The First Day

September the first happened to be a Monday. Harmony woke up early, even before her mom had left for work, and asked her to send a message to Sugarcane's mom saying that she was leaving. She triple-checked her school bag, and set off for Sugarcane's.

"Have fun at school!" Frosting said as she left. "Be safe!"

Harmony arrived just in time to see Sugarcane coming out from her apartment building. They greeted each other and continued on their way.

The guard was no longer present at the intersection. Instead, a barrier was set up on the lane, and a row of traffic police hurried around, directing the flood of cars that had taken over.

"Don't loiter!" Some of them yelled. "Drop off and go!"

Some of the students were pulling huge suitcases around. "How come?" Harmony asked.

"High-schoolers," Sugarcane replied. "They stay in the dorms. They could've separated the campuses, though. Or at least use a different gate. Oh well."

"Don't cross the road here," an officer standing near the intersection put up an arm in front of them. "Turn right on this side and cross in front of the school entrance."

They did as she told them. At the entrance, the car gate was completely open as high-schoolers carted their suitcases in. Someone, presumably an upperclassman, was holding up a big sign that said "New students come here!" And they did just that.

"Are you seventh graders?" The upperclassman asked.

"Yes," they replied. Harmony twisted her backpack to the front, about to take out her ID card.

"Head right in," the upperclassman said. "Turn right, and you'll see a tent where you can check which class you're in."

"Where did all the ID checks go?" Harmony wondered as they walked.

"Probably come after. There are so many police here I don't think anyone's gonna pull anything."

A teacher sat behind the table under the tent. The girls handed over their ID cards and stated their names.

"Harmony… you're in class five. Sugarcane — also class five!"

"Yes!" Harmony jumped excitedly. "We're in the same class!"

"You'd wager Sky pulled strings?"

Grade seven class five was fortunately on the first floor of the main building. It was dimly-lit, with floor tiles that had once been white. At the front, the teacher's desk sat on an elevated platform, where a huge stack of boxes lay, probably textbooks, waiting to be handed out. The blackboard hung on the wall, the bottom groove caked in chalk dust. The projector screen was retracted, leaving the default blue screen blasted straight onto the blackboard. Forty or so wiggly, rusted desks cramped into the small space, and some kids were already sitting in them. Some lifted their heads as Harmony and Sugarcane walked in, but their interests faded when they realized they were only fellow students, not the teacher.

Sugarcane found two spots for them right next to the door and they sat down next to each other. A girl with thick, long hair was right behind Harmony.

Sugarcane turned around and said "hi" to her. She lifted her head, and that was when Harmony noticed her eyes were of different colors, one blue and one pink.

Heterochromia, or two souls? Her ears were drooped so Harmony couldn't check the color of her inner ear.

And then she saw, on her forehead, she had a third eye. Yellow, with a black iris.

"Hi," she said back.

"I'm Sugarcane. This is Harmony. Nice to meet you!"

"Nice to meet you too. I'm Cosmo."

Cosmo. "That's a pretty name," Harmony said.

She felt a weird tingling sensation in her mind as Cosmo looked at her. It felt familiar, though she couldn't remember when she last felt it.

"Thanks. Harmony is a good name too." Her third eye blinked. So it really was an eye.

"What's up with your eyes, if you don't mind?" Sugarcane asked. "I've never seen someone with different colored eyes before."

"Oh," Cosmo flashed a smile. "I have two souls."

"Whoa. How?"

"Apparently I was supposed to be twins. But I ate the other kid or something," Cosmo rolled her eyes, including the third, which she pointed a finger to. "Probably how I got this thing too. I can't actually see out of it. It's just there, being creepy."

"I don't think it's creepy at all!" Sugarcane said.

"Really," Cosmo crossed her arms.

"Well, maybe not," Sugarcane admitted. "But now I know what it is."

A new student arrived at the door. "Is this class five?" He asked.

"Sure is," Sugarcane immediately turned towards him. "I'm Sugarcane, this is Harmony, and this…"

"Cosmo."

"Hi, I'm Sunny." He walked over to the seat next to Cosmo, behind Sugarcane. "Mind if I sit here?"

"Not at all," Cosmo said. She scooted over a little bit, the chair making a horrible scraping sound against the floor as Sunny settled down.

