To really understand what's going on... you should probably read the first coupla chapters. Although this is another stand-alone chapter.
I'd really like to know about a couple things:
1. Who do you see as the main character?
2. Do all the names confuse you?
3. Who sticks out to you? How?
Thank you so much for reviews!
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Chloe Sibylle was short, but that was just a fact of life.
She was fifteen and a half, a sophomore, and not a very good student. Those were just facts of life, too, just like her exactly five feet of height. However, she had two best friends in the whole world: Maria Aguinaldo and Ian Drake. This was not a fact of life. This was a casualty of life.
After ditching her sister, Chloe's first move was to find her two best friends, who were both reading the welcome board. “Ian! Maria!” She threw an arm around the shoulders of each of her friends. With Ian it was a bit of a struggle, as he was more than a foot taller than she was.
Both smiled. “Hey, Chloe,” Maria said. She was near Chloe’s size, just two inches taller, with olive skin and long black hair. Her younger sister was the same age as Amanda, although she and Tria got along much better than Chloe and Amanda did. “How was your summer?”
Chloe grinned. “Great. I was at my boyfriend's house almost every day. Tyson is so adorable. You've gotta meet him. You have a good summer, too?”
Her eyes shifted to Ian momentarily, then returned to Chloe’s gaze with a smile. “Pretty good, yeah.”
Chloe smirked. “How about you, Ian?”
He smiled, showing a flash of braces. “I had a pretty nice summer, Chloe.” Ian slid a lanky arm around Maria’s waist, and Chloe smiled. After a few months of 'convincing,' Ian had asked Maria out, and they had been together for about four months.
“Where’d Gordy go off to?” Ian asked.
“Probably to wherever Juliet went off to,” Maria said. Gordon Johnson and Juliet Martin made up the other couple in the sophomore group of friends. They were constantly at one another's side; Maria sometimes referred to Juliet as “an extension of Gordy’s arm.” This amused Chloe. Maria may not have been growing on Ian’s arm, but the pair was inseparable.
“Hey, guys,” said a cheerful voice from between Maria and Chloe’s heads. Zoe Lee was Maria’s best friend, a taller, athletic girl. Her very straight blondish-brown hair was pulled up in a sporty ponytail. Appropriate, for a girl who was a softball captain. “What’s up?”
Chloe smiled. She had a very cute smile. “Hey, Zoe.”
She grinned. “Looks like we’ve got most of the gang.”
“Except Gordy and Juliet,” Ian pointed out, shaking his head. He had thick, curly brown hair that had grown past his shoulders, and it kept falling in his eyes.
“They’re probably in Intro Chem,” Zoe said dismissively.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Chloe impatiently, tossing some hair over her shoulder. “If they’re in Chem we’ll see them in a few minutes anyways.”
Zoe smiled. “Introductory Chemistry is going to be pretty interes-ting,” she said knowingly. There were only six students in the class.
Ian laughed slightly. “Heck yeah!”
Just then, the principal stuck her head out into the hall. “Get to class, guys!” Instantly, a hundred and twenty kids moved into their classrooms. The small school consisted of a cross-section hallway with four Humanities classrooms and three offices, an upstairs science lab, and two upstairs math class areas. The four friends raced up the stairs to the lab, where they would start their “advanced” science class.
†
The school’s science lab was divided into two parts for the first hour. In the front of the class, one science teacher was giving a lecture to the basic Biology class. In the back of the room, a second teacher was teaching in a much smaller “Introductory Chemistry” class.
The teacher, Mr. Andrew Nobill, was an almost intimidating man. He stood at an imposing six feet, four inches, with small, intense eyes and balding black hair. He was the harshest grader in the school, and many students didn’t like him very much because of his creation and one true passion, the Science Webquest.
The six students before him, on the other hand, had very different opinions. Ian adored him. Chloe thought that Mr. Nobill had an unprov-oked personal vendetta against her. Gordy was indifferent, as he usually was; Maria admired his amazing intelligece; Zoe loved to annoy him. Only Juliet had a developed a passionate dislike of Mr. Nobill, almost to the point of hatred.
“In this class,” he began, “we won't be learning from the book. We will be learning… in the field.”
Gordy and Ian exchanged devious looks and grinned.
Mr. Nobill rolled his eyes. “So – we’re going out into the field.”
The students were very excited. Except for Juliet, they all practic-ally jumped out of their seats. Quietly, the students followed their teacher out of the lab, through the halls, and out of the building towards a forested area of the campus. There was a very specific clearing in the middle of the trees where the six assembled. The trees there were thickest and tallest, blocking the clearing almost completely from outside view.
Once they’d reached the clearing, the students pulled something from purses, jeans pockets, cargo pockets: small, black, plastic disks. Each student had a disk with a different-colored button on it.
Grinning, they pushed the button.
