A Taste of Everyday -- Chapter 3

Disclaimer: The TV show Dark Angel, all of the characters that appeared on it (Max, Zack, Zane, etc.), and everything else that has to do with the show belong to their respective owners, not to me. No money is being made off of this fic. I only own the original characters (Rena/X5-120, etc.).

“Janie, are you ready yet? I want to get going in five minutes,” Brianne said to me from the hallway outside of my bedroom door.

“Yeah, I’ll be ready in a minute,” I told her. My first day of regular school. I was nervous as hell. I was really going to have to fit in for the first time. Not just like any other new kid, but I was going to have to make sure that nobody had a clue that I was an X5. I was happy that I’d snuck out of the house the night before to get my barcode removed. Brianne and Vincent might have been right in that the area was still pretty good, but there were still people in downtown Dallas who would remove what appeared to be a tattoo from a twelve-year-old with no questions asked if you had the money, which I just happened to pickpocket from this asshole who was annoying Brianne and I when we’d been out shopping on Saturday. I took a deep breath and picked up my new backpack and left my room. “I’m ready to go.”

“Great,” Brianne said. “You look wonderful, Janie.” She smiled. “Are you sure that you’re only eleven? Between that short hair and your height, I’d say that you were older.”

I knew that Brianne was only teasing me, but the comment still made me a little nervous. My hair was still only about chin-length and I was pretty tall for my age. I’d been taller than everybody in my family except for Zane. I’m even taller than Zack by an inch or two! “I wanted to try short hair the last time I got it cut. If you want somebody to blame for my height, blame my dad. He was a basketball player in college.”

“That’s interesting,” Brianne remarked as we left the house and went to her car and got in. “Did he ever make it professionally?”

“No,” I said. I thought of a story that I had read from this sports magazine that Zane had stolen from a newsstand back in August. “He was planning on going professional, he told me that people were saying he could maybe go in the first or second round of the NBA draft, but he blew out his knee in his senior year of college and that was that.”

“Oh,” Brianne said. “Did you inherit your father’s athletic ability as well as his height?”

“I wish,” I said. You have no idea how athletic I really am. “I’m okay, but I’m not nearly as good as my dad was. My gym teachers back in Omaha would complain about it all of the time. Even when I would do something pretty well, it was always ‘Jane, why couldn’t you have run a second faster?’ or ‘Ms. Richardson, I know you could do better than that. Your father was so good at this.’ I’m glad that nobody here knows that my dad was a star athlete. If my gym teachers complain, it’ll be because I actually screwed up and not just because they had higher-than-normal expectations for me because of who my dad was.”

“I hope they don’t complain about you,” Brianne teased.

“Me too,” I said. We pulled up in front of the school and I took a deep breath. Holy crap. Time to suck it up and take this like a soldier. If you can survive live ordinance training with Commander Blake, then you can survive this.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Brianne assured me. “School gets out at three. I’ll meet you here when you get out. You can take the bus to school whenever you feel that you’re ready to, okay? Just let me know when you want to so that I can call the school and let them know. Don’t forget to stop at the guidance office so that you can pick up your schedule. Do you remember where that is?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. We’d gone to the school on Saturday before we’d gone shopping and I met the principal and I’d toured the place. “I’ll see you later, Brianne.”

“I’ll see you later, Janie.” Brianne smiled. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” I said. I got out of the car and shut the door and went inside the building. I just looked around at all of the kids for a moment before I turned and walked down the hallway and went inside the guidance office. “Hi, I’m Jane Richardson. I’m here to pick up my class schedule.”

“Oh yes,” the lady behind the desk said. She went to a file cabinet and opened a drawer and took a file out of it and took a paper out of the file and handed the paper to me. “There you go. Your homeroom is with Mrs. Thompson in room 113. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah,” I told her.

“Great,” she said. “Good luck, Ms. Richardson.”

