School.

Do you know what I hate the most about school?

The first day of school.

You got to break the summer habits, get up early, adjust with a new schedule and new teachers, and deal with the huge homework load of the first day of school.

When the bell rang after my zero period class, I flew up to my first period class: Chemistry.

Now from my experience from eighth grade science, I loved the chemistry unit because everything made sense and I aced all of my quizzes and the tests on it. So I figured that I was also gonna be awesome in this class.

I ambled into the science class room-slash-lab and sat in my assigned seat, which was in the front row, right in front and facing the teacher's dark jade green lab table.

I pulled out my iPad since I didn't know what else to do. Believe it or not, but one of the cool things about my school is that iPads are they're required. Why? Because that's where we hold our textbooks in and school apps.

But before I was able to do anything else, my teacher came in and told us to put all of our iPads away.

The teacher was a young, quite short man with brown hair that was neatly groomed and hazelnut eyes; he talked in a harsh, Philadelphian accent, since he told us that he was from there. He introduced himself as Mr. Jekyll and told us for a 'first-day-of-school' exercise, we were to interview our table partner and write down their answers of the questions he wrote on the board on a small whiteboard.

Ugh...I hate talking to my classmates..., I thought to myself as a small whiteboard was passed between my table partner and me.

I zipped opened my back compartment of my pink pencil pouch and pulled out a blue whiteboard marker. I turned to my table partner, realizing that he's a new kid.

He had deep blue eyes that reminded me of water in a really pretty water fountain, a pointy nose that reminded me of how I draw my noses in my cartoons with a bump on his bridge, sharp facial features, blonde hair that was combed to one side, yet had lots of volume on top because the bottom half was buzzed off, but it did look pretty good on him, and he had really nice eyelashes.

"Okay..." I uncapped my marker and drew a line in the middle of the whiteboard.

"What are we doing?" my table partner asked me.

I turned to him. "We're gonna interview each other. I ask you the questions on the board and write them down. Then you are gonna do the same thing to me."

He nodded. "Okay."

I looked at the board, reading the first question; I turned back to my blonde table partner. "So, what's your name?"

"Alek."

"Alex..." I wrote that name down.

"No, no 'x'--it's a 'k,'" he told me, pointing to my writing.

"Oh whoops..." I erased the 'x' and put in a 'k.' "Errr...last name?"

"Soldatov," he told me.

I made a shocked look. "And how do you spell that?"

He told me the letters to his name and I wrote them on the board.

After I was done, I looked at the board. "Okay..." I gazed back at him. "Where are you from?"

"Russia."

I froze for a moment. OMG, he's from Russia! I got a Russian sitting next to me! "Ohmygosh, really?"

"Yeah."

"That is so cool! Which city?"

"St. Petersburg."

I quickly located that city on my mental world map, since I was also a geography whiz. "Ohmygosh, that's so awesome!" I let out a huff. "Okay, now you get to write." I passed him the whiteboard and my marker.

Then he started interviewing me. And when he was doing that, I found out that he had a thick Russian accent, something I surprisingly didn't notice when I first talked to him.

"What is your name?" Alek asked me.

"Brynne..." I let my voice fade while I saw him writing my name down in the empty column surprisingly correctly. "...Toivonen: T-O-I-V-O-N-E-N."

He wrote down my last name then asked me the next question. "Where are you from?"

"Eh, I'm from here: Westbrook." I felt so boring that I was born in the same city I'm at now.

He wrote down 'Westbrook, LN,' since I was born, and still living in the state of Lanston. He looked up at the board, looked around a bit, then looked back at me. "Now what do we do?"

I shrugged. "I dunno... We wait."

He pushed the whiteboard and marker back to me, then pulled out his black iPad and began messing around on it.

I wonder if he liked hockey, though... Should I ask him? Yes? No? "Do you play any sports?" I asked him.

He looked at me. "Yeah, soccer."

Dang it. I forgot that sport existed. But it did explain his hair style.

"What sports do you play?" he asked back.

"Well...I don't play any, but I would like to play ice hockey as a goalie." What I said was very true.

"That's cool." He went back to his iPad.

A few minutes later, Mr. Jekyll told us to introduce our table partner to the class, using our whiteboards. It was weird having a foreigner introducing you, but I was so proud to tell the class that my table partner was Russian! Man, I hope I get to sit next to him for the whole school year!

