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Chapter 7 Rotten House

"Stop it!" Zoe hissed under her breath, covering her paper from Ivy, who was leaning over her own desk to look at Zoe's test page. "I think you should look at your own paper!"

"I think you stink!" Ivy snapped back; she sat back in her chair and crossed her arms with a huff.

"You're the one who doesn't brush her teeth."

"What?" Ivy's mouth hung open—absolutely flabbergasted. "Yeah, what's the point? It's just gonna get dirty again."

"That's disgusting."

"You don't take showers!"

"I hate water!" Zoe protested.

"No one hates water."

A loud cough came from the front of the room. Their teacher had stood up from his chair and glared at them at the back of the room.

"I thought this was a free country," Ivy grumbled as she went back to her bored slouch, absently doodling on the sides of the test paper. Soon enough, though, she had begun to fidget and bounce in her seat.

Noticing movement out of the corner of her left eye. A quick turn of her head revealed that Ivy had her hands running through her hair in a frustrated fervor. She looked at Zoe, her eyes wide. "PLEASE?" they seemed to scream at her. Zoe glanced up, seeing that the teacher was greatly distracted by something on his desk.

Silently moving her own desk closer to Ivy's, she placed her test paper near the edge of the table so Ivy could get a better look at it. "This is the only time."

"Thanks!" Ivy said with a raspy whisper. "After class, we need to go see Colson about something."

"Why?"

"LADIES!" A booming voice came from the front of the room. The teacher stood, fists clenched. "You will both fail if I hear another peep out of either of you!" He didn't seem to notice that their desks had migrated together.

Ivy bit down hard on her own tongue to stop herself from laughing. Zoe's face turned ghostly white, and she put her head down and continued feverishly working on her paper.

"Colson's gonna agree!"

"Ivy, no," Zoe said as they walked through the classroom doors. "That's a terrible idea."

"Why?"

"He's not going to do anything you ask him."

"Really? I'm sure he would!"

"I've known him a long time. He won't."

"Uh, okay," she extended the last word. "Well, what if we do a mission instead? A real dangerous one! One that'll make us tough and get us a star!"

Zoe sighed, "We aren't going to find one like that. We're just going to have to pick up trash or, worse, kitchen duty," she shivered at the thought.

"You'll see. Colson will be on my side." Ivy had a sly smile on her face. "I, too, can see the future. We will get a mission on that board. You'll see."

"Ivy, that's not how that works," Colson said while stuffing the rest of his books in his bag. They were inside his dorm room, somewhere they shouldn't have been in the first place, but Ivy had dragged Zoe along. He sat down in his desk chair with a huff. He turned to his desk, fiddling with a sleek black camera. Colson picked up an almost microscopic screwdriver, squinting at the camera's underside, looking for a screw. "We can do them if you wanna make a quick buck, but it's not gonna get you any closer to ranking up."