Woo! Chapter 3, is anyone actually reading this? Probably not, Oh well, I like the story too much to quit.

OUTFOXED

Chapter 3: The Smell Of Cheese In The Morning (What a demented title, I couldn’t think of anything else! Sorry)

Pietro jerked the locker open forcefully. As a rule, because he was a new student, the attendance office stuck him with one of the worst lockers at Bayville. So much for having Mystique as a power in the school. The locker was in the middle of nowhere, next to the janitors closet, and the door was bent horribly out of shape. But at least it wasn’t as bad as 213, the locker beside his, from which the distinguishable smell of cheese had emanated since he came here.

It was like the office had a grudge against new kids, Pietro didn’t understand it but, what could he do? However, the broken locker and it’s cheesy counterpart were not the source of his terrible mood today. He had just utterly failed a huge English IRP (independent research project). 54%. Okay, so it technically wasn’t a fail, but he had actually worked hard on this. He didn’t mind getting bad marks if he didn’t try but . . . he DID, dammit! The teacher just hated him. It was because Pietro was fast. He had figured out there were two types of people in this world, the fast and the slow.

Pietro was fast: he thought fast, he talked fast, he did fast. Maybe it had something to do with coming from New York, or just his mutation. He almost felt like he was working on an entire different wavelength than the people here in Bayville, like a quick spreading dandelion in a field of placid daisies’s. Like his teacher, Mr. Greisen, who was painfully slow. Not stupid, just . . . slow. His voice was a boring low monotone, and he rarely did things spontaneously. Pietro would die if he lived like that!

As he was shuffling books around in his locker, he noticed the smell of old cheese become suddenly overpowering.

“Ugh . . .” came a disgusted female voice to his left. Female? Pietro closed the locker door slightly so he could see where the voice came from. A girl in a white sweater was holding a brown paper bag at arms length and pinching her nose. Not just a female, a pretty female. Maybe this locker did have it’s perks after all. She crossed the hall, deposited it in a garbage can, and walked back to her locker. Pietro couldn’t help but make a gagging noise from the smell.

“ ‘ow long do you think zat ‘as been in zere?” she said, smiling in his direction.

“At least a month, that’s how long I’ve been here.” he replied, returning her smile, “My name’s Pietro Maximoff.”

“Pietro? Iz zat Spanish?”

When she said his name, her “r” rolled in the back of her throat. He couldn’t help but smile even more broadly. Most girls barely looked his way, but she was actually having an intelligent conversation with him. Which was another thing about Bayville, most of the pretty girls, like the cheerleaders, were incredibly um . . . dim.

“Yeah, it’s Spanish for Peter. So, do you have a tag?” He couldn’t believe he just said that, was he trying to sound like a total idiot?

“A what? My English izn’t too bad, I just ‘ave some problems wiz sayings and phrases.” She crinkled her brow in confusion.

“A name. What’s your name?” On the bright side, she had just took his stupidity as a translating problem.

“Oh, Angeline Feurenard.” She said, blushing, “I’m sorry, I thought I ‘ad introduced myself.”

“Nope, but now you have. So, you new here?”

“You ‘ave no idea ‘ow many times I ‘ave been asked zat question today. But yes, I’m painfully new.”she replied, smiling ruefully and rubbing her temples.

“Rough day?”

“Well,” she looked at him cautiously, “You going to think zis iz incredibly stupid . . . ”

“What? Tell me.”

“But . . .”

“Come on,” he coaxed.

“Everyone iz so nice,” she cried, half-exasperatedly, “and they all want to get to know me. Itz like ze school iz one giant welcoming committee. Don’t get me wrong, itz not zat I don’t appreciate it but . . . I don’t know. I’m kind of used to just being another face in ze proverbial crowd.” She sighed heavily, “and out of all ze people I ‘ave met, I still don’t ‘ave anyone to eat lunch with.”

“I felt like that on my first day, and I even knew some people,” Whoa, he had figured she was probably part of Summer’s little entourage, the x-freaks, but she wasn’t. She would’ve been eating with them if she was. “Why don’t you eat with me and my friends?” Him and his big mouth, that was one of the problems with being a fast person, speaking before thinking things through. She wouldn’t want to eat with him, and definitely not his friends. He waited for laughter.

Instead, she buried her face in her hands, “No more new people!”

“How ‘bout just me then? You’ve already met me.”

“Good point,” she mock-pondered it for a few seconds, “Sit alone, or with a guy I just met . . . alone, you, alone, you, . . . um . . . I think I’ll eat with you.” She said, smiling.

“Excellent choice,” he pulled out his lunch bag and closed his locker, “So, are you brown bagging it or have you decided to temp the fates and try Bayville’s wonderful world of mystery meat and plastic cheeses?”

“I like a challenge,” she smirked, “so I guess it’z ze mystery meat. It can’t be zat bad,” she said, walking in step with him to the cafeteria.

“You’ve never tried our cafeteria food.”

They took their seat at a small square table off to the side of the room, in view of Pietro’s regular table. He noticed he was getting envious stares from Todd and Lance (Fred was away at some course-thing for the remedial class for like three weeks). In fact, he was getting envious stares from the entire male population who were sitting in the cafeteria. As they walked across the room, Angeline was greeted with various hoots and catcalls. “Come on, suga, work your thang!” “They don’t breed ‘em like that in Bayville.” “Baby, you’re like milk ‘cause I know you do a body good.” and many other, a lot less appropriate ones. She just rolled her eyes and kept on her conversation with him.

“Well, I guess I’ll ‘ave to try it if I want to eat. Anything you suggest zat’s not toxic?”

“Go for the soup.”

She left the table and got into the lunch line, followed by the blue freak (though you couldn’t tell during school hours). He watched as Duncan Matthews, the annoying senior, followed the girl and entered the line behind Kurt.

To be continued . . .

Short and pointless, I know. It’s my excitement for Shadowed Past that’s distracting me. I make my family be quiet even when the commercial is on! I should have developed it a bit more but there’s a really good part coming up involving Duncan and chili, and I felt the urge to advance the plot. Chp 4