Of Misdemeanors and ***

Hayden’s Point of View

She was insane. Of course, I had known this for awhile, but she was really starting to emphasize it. I mean, really? Pushing me into a damn closet to ask me a question that she instantly forgot? I knew squirrels with better attention spans than her. Thinking back to the whole ordeal, a broom closet meeting really should have led to a different encounter. I mean, in chick flicks, that was supposed to be the part where the girl finally ends up making out with the guy she’s been chasing during the whole damn movie.

My face heated up at the thought and I shook my head to rid myself of the stray mind babbling. It was a good thing Raven was a socially incapable idiot that couldn’t grasp the concept of how normal human beings would act. Otherwise that closet thing could have been extremely awkward.

I walked into Agility just a few minutes before I would be considered late, looking shamefaced as Mrs. Lilany turned a small glare on me. Collapsing into my seat beside Lee, he held his fist out and I bumped it with my own absently. Dame on my other side nudged me with his elbow and nodded to me in greeting. I nodded back with a smirk. Sitting directly in front of me was Laura Harding. Even the back of her head looked ridiculously gorgeous.

I only looked away from her when the back of Leon’s hand tapped the side of my face, drawing my attention to the door. Where Raven was walking in late--as I had expected--what I hadn’t expected was that Derek Fairborn would be walking in with her. The weird part? She was actually smiling, about something he had said? I narrowed my eyes without even realizing it, until Raven looked at me and her smile disappeared, her brow creased in curiosity. I tried to look indifferent after that, but had a feeling she hadn’t missed the expression on my face.

It wasn’t like I was jealous…

No seriously, I wasn’t. I was just…confused. Horribly confused as to why she would even be interested in talking to a dick like Derek. Especially after that douche bag had beaten her senseless for no apparent reason only a few months before. Knowing Raven as well as I did, she certainly wasn’t the type to let things slide, she could hold a grudge for decades I was pretty sure.

Raven took up her seat a few desks behind me, since every other chair was taken. Derek sat on the right side of the room, closest to the door. Well, at least they weren’t all buddy-buddy and sitting next to each other whispering secrets and passing notes like little school girls. I didn’t have more time to contemplate why the hell Raven would talk to Derek, since Mrs. Lilany had decided to start the class.

“Today we’ll be doing an exercise,” she announced, leaning back against her desk. “Since the sun has decided to stay out today, we’ll be going outside into the forest. Everyone gather your things and follow me.”

People around me started to stand up with a mixture of restlessness and reluctance as they began to shuffle after Mrs. Lilany. It was one thing to be able to get out of lectures for the day, but something completely different when we were being subjected to one of Lilany’s “exercises”. What she considered and exercise could make any kid cringe. It would most likely involve ridiculous feats of physical activity and concentration.

And still I couldn’t get the image of Derek and Raven out of my head. It was just outrageously bizarre. Lee and Dame flanked me as we started moving down the halls and Raven moved in on Dame’s other side a little later. I didn’t look at her as we walked, because I really didn’t have anything to say to explain my little glaring bout. So my conclusion was to pretend it hadn’t happened and maybe even ignore Raven a little bit.

Evidently, Raven didn’t fancy my tactic, and decided to shove herself past Dame to stand in between the two of us. Pulling up all of my training to keep a cool head when others might panic, I pretended I didn’t notice.

Raven had a counter for this move as well. She dug her boney elbow into my ribs so that I would have to turn a glare on her. “What kind of exercise do you think this’ll be?” she asked as I stared at her, trying to decide what it was that I wanted to say. I certainly didn’t feel like answering her aimless question, I was on the verge of blurting out accusations.

On my other side Lee answered for me, which I could have kissed him for doing. Although he didn’t know that he had stopped me from blurting out a jealous line of profanities bringing to light her incriminating behavior around Derek. “Most likely something that you’ll pass out in the middle of because you refuse to work on your endurance,” Lee said smugly, giving Raven a challenging look.

