Sitting in a black beanbag, trying to brush her hair and not slide onto her back, Dusk was also trying not to think about Hanson. She was, however, not really successful.

Ever since she'd realized that the guy in the video wasn't a girl, she'd had a crush on him. Not an all-over-powering heart symphony, she just thought he was really, really cute. With him being almost a year younger, though, she'd tried to ignore it. She could totally forget about him if she wanted to, she could be, and was, very able to think that he looked ridiculous sometimes, but whenever she saw him fixing those killer blue eyes on something out of this world... She scowled. I am NOT the swooning type, so just shut up, she told herself. But I'm going to meet him soon...

Shaking her head at herself, she managed to work her way out of the very slumped position she was in, and walked over to the dresser where the stereo stood next to the TV. She picked up the remote, but changed her mind and pressed the stereo's 'play' button. Expecting 'Thinking of You', she almost groaned when she heard the powerful opening chords to an entirely different song.

Why was it always like that? Even the boyfriends she'd had for real had never managed to fill the mold of her dreams. Somehow... She sharply cut off the trail of her thoughts and pressed 'next', already while doing it realizing what the next song was.

Sighing, she sat back up and looked around for her backpack. Never the enthusiastic scholar, she'd been slipping a little lately. Her science teacher was, in his own words, "hurt and disappointed at your disinterest". Of course, since he'd gone on to talk about her 'talent' and how she could be really good if she just applied herself, Dusk had just shut him out. Never, ever, believe anything nice grownups say about you, especially if it's in the same sentence as 'if you only' or anything to that meaning.

She rummaged through it, and pulled out a tattered science book and an equally tattered, very large, spiral notebook. The notebook held, basically, the entire life she'd led for the last couple of years, her editorials, her ideas, her stories, projects and schoolwork. The science book held, well, science.

She opened the science book and picked up an orange highlighter. Okay, so what's up in this quark-eat-quark world?

After almost fifteen minutes of highlighting anything that made sense, she gave up and figured she'd just smile and hope - well, pray devotedly - for the best when that class decided to happen. She opened the notebook and picked up her favorite, dark purple, fine-tipped pen. For the next hour and a half or so, she was happily lost in a world of vortexes-slash-doors in an old university.

As her heroine was contemplating upon sexual preferences and how much they really meant, the creative urge suddenly ceased. Skimming through the semi-legible notes, she felt pleasantly surprised at how easily the words had flowed, and how, relatively, good the result had turned out. It just felt right.

Glancing at the alarm clock by her bed, she realized that the Surgeon General would have been very displeased, had he been able to see her. She quickly undressed, pulled a Pink Panther shirt over her head, and slid beneath the leopard-print sheets.