They are getting new students today. Edie heard this from her mother, who heard this from the principal, because of course Charlotte Xavier was going to befriend the school principal and keep on top of this kind of gossip. Regardless, having the dubious honor of having been the new kid herself, it's...probably for the best if she helps them get situated. She loiters near the main entrance, scanning for completely unfamiliar faces.
"Turn right, take the staircase on your left, and American History is just across the hall. The teacher, Mr. Phelps, he's terrifying if you don't turn in the homework or get caught cheating but otherwise very nice. AP English you share with a friend of mine, her name's Anna-Sophia, she'll be the quiet brunette with the, mm, she's wearing a light blue shirt today I think...she's fairly shy but she trusts me, tell her Edie told you to say 'chestnut waterboarding grasshoppers' and she'll warm up."
"I believe his exact words were 'I'm going to wake up tomorrow to a postcard from Vegas soliciting my congratulations on your elopement. It will have mysterious bloodstains on it and you will protest innocence when I ask who you shot at your wedding.' This when we'd known Edie for about two minutes."
"It actually does normally take me longer than two minutes to convince people they should let me join their secret spy rings. And I prefer to let my twin be the one to talk me up because I sound less egotistical that way. But if you insist, I'm a frighteningly charismatic, slightly manic-depressive overachiever who will settle for being the first Asian-American President if being the next Steve Jobs doesn't pan out."
"Edie has a temper, and while she's gotten pretty good at not blowing up at people she's trying to argue around, if you ask her to tell you about all of her political opinions, there are policymakers she'll call things like 'homophobic pox-mucous' and 'problem-solving abilities of a banana slug in a bucket of pretzels'."
He giggles. "English was good! Anna-Sophia explained that you don't have a password! I feel like that's a really easily hackable system. Like, it's hard to guess that that's the setup, but guessing that that's the setup and being really good at bluffing are all the work that needs to be done."
"My original vision for the spy-show Vegas wedding involved getting the postcard tomorrow morning. Do boring twins come see their siblings elope when it involves buying a same-day cross-country flight? I feel like you're already in definitively non-boring territory at that point."
"Organized a bake sale for a local girl scout chapter--keep in mind that we weren't actually girl scouts--and convinced everyone to turn over all the baking to her, mostly by pretending to everyone that everyone else who was supposed to do any of the baking hadn't actually done it, then found enough recipes for things that didn't actually involve flour that she was able to embezzle almost all of it."
"I didn't even get caught, after," she volunteers. "I mean, at the girl scout shenanigans, I totally got caught blowing up our backyard with a flour bomb. But no one wanted to admit to having accidentally offloaded an event's worth of cooking to a seven-year-old.
...I think Dad guessed. But he--approved of my cleverness, if he did, he thought the whole thing was great, he was a lot less mad about the hole in the backyard than Mom was."
...She sits down. Quietly: "Their mother has been trying to help me get taken away from my parents since they got here. She's got money for good lawyers, but so do they, and--the contrast of the courts fucking up so dramatically in opposite directions--
I don't like it when people are angry around me so she left."
"She disappeared for a few months and came back pregnant, when she confided in a friend about what had happened the friend had her committed, and now she won't talk about it to anybody ever at all no exceptions. And we know it wasn't a one-night stand because every so often she'll drop a comment like 'you get that from your father' or 'your father would be proud', and then stonewall all followup questions..."
"Every so often I'm tempted to throw up my hands, declare that school can't keep up with me, and become a pure autodidact, but a depressingly large fraction of the interesting things it's possible to do with one's life demand a college degree. School totally can't keep up with me, though."
"There'd be no reason to do it to exactly five people at exactly 9:12 once a month! And if it's reliably a different day each month then it's not something obvious like the phase of the moon because you'd end up pretty close come February - that or the scenario is underspecified, which is what happens when you make it up without an answer in mind, I guess -"