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“Paul, would you partner Taryn? Betsy, could you keep Todd occupied? And Katherine, it would be wonderful if you could stop writing ‘I love Piotr’ in your notebook, join us in the real world and work with Lance at this lab. If it’s not too much trouble,” the chemistry teacher, Dr. Essex, smiled thinly.

Kitty blushed and put her note book away to peals of laughter from the other students.

“Hard luck, Kitty-cat,” Betsy said as the good doctor walked away from the lab benches and began to write instructions on the white board, “but I told you not to doodle during his class.”

“I swear, he’s a sadist or something,” Kitty ground her teeth.

“Not half as much as you are,” Todd muttered as he saw Lance try and hide how much ‘I love Piotr’ had stung him.

“Oh well, we had better get working,” Paul sighed.

He glanced over at Taryn who was putting on makeup. He wondered if he could switch partners with Betsy or Kitty. Having either Lance or Todd as a partner would be better than this. The compact mirror that was held in Taryn’s hand closed with a smug click. She turned to face him, her carefully done make up perfect as ever.

“Well, are we going to start?” she asked as if this wasn’t what he had been trying to do.

“Yeah, I guess.”

Betsy watched the two go with a shake of her head, “Poor Paul, he doesn’t realize what he’s gotten into. Oh well, Todd we had better follow their lead.”

Lance got up to get the materials. Also, if truth were to be known, he was trying to get away from Kitty, who was now staring out the window and sighing. ‘I love Piotr’ burned itself into Lance’s mind and he clenched the fist that was holding the thin glass beaker needed for the experiment.

“Maybe you should let your air headed partner get the supplies,” Dr. Essex snatched the beaker out of Lance’s hand and placed it with loving care on the lab table, “I have no wish to have you disrupt class with the need to dig glass splinters out of your hand.”

“Sorry sir.”

“What amazes me is that Dr. McCoy allowed you to pass geology last year. Maybe you have only developed this clumsiness over the summer, although I highly doubt it.”

Dr. Essex moved on, his nasal voice making sarcastic comments at everyone who even looked at him cross-eyed. Lance had an over powering urge to shove the teacher’s pale face up his, presumably, paler a--

“Hey Lance, where’s the goggles?” Betsy asked interrupting his train of thought.

“Er, in that bin over there.”

They settled down to the experiment. Lance went though the motions, trying to get his emotions under control. In a book this should have been the perfect set up. Guy gets stuck working with girl, who he likes, but she likes someone else, and they wind up becoming friends. She finds him witty and adventurous, and he is drawn to her sweet charm, and forgiving nature. Cupid has struck pay dirt, end of story.

Of course, Cupid forgot to factor in the fact that the girl is only too obviously head over heels for Tall, Dark, and Russian, and the chance that Lance would ever be witty was one in a million. Lance tried to console himself with the idea that one in a million comes up nine times out of ten. He had heard it in a book that he had borrowed from Betsy one day when he nothing else to do and was waiting for Fred and Marie to talk Pietro out of killing Todd.

From Betsy’s end of the lab table there was a poof of smoke and some coughing. He looked over as Dr. Essex swept down to admonish the blackened Todd and his gothic partner. There was another poof, and something red exploded from the test tube to create a diamond shaped stain in the center of the good doctor’s forehead.

Needless to say, class was dismissed early that day.

Lance walked to his locker intent on the keys to the Tech Center where his auto class project waited. There was also a can of spray paint in there in case he became bored. He was already designing a mural on the east wing lockers in his mind. The center piece would, of course, feature some reference to the red diamond currently decorating Dr. Essex’s head.

Hmm, he had red white and blue spray paint, nicked from last year’s Memorial Day parade float. Both the red and the white would work, and he could use the blue for shading, but there wouldn’t be any contrast between the perpetual lab coat that Essex wore and his chalk white face..

“Hey Lance, can I, er, walk with you as far as the Drama class?” Kitty had miraculously appeared at his elbow, and she was looking shifty, “I have that next and you, uhh, know how err, hard it s to walk, umm, alone to someplace, epp,” She ducked behind Lance as someone went by in the hall.

Lance tried to catch a glimpse of who it had been. He saw purple hair and combat boots before they whisked around a corner and were lost to sight.

“Why are you hiding from Betsy?” he asked perplexed.

“That was Betsy? I know her from the Academy, she’s nice, a little eccentric, but,” Kitty ducked behind Lance again as Paul began to walk to his locker.

“Yeah,” Lance said slowly when Kitty came out of hiding.

There was something weird going on here, something very weird. Kitty did not look to him as her protector in the grand scheme of things. Not that he objected to this new world order, but it wasn’t right, and Lance got jumpy when things weren’t working out right.

Maybe it was PMS, or something. Lance decided that the safest course of action would be to drop Kitty off at the Drama classroom, and then go in to check on his project for the next half hour.

He wondered if he should ask her what was going on, but as Kitty turned around he caught sight of a heart and P. R. + K. P. on her back pack in white out. What did he care what some silly computer nerd was jumping all over the place about? Why would she confide in trailer trash like him anyway?