I know I spoke of a sequel for this story and here is a little preview of what is to come. Just know that I am diligently working on it!

The Way Things Seem

Excerpt from Chapter One

A school bell rang and swarms of preteens flooded out of the large brick building. Yellow school buses were lined up in the parking lot. In a crowded hallway, a blond boy with glasses slung his backpack over his shoulder and pushed his way out to the back athletic fields. Two floors down, a second blond boy slipped into the art room.

Matthew plopped his backpack down on the desk. The studio was hushed. The noises from the other kids barely touched the calm inside the room. Mattie wasn't the only one in art club usually, but this week the flu had been going around so a lot of the members were out.

"Just you today Matthew?" Mr. Germania asked.

Matthew nodded, "Feliks, Toris and Mei have the flu. And Jack has rugby practice. Liam might come in though."

Mr. Germania smiled, "a quiet day then."

Mattie nodded and pulled out his biology book. Jack and his brother, Liam, were both in his boy scouts troop. Liam had aged out of cub scouts last year and had joined their troop. Both boys were really cool.

For as long as Mattie had known Jack he was a total adrenaline junkie and even though their was a rugby team at the school, Jack decided he needed another extracurricular ("to make him well rounded") so the first day of sixth grade, he'd join art club. Three years later when Liam started sixth grade, he'd joined also.

He wanted sometime to work on a project for boy scouts without everyone around asking him about it. It was cool to be in scouts in elementary school and even the first year of middle school, but now as an eight grader... not so much. He pulled a book of paper from a wooden cubby in the corner of the room. Matthew had been working towards both his plant science and forestry badges for a while now. The blond boy had seen all the overlap between the two and figured he'd kill two birds with one stone.

Last fall, Matthew had finished the field work so now he only had the drawings and labeling still to do. To save himself from constantly looking for two books he'd put all his work in one big book. The first half was for forestry and the second was for plant science.

He shook his biology book upside down and, from between the pages, out fell several bags of dried leaves and flowers. At the top of each bag was a piece of masking tape with the name of each plant. The boy set out the bags on top of the other desks.

The first pages were filled of detailed drawings of different trees. Each page had the tree drawn in the middle of the page and his descriptions and explanations curling around it. It was coming out really cool.

"Hi Matt!" chirped Liam as he stumbled into the room. He had a frisbee tucked under one arm.

Matthew looked up from organizing his plants and smiled, "Hey!"

The boy set down his stuff with a clatter and trotted over to the corner to grab his clay. He'd been working on some strange sculpture thing for a while now. Matthew had no idea what it was suppose to be but the smaller boy was very excited with it.

The pages of his notebook were scraggly from constantly being flipped through. A quarter of the way through he found a clean piece of paper. He pulled out his little black field book and in clean lines labeled at the top, Beach-Pea, Lathyrus maritimus.

"What are you doing?" Liam asked. Matthew looked over, his hands were already covered in a layer of brown clay.

"I'm doing the forestry and plant science badges for Scouts."

"Oh," the younger boy said as he looked closer, "Jack did the forestry one. It's really hard!"

Mattie nodded, "Yeah, I remember when he got it. He helped me find a good sight to look up different plants."

The two chatted as they worked about the next badge ceremony and Liam's dog care badge. Mattie pulled the pencil across the page and the image of the beach-pea was pulled out of the white paper. Dark, thick lines of the stem spanned the page diagonally. He drew a small line and labeled the different properties in his looping hand writing. If he ever needed to he could live off the land some day.

The Way Things Seem complete Chapter One will be posted in the next few days. Be excited everyone! We're off on another adventure!