<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/4b/02/42/4b024225317d660c10c1354e6c9c80be.jpg)</div><em>Well</em>, Tara thought to herself as she walked the over-manicured grounds of Nevermore.<em>This is fersher NOT where I imagined myself being right about now.</em>Not that she'd had Major Life Plans, but she'd figured she'd finish Senior year, party righteously after prom, bum around for six months working at a cool book shop or an overpriced coffee joint, then go to college for something mildly useful and interesting, like being a Veterinary Assistant or something.<br/><br/>Instead, she'd ended up with a mindfuck of a gap year, a new look, a creepy story to tell- and a very uncertain status. It was cool of her Mom and Dad to manage to get her crammed into a class at Nevermore (THE school for freaks and freakettes like herself), but the whole thing was kind of AWK-warrrrrd. Who was it who said teenagers thought they were immortal?  Well, she'd ended up with the real thing, bay-bee, though it maybe wasn't the best trade she'd ever made. And although she was, in theory, a Senior once again, by age at least, the curriculum at Weirdo High was bizarre and different enough from anything she'd studied before that there was some question as to when she'd actually qualify to graduate. She didn't think the state Regents had ever pictured quite this scenario.<br/><br/>Oh well. It wasn't as if she was pressed for time. Not anymore.<br/><br/>Nevermore allowed a certain amount of self-guided course load building, so most of her stuff was about 'what and why Outcasts are'- history (she'd always sucked with names dates and stuff, but the connections between happenings always fascinated her) and psychology (voted<strong>Most Likely To Listen To Your Problems </strong>in the Yearbook). That plus the required blahblahblah filled up a lot of her time, but she'd managed to cram in a couple of magic classes, too. One she figured she probably wouldn't have any real use for, though you never really knew when you were dead what would be useful in your 'life', since it sounded like mostly hands-on magic. Witch Shop, sort of. The other one, though, Afterlife Studies...that was right up her alley. She really, really wanted to know exactly what had happened to her.<br/><br/>Speaking of alleys, and being up them? Tara was surprised how normal most of her fellow students looked- and how cute a lot of them were!  She'd never been a grind, had always made sure she had plenty of time for the finer and funner parts of living, and she certainly didn't intend to let being technically<strong>un</strong>living slow her down. So she smiled and nodded to people, and watched their reactions. Appearance-wise, she was for sure one of the outliers, which was kind of cool. Got her noticed.<br/><br/>Dabbing a bit more sandalwood essence behind her ears and at the hollows of her narrow shoulders (she couldn't smell herself, or anything, really, but she'd been advised that her<em>eau de Morgue</em>was kind of a buzzkill, so she worked at covering it up), she slipped through the large doors of the main classroom building, wiggling between and amongst the larger students. Unpacking hadn't been a big deal, and her roomie hadn't been there when she'd arrived, so she was early, but again, time was not of the essence.  She wandered the halls for a few minutes, checking out the the seriously gloomy and old-school artwork before hunting up the room her general magic class was in.  There were already more than a few folks there, some of whom as she entered gave her The Stare that she was getting used to, but whatever. Beasts in glass houses, and all that. Planting herself in a chair towards the back, she looked around, and then focused on the gorgeous older redhead down front, who almost assuredly had to be the professor.<br/><br/><em>Oh, right. First day, lech on a teacher. That's just brilliant.  Down, girl!<br/><br/>She<strong> is</strong> a hottie, though... </em><br/>