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Aredhel squirmed in her chair and tapped her feet impatiently as Miss Ilmarë wrote something on the whiteboard, trying to demonstrate how to properly subtract to a group of impatient first graders. The clock seemed to be ticking slower than slow, and Aredhel sighed, looking longingly out the window at the playground.
"Irissë. Pay attention." Miss Ilmarë had noticed Aredhel's distraction and sought to draw her attention back to the math problem on the board. At that moment, though, the blessed bell rang and Aredhel jumped out of her seat and raced out of the classroom ahead of all the other children.
Recess had always been Aredhel's favorite time during the school day. When she could get out of the stuffy classroom and run, climb and scrape her knees to her heart's content. Or at least she used to be able to, until the first and second graders had started sharing their recess time with the fifth graders. Fifth graders meant Turgon, and Turgon had taken to following his little sister around like a puppy, claiming that he just wanted to "keep her safe."
Aredhel reached the playground before all the other children, and immediately ran for the play structure. Although there were stairs that led up to the slide, she chose to climb up the outside of the structure to get there instead.
It wasn't very tall, only about ten feet off the ground. That was nothing compared to what Aredhel had discovered she could climb, but it still gave her a little thrill to do something the dangerous way.
She leapt over the railing and landed at the entrance to the slide. It was enclosed, and wound around several times before reaching the exit.
The slide had never been Aredhel's favorite thing on the playground, but she enjoyed the thrill of climbing up to it to whoosh down and feel the wind in her ponytail if she could go fast enough.
That hadn't happened ever since Turgon had caught her using ice blocks to slide down in the winter and told her father, who had promptly vetoed the practice.
When she reached the entrance to the slide,the other children had begun to trickle out onto the playground and join her on the play structure. She grabbed the bar above the slide and sent herself flying down the tube.
When she reached the bottom with a shout, it was to find a boy whom she vaguely recognized as having transferred into the school's second grade class a few days earlier sitting at the bottom of the slide with his arms spread blocking the exit.
"Excuse me." She said, and tried to wiggle past him to go and climb the tree on the other side of the playground. He didn't move.
Aredhel glared. "Please move."
The boy stayed put.
She glared harder and shoved him, hoping that would encourage him to find somewhere else to sit.
No such luck.
"You can't leave," the boy said. "Not until I say so. And I don't say so. Not until you kiss me."
Aredhel made a face. She had spent enough time around her cousin to know that boys were gross. Makalaurë always said so to her and Curvo and Artanis, and she couldn't fathom Makalaurë and all her sixteen-year-old wisdom being wrong.
"Ew! No! I'm not going to kiss you, you creep!"
"Then you're not leaving the slide."
Aredhel gauged her options. The slide was too steep to climb back up (she had tried before). She could always fight the boy, but Atya had said that if he got another call from the principal's office he would take away her bow and arrow AND she would be grounded for a week. That left one, regrettable, option. She didn't want to take it, but saw no other choice if she wanted to escape without getting in trouble or kissing this creepy boy.
"TURGON!" She screamed, knowing that he would be there in an instant.
Indeed, she looked up in less than one second to find her older brother panting at the base of the slide.
"What is it, Aredhel? What happened? Are you hurt?"
"This jerkface won't let me out of the slide unless I kiss him!"
Turgon grabbed the boy's shoulder and turned him around so that he could see him properly.
"Hey, I recognize you! You're that Eöl kid who's always watching my little sister! Let her out of the slide! Now!"
"No!" Said Eöl. "She has to kiss me!"
"Listen up, kid," said Turgon, drawing himself up to his full height, hand still locked in a death grip on Eöl's shoulder. "You let Aredhel out of the slide this instant or I will beat you into a bratty second grade pulp!"
Eöl glared back, refusing to cower under Turgon's threat. "I'm not afraid of you."
"You will be!"
Aredhel took advantage of Eöl's momentary distraction with Turgon and shoved past him, running towards the tree.
"Thanks, Turgon!" She yelled over her shoulder, and ran off to scrape her knees some more, ignoring Eöl's disappointed shout.
When Turgon caught up with his sister, she was already three branches up.
"Wow," he said, leaning against the trunk. "That kid is a creep. Stay away from him, OK?"
"Mmhmm. I don't wanna go near him anyway. He wanted me to kiss him," she repeated.
"You're not going to be kissing anyone for a long time, right Aredhel? Especially not him."
"Mmkay," she said absentmindedly, already climbing higher. "Sounds good."