Raven’s chin jutted defiantly into the air. “My endurance is epic, thank you very much. I’m fit to go through child birth in the middle of this hall. Try pushing a bowling ball through a garden hose then we’ll talk about endurance.” She huffed and turned her attention ahead of us. Lee winced at the bowling ball bit, but snickered and turned his attention toward the rest of the class too.

Every student that had endured Mrs. Lilany’s exercises before knew the four different places that she generally dragged the students to. First off and most often used was the forest around the school, where she had numerous traps and obstacle courses set up. If they weren’t going that way, there was a small building behind the gym where she had even more obstacle courses set up; though they were generally collapsible, less hazardous to one’s health and mostly used on rainy days. On off occasions Mrs. Lilany was known to use the gym for more extensive obstacle courses that wouldn’t fit in the room behind the gymnasium; which were the worst kind of obstacle courses, involving too many walls and ropes to climb in order to reach something generally miniscule.

I hung back a little and caught the back of Raven’s shirt, tugging her back and causing her to stumble to a halt. I was going to end this gnawing curiosity before it totally fucked up my ability to go through any sort of exercise.

“Hey, what…?” she trailed off when she turned and saw the expression on my face. Which must have read “all business” because her lips were pressed in a hard line, clearly suppressing what ever comment she had been intending to make.

“What were you doing with Derek?” I asked, letting the question jump out of me.

Raven’s expression shifted into something more wary and then she smiled at me. “Oh. That’s what’s buggin’ you?” Her smile widened and she laughed slightly, causing something inside me to stir with irritation and another emotion I couldn’t quite place. “We were just working out some finer details of a bet. Which, by the way, I don’t plan on losing.”

I stared at her for a long moment. “What bet?”

“Oh, uhh, the other night he challenged me to a game of pool. So, we initiated a bet and I’m going to have him running around school in a lovely ballroom gown, purchased from the money in his very own pocket.” Raven’s smile widened into a grin at her own confession, like she had let me in on some great secret.

“You play pool?” I inquired, my mind wandering from Derek for just a moment.

“Yeah. Shockingly, you don’t know everything about me,” she mocked with a snort of a laugh.

The prospect of Derek prancing around the school in a dress was bridging on a hysterical moment to go down in history. Then again, that was only if Raven won. Which brought me to the next question I decided to ask. “What if he wins?”

Raven shifted uncomfortably, moving herself in the direction the rest of the class had gone in, as if suddenly eager to catch up with them. Had I not still had a fistful of her shirt, she might have actually gotten away. “Raven,” I said sternly as I pulled on her shirt once, drawing her attention begrudgingly back to me.

She looked down at my fingers tangled in her shirt and froze, like she hadn’t noticed the contact before. There was a tense moment where we both must have realized the close proximity we were in. Our faces inches apart, our bodies moving in time with our synchronized breathing, our breath tangled between our parted lips. Raven was the one who moved first, smacking my hand and startling me enough for her to pull free and move away from. “If you must know. I have to go have a drink with him, or something.” At least she knew how to kill a moment when she didn’t approve of it.

“What?” I couldn’t have possibly heard her right.

“Are you deaf now?” she snapped, sounding suddenly flustered.

“You’re going out with him? That’s what--are you fucking crazy?” The words dropped out of me before I could stop them. I hadn’t even considered picking more delicate words.

Raven gave me a scathing look. “You say that like I’m going to lose. Jesus, have a little faith you jack ass.” She turned her nose up and away from me, looking like what I imagined the brattiest child on the planet would look like if she hadn’t gotten the pony she had demanded for her birthday.

“First of all, I’m not sure if you know this but, ‘jack ass’ isn’t exactly a term of endearment. Second of all, I always have faith in you. But, in that tiny little percentage where things won’t go your way, I don’t want something to happen to you because you didn’t think.” My thoughts felt as scattered as the explanation that I scrambled for.