They spent the rest of the time chatting. Well, Sugarcane, Cosmo, and Sunny at least. Harmony didn't speak a lot; she just watched. They caught Sunny up to Cosmo's eye situation. Sunny lived about an hour's drive away, and Cosmo had to take the subway to and from school. They both envied how Harmony and Sugarcane lived so close, but Harmony could tell that Cosmo realized what this said about their parents and didn't bring the topic up again.

The classroom slowly filled up.

At eight o'clock sharp, a teacher walked inside and the chatter died down. It was none other than Sky Elmwood Dazzle himself, holding a cup of coffee that said "#1 teacher."

"Good morning, class five!" He said cheerfully, setting the cup down on the table.

"Sky definitely pulled strings," Harmony whispered to Sugarcane.

"No I didn't," Sky had apparently heard that. "They go off by who went to whose homes. And that means I had met all of you before. Nice to meet you again, and I hope we have a great three years together.

"Now, I'd like all of you to get in a line outside of the classroom. We're going to the soccer field for the opening ceremony."

Some kids audibly groaned, but a line was quickly assembled. Sky led them to the soccer field and placed them between classes four and six. Luckily enough, the sun was behind them, so they didn't have to stare into it as the principal gave his speech.

Harmony stood right behind Sugarcane. The principal was a middle-aged man. Harmony supposed he was also in the MSS, though he wasn't wearing a uniform, but a suit instead, which means he didn't have a hat on, exposing his bald head for all to see. They couldn't make out a word he was speaking, so they just stared and laughed at his head.

"You see that patch of light on the wall? It moves around." Sugarcane pointed. "His head reflected the light over!"

Harmony snickered.

"Hey," came a voice behind them. Harmony turned in horror to find Sky standing right next to her. "As a man with little hair myself, I didn't appreciate that. You're not gonna be seeing the principal every day like you do me and I'm worried." He tipped his hat up to reveal a mohawk, with the other parts of his head shaved to the scalp. "Once you're done laughing about this, I hope you'll leave me alone for the rest of our acquaintance."

"Sorry, sir," Sugarcane said, and Harmony quickly followed suit.

After they returned to the air-conditioning of the classroom, Sky unpacked the box on the table. It contained a stack of cards.

"Here are your student cards. Come up here and find which one has your name on it. You'll be needing this to swipe into the school from now on, as well as the cafeteria."

Sugarcane went up first and found both of their cards. She also went up when Sky asked for hands in helping him give everyone their textbooks.

Harmony soon amassed a big pile. Language and literature, math, physics, chemistry, biology, geography… The "science" class in elementary school had been dismembered, I see… And politics. That was new. She spent a good while writing her name and class number down on all of them. Sugarcane settled back in her seat and did the same.

At last, Sky had one final announcement to make.

"Tomorrow you will have an entrance exam," he said.

Voices of "what?" "no!" and "aaaarrrrgggghhhhh…" echoed throughout the room.

"Don't worry! It's just here to see where everyone's starting from. We're not even gonna return it back to you after we grade it. Don't be stressed about it."

"Oh no," Harmony said, perhaps a little too loudly. "They're gonna separate us! These classes are temporary; they're gonna split us into new classes based on the test results!"

"Isn't that illegal for public schools?" Sugarcane replied.

"Exactly!" Sky raised his voice. "That's why that's not what we're doing! You're all staying in this class. We just need to know who's a Math Olympiad kid and who can't count to ten on their fingers! Although," he added, "I hope everyone can count to ten here."

"What subjects are gonna be on the test?" Cosmo asked.

"I don't know. I hadn't seen the questions. But they could be anything. There's bound to be questions about things you never heard of before, and that's okay."

"Do you have any preparation materials?" Sunny asked.

"No. It's just an assessment of your current level, not how well you can cram."

"We should cram the new textbooks, got it," Cosmo said.

"That's not — whatever," Sky threw his hands up. "Just make sure to get enough sleep."

On that note they were dismissed. It was only eleven o'clock. They packed up the books — the backpack was visibly heavier — and waved goodbye to Cosmo and Sunny at the gate. Harmony invited Sugarcane to her home for lunch, but Sugarcane said her mom had already made lunch for her.

"How did you even know that?"

"Oh, she texted me."

"How?"

