After a moment of thought, she goes to hide at the back - she hopes like hell that no-one wants the seat she's claimed. She does not want to move.

Conveniently – ish – she is actually the last to have come into the class! … People may have been listening in while she was chatting with the teacher. Hopefully that was not too embarrassing.

The teacher does the roll call, homeroom occurs presumably as it will for the rest of her school life, and then they do some calculus.

Regardless of whether it was objectively embarrassing, Joss is kind of mortified at the idea of people overhearing.

She grits her teeth through calculus, tries to adapt to the rather different environment of doing it surrounded by other people compared to being on her own. (It might be noted that she's fairly easily distracted by her fellow students shifting and talking.) It won't take too long to adapt to that...she hopes.

The students are relatively quiet; perhaps the teacher is quite willing to punish them for disrupting class. The calculus is not impossible, but she may find it challenging. People fidget aplenty.

Then the bell for end of class rings, the teacher watches them carefully but dismisses them, and Joss can go have a thrilling hour of economics!

Everyone being relatively quiet helps. Some. It is challenging. Maths in general and calculus in particular - so not her strong suit. But she gets by okay. She hangs back a little so that the first surge of people is gone after the dismissal.

Oh. Yay. She is thrilled. Another class that is not one she would be doing if she had a choice. But she can do it. So she will. The problem of being easily distracted persists, but she tries very hard not to let her attention drift too much.

It passes by.

She has English next. The classroom is not very hard to find.

English is more her style. She doesn't claim to enjoy dissecting books, but she expects she can probably blag her way better in an essay than she can with incorrect calculations.

She looks around the classroom as she steps in the door.

She can see the girl from earlier, the one she met on the steps, sitting toward the back of the room, and she's just in time to see someone reach over from nearby and swipe a notebook from that desk!

The girl from earlier, Jade, looks after the notebook, annoyed, but just sighs and looks back at her desk. The teacher seems happy to ignore them for now.

Well then. The is definitely not friendly. (And the few times Joss has interacted with people her own age, bullies were the one thing she couldn't abide.) And, well, if the teacher isn't going to do anything...

Joss does her best to appear like she hadn't noticed (and she had plenty of practice pretending not to see things), as she heads for the back of the class, and will, if no-one responds quick enough, swipe that notebook back and drop it back onto Jade's desk. Without a word, as though she hadn't just done that.

The thief blinks, then turns to look at Joss, seeming affronted.

Jade puts her head in her palm, looking like she might want to sigh, and her other arm goes over the returned notebook. "… Thanks."

There's a seat free next to her.

Joss ignores the thief and points to the seat. "Do you mind if I take that seat?" It's polite to ask after all. And after a beat, much quieter: "You're welcome."

"Feel free."

The thief continues to look affronted. "You can't just do that!" she says.

Jade sighs.

Joss takes the seat, and then leans forward to give the thief a mock confused look. "Why not? You did first. Unless this is one of those one rule for one and another for the rest, and I'm really bad at remembering which rule applies to me. So...I don't think this conversation has any merit whatsoever. I'm gonna stop talking to you now." And leans back as though the matter is closed.

The thief manages to look even more affronted. She turns to the teacher, maybe considering trying to argue a point, but he takes no notice of her and simply starts talking about today's subject material.

Well...that's probably going to be a problem later. Joss decides she doesn't have the time to worry about it (but she will anyway), and tries very hard to pay enough attention.

It would appear they're taking a moment to focus on the various dialects and pronunciations of the English language, most particularly the various dialects in North America.

Jade looks interested, at least briefly.

Joss manages to listen for a little more time, and then gets distracted (and a little homesick) thinking about British English dialects. (She ends up doodling British slang down the margin of her notebook, when she hasn't managed to keep her attention on what she's supposed to be doing.)

The teacher references some essay they did last year, during the explanation, and Jade flips to a page of her notebook that seems related to the topic at hand.

It has a few red marks, in particular around what one might recognize as the British variants of words.

Joss squints at it, tries not to read too much, although...

She scribbles a quick note in the corner of her page underneath 'geet walla'.

'Can I get a copy of that essay for context or is it not that important? Teacher got a problem with Brit spelling?' She taps her pencil first slightly closer to Jade to get her attention and then on the note.

Jade tilts her head at the note, and flips to the back of the notebook to write a message of her own: 'Not too important, can copy anyway. Yep.'

'Thank you,' she scribbles back. 'Grab it later if that's okay?'

'Library has a copier.'

And they should probably stop before the earlier-thief can complain to the teacher about their note-making.

And Joss wrenches her attention back to the lesson, and manages to mostly keep it there for the remainder of the lesson.

The saga proceeds, as the earlier girl goes over to a friend and seems to rather energetically talk about something, indicating Jade and Joss as she does so. The friend then glares in their direction.

Jade seems quite happy to ignore them both.

Then Joss will ignore them both as well, although she will try to make sure she remembers what they look like.

Making enemies probably wasn't what her father meant by 'be normal'. Still, she has the fun that is the rest of today to look forward to.

Where next?