In among the 11th graders, an unfamiliar boy stands up, looking a bit awkward seeing as he's one of the few who are both new and not freshmen.

Alli isn't paying attention when the students first stand; Helen's filling her in about her kind-of-not-really boyfriend from gymnastics camp. But then Jada nudges them. "You guys. You guys. You guuuuuuys," she hisses.

Alli looks up. "Huh? Wha-" then she sees the new boy.

"Look at the new kid!" Jada whispers happily.

"Holy. Shit." Alli sizes him up. "Can I have one?"

"...I am seriously regretting the camp boyfriend right now," Helen giggles.

They applaud rather more enthusiastically than normal. Alli grins. Thank you, transfer student gods.

Theo sits back down, waiting for the end of the assembly.

For once, Alli is grateful for the snobbery of cheerleaders. While they clearly agree that the new boy is worth chatting up, at the end of assembly they sashay past him with winks and smiles but not a word. No matter how pretty he is, they obviously expect that he will approach them first.

Alli has no such compunctions.

"Yo new kid!" she says cheerfully and sticks her hand out. "I'm Alli, what's your name?"

Theo smiles at the cheerleaders as they walk by, but doesn't wink back. He seems a bit confused by the attention.

Ooh, conversation. "Hi! I'm Theo," he says, reciprocating.

"Nice to meet you," she says with a grin. She waves at her friends behind her. "That's Helen and that's Jada." They wave. "What brings you to Sunnydale?"

"Oh, pretty boring really. My dad got a new job in the area."

"Well, welcome, glad to have you." The bell rings and Alli bites back a swear; there's a lot of teachers still nearby and she definitely doesn't need detention her first day. "Math time I guess. Where're you going? We can help you find your classroom."

He looks down at his schedule. "Apparently I also have math!"

Jada pouts. "I've got English."

Helen kicks her ankle as she smiles brightly at the others. "Me too. Come on, Alli can walk Theo, right?"

Jada smiles back, but her eyes are glaring Not everyone has handy camp boyfriends! at Helen. But she goes along with it. "Nice to meet you," they chorus, and wander off towards their classroom.

Alli does a gleeful dance in her head and decides she owes Helen a thank you drink. And possibly Jada an apology drink. "Math it is! Come on, it's this way." She grabs her backpack and heads out of the gym. Once outside, she takes a gasping breath. "Oh man. I did not realize how stuffy that room was until I left. Air."

"Haha, yeah. Assemblies aren't exactly the most interesting. Are we in the same class?" He shows her his schedule.

"Ugh, right? I don't know why they think that'll make us any more excited about school. An hour of listening to adults saying feel good shit. No one caaaares." She looks at his schedule mostly as an excuse to lean towards him and peer at it. "Yeah, that's mine. I think there's only two sections? Sunnydale's not all that big."

"Ah, okay. Have you had the teacher before, then?"

"Couple years ago, she teaches Algebra 2 and Precalc. Last year was Geometry with a different guy." Alli shrugs. "She's okay. Little weird? She's into creative shit, and it's math." Not particularly wanting to focus on school, she changes the subject. "How do you like Sunnydale so far?"

"It seems nice, I guess? Lots of graveyards, though."

"Tell me about it. We're like a bad Halloween joke or something." If only he knew, Alli snickers to herself. "At least I match-" she is in fact wearing quite a bit of black, "-but enh. I don't do the whole mopey death poetry thing. Just the clothes."

She turns them into the next door on the right and grabs a seat towards the back. There's a desk free next to her she jerks her head at. "Wanna join?"

Theo looks around the classroom a bit, but decides to sit next to the one person he kinda knows. "Sure."

He sits down at the desk next to her, moving fluidly into the seat.

That was- huh. That was rather more graceful than Alli was expecting from a teenage boy. What is he, a dancer?

Class starts, limiting Alli's ability to chat, but she isn't paying particularly close attention; mostly she just draws stupid doodles on her notebook. Nothing worth taking notes on happens the first day of class anyway. Every so often she'll slip one in a note to Theo; her favorite is immediately after the teacher starts talking about how "math is a super power."

