Not Today

Naoko was done for the day, which was a blessing in itself. Just because she was good at school--and she was, thanks to an excellent work ethic--didn't mean she necessarily enjoyed school. No, she was pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. She liked being good, and she liked some of her classes, but some of them were just agonizingly boring.

She was on her way out when she spotted a change of flow. Someone was interrupting the usual traffic pattern of the hall, and that normally meant either a newcomer who was so physically large that they impeded the flow of traffic, or it meant that someone new was standing perfectly still in the middle of the hallway, lost and unsure of where to go.

Naoko paused for a moment, reminding herself that she was trying not to stick her nose in other people's business, and then decided it really wouldn't hurt to help.

Just this once, of course.

Naoko cut across the flow of traffic to find a boy around her age standing in the middle, looking lost.

"New?" She asked immediately, raising her eyebrows.

Naoko let out a rather unladylike snort when the boy said that he wasn't lost. He obviously was. He was standing in the middle of the hallway, sighing and looking around. Of course he was lost.

"Then where are you going, exactly?" Naoko said, raising an eyebrow. The polite thing to do would be to play along somehow, but while Naoko could be pretty dang friendly, she wasn't going to indulge someone who was lying to her face. And if he wasn't lost, then something else was going on, and that wasn't her business anyway.

But he was definitely lost, so it didn't matter. Everyone who wasn't born on the island got lost over and over.

Naoko rolled her eyes at the response, folding her arms over her chest.

"There's no need to be like that, you know," she protested. "Everyone is new at some point, and everyone gets lost, so if you just tell me what you're trying to find, I'll point the way and the problem's solved."

She didn't really see the point in acting stubborn. Why not just admit he was lost, get help, and move on with his life?

Honestly, people could be so irritating.

Aha. So she was right.

Naoko did her best not to smile, turning away to hide it as she gestured the correct way.

"Assuming you want to get out of the building, the fastest way is that way. But if you're trying to get back towards the front of the school, it'd be a bit faster to go that way, so you don't have to go the whole way around the building," Naoko explained, swinging around to point the opposite direction. "The school's really big, so it's easy to get lost.

"Did you already go by the administration office then?"

"Really," Naoko confirmed. She didn't see the point in lying to people, especially not when he was new. A lot of people who were new to the island had less-than-enjoyable pasts, and Naoko wasn't going to make things worse by bullying them just because they were less than polite.

"Well, if you want me to point your way back there to get a map, I can. The maps are really useful, since the school more or less assumes everyone is coming in from the outside and isn't familiar with the school grounds." Which was fair enough, because it was more or less true. The number of students who were natives to the island was vanishingly small, and while Naoko proudly counted herself among their number, she didn't have any illusions about how many there were.