Her expression softened the slightest bit and then she rolled her eyes at me. “Nothing is going to happen to me. Worst case scenario, I get to throw a few drinks in Derek’s face. Sounds like a magical evening to me. Best case scenario I wipe the floor with him and record him strutting through school in a lovely gown. Either way, it ain’t that bad of a turn out.” She sounded so nonchalant and sure of herself, I couldn’t even argue that things could end up horribly wrong.

“Whatever,” was the only response I could come up with.

Raven moved behind me and nudged me forward with her shoulder. “Come on, let’s go fail at some Lilany tests,” she joked and started walking alongside me.

I nodded absently but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have convinced her to call off the deal. Derek wasn’t someone to fuck around with, and she should have known that better than anyone. The fact that she was a girl didn’t change any rules for him, he was still the same shitty individual that he had been raised to be.

____________________________________

Raven’s Point of View

When Hayden and I caught up with the rest of the class we shuffled into the back of the group where Mrs. Lilany couldn’t quite subject us to her full blown glare. Damion and Leon were milled somewhere in the middle of the group, listening attentively to the directions Mrs. Lilany happened to be in the middle of delivering.

I turned my attention to the obstacle course set up in front of us. Unlike what I was accustomed to, the threats of this course were out in the open, but much less hazardous. She wanted us to “learn through firm correction” as she put it, as opposed to “dying and leaving a mess for her physically and lawfully”. Spread out between the trees and pine needles were several versions of the same obstacle course that consisted of what looked like six-foot walls, wobbling bridges, some sort of weird landing with different symbols on it, another platform with numerous trap doors and finally a padlock attached to a door that seemed to lead to thin air. Not much of a reward to work toward there. Unless of course that door secretly led to an alternate universe that consisted entirely of gold. In which case I would harvest said gold and pay people to be my living chess set while I sat on a throne consisting entirely of sausage in my high-priced mansion. Sure the chair would smell weird and I’d probably have a problem with animals chewing on it, but at least I could say “I’m sitting on a chair consisting entirely of meat”…Okay that sounds like an innuendo that wasn’t supposed to exist. I let out a mental sigh, relieved I didn’t relay my thoughts to Hayden, Leon and Damion. I would have never heard the end of the “meat” jokes.

“…make your own teams of five, there can be one team of four. You have five minutes,” Mrs. Lilany said in her low, lilting way. Always so eager to send us to our doom.

Leon and Damion sauntered over to us and our implied team was finished. Had I not known them, I would have been annoyed that we chose our own teams. Since I was always that kid that didn’t have an implied partnership with anyone in the class, so I would be forced to squeeze myself into a group that didn’t really want me but needed the extra person anyway. Luckily, that wasn’t the case this time around. I was blessed with idiotic friends that could shove each other for hours on end and not get bored, but accepted me no matter what.

The five minute time limit expired and Mrs. Lilany paced in front of the groups of students like a drill sergeant. Ready to explain her maniacal plot to her troops. “This is a relay race, as you can probably tell. There are five different trials, for five different people, the group of four,” she looked at us with a thoughtful quirk of her head, “will have one person take care of two tasks.” I hoped to high hell that I wouldn’t be that person, I didn’t need that kind of pressure shoving me through this exercise.

“The first task,” she began again, “is a test of strength.” Mrs. Lilany proceeded to explain that the two boarded walls standing at approximately seven and a half feet, of which were stacked in succession were meant to be climbed (whether by using the rope attached to them or some other tactic), while the next two brick walls were meant to be charged through. I had to hope that the bricks were the breakaway kind, and not the type people constructed buildings with. Only Mrs. Lilany would expect teenagers to charge through a solid brick wall just because she told them to. As an extra incentive Mrs. Lilany added, “If you take too long getting over the walls, blunt, padded staves will bludgeon you until you find the strength to make it over the top. Same thing goes for the brick walls if you fail to break through on the first go.” Of course. It wasn’t enough that we were throwing ourselves against bricks, we needed to be bludgeoned as well.