Towards the end of class, she puts her pencil down to fold a note for Helen for later, but the pencil fails to stay where she left it. It drops off the desk and rolls away from her, landing somewhat behind Theo's desk. She sizes it up, decides that she probably can't actually scramble for it, and then sighs at the empty desks behind them. No one she can ask to pass it, and it'd be an awkward angle for Theo to reach; twisting around in these desks is downright painful. Fine, fine, she can do this subtly, right? There's no one behind them anyway or she wouldn't have this problem.

She leans down, reaches as close to the pencil as she can manage, and wiggles her fingers. The pencil scoots closer to her all by itself until she can snatch it up without overextending her arm. Gotcha.

She sits back up, and goes back to her latest doodle. Cartoon-Cosine and Cartoon-Sine aren't being very nice to Cartoon-Tangent. Shame on them.

Math... is kinda boring. Theo's pretty good at it, and they're just listening to the standard start-of-year lecture that recaps a couple of things and tries to get them all inspired for the new year of wonder. Eugh. He's pretty amused by Alli's doodles, though, but he tries not to laugh – he doesn't want to get called out on the first day of class.

Not noticing straight away when Alli drops her pencil, he keeps listening to (or at least trying to listen to) the lecture, but he looks down when she leans over to pick it up, trying to see if he's at a better angle to get it, and seems a bit surprised by the random movement of the pencil. He didn't think there was a breeze... along the floor... at exactly the right point to nudge her pencil back into her hand?

Oh well. He's not too worried by it.

No one noticed. Score!

Class wraps up pretty quickly after that. Alli gets up, puts her bag on her chair, and digs out her schedule. (Stupid single pieces of paper, it got crunched under her books, ugh.) Once she knows where she's going, she looks back at Theo. "What've you got next?"

Theo stands up from his seat, again moving fluidly. Perhaps he is a dancer?

In response to Alli, he grabs his bag, pulls it up from under the desk, and accidentally catches his nails, leaving a mark in the desk. Ow?

"I have... French. What about you?"

Okay, dancers are one things, but- that is not a thing that fingernails do. Not even if you file your fingernails into claws, this is not a thing they do. Maybe if he'd coated them with metal, but... that's a gouge. In a chair.

Alli likes magic. When she found books on witchcraft in her sister's boxes, she actually, voluntarily read them all. A couple of them were comprehensive enough to cover more than just witchcraft. She can figure this out. She can fill in "not a vampire" all by herself, for example; they're in a classroom full of windows on a sunny day. But Theo is definitely not entirely human. If she thinks about the nails in that context- yeah, she's got a couple guesses. Fingernails aside, neither are particularly dangerous. Weird shit, but not "flee screaming" level. (Which is awesome, because he's still really hot.)

It occurs to Alli a second later that this might mean Theo knows about witches. She could have someone at school to talk magic with! The people at the Magic Box are okay, but they're mostly old and pretty much exclusively crazy. If she wasn't in school, destroyer of all things happy and exciting, she would consider dancing with glee. But this is still a bit of a leap from fingernails. (Desk-gouging fingernails! But yeah, fingernails.) So she decides to be subtle.

"What'd that desk ever do to you, Nails?"

Subtle for her, anyway.

"But nah, I've got Latin. But I can show you where French is first if you want? All the language rooms are next to each other."

"I don't actually have anything against random desks, though these ones are pretty annoying. That wasn't me, though - do you really think my nails can do that?" he asks, laughing. "But sure, lead the way."

He's got a good poker face, Alli approves. "Whatever you say, Nails." She hoists her backpack up, silently swearing about heavy science textbooks, and heads for the door. "C'mon, this way to gibberish."

He looks at her a bit weirdly in response to her first comment, but follows after her towards the language classrooms. "I don't do Latin, so that's definitely gibberish, but French really isn't too bad."