Her technical hometown is as she left it: wet, small, nothing to do, full of people who don't care that there's nothing to do, containing one adult who's basically reasonable if kind of controlling instead of one who mostly lets her get away with more but sometimes goes kind of crazy.

That's what she signed up for.  At least she only has to make it nine more months.  Her reasonable adult even got her a 1963 Chevy StepSide C-10 pickup, which is - sweet.  Really sweet actually.

The weather is mega gross, what a surprise, and for some insane reason the school's spread out across multiple buildings.  But hopefully the worst of winter is already through, and by this time next year she'll be wherever she wants anyways.  The cars in the parking lot are mostly slightly old in not a very cool way (unlike her truck, which is great), but there are a few ones that've held up almost as long and one incongruously new Volvo C30.

She's already read some of the stuff on the docket for lit but it looks like it's all going to be boring old stuff, ugh, nothing fun and cool like dragons or spaceships or even, like, Frankenstein.  Government seems fine-ish (it's not like it's supposed to be interesting in the first place, unlike English), trig seems fun, Spanish is going to be useful but the class itself seems just okay.

The other students are all pretty nice to her.  Maybe she can get one of them to summarize the books for her enough to bang out some essays with only skimming?  Especially the boys, the boys seem interested in her, like interested interested in her, which is pretty exciting and unexpected and not something she has a good idea of how to react to.  She defaults to her best attempt at politeness, even in the face of having to correct 'Isabella's to "No, Izzy."  A group even asks her to sit with them at lunch, which is something it's great not to have to worry about.

Lunch is fine, food-wise.  Also there's a table full of INSANELY, INHUMANLY HOT PEOPLE.

Shut up!  Wow yeah there totally is.  Jessica, a girl who's being super friendly to Izzy (especially for someone who seems about as popular as a school in Forks has room for), helpfully fills in some background:

• They're the Cullens and the Hales
• They're adopted, but also two of them are dating each other, and two of the boys are maybe a little more friendly with each other than is . . . friendly
• Jessica has totally tried to get with the definitely-single one and failed, which she's miffed about, which like, fair
• Their dad is a doctor, and also super young and hot, and Mrs. Cullen can't have kids
• Also they totally all have first names which Izzy doesn't successfully attach to any of them and she's not going to ask again right now, especially since several of them are like, weird and old (which is cool, but not good for remembering them)

Izzy makes remarkably successful small talk and daydreams about the family on the other side of the cafeteria being shapeshifted unicorns or dragons, or fairies with glamoured hidden wings, even though the truth is probably something comparatively (but not really objectively) boring, like that they all have plastic surgery.  Or maybe it was top-secret, experimental plastic surgery, and Dr. Cullen rescued them all from a cabal of evil scientists, and -

One of them is looking at her, with an air of slight confusion.  Or interest.  Or annoyance, or at someone or something else in her general direction; faces are hard.

Faces are so hard especially when they're very pretty and her brain kind of shuts down about them!!

His expression changes, for the briefest moment, in a more solidly interested direction.  Then he turns his attention back to his tablemates.

Izzy tips over to whisper to Jessica, her hand over her mouth and her elbow landing on the table.  Jessica totally thinks he was looking at her!  Now the rest of the (not-ludicrously-hot) table is looking at the two of them!  Probably that was rude of Izzy or something!

She hopefully-probably recovers the opinion of her (regular, very normal, not super interesting) classmates (. . . who were nice enough to let her sit with them) and then it's time for biology.

There's exactly one empty seat.

SCORE.

. . . She didn't even say anything??  - It's probably not about her.  It's almost definitely not about her.  Even if it did happen pretty exactly as she walked up to him.

She sits down.

Paying attention to the actual class under these conditions is super hard which is fine because she already covered this at her old school!  She takes any notes but mostly she sketches.  Dragons and unicorns and fairies and - maybe the Cullens are aliens.  She doodles a little big-eyed martiany guy with a flying saucer and then scratches it out when she realizes that's not very smart to do in the event that he really is an alien.  He totally isn't, of course, but . . .

Izzy properly erases the martiany guy and his UFO, which she could and should have just done in the first place, since that's what she's done with all of the other ones so far.  (Having a notepageful of drawings is a rather more mundane form of being idiotic with your evidence, at least when you don't know the teacher; she does all of hers in the same graphite-graying corner.) The page, having been rubbed at a few too many times, rips, and Izzy semi-on-purposely jumps, the way you do to indicate that a noise startled you as much as everyone else and therefore wasn't because you were being disruptive on purpose.  As she does so, she quasi-on-purposely turns in a direction conducive to catching a glimpse of the crazy hot and possibly crazy guy.

She tears the corner the rest of the way off and scrawls Are you okay? on its flipside.  Slides it over.

It takes a couple of glances in his direction before he very deliberately lays his palms flat on the black-topped desk and produces a near-imperceptible headshake.

And then he collects his pile of textbook and notebook and pencil case, never unstacked, and powerwalks out of the classroom.

Okay.  Well, she hopes he turns out alright.  There's still 37 minutes left in the class; the teacher wants to know if Izzy (or, 'Isabella') knows anything about her lab partner's - Eugene, apparently his name is Eugene - rapid departure.  She doesn't, Mr. Banner, except that he looked sick or something, and also it's just Izzy?

For the rest of class she tries harder to take actual notes and only doodles by filling in the counters of her handwriting.  . . . And doing a simple repeating scale pattern down the left margin, when there isn't anything to write that she doesn't already know.

And then it's time for gym!  They're doing volleyball.  Izzy is not obligated to participate on her first day.

That's probably for the best given that some very distracting things just happened to her.  She didn't bring her notebook to gym so she can't draw; after five minutes of just sitting on the bleachers she asks her way into the equipment room and starts practicing juggling.

Bean bags are fine, basketballs are not fine, ouch, she lands one on her face and sends another bouncing across the room and has to run into the middle of a volleyball game to retrieve it (carefully, foot goes there there there there, always under her in the right spot, she doesn't need to trip right now) - ooh bowling pins.  Bowling pins are definitely a normal object for people to juggle, but not one she has personal experience with.  By the end of class she can get a stable pattern going, although probably not one she could keep up indefinitely.

After class one of the friendly boys (definitely either Mark or Eric) compliments her on her juggling and teases her in only a friendly-seeming way about the basketballs she sent flying.  He sort of kind of by implication asks her to teach him, which is pretty exciting!!  She's too flustered to remember to try and make specific plans but eeee someone wanting to hang out with her outside of school!  And thinking juggling is cool and acknowledging her skill in it instead of thinking she's weird and annoying!  And being a boy!  And this would be such a weird way to do the prank of having somebody pretend to ask her out so everyone can laugh at her (and everyone's been so friendly so far, seemingly genuinely) so it's probably not that but regardless she should keep it cool.

She collects her stuff and heads out to the StepSide.