“The second task,” she proceeded to explain despite the grumbling of the students, “is a test of stealth.” Which, apparently sometime in the near future she expected us to be sneaking across creaky bridges. Were we going to be infiltrating a child’s playground? Regardless, the stealth portion required that someone walk as quickly as possible across three bridges without allowing them to creak. If that person failed at silence the part of the bridge they stood on would break away and they would start back at the first bridge. Obnoxious to say the least, but at least they weren’t being beaten.

“The third task is a test of cunning,” Mrs. Lilany explained, examining her fingernails as if she had made the explanation a thousand times before and it had become redundant. She gestured toward the platform with symbols on it. “There are six separate symbols which are removable, but must be arranged in the proper order and placed on the wall. When you believe you have the correct sequence, you push the green button on the wall beside your symbols. If you’re correct, the wall will open and you’ll move on. If you’re incorrect, you’ll be hit by the same correction staves as the ones at the beginning of the trial.” The smile on her lips was tight but filled with satisfaction at the mixed looks of disapproval on the group’s faces. She informed us, as a last minute thought, that there were no hints for getting the symbols in the right order, just a matter of luck or excellent guessing skills.

“The fourth task, is a test of perception and care.” In her eloquent way, Mrs. Lilany explained that the trap doors were rigged to fall (shockingly) if someone stepped on a panel that wasn’t in the predetermined pathway leading to the next landing, and they would be forced to start from the beginning of the trial. There were initials on the trap doors which evidently had some sort of meaning which would help the person cross the platform without plummeting to the beginning again. If they decoded that meaning making it to the other landing would be a cinch. On the other hand, if the person decided not to decode the initials, they were welcome to guess and hope for the best. Dumb luck was always a solid plan to lean on.

“And the final task is the most detrimental task of breaking and entering. The rules are simple, pick the lock, you finish the relay race and guide your team to victory. There are several lock picks to choose from, if you break all of your picks then you’ve failed the exercise and you’ll be graded accordingly.” Her tone was harsh and unforgiving. “As an extra, bonus if you will, the team that finishes first will be excused from any sort of extra assignments for the upcoming weekend.”

That piqued my interest slightly, as well as the interest of the entire cluster of students around me. I was, as a new student, not allowed to go on extra assignments until I was better acquainted with the school, but Leon, Damion and Hayden were gone almost every weekend, leaving me with a silent dorm and no friends. Which, as a matter of fact, was sort of a downer on my free days. There were only so many things someone could do when they were alone and were so bored that their brains threatened to leave their skulls as a protest. However, if we won then I would have an potentially more interesting weekend.

Mrs. Lilany was leering at me, which was enough to make me shove my wayward daydreaming into the furthest crevice of my mind. She thrust a simple baton into my hands. The object we were supposed to cart through the race, I assumed. I held the baton away from me between my index finger and thumb, as if it were a disease ridden article of clothing. “Someone take it, it wreaks of hard labor and forgotten tears of students past,” I said dramatically, holding the baton toward Hayden. He snatched it away with a roll of his eyes.

“Decide who will overcome which trial and report to me when you’ve finished,” Mrs. Lilany announced and stood a small ways away from the huddled groups of students.

“Leon,” I heard Hayden say, and turned to look at him, “think you can manage a few walls?” he asked with a sly smirk.

Leon grinned back at him. “No sweat,” he replied, pounding his fist once on his chest to emphasize his overwhelming toughness. Men were so much like apes I half expected them to start flinging feces at each other whenever they got into disputes.

“Dame?” Hayden turned to him with a raised eyebrow. “You wanna cover the padlock?” he offered the task simply.

Damion nodded blithely and didn’t say a word otherwise.

