Thread: Extracurricular Activities [Spider-Man -- Sigr & Virginia]

Savannah Smith was struggling. She'd put on the ugly shirt the couple who'd adopted her seemed to think was so cute, even kept her black faux-leather jacket tied around her waist until after they'd left. Like she needed to be walked to school. Admittedly there were things to be said to the principal, but she could have done it herself. This... worked, though. Awkward, shy. mourning new girl was a role she could play. It wasn't like her adoptive family wasn't nice , they were wonderful people. She remembered them vaguely, and having lived with them for a week, she understood why her mother had been such close friends with them. They gave her free reign to decorate her room, and a nice budget to pick out the kind of furniture and paint she wanted in it. They'd helped her set everything up, and complimented all her choices. She'd played along based on the things she knew they liked, and then done much the same when it came time to get new clothes. It meant a lot of her new wardrobe was things that two 'slightly out of touch but generally not fashion failure' sorts of people thought was reasonable, and she was just going to have to fix it with things that she bought on her own and had brought with her. Wasn't going to make her the sexiest and best dressed in school, but she looked normal if perhaps a little bit out of touch. Or just confident in her own choices and style, she supposed. Either way she figured people would know by the end of the day that her family life was abnormal, teachers talked and that meant that students heard. But hey, it was a nerd school. Nobody was going to give worse than she could take. In gym, she had to resist the urge to just take out one of the people on the other side in dodgeball her dad had always said that if you weren't going 100, you might as well not even bother. Then again he'd also heavily encouraged blending in, she'd just never had to do it quite like this. So it was a class of awkward fumbling the ball and feeling the stress and irritation build, letting her curls fly into her hair and generally just trying to perform at the level that these... nerds did. Not that athletic nerds weren't a thing, but the one who had been getting on her nerves? No. No, she'd probably have crushed him. And then he'd have whined and the satisfaction would have been entirely ruined. During art she sat in the back and just kept to herself, smiling at anyone who looked in her direction and just generally trying to come off as pleasant but distracted. It had been working so far, and things seemed to be going as well as could be expected until someone to her left piped up with a you're good at that. Savannah looked down at her sketchbook and then up at the darker skinned teen who'd spoken, expression friendly but confused. Excuse me? Pretending you care. You're good at it. For a minute, Savannah thought the mask was going to crack. Who the hell was this that she could just pick up on the fact that the blonde had absolutely no interest in any of this? For a moment she was anxious, but brushed it off and recovered. I heard that 'fake it till you make it' was an actual thing, so I'm giving it my best shot. That seemed to be a good enough answer, though she suspected, after spending the rest of the hour and a half carefully observing the darker skinned artist, that Michelle as she'd picked up when the teacher spoke to her actually didn't care and just liked to make observations. Perhaps specifically, she liked to make people uncomfortable, but it was hard to tell. At lunch Savannah considered sitting alone, but that seemed impractical. It would end in someone coming to talk to her, at least that was her fear. Instead she headed towards a mostly empty table that was populated by a skinny looking teen, his... maybe Filipino friend and they were definitely friends given how close they were sitting and that gal from art class who Savannah knew she had to keep an eye on. Room for another, or is the table too full? It very obviously not, and the wild haired new girl dropped down onto the bench attached to the white lunch table, tray settling with a clatter, picking a spot closer to the other girl than the two guys. She investigated the food on the tray with a little more curiosity than she probably should have, and then decided that yeah, it was probably edible. She'd been home schooled if one could call it that for years, and school food had been a distant elementary school memory until she'd gotten into the cafeteria and realized it was reality again. Delightful.