I Must Be Crazy

“I hardly saw you at school yesterday,” Tracy remarked at breakfast the next morning. “Usually I see you between lessons, or if I go somewhere during lunch.”
Markus kept his eyes on his cereal, not trusting his expression to not give anything away. “Oh, didn’t you? I was a bit late getting out of some lessons, maybe that was why.”
“Yeah, maybe.” She didn’t ask any more questions. Markus breathed a sigh of relief as soon as they were out of the house.
“I’m walking with someone else today,” he said to Tracy and Lissy. His older sister raised her eyebrows.
“Who, new friend?”
“Yeah, I suppose she is. Seeya later, Lissy.”
“Ooh, a girl?”
He waved, smiling, and started off on the alternative route to school.

The girl was waiting on the corner of the street, sitting patiently on a bollard. A school bag was at her feet, and she was swinging her foot at it absent-mindedly. Even from this distance Markus could hear her humming, although he didn’t recognise the tune.
Like Darcie, she seemed to have the uncanny ability to know when someone was approaching her, because she stopped humming and jumped up when he was a few feet away from her.
“Hi! Are you Markus Vaun?”
Markus nodded. “Uh, hi. You’re Tiar?”
“I am.” To his mild shock she threw herself at him and hugged him around the neck. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’re the first person ever to hire me, I can’t thank you enough!”
Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Markus started walking in the direction of school again. The girl skipped happily along beside him. She was wearing the right uniform for his school; he wondered where she had got it. Asking her, she laughed, and said, “Some strings just got pulled. The agency does that. I’ve been enrolled in your school on short notice, and I also got a uniform.”
“How did they do that so quickly?”
“Magic!” she grinned.
The more Markus spoke to Tiar, the more the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach grew. There was just something strange about her - something fake, something plastic. She reminded him of nothing more than some kind of creepy living doll.
“Why have you never been hired before, do you know? How long have you been with the agency?”
“Oh, ages,” she pouted. “I don’t know why no-one’s ever hired me. The right person just never came along, I suppose.” She gave him a radiant smile, and a shiver ran down Markus’s spine. “But that doesn’t matter now! We’re going to have so much fun, you won’t even think about those mean bully-boys. But if they do, well! They’ll regret it afterwards, let me tell you…”
Markus smiled awkwardly. “What exactly will you do to them, Tiar?”
“I’ve had some self-defence lessons,” she said gravely. “I’ll use what I remember from those. I’ll, like… kick ‘em in the head and stuff.”
“You learned that in a self-defence class?”
“Well, no, but I’ll improvise a little. But you just leave everything to me, okay? I’ll beat them up and then we can be best friends forever and ever and ever! And then one day maybe we’ll get married, and have kids, and -”
“Whoa, whoa! Married? Where did marriage come from?” he interrupted, waving his hands, horrified. Tiar blinked at him, looking hurt.
“You don’t want to get married? Well, I suppose we could just live together, but-”
“L-let’s just take this one step at a time,” said Markus weakly, still waving his hands. He didn’t want to get on the wrong side of this girl, at least until he’d sorted out this bully problem; that would mean having to go back to the agency, and he didn’t want to have to repeat the whole business of sneaking out of the school, even if it would be easier the second time around, since he’d know where to go. Still, it might be worth it to get out of the company of this creepy girl.

The school seemed to completely ignore her arrival; Tiar walked around the school as though she’d been there forever. After a while Markus suddenly realised that he was following her to his classes; she seemed to have memorised his timetable and where his lessons were. During lessons, she paid attention for about half of the required time; the rest of the time she spent chatting to Markus, to other people in the class, or even to the teacher. She didn’t seem to care if anyone listened to her, she was just filling the silence. For most of the time Markus didn’t even know what she was talking about. No-one else seemed to know, either.
At lunch, of course, she sat with him; she finally stopped talking to eat. She ate a lot, really a lot, about three times the amount Markus did. About halfway through she noticed him staring at her, and she stopped and asked, “What?”
“N-nothing.”
Luckily, before he was asked to explain further, the older boys arrived.