Hayden looked at me last, his gaze calculating for a moment. “Raven. Can you handle the bridges and trap doors?” Of course he would offer me two trials. I mean, it wasn’t like I had proved myself worthy to the group on numerous occasions. Such as when I…Hmm. I thought about that for a moment and scowled inwardly, I guess I hadn’t really done anything to earn my way into their little trio.

Regardless, I nodded gruffly. “Yeah, leave me with all the pressure,” I muttered with one last huff, resigned to my fate.

“Awesome,” Hayden grinned at me and ruffled my hair. “I’ll take care of the whole symbol thing,” he added as I swatted his hand away from my head. Another moment passed and he was on his way to Mrs. Lilany informing her of our choices. Our teacher nodded her head as Hayden told her who was performing which task and then we were ordered to report to our respective place in our assigned obstacle course.

I shuffled my feet nervously as I speculated how to cross the bridge as silently as possible. There was the simple solution of moving really slowly and not pissing of the bridge to the point that it caved in on me. But that was much too boring, I wouldn’t have the self-reserve to make myself move slower than growing moss. Not to mention we’d lose the race that way. Which was something I didn’t intend on doing.

There was a small pop that signaled the start of the relay race, reminding me that I didn’t exactly have time to conduct a viable plan. I scowled to myself and craned my neck, watching Leon practically fly over the first wooden wall. My eyes bulged out of my skull at how high the kid could jump before he even had to take a grab at the rope to pull himself the rest of the way over the wall. I looked away from his progress and turned to see the progress of the other teams. From what I could tell, they were around the same point as Leon, if not a fraction of a second behind. I noted that Derek was working on the first trial as well, and working on plowing through the first set of bricks right alongside Leon.

I tapped my index finger anxiously against my palm, he was getting closer which meant I would have to act soon. My lower lip disappeared beneath my top row of teeth as I gnawed on it for something to do. I hated pressure like this, it always made me inexplicably have to pee. Ignoring my bodily urge, I watched a brawny looking guy pass his baton off to Laura Harding who immediately started across the first bridge, her brow drawn tight in concentration. Only when a baton was thrust into my face did I focus on the task at hand again.

Wheezing, Leon slapped me on the back as encouragement and ambled off to watch from the sidelines with the other first trial people. I was so nervous I almost fumbled the damn baton over the side of my landing. Gripping it tightly to stop my shaking hands, I turned to the left and saw someone’s bridge collapse. Without turning again I heard someone cry out as they were engulfed in a trapdoor. I looked to the right and saw that Laura Harding was starting her second bridge. I bit my lip again and focused on my own obstacle.

That was when I saw the chains on either side of the bridge. Meant to be a handrail of course, which might have been helpful when the bridge collapsed at the slightest bit of sound or strain. However, I had a different thought in mind. I wasn’t known to try any sort of tight rope stunts, but I figured I could leap a few strides on a chain if I really had to. The nice thing about Shadowstep Academy, was that they always encouraged creativity, and Mrs. Lilany hadn’t been specific about actually touching the bridges themselves.

Instantly, I leapt up onto the right chain and took the biggest strides I could manage without tumbling over the side and breaking my neck. I was on the second landing in a matter of seconds. My heart was racing and I swore I could have heard someone protest that I was cheating. But no one stopped me. I jumped onto the next chain, this time on the left one to keep my good luck going. I wobbled to the right, held my breath and stabilized, then bounded across the chain in another few seconds. My feet hit the third landing and I was squeezing the baton so hard I thought it might burst into dust. I exhaled, steadied myself and hopped onto the final chain, this time going for the right one. The chain groaned under my weight and I thought for a moment it would collapse and leave me sprawled in a shameful heap on the forest floor. This only encouraged me to shuffled faster across the weaker chain.

I leapt from the chain and landed with a final sounding thud on the last landing, crashing into Hayden’s arms in the process. He made a quiet oof sound, but otherwise said nothing. I looked up at him and he looked right back at me, an expression of disbelief overtaking his face. In my moment of triumph I allowed myself to revel in the fact that I was in Hayden’s arms, then after a short speculation, I realized I was successfully the first person across the bridges, but people were starting to adopt my tactic. I shoved myself backward so fast that my head slammed against Hayden’s chin, causing him to swear. I passed the baton into Hayden‘s hands. “Go!” I gasped, not even contemplating an apology. I watched as it registered in his mind that we were still competing. He wheeled around and raced away from me, baton in hand.

My breath was shaky, but I shook it off and hopped down from the landing, rushing over to my next challenge. I would just treat this like one of my self appointed missions of survival, if I messed up I went to jail. What other incentive did I need to execute something perfectly? I needed to figure out the right path through the trap doors before Hayden finished his own puzzle, otherwise I’d be stumbling forward and falling like an idiot. I couldn’t find another way to get through this trial, there weren’t any extra objects or loopholes for me to find. I just had to find a pattern, how hard could that be?

I pounded up the steps and stood on the landing, my eyes raking across the initials painted on the trap doors. It was almost like something out of a video game. Except I couldn’t look up how to beat this puzzle on the internet. I looked to my right and saw Irwin’s lips moving absently as he scanned the initials. Straining my ears, I could barely make out that he was muttering something about barium. Which was an element on the periodic table, which I only knew because my eighth grade science teacher was a drill sergeant in disguise and made us memorize the elements, since he was absolutely convinced we would need to know them later in life. Guess he was right for once.

“B-A,” I murmured to myself, spotting the initials for barium, which Irwin had promptly stopped looking at. So it had nothing to do with that element. There had to be a connection. My mind was humming with possible connections, there were several reasons why the elements were connected. Some were rare earth metals, noble gases (of course what made gas “noble” I really couldn’t be sure), there were the poor metals, the nonmetals and tons of other things that I really couldn’t recall. I scowled at my inability to make any sort of connection, my memory was photographic, and I could picture the table of elements perfectly. However, the relations the elements had completely eluded me.

“A-U, Gold. H-G, Mercury. Jesus Christ what the hell does it mean?” I grumbled at myself, tapping my foot apprehensively as I ran stray elements across my thoughts. This whole thinking thing really wasn’t my cup of tea. Stupid Hayden should have taken all the puzzle shit, because I could hardly pay attention to a TV show when it was on. How in the hell was I supposed to apply myself to a thought inducing puzzle of doom? I was starting to wish there was someone I could pay to call and give me the answers I needed.

I blinked at that thought. “What if…” My voice trailed away from me when I looked back at the initials for Gold. Gazing past it I saw the initials to the right of it reading Ag. Silver. Gold and Silver, old versions of currency. What the hell were pennies made out of? I had done a report on Zinc in eighth grade, and distinctly recalled being interested that pennies had more Zinc than Copper in them. Grinning at my progress, I moved up from the Ag symbol and found the initials Zn, Zinc, excellent. I had it.

Approximately two and a half minutes had passed. I whipped around to see the wall slide to the side revealing a relieved looking Hayden. Absently, I wondered how many times he had been hit with the “correction staves” before he had actually gotten the sequence right. I grabbed the baton from his outstretched hands and hurled myself at the Au symbol, praying that the trap door wouldn’t drop me. I held my breath and waited half a second.

The trap door stayed solid. Grinning like a mad man, I jumped onto the next trapdoor labeled Ag. Once again, it didn’t collapse. I was starting to think less and move more, sending myself stumbling onto the Zn trapdoor, then jumping onto the next one to its right labeled Cu, Copper. Directly after that was, Ni, Nickel. I paused, blinking when I realized I was out of currency related elements. There was still a whole row of trapdoors between me and the landing. Panicking, I dragged my eyes across the initials, coming up completely empty. I gazed around me and saw that Irwin was hot on my heels, clearly realizing what I had just a moment too late. My legs were shaking and I nearly dropped the baton, then looked at the landing in front of me and thought blandly, it’s not that far of a jump…

I stole another glance at Irwin, he looked as stumped as I was, his brow furrowing and his glasses climbing up his nose as he speculated where to move next. I didn’t have time to think, and unlike him, I wasn’t as good at it. Acting was where I excelled. Throwing myself forward, I tumbled once through the air and crashed to the landing, completely skipping the last row of trapdoors. Rolling to my feet, I raced over to where Damion stood, gaping at me like I had sprouted a set of wings, taken to the air and started flying at him. I shoved the baton into his chest and he grabbed it, snapping out of his trance and stumbling backward a second before righting himself and sprinting to the padlock.

