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then giggling to herself. Mira immediately knew she wasn’t the first person to fall victim to this. Vern, again, looked mildly amused.
    “Ok, you don’t have to tell us now, but you won’t be able to hide for long. We’ll have the Tournament Trial as soon as class starts and it’ll have to come out then. But I predict the result won’t be too different from last year,” he gloated. Aoi scowled at him with piercing, malicious eyes.
    “Yes, of course, the Tournament Trial,” Mira fibbed. “I know all about that. What happened last year, anyway?”
    At this, Aoi erupted. “If I could have just gotten my hands on you, you would have had a mouthful of dirt!” The venom in her voice startled Mira, but Aoi calmed down and shifted her attention to Mira. “Vern has an attractive force, so you think it would be easy to get near him, but it’s not. And that’s why he’s class leader—because he finished the year top of the class—and I’m not…yet.”
    A distinctly smug and satisfied expression formed on Vern’s face as he folded his arms. Mira wanted to know more about what “an attractive force” meant. But Vern’s grin enraged Aoi and she went off before Mira could say anything. “Things are going to be different this year. So you can just wipe that look off your face!”
    “Maybe the real reason you’re upset is that Fortst asked me to help out because I’m class leader, and you’re here as punishment.”
    “What are you being punished for?” Mira asked, unabashedly curious.
    Aoi hung her head and spoke very softly, in almost a whisper. “I may have accidentally broken something.”
    “It was a house, Aoi!” Vern boomed.
    “I break things! Ok? It happens. They shouldn’t have made that house like that. It was just asking to be knocked over. It wasn’t my fault!”
    “What do you mean it wasn’t your fault? Everyone saw you drop kick it.” Aoi just shook her head, fuming. Mira decided to change the subject.
    “So what are you doing here, anyway?”
    Both Vern and Aoi turned to look at what they had walked away from when Mira arrived. A group of large boulders and some divots in the ground lay before the entrance of the schoolhouse. Whatever they were doing, it didn’t look like much progress had been made.
    “We’re trying to make a pathway leading to the entrance. But we’re not having any luck getting these stones into the ground.”
    Mira walked over to analyze the work area. She couldn’t be sure, but she guessed that they had been digging up these boulders and then trying to press them back into the ground, leaving half-buried rocks that were still half as tall as Mira.
    “How are you moving these rocks around?” Mira asked. “Oh,” she added after Aoi put her hands together. “Why don’t you try breaking the rocks into pieces? If you can lift them up, and then bring them down hard on another rock. That should create some flat surfaces along the break point. If you carve out thin slices from these rocks you will only have to do a tiny bit of digging to set them in the ground.”
    Vern and Aoi, resumed their places in the workspace, reasoning that it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try. Mira, hustling out of the way, watched as Aoi yanked a boulder that was as large as she was out of the ground and held it in her outstretched arms. Vern shouted directions to her and she maneuvered over toward another stone.
    Once in place, Aoi slammed the stone down as hard as she could. The rock cleaved in two. Without a word, Aoi went about preparing to shatter the remaining pieces and the other stones.
    Only then did Mira finally get a chance to fully survey the schoolhouse she had come to look at. Her notion of an impressive institution of learning met with resounding disappointment. The building before her had thin wooden boards that light could sneak through, an uneven cement foundation, and a shingled roof that surely leaked.
    Getting the okay from Vern to go inside, Mira walked up the