Her first day back at school passed dully. Since Val only needed to sit here and breathe for both attendance and to pass her classes, she did not pay attention to the actual material being taught.

The electronic bell rang throughout the classroom to signal the coming lunch break, compelling Val to leave the classroom with the surge of other students. While she may have walked among everyone, she did not walk with anyone. Many students with poor attendance made friends amongst each other and played hooky together. Val did not associate with any of those students, though. She ditched school for her own purposes and had no reason to make temporary friends in this mortal life.

As such, Val sat alone at her own table for lunch. She enjoyed her lunch in peace, mind blank as she chewed through a sandwich. The minutes passed peacefully enough. Val moved on from her sandwich in favor of crunching on some baby carrots.

A lump of red flashed through her vision. It bounced on the table in front of her, sending a few stray drops of moisture over her. Val wrinkled her nose up in disgust. The offending droplets not only splattered across her face, but also contaminated her carrots.

As quickly as the apple appeared at her table, it fell onto the floor and rolled some paces away. The uneven shape made the apple loll around in a circle. The half-eaten side became exposed in its rotation.

Val scrubbed her sleeve over her face to wipe away what was likely a mixture of the apple's juices and the owner's saliva. Tinges of rage heated on her face. The insolence of the mortal who threw that apple could not be simply ignored.

Rather than looking all around the cafeteria like a fool, Val closed her eyes. She might as well use Past Insight for this.

She slotted up the pieces of information. For the ‘who’, Val would wager to guess that it had been Gina. The ‘what’ was the offending apple that had been thrown at her. The ‘where’ was obviously the cafeteria. Given the recent nature of the event, the ‘when’ demanded precision, so she estimated how many seconds ago it had just happened. The ‘why’ was simply because someone hated Val.

For a moment, she gave pause. Did she really want to risk giving herself a migraine in the middle of the cafeteria because someone had made her mad? Yes, Val determined, yes, I do.

Val phased into the past seamlessly. From outside her own body, she perceived the entire cafeteria. At a table near the back, she could see the past version of herself sitting alone. A fair distance behind herself and to the left, a garbage can lay.

Of the garbage can, Val made a note to herself. In the future, she should make more cognizant choices of where she sat. In the off chance that she would have wanted to report a student's misbehavior to a teacher, the student could claim to have been trying to toss the apple into a garbage can. While no one should throw food, they would get off with simply being an imbecile, rather than punished for the true nature of their crime: bullying.

Again, this petty behavior did not bother Val personally, but the wrongness of the deed still aggravated her. Whoever the perpetrator was, they did not know about her divine blood. Simple high school bullying could affect a mortal's life much more severely than that of a demigod. So long as she found herself leading a mortal's life for the time being, Val ought to teach these bullies a lