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“He seems nice,” Taylor said dryly, glancing after the colonel as they approached campus.
“Look, there,” Isabela commanded, pointing at two large buildings on either side of the main walkway. “Boys’ dorm and girls’ dorm, okay? You’ll be rooming with me and Ran. We’re on the third floor. It’s not bad. Good light. I hope you won’t be dirty.”
“I’m . . . no, I’m not,” Taylor replied. “I won’t be.”
“Perfect.”
Isabela pointed out the other important landmarks—the administration building where they took their classes and where the faculty held office hours, the student center where meals were served, the gym, the military-grade training center. She gestured towards the cul-de-sac-style clump of small cabins set a distance away from the dorms, explaining that the faculty lived there. Taylor’s neck started to hurt from all the head-turning, Isabela’s finger speeding around the grounds.
“How do classes work?” Taylor asked.
“They are boring,” Isabela replied.
“Not really what I asked, but okay.”
Isabela sighed. “They’ll give you some tests. Sit you down with an academic adviser. Figure out if you are smart or dumb. Which is it, by the way?”
Taylor was taken aback. “Which . . . um? Smart? I guess.”
“Hmpf. Arrogant,” Isabela replied. Taylor couldn’t tell if she was joking. The fast-talking Brazilian had already moved on, lowering her voice. “If you make it seem like you’re uneducated, they will give you easier classes. I took algebra in Rio, now I’m taking it again. Very simple.”
“Oh,” Taylor said, nodding slowly. “I, um, I don’t think I’ll lie.”
“Suit yourself,” Isabela replied. “There is a lot of homework. They like keeping us busy. At first, I thought, why would I do this stupid shit, huh? What can they do? Suspend me? Call my parents? We are basically prisoners. What can they do to us?”
“What can they do?” she asked.
Isabela tossed her hair. She recalled her first few weeks at the Academy, when she had pushed the buttons of every authority in place, trying to find out how much she could get away with. Her experiments had paid off.
“First, they will take away privileges,” Isabela said, ticking off her fingers. “Make the recreation center off-limits, exclude you from movie night, allow you to eat only the boring food in the dining hall. The chef here is very good, surprisingly, so that one hurt a little.” Isabela watched Taylor, gauging her reaction.
“Okay . . . ,” Taylor replied, slightly amused by how Isabela puffed up with pride at her tales of misbehavior.
“After all that, I still wouldn’t do the work they asked of me,” Isabela bragged. “I was ready to live like a monk. There’s a decent beach here if you hike down the cliff. I figured I could spend my time down there until all the boring shit was over and they sent me off to be in Earth Garde. But then they started to punish my roommate and my classmates. Until Isabela does her work, they said, the student center will be off-limits to everyone.”
“Oh, wow,” Taylor said. “So you gave in?”
Isabela dramatically pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “They found my weakness. I could not stand being unpopular.”
Taylor’s shoulders slumped when Isabela finished her story. She still held out hope that her new reality would dissolve like a bad dream and she’d find herself back on her farm in South Dakota. Isabela pinched her cheek as they approached the student center. Taylor flinched.
“Don’t put on such a sad face,” Isabela chided. “It makes you ugly.”
Taylor blinked, startled. “Um, sorry.”
“I shouldn’t tell you these stories. I’m a bad influence. Anyway, life here is very boring, more boring than you’d expect considering the things we can do. Homework, at least, helps pass the time.” She squinted at Taylor. “You don’t want to be here, do you?”
Taylor met her gaze. “Is it that obvious?”
“Maybe you were thinking about getting yourself kicked out, hmm?” Isabela asked in a knowing singsong. “Don’t bother. You’re Earth Garde now.”
Taylor noticed a tall woman emerging from the nearby administration building. She was probably in her thirties, although it was hard to tell with her wrinkle-free mahogany skin. The woman carried a tablet computer, her fingers dancing across the screen as she walked towards the faculty housing.
Isabela followed Taylor’s gaze. “That’s Lexa. She’s in charge of cybersecurity or something. Later, you’ll have to meet with her and give her access to all your social media accounts and emails.”
“What? Why?”
Isabela rolled her eyes. “For our own good, they say,” she replied, then lowered her voice. “I think she is secretly Professor Nine’s sexy older girlfriend.”
“Who’s Professor Nine?”
“Ha! You will see.”
Isabela led Taylor into the student center. The two-level atrium was clean and brightly lit. At one end of the room was an open kitchen, a few hot trays out for midday snacking. Long tables filled the room, with smaller booths on the balcony level. About thirty students were present, most of them a crowd of young men watching a soccer game on a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, although there were some students trying to study quietly on the second level.
“You said you came from South Dakota, yes?” Isabela prodded the quiet newbie, trying to wring some small talk out of her. “They made me learn all the states in geography. That’s one of the boring middle ones, yes?”
Taylor’s mouth tightened. “Some people think so.”
“Lots of cows and stuff, right?” Isabela didn’t wait for Taylor’s defense of South Dakota, continuing on obliviously. “Did you have cliques in your little high school?”
“No,” Taylor said with a tired roll of her eyes. “We Midwest barbarians haven’t learned such complex social concepts yet.”
Isabela picked out an orange from a fruit bowl, then raised an eyebrow at Taylor. She held up her arm, reminding Taylor of the bracelet charged with Simon’s Legacy. “Sorry, the translator doesn’t do well with sarcasm. Also, if I seem rude, please understand, it’s just the language barrier.”
“Oh. Oh no, you’re fine,” Taylor replied half truthfully. “I’m just exhausted.”
Isabela smiled. There was nothing wrong with Simon’s Legacy-powered translator. Isabela punctured the orange with her fingernail, peeled it and offered Taylor a slice. She gestured towards the group of boys watching soccer, noting with no small amount of satisfaction that a few of them had turned to subtly check her out.
“The boys here, they are probably the same as the boys where you’re from. Dirty and stupid.” Isabela waved at the group watching her and Taylor, then led her new roommate back towards the door. “They all gravitate together like smelly, immature meteors. But there are some differences. The Americans tend to hang out more with the Americans. We foreigners outnumber you here and it makes you all—” She slipped into a cartoonish southern accent. “Y’all, hmm? It makes y’all uncomfortable. Am I making you uncomfortable, pard’ner?”
“We don’t all talk like that,” Taylor replied with a raised eyebrow.
Isabela shrugged blithely. “Sounds like it to me. Anyway, the ones designated for combat—that means they have violent powers—they also tend to cling to each other, like the star athletes might, always trying to one-up each other. They are our jocks.”
“Jocks I get,” Taylor said.
“The ones who are close to graduating, they will pursue you the most, always flirting, because they think it’s their last chance to get some before they go off to be Peacekeepers, you know? Pigs! Well, some aren’t so bad.” Isabela wrinkled her nose. “I am supposed to be showing you where the library is, but this is the stuff that really matters, yes?”
Taylor was surprised to find that she was smiling. Short of slapping the girl, there was no other way to respond to Isabela’s irrepressible bluntness. Also, it was good to talk about mundane t
hings—like boys—instead of contemplating the stranger side of her new surroundings.
“You sound like you’re making a nature documentary or something,” Taylor said. “Like, the lady who went to live with gorillas.”
“Sometimes it feels that way!” Isabela replied with a dazzling smile. “Observation is my hobby.”
Isabela led Taylor out of the student center and took her down the walkway towards the training area.
“We girls, our cliques are much different. Many get tight with their roommates, whispering secrets long into the night.” She flashed Taylor a sharp look to communicate that this would be out of the question. “There are the goody-goodies who do all their work. I thought maybe you were like this at first, but now I’m starting to think there’s more to you. Maybe a secret rebel.”
Taylor chuckled. “No. I’m definitely a goody-goody.”
“That’s okay. At least you aren’t the brooding type. Like Ran. We get a lot of those, too. Boys and girls. Simon calls them little Bruce Waynes, but this is a reference I do not understand.”
“That’s Batman. His parents died and he became a superhero.”
“Yes, yes, I know. I choose not to understand these silly pop culture phrases. Everything is like . . .” She shifted into a stoner accent. “Whoa, man, this is just like that movie or that TV show or who cares.”
Isabela popped another orange slice in her mouth, tossed the peel away on the lawn and began ticking off fingers again.
“Then there are the artsy types, the hippies who want to use their Legacies to fix the world, the ones like me who don’t give a shit and—oh, the tweebs.”
“What’s that?”