“Thank you,” I said. I took one look at the schedule, memorized it in a nanosecond, and put it in the pocket of my jeans and walked down the hall until I got to my homeroom and went inside. I glanced around nervously before I walked over to an empty desk and sat down. I heard the other kids in the room talking about me and I could hear exactly what they were saying, too.

“Hi, are you new?” a girl next to me asked. “I’m Vanessa.”

“Yeah, I’m new,” I answered. She seemed nice. “I’m Jane. You can call me Janie.”

“This is Nancy,” Vanessa told me, pointing to the girl sitting next to her on her other side.

“Hi, Janie,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“When did you move to Texas?” Vanessa asked.

“A few days after Thanksgiving,” I replied. “I was living in a motel near Plano with my parents until it burned down when I went out to grab some milk.” I got quiet. “My mom and dad died.”

“Holy crap, your parents were killed in that big fire in Plano?” Nancy said. Her eyes were huge with surprise. “That was all over the news here! They said that the fire was so bad, they would never know how many people had been in there and had been killed because it burned so badly that the bodies had been totally burned to ash!”

“I’m sorry about Nancy,” Vanessa apologized.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m living with foster parents right now.”

“Well, welcome to Garland and welcome to hell,” Vanessa said.

This is hell? I’ve been to the real deal. “It can’t be that bad here.”

“Are you kidding? I hate this school,” Nancy complained. “The teachers are boring, they always nag you, the food is horrible, and it really sucks.”

“It can’t be any worse than my old junior high school back in Omaha,” I said.

“Omaha as in Nebraska?” Vanessa asked.

“Yep,” I said. “I’m from boring old Nebraska. If there’s one good thing that the Pulse did, it was make life there more interesting.”

Vanessa and Nancy giggled. “Was it really that boring in Nebraska?” Nancy asked.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Omaha was okay because it was a city, but you go outside of it and—“

“Quiet down, everybody,” Mrs. Thompson said as the homeroom bell rang. “Before I do roll call, I want to introduce a new student that we have with us. Everybody, this is Jane Richardson. Jane, will you please stand up and say a few words about yourself?”

Hi, my name is Rena and my barcode number is 331487456120 and my designation is X5-120. I’m originally from Gillette, Wyoming, where I was born and raised in a secret government facility called Manticore with other kids who were like me. I’m a genetically engineered super soldier who escaped from Manticore back in March and I’m on the run from them and will be for the rest of my life. I know how to blow shit up, fire guns, generally kick all kinds of ass, and so much more. Oh yeah, and genetically I’m only about 80 percent human. About twenty percent of my DNA is feline with maybe a dash or two of some other animal thrown in there. Oh, I wish I could tell them the truth. It’d be funny as hell. “I’m from Omaha, Nebraska and I moved to Texas a few weeks ago and I moved here to Garland last week. That’s about it.” I sat back down.

“Okay, Jane, thank you,” Mrs. Thompson said. She began to take roll call.

“What’s your first class?” Vanessa asked.

“Science,” I said.

“Cool, me too,” Nancy said. “We’re going to dissect frogs today.” She made a face. “It’s gonna be nasty. I wish we didn’t have to do it.”

I wish I’d paid more attention to when Wayne was babbling on about dissecting various organs of various animals back before we’d escaped. He was our field med and he’d actually been so good at it, he was two years ahead in his medical training so he was taking the same field med classes that Zack, Tinga, Kenny, and Zane had been and he wouldn’t shut up about it at times. I personally knew more about the anatomy of most animals known to mankind than anybody here, but I’d never actually dissected something before. I guess school won’t be as boring as I thought it would be. “We were getting ready to do that at my old school in Nebraska before I moved. I think it could be interesting.”

“If you can get through it without throwing up, let me know,” Vanessa begged.

“And before you let me know, tell me how you could do it,” Nancy said.

“Hey, we haven’t gotten to it yet,” I said. “But I’ll tell you if I do. I promise.”

“Cool,” Vanessa said. “You’re awesome, Janie.”

I grinned. “Thanks. You guys are, too.” I think I actually made some friends.

TBC