"Wait, I never told you? I have a phone now. For middle school." Sugarcane pulled it out of her pocket. It was modern-looking, perhaps the latest model of StarPhone, and had an adorable phone case featuring kittens and puppies.

"Awww, no fair! My parents didn't even mention giving me a phone."

"Then you can bring it up. Tell them it's dangerous for you to walk twenty minutes to and from school every day with no way to contact them."

"You're right, I should do that." Harmony said. "Are you worried about the test?"

"The entrance test? No, why?"

"What if I do badly on it?"

"You won't. It's just an entrance exam, c'mon. How hard can it be?"

They waved each other goodbye at Sugarcane's apartment building.

During lunch, Harmony freaked out again to her parents about the test.

"Well, that's going to become the norm in middle school," Frosting said. "You're also going to have midterms as well as finals."

"Any test is an opportunity to learn from your mistakes," Entity added.

"But they're not even gonna return our papers to us! We won't even know what we did wrong!"

"That just makes it matter less," Frosting assured her. "Do you want to play with Sugarcane in the afternoon? I can call her mom."

"Oh yeah, about that. Sugarcane has a phone now."

"You're not getting one," Frosting said.

"But what if an accident happens on the way to school?"

"You've been walking to school for quite a while now. You're going to be fine. If you give me Sugarcane's number I can contact her directly."

Harmony looked at Entity expectantly.

"Your mother's right," he said. "You don't need a phone." The rest of lunch continued in silence.

When she was done, Frosting called Sugarcane's mom for the kids to meet, and returned to work for the afternoon. Entity went to their bedroom to nap, leaving Harmony to pout alone on the sofa. Eventually she got up to meet Sugarcane.

"She won't get me one," Harmony said as soon as Sugarcane opened the door.

"That sucks."

"Can you send her a text so she can get your number?"

"Come inside first."

They headed straight into Sugarcane's room and sent the text, although Harmony knew Frosting won't see it until she had gone off work.

On her desk, the new textbooks were strewn about, all of them open on unit one.

"Have you been studying?" Harmony asked. She hadn't even taken the books out of her backpack.

"Kind of. But I keep forgetting stuff as soon as I read it."

"I haven't even opened them," Harmony admitted. She grabbed the nearest book and looked at it. It was chemistry, open on a diagram showing the structure of an atom.

"What's an atom?"

"It's, uh, it's like a thing. That has these things inside it," Sugarcane pointed to the diagram.

Harmony set the chemistry book down and grabbed the physics one. Stuff about the three laws of Isaac Isaac Hannah, because apparently people liked naming kids after themselves back then. Funny things, but Harmony could understand none of it.

"I'll be fried in the exam tomorrow," Harmony said.

"Me too," Sugarcane followed.

"But you've been studying. I haven't done anything."

"Eh, fair."

Harmony reached for the chemistry book again and turned it to page one, reading from the introduction.

"Do you want to draw?" Sugarcane was holding their doodle books.

"I kinda wanna study. Can't you study with me?"

"But I've been studying since I got back home. I'm tired."

Harmony tried to focus on the books, but eventually she settled to play their usual things with Sugarcane because the textbook was too boring. Then she thought of something.

"When I was talking to the Cosmo kid, I felt this weird thing in my head. I remember feeling it before. Have you?"

"Oh, that. She's a mind-reader."

"That's it!" Harmony remembered. The feeling came from your mind being read.

"Most mind-readers won't let you feel that, though," Sugarcane said. "Maybe she just hasn't been trained."

Harmony wondered whether Cosmo had heard her thoughts. "I bet she thinks I'm weird and offensive now."

"You're fine."

Harmony sighed and didn't continue the conversation.

Late into the afternoon, Sugarcane's phone buzzed. She immediately picked it up.

"It's your mom!" She said. "She just got off work and she wants you to go home."

"Alright then," Harmony said. "See you tomorrow!"

"Bye!"

On the way home, the wave of anxiety that Harmony had been suppressing resurfaced. Sugarcane knows about the structure of an atom now, and she doesn't know anything. Why can't she be smarter and more hardworking? Like her?

She told this to Frosting at dinner.

"Darling, just go to bed early," she said. "When you finish the exam tomorrow, you'll see that there's nothing to worry about."

"It's not about the exam," Harmony shook her head.

"Then what is it about?"

Harmony didn't know how to word it, so she just left it at that.