A Ninja's Guide to Surviving High School
By: JAJapster
Copyright Stuff: I don't own Naruto. Oh, and don't copy this fic and repost it somewhere else on the internet without asking. Because that would just be uncool.

Summary:
Slightly AU- High school is tough, but it gets a lot tougher when a demonic fox lives inside you and all your friends are ninjas. It's a world of angst, rivalries, friendships and romance inside the halls of Kohona High, but outside, trouble is brewing. A dangerous world awaits them after graduation…assuming they all don't kill each other first.

Chapter One: Run Like Hell

Her panties were white.

Naruto grinned broadly as he spotted the quick glimpse of white underneath Sakura's skirt as she crossed one leg over the other. It was brief, but Naruto savored the moment, replaying it over and over again in his mind with a dreamy smile on his face. Quickly, but not too quickly, Naruto leaned back in his chair and shifted his eyes to the front of the classroom where Instructor Shizune was giving a lecture about healing herbs. Or that was what he thought she was teaching anyway.

Looking up skirts, peeking down blouses, or surreptitiously getting an eye full down a girl's too tight pants was Naruto's calling in high school, one which he took quite seriously. Anyone could be a pervert, but not getting caught and branded as one; that was the true art, one which Naruto wished to perfect. It required a level of stealth, precision, and determination that only a ninja could ever dream of attaining.

And that was him. Uzumaki Naruto. Ninja in training.

"So what color were they?"

Naruto looked over at the boy sitting next to him. He had black hair that spiked in every which direction and was clad in a long, black overcoat that was so baggy it almost resembled a dress. The boy stared at him eagerly.

"White." Naruto whispered. The boy's name was Takeda Kyo, friend at Kohona Academy, and fellow peeking tom. He was good at it, but was far from the level of mastership that Naruto possessed. At the moment, Naruto had taken him on as his apprentice.

"White?" The boy asked, his eyes narrowing. "Are you sure?"

"Positive."

Kyo flipped open a notebook he had been concealing under the notes he had been taking and jotted down their findings. "I've found a problem in our statistics."

"Really?" Naruto asked with concern. He leaned over to his friends' desk so that he could take a look at their records. His eyes widened. "Wow, you're right!"

"Today is Monday. According to our two months of observation, she should be wearing pink panties." Kyo muttered. "It's always been white on Wednesday and Thursday, blue on Friday and Tuesday, and pink on Monday."

"You think she's on to us? You know, messing with our findings?" Naruto wondered. The idea seemed possible, but quite unlikely. Especially since Sakura certainly wasn't supposed to know he was regularly peeking up her skirt during class in the first place.

"I don't know," Kyo said irritably. "Why don't you go ask her?"

"Shut up," Naruto laughed.

Kyo threw the notebook back into his backpack. "Well there goes two months of hard work." He sighed disappointedly, frowning, but then his eyes perked back up. "So who do you want to target this month? Hinata?"

Naruto glanced into the crowd of students dedicatedly taking notes. It was easy to spot Hyuga Hinata, a petite, pretty girl with short blue hair. She was attractive enough, but was incredibly shy. Several times Naruto had spoken to her in the lunch line or on the rare occasion they were partnered up for something, but it always ended up to be a very one sided conversation. Either Hinata would find an excuse to get away from Naruto, or she would stammer out monosyllabic replies until he gave up. Still, while she might not be much of a talker, Naruto had to admit Hinata had a killer body.

"No." Naruto finally replied. The peeking-tom business did not leave much room for morals, but he would make an exception in this case. There was something about Hinata, something so sweet and innocent about her that made peeking on her seem unforgivably wrong.

"Ino? Tenten? Mitsuko?" Kyo asked, reeling off names on their unofficial "Hotties of Kohona High" list. "Asuka? Kasumi? Ayanmi? Eiko?"

Naruto shook his head. Quietly, he said, "I was thinking of sticking with Sakura for a little bit longer."

Kyo grinned when he noticed his friend blushing, a sly twinkle in his eye "Yeah I bet you do."

