Fine Art chapter 1 re-write

[jaebility]

Fine Art (zillionth draft)
Working on: First chapter! Getting Daisuke to school and into the art club.
Word count for this chapter: 1172

For kashiichan!

It wasn’t like blowing up buildings or punching dragons right in the face, but the first week of wearing uniforms and having a shitload of homework was OK, I guess. Me, Takeru, and Hikari rode the train together, which sucked because it meant dealing with Takeru’s bright and early cheerfully annoying existence all the way to school, but which was also awesome because Hikari in the morning was like eating a bowel of sunshine for breakfast. We all got into high school together, even though Jun said that the only way I’d pass the entrance exam was if I dressed up Ken and made him take it in my place. So what if that’s practically what happened? There was no way I was going to let Takeru get Hikari all to himself - And it was the same school that Taichi-sempai had gone and Ishida-sempai, too, before he got too cool for it and quit to become a kick-ass rock star. So what if it meant that Ken had to sleepover for practically a whole month while he helped me study? I made it in totally fair and square, no matter what Jun said.

That’s what I was thinking about, about Ken staying over everyday and all night, while the train rolled us to school. I pulled out my phone and flipped it open. He hadn’t sent me a text since the day school started and hadn’t called me since a week before that.He was probably busy with homework and clubs and interviews and smart stuff.

“Daisuke! Stop daydreaming and do your homework!”

“Huh?”

Hikari nudged my shoulder and pointed to the open notebook in my lap. “I can’t believe it’s only the second week and you’re already falling behind. You need to work really hard now, Daisuke.”

“Yeah or else I’m going to tell Ken on you.” Takeru grinned and bent down to point at quesiton fifteen. “The answer’s four point eight kilometers an hour. I remember getting stuck on that one last night.”

I wrote it down to fill the empty space, figuring any answer was better than none. “Cool. Next?”

Takeru rubbed his fingers through his hair. “Uh, I think it’s sixty even. Sixty kilometers an hour.”

Hikari opened her bad and pulled out a folder with yellow flowers on it and carefully removed a sheet of paper. I snorted and grabbed it from her. “You’ve got homework too? So my bad habits finally rubbing off on you?”

"Hardly," she said with a giggle to soften the blow of the insult. "Actually, I was just looking over the club list for this year. I'm thinking about joining the astronomy club, since Miyako-chan’s doing that at her school and we might be able to meet up, but the tennis club looks good, too, and I know that Sora-sempai has had a lot of fun with them." She sighed, blowing some strands of hair that had escaped her butterfly barrette. "Or maybe the art club. Even if I’m terrible at drawing, I hear that they do a lot of photography too, and it’d be cool to get back into that. And the art club only meets twice a week, so I could even join something else."

"The art club? Damn," I said as I eyed the list., "Won't that make you too busy? Didn't you want to get a job, too?"

She sighed again, and grabbed the piece of paper and tucked it away. "Well, I could use the extra money," she said slowly. "But, mostly," she paused and looked quickly around before lowering her voice. I leaned in to share her secret, inhaling the flowery scent of her hair. "I want to make the most of my free time, now that I - that we - have some. I want to make up for everything I missed in elementary school and junior high. So now we have the chance to be normal kids. It's such a relief, don't you guys think?"

Her brown eyes flickered back to her paper and we both stared at it like any minute it was going to jump up and do a dance routine. I felt the vaguely unpleasant feeling of the foundation crumbling, an earthquake or a landslide. I looked up at Takeru but he was looking out the window at the trees blurring outside. I opened my mouth to ask them about the Digital World, about the rest of the gang, about how Hikari didn’t mean she wanted to ditch all of that for clubs, did she? But the train pulled into our stop and I crammed everything back into my bag and we all got out. And the Takeru brought up his brother and how his bass player blew up another amp, which was too good of a story to interrupt.

When the morning routine of greeting our teacher and waving my hand to prove I totally hadn't stayed home all day in my underwear playing Super Dragon Fighters Rockets 2, fulfilling the requirement of attending class had finished, I glanced over at Takeru, who sat a row to the side and a desk in front of me. I scribbled a note to him asking what he thought Hikari meant, but when I tossed it at his head, it just bounced off his hair and landed by his foot. He’d be terrible at soccer with reflexes like that.

She probably meant that it was a pain in the ass to get to the Digital World, I thought as our homeroom teacher started droning about class duties. And it was. It was harder to sneak into the computer lab and since Koushiro got into some insane college where he practically had to turn into a computer himself, we didn’t have someone around to monitor all the crazy shit that the Digital World did. Portals slammed closed and the didn’t open again for days, some moved so you got dropped in the ocean instead of on the beach, and some disappeared completely. I nodded to myself. That’s probably what Hikari meant. There was no way she regretted all the awesome stuff we’d done. That’s be insane - The Digital World was the greatest place on earth. Or not on earth. Wherever the hell it was. Me and Ken spent a ton of time there in junior high, since it was easier to get meet there then deal with the trains and buses from getting from my place to his apartment. We’d go and then fight some bad-ass flying elephant or something or then do races with the Kamemon and totally wipe the floor with them. Sometimes Taichi-sempai would come along and we’d recruit a bunch of Digimon and play soccer. But whatever we did, it was awesome.

A few times the whole gang managed to meet up. Even Ishida, who did concerts and commercials and was trying to get into acting, too. And even Kido-sempai, who almost cried the time the portal dumped us in the water.