“Don’t bother,” said a voice. “None of the doors are open. The student climbers are supposed to wait out here.”

It was a boy talking to him. He was around his age.

“Oh, thanks for letting me know,” said Max.

He approached the boy, but the boy turned away and focused on his mobile phone.

I guess this guy wasn’t going to be my new friend, thought Max to himself.

He went and stood behind the loitering groups. He looked to see if there was anyone else there on their own. Someone he could maybe talk to, maybe even earn more about what to expect here at the climber academy.

But there was no one else by themselves as far as Max could see.

He sighed.

Even in the tower-zone, popularity was just not something that was going to bless him at school. Oh well.

Max stood around, waiting for something to happen, when a paper airplane flew above the crowd of students.

It caught Max’s attention because it was behaving quite abnormally for a paper airplane.

Mainly, it didn’t seem to be falling towards the crowd. The plane hovered in the air and did a flip. It then flew towards Max. It did another flip before hitting him in the forehead.

“Ah, what!?” said Max.

He heard giggling nearby.

Max’s shoulders suddenly shot up. He’d spent so much of his school years prior to this one dealing with tormentors, he’d learned a giggle was never innocent.

He looked down to the paper airplane that had fallen to his feet after it had smashed into his head.

There was a note scrawled on it.

Open me.

He picked up the paper airplane and unfolded it. There was a note inside.

Are you the new kid?

Max looked up and suddenly he saw a very pretty girl waving at him.

She had wavy brown hair tied in a ponytail and bright green eyes.

She wore a burgundy corduroy pinafore dress with a thin-striped long sleeve sweater underneath. She would have looked playful and innocent if she hadn’t just launched a hostile airplane at his forehead, which made Max suspect her of being quite mischievous.

“Based on that goofy expression on your face,” giggled the girl in front of him. “I’m going to take that as a, ‘yes, you are the new kid.’”

Max didn’t know what to say. He was just mildly shocked that what he had expected to be another traumatic experience to add to the list, wasn’t in fact, traumatic at all. It was maybe even...nice?

The girl strutted up close to him and offered her hand.

“I’m Casey,” she said.

“I’m... Max,” he said, triumphing over his struggling hormonal brain to remember his own goddamn name.

She giggled again and her cheeks turned red.