After everyone had been introduced, we began working on of the chemistry basics by doing some multiple choice math problems on our iPads, which I found pretty difficult. But sometimes, Alek would just help me out like as if he had some sort of telepathy, since I was crying for help in my head.

I sensed Alek leaning closer to me, looking at my screen. He muttered the question I was on under his breath, doing the problem in his head.

"I think the answer is 'B,'" I said quietly, not looking at him.

"No, it's 'A,'" he told me. "Yeah, it's 'A.'"

Should I trust him? "Okay..." I tapped on the gray bubble next to the letter 'A,' filling in a blue dot in it.

Alek continued doing his problems, which he zoomed through quickly. I finally completed my math problems to the best of my ability, getting a whoopin' 'C' as my grade. I checked through my answers, and Alek did get that problem right: it was 'A.' I hope he can help me with these problems more often, I thought to myself.

"When do we get out of this class?" I heard Alek ask me.

I turned to him. "What?"

"When does this class end?"

"Oh, it ends like in about..." I looked at the time on my iPad. "...ten minutes."

"Okay. What's after this class?"

"Break."

Alek made a confused look. "What do you do in 'break'?"

I felt like laughing, believe it or not. It's a question I've never heard before being asked. I began thinking of how to describe it, assuming that there was no such thing as 'break' in Russia. "Uhhh...it's when you eat...and hang out with other people...and talk. Yeah."

My Russian table partner still had that confused look on his face. "Isn't that lunch?"

Oh. "Well, yeah, except break is shorter than lunch..." I hoped I was explaining this right and not so confusing.

"Oh, okay." He went back to his iPad.

About ten minutes later, that annoying bell dinged, ending the class. I got up and began packing up my stuff, looking down at Alek, who was going ahead on his online homework. Say bye to him, I heard my inner self say.

Errr...no.

Just do it.

"Bye," I said quietly under my breath, swinging my backpack over my shoulder and quickly getting out of the table row.

And of course he didn't hear me since it was like I was saying 'bye' to myself!

After exiting the classroom, I walked down the junior high hallway, since the science class room was in the junior high section of the school. I went down the stairs and went off to break, realizing that it is sort of like lunch. Huh.

After I ate my sandwich, I went off to my next class: French 2. I took French 1 last year, so now I am up a level in French, which is the first with me and foreign languages.

I don't have any friends in this school, as you might've already had noticed, but if I had to choose someone to call as my 'friend' here at my school, I'd have to choose my table buddy from French 1: Andrea.

"Hey!" I greeted excitedly, sitting next to her.

She turned to look at me. She has golden blond hair is down with bangs and green eyes. "Hi, Bree!"

I sat down next to her. "How's it like being a senior so far?"

Andrea tilted her head side to side, thinking of an answer. "It's doing pretty good so far. It's nice." She smiled at me.

Andrea is a senior so this practically meant that this was my last year with her, since I'm a sophomore.

"Ready for French 2?" I asked.

"Oh yeah." She nodded her head.

The French teacher then opened the door to let us in and the other classmates into the trailer.

After class was over, I headed off to lunch.

Now for high schoolers, one of the options for eating lunch was in the mezzanine, which is where I spend my lunch time.

The mezzanine was lit up with new painted walls, where were now the colour navy and Carolina blue and white, which were the school colours. There were way more tables to sit on and the plastic tables were replaced by wooden tables that connected to the wall and counter top tables with those really high chairs.

I settled myself to the high table that was closest to the exit and sat on the black chair. I unpacked my lunch and began messing around on my iPad while I was eating my noodles.

Then the last period of the day rolled around: P.E.

After selecting my locker and changing out, I walked onto the gym where the guys were already at since they change so fast. And of course, they were messing around throwing footballs to each other and shooting volleyballs through the hoops of the basketball net.

I sat on the wooden gym floor and waited for the PE instructor to come out.

Now, I knew most of the freshmen guys; I had Pre-Algebra class with them when I was in eighth grade, since I was held a year back in math because I'm terrible at it and they were in seventh grade. But there was this one freshman that stood out since he was catching all the footballs and was just running around. I remember his name because he was one of the guys from my Pre-Algebra class: Cade. He still looked like his seventh grade self with that blond hair and those blue eyes, but he now looked a tid bit older, especially at the fact that his hair was spiked up now instead of being in bangs like before.

Before I could go any further talking about this guy, the P.E. instructor came in and told us to start up the actual class after he did the first day of school speech and all.

Then before I knew it, my first day of school was over.

Thank God I survived!