"Shut up!" Someone hissed. Naruto looked down the row of desks, and expected, it was him. Dressed in a blue shirt bearing the crest of the Uchiha clan and white shorts, it was him. With his sleekly, long, black hair and brown eyes it was him.

It was Uchiha Sasuke, sole heir of the Uchiha clan, and Naruto could not stand him. It wasn't so much because Sasuke acted like a complete jerk all the time –Naruto got along with people like that all the time; in fact, some would say Naruto was one of those people –but it was because the pompous prick was goddamn perfect. And that was what infuriated Naruto the most about the young Uchiha. His academic performance was beyond flawless, prodigious even, a fact which earned him the love of all the instructors at Kohona High the moment he walked through the doors.

Actually, it earned him the love of more than just the teachers. And that really pissed Naruto off. The girls loved Sasuke and worshipped him more reverently than any god. Sasuke ignored their subtle and occasionally not so subtle advances with his characteristic cold, almost borderline rude, demeanor, but far from dissuading the girls of Kohona high, it emboldened them to the point where there were more love letters stuffed in Sasuke's locker than books.

It made no sense to Naruto, of course, why the girls like Sasuke so much. Sure he was a genius, and sure he looked like he just stepped out of a modeling magazine, but that was really trivial anyhow. Naruto could only attribute Sasuke's roaring popularity to his rudeness because, after all, girls loved jerks for some completely nonsensical reason. Everyone knew that.

Naruto rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he watched Sasuke take notes. This of course could not explain why the girls still staunchly rejected Naruto when he tried to act like a jerk. It was all quite confusing, and not for the first time Naruto wished he had an older brother to consult about the raging battle for the affection of the finer sex. He had once contemplated seeking out one of his instructors for advice, but then remembered that all of his instructors' success with girls was nothing short of dismal. Kakashi's love life included cheesy romance novels, and Naruto still had nightmares about the time he spotted the Perverted Hermit trying to pick up loose women outside of adult movie theaters. Suffice to say, the idea was short lived.

This all left Naruto in a quandary of uncertainty with little relief in sight. He had hoped that the girls' would conclude that Sasuke's obvious disinterest meant that he was a homosexual and move on, but that had been all the way back in eighth grade. The girls still chased after Sasuke, and not once had his sexuality been questioned by anyone except Naruto. No one really listened to him anyway.

Instructor Shizune was writing something on the chalk board, and a quick glance confirmed Naruto's decision that he didn't understand any of the material. He had been too busy trying to look of Sakura's skirt all lesson long that he hadn't bothered to pay attention. With a sigh, Naruto put his head back on the desk and closed his eyes. There was little point in trying to pick up one of Shizune's complicated lessons halfway through. He would just copy someone's notes later in the unlikely event he decided to bother.

"Can someone tell me the answer to number thirteen?" Shizune asked.

Immediately, a dozen hands shot into the air. Unsurprisingly, Naruto's was not one of them. What caught Naruto's attention immediately, however, was that Sasuke's hand was up. Not that it was surprising. Sasuke always knew the answers which was why the teachers loved him so much. But his raised hand would draw Shizune's attention towards this area of the classroom which would invariably lead to…

"Naruto? How about you?"

Damn you Sasuke! Naruto wasn't sure Sasuke was really at fault for this unfortunate turn of events. His paper thin logic couldn't even convince himself fully of Sasuke's guilt. It could have just been a product of bad luck, but it felt good to blame someone else. Frantically, Naruto looked at Kyo who kind of shrugged and gave him a better-you-than-me look.

"I'm not sure." Naruto answered.

A few people giggled, but Shizune ignored them. "You don't know, Naruto?"

"Yes, Instructor. I do not know."

More people laughed, louder this time.

"Naruto," Shizune said, not bothering to hide her impatience with him. "What year are you in?"

"Senior year."

"And how old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"Well, don't you think it's time to start paying attention during my class?" A cruel smile crossed Shizune's face, contorting it until it resembled her pet pig she always hung out with. "And not spending all your time looking up Sakura's skirts?"

It was like a bomb hit. Everyone started laughing so loudly the room seemed to shake. Smiling feebly, Naruto lowered himself into his chair, wishing the ground would swallow him up, but of course, had no luck. He wished he were dead just so that he could escape the humiliation. Groaning loudly, he resigned himself to lying low until the laughter died down.

