Liz is thirteen years old.

Only her first day at high school, and already she's a nervous mess. She'd gotten used to being in the eldest group of kids, but now she's in the youngest again and it leaves her feeling unsure and off-kilter. All around her are older kids, kids who look capable and mature and so adult. Next to them, Liz might as well be a baby. And that doesn't even go into the classes – now suddenly she has periods, and set subjects for set times, and she has to move from classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher rather than just staying nice and safe in the one classroom with the one teacher all day. Everything is strange and alien, and she's worried that she won't be able to adapt.

Think positive, Liz, she tries to tell herself, running through the corridors to try and find her English classroom. It's not all bad. All of her friends are in the same school, now – before, she and Tom and Richelle were in one school, with Sunny and Nick in another. And even being in the same school hadn't meant they could always play together anyway, since most years Tom and Richelle weren't even in her class anyway, and she'd hardly ever gotten the chance to see them. But now they're all together, and the game of musical classrooms means that even if she doesn't share one class with her friends, she will share another.

She just needs to find her feet, that's all.

Finally she reaches her English class and hovers at the door. Most of the other kids have gotten here before her, and she looks around, trying to find a spare seat.

Her eyes pull towards a red-headed boy sitting quietly in one of the seats near the front and leafing through a book. He looks like he's not bothered at all by the chaos around him – the confident kids already chatting to each other like old friends, the less boisterous ones shyly feeling each other out. But he sits alone, separate from everyone else.

Even though he seems so solitary, something about him feels friendly. Someone who likes books can't be all that bad, so Liz resolves to take the empty seat next to him.

She never gets there, though.

"Liz!" she hears from behind her. Spinning around, she's face to face with a smiling Sunny. "You're in this class too?" Sunny says.

"Yes," Liz says, beaming. "I didn't realise we'd be sharing this class!"

Already the red-haired boy is being pushed from her mind as she gravitates towards the familiar Sunny. Liz doesn't mind making new friends, but the ones she already has mean more to her. And for this first day, where everything is new and scary and strange, Liz is all too happy to stick to the one thing she already knows.

Sunny and Liz take two of the seats near the wall, and start chatting away about the other classes they'll have that day until the teacher arrives to take the roll. The red-haired boy is just a name, like all of the other students.

Liz is thirteen years old. When she thinks back to her first day of school, she wonders how things might be different if she'd gone to sit next to Elmo. Maybe they'd have gotten to know each other then, instead of a few months later when Teen Power Inc. was born and they had their first job - and mystery - at the Pen. Instead of seeing Elmo as just a kid who likes to hang around on his own and reading books, she could have been listening to him talk his head off about the Pen's latest article, or the book he'd just read, like he is now, as she sits with him at lunch.

"Do you ever wonder how things would be different if we'd made friends at school?" Liz asks, interrupting Elmo in the middle of his ramble. "Instead of during everything with the Pen and the Glen Ghost, I mean."

Elmo pauses, and turns to look at her seriously. "I don't know," he admits. "I've never really been good at making friends at school."

"That's not true!" Liz exclaims. Although it kind of is, she thinks guiltily. Elmo had been a different person at the Pen. No – he hadn't been a different person. The Pen was where Elmo could really be himself. It was a school that Elmo was a different person.

"Yes, it is," Elmo says, sounding amused.

"Well, I think it must be that we were meant to become friends through the Pen," Liz declares. "Especially since that's when we became Teen Power Inc. too. You're like the last piece of the puzzle."

And she likes it better that way, Liz realizes. Richelle, Tom, Nick, Sunny…she'd been befriending them since she was in kindergarten, but they weren't complete until they had Elmo. And they weren't a team until they were Teen Power Inc. It doesn't matter whether she's known them for her whole life, or for just a few months – they're all her friends, and she wouldn't want to be without any of them.

"Whatever you say, Liz," Elmo says, apparently not sharing in Liz's epiphany.

"I'm glad you're one of us, Elmo," Liz tells him, feeling like it's important to let him know this.

Elmo pauses, and then smiles, looking genuinely touched. "I'm glad too, Liz."