What is a ladies’ gala, anyway?” Juniper said, breaking the laughter.

“Oh… shit,” Dane suddenly sobered from his laughter.

“It’s nothing that Kai is ever going to do. It’s a ball where he actively searches for a lady of the castle. It’s so lame and totally not Kai’s style. He has you, so they will never force him into it, either.”

“Who was talking about it?” Finch asked.

“Trina and Copper,” Kacey responded. “Said she would be tossed in a pit of lava, too.”

“Damn, that’s just harsh,” Dane commented.

Juniper felt at ease with this group. They just wanted to mellow away from the world, and they didn’t seem to care that she was human. If anything, they thought she was cool because of it.

Dane came from a lower-class district. It turned out you could go to this high-end university if you passed all your marks, and even though Dane didn’t seem it, he was a dedicated student, but just because he was at this uni didn’t mean he was treated equally, and that’s why he came out here most days to rant.

Finch was the opposite of Dane. He came from a royal family and was handed everything, but his family had some issues that he didn’t want to hash out, which led him not to want to be like the other goodie two shoes.

Kacey, as Kacey told her story herself, is just Kacey. The boys laughed in agreement.

“We should head back before we miss lunch,” Kacey said, slapping her hands on her knees and breaking the conversation.

They walked back to the cafeteria as a group. When Shaylee spotted Juniper, she called out, “Juniper, there you are! Come, we have a table here!”

Shaylee’s giddy expression dropped when she saw Kacey’s arm wrap around Juniper’s. She felt bad but didn’t want to be around fake people, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that Shaylee and her friends were using her.

Juniper kindly waved hi and then pointed to Kacey as if to say, I’m eating with them today. Gosh, it felt like high school again!