It took another five minutes before Naruto felt confident to emerge again, and by then, the class had more or less returned to normal. Kyo was still laughing, but for the most part, everyone was busy taking notes again while Shizune lectured. Deciding it might not be a bad idea to follow suit to avoid further embarrassment, Naruto picked up his pencil and looked at the board. As he did, he noticed two things.

First was that Hinata was looking at him, a horrified look on her face as if Naruto had walked over there and slapped her. When she spotted him staring, she blushed and quickly turned away. Odd.

The second and, probably more important, was Sakura. She was taking notes like everyone else, but her hand was clenched so tightly around her pencil that the wood was splintering beneath her fierce grip. Her teeth were clenched and she kept stabbing at her paper, oblivious to the large gashes in her otherwise immaculate sheet of class notes. Finally, the pencil could take it no longer and yielded under Sakura's might and snapped into two.

Crack! The sound echoed in the room, an ominous portent of terrible things to come.

"Oh great." Naruto muttered.

----

Run, run run…

Naruto walked quickly down the corridor leading away from Shizune's classroom, slow enough to avoid attention, but fast enough to get him away from the impending doom that would soon be exiting the room after him. The moment the bell had rung Naruto was out of his seat, his bag half zipped and spilling its contents across the floor as he made a run for the door. Sakura would kill him, of that he had absolutely no doubt. Worse than the humiliation he had suffered under Shizune would be the shame if he allowed Sakura to beat the living hell out of him again. It had happened once before during their freshman year in Kohona High when he accidentally stumbled into the girl's locker room while Sakura had been changing, and years later people still teased him about getting beat up by a girl.

A small grin formed across his face at the memory. The bruises had lasted for a month, but it had been worth it. His only regret was that he had not brought a camera with him that day.

"Walk fast, Naruto." Kyo whispered. He was walking behind Naruto, glancing behind them at Shizune's classroom every few steps. No sooner had he said that, the door was thrown open hard enough that it cracked the concrete wall behind it. Framed in the doorway, was Haruno Sakura.

She had long pink hair and a gorgeous face that Naruto had adored from afar for years. Her attire consisted of a white blouse, and of course, the pink skirt that he had dedicated the entire of Shizune's class to peeking up. Naruto thought she was singularly the most beautiful girl in the school, though admittedly she did not look so beautiful right now. Her normally comely features were contorted with unbridled rage, and her eyes had been reduced to murderous slits that scanned the hallway, like a serpent searching for her prey.

"Walk faster," Kyo said. "And put on your forehead protector. You might need it."

Naruto nodded hastily and reached into his bag for his headband. The forehead protector, a blue strip of cloth with a metal plate bearing the crest of Kohona's Hidden Village of the Leaf, was a ninja's most precious possession. It identified their occupation to the world and in addition related their village affiliation. A ninja was not a ninja without their forehead protector. He slipped it on and tied it tightly.

"Naruto!" Sakura screamed, a blood curdling sound that resounded down the hallway. Naruto began running.

A ninja was trained in all arts of combat. They could fight hand to hand, create illusions to deceive the enemy, and unleash their inner powers in a variety of devastating attacks from fireballs to summoning giant beasts. Some ninjas were better than others in the various schools of combat, but all ninjas knew how to do one thing really well.

Run like hell.

---

Author's Notes:
This officially is school-fic number eleventy-billion-nine-forty-five in the Naruto universe, and I'm not sure why I got suckered into the trend. It's just too much fun as writing this first chapter quickly proved. The Naruto characters are so freaking awesome and high school is such a pain (except when it's not) that their compatibility is uncanny! It's slightly AU, but all the cast are more or less in character. Also, there's a few original characters running around (you know those generic, nameless ninjas that always end up getting killed? Yeah, they end up becoming guys like that) because a classroom of ten would be kind of boring.

More or less experimental and completely for fun. I'll see the feedback on the first chapter before deciding whether or not to continue. Writing Naruto is tons of fun, but I have a few other projects I'm late on continuing.

Thanks and remember to review because reviewing is just cool.