It's Ariel's first day of school in Washington, DC! She's been shunted from family to family and city to city ever since her mother's untimely death, which she doesn't really care about, because she likes making new friends! As usual, this set of fosters has a bunch of kids; unusually, she doesn't particularly like any of them. Well, their loss. She'll make her friends at school.
She breezes through her first couple of classes, not paying much attention but paying enough not to be completely lost later. She fills her backpack with textbooks and miscellaneous sheets of paper, not particularly bothering to make anything findable. She walks into the cafeteria for lunch, and looks around to see if there's anybody who seems like fun to sit next to.