The rest was up to him. If he lost at that moment, I was going to punch him so hard in the face, he’d go into a coma for the rest of his life, where he’d get fondled by gay male nurses and not even know it. Not that he could hear my threat, but I hoped he would feel my glare of warning on his back. Letting out a sigh of exhaustion, I collapsed on the landing and rested, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal, because I was a little more than certain I was on the verge of having a heart attack. And if I lived through my cardiac arrest, I would sue the shit out of Mrs. Lilany.

My short intermission between moving was interrupted when Hayden stalked up next to me, nudging me with his foot to get my attention. “Nice show you put on there,” he commented, watching Damion’s back as he worked through the padlock.

“I’ll kill Damion if he loses,” I said, ignoring his comment.

Hayden looked down at me and smiled crookedly. “Right. Well I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that.” He shrugged his shoulder in Damion’s direction. Turning my attention that way, I looked just in time to see Damion pull the padlock off and thrust his door open in triumph. I let out a whoop along side Hayden and scrambled to my feet, my weariness completely forgotten.

By the time we met up with Leon and Damion on the sidelines, Mrs. Lilany was already stalking over to us. “Very impressive you four,” she praised, although her tone wasn’t an octave over blatantly interested. “Especially you, Raven. Quite the…unique performance in your trials.” She paused in a moment of thought and then said, “Although, I wonder, how it was that you knew about the last line of trapdoors?” An eyebrow was quirked in my direction.

I squirmed nervously. “Uh…”

Mrs. Lilany frowned in understanding. “Oh. So I suppose you didn’t know that the last row of trapdoors were all rigged to fall?”

I laughed uneasily, embarrassed that I wasn’t as smart as I looked. Peering off to the side, I saw Troy Velen, the other boy who had joined Shadowstep with Laura and me the first time around. He was in the midst of finishing off his padlock and opening his door as well. “All I knew was that no other initials that were left made sense, and the landing wasn’t that far away,” I admitted finally.

Mrs. Lilany spared me a tight lipped smile. “I see. Well you have commendable instincts, regardless, Ms. Crawford.” With that said, she strode away, supervising the remainder of the students through the last of their obstacle courses. It was still bizarre to me, hearing Hayden’s last name tacked onto the end of my name. But I imagined I could get used to it, if I heard it enough times.

Leon’s palm collided with my shoulder, quite possibly rattling my spinal cord. “Nice moves out there Raven,” he complimented, a wolfish grin on his face.

I could have swore I felt my arm go numb from the impact of his “friendly” back slap. “Thanks,” I replied, grinning right back at him. “You were pretty slick yourself. At least next time I piss you off, I know a brick wall won’t stop you,” I retorted with a snort.

“Damn right,” Leon affirmed with a wink.

“So. What the fuck are we gonna do this weekend?” Damion piped in, leaning forward speculatively, appearing to think about the answer.

I shrugged at the same time as Leon and Hayden. I stared at them for a moment and sighed dramatically. “We are so uncreative. We better come up with something awesome to do after a win that bad ass.” I shrugged toward our completed obstacle course. My three friends muttered their agreement.

“We got a few more days to think about it,” Hayden pointed out. “Til then, let’s focus on getting the hell out of here.” When he turned away from the obstacle courses we all followed him out of the clearing. Class was dismissed after the exercises were finished, so no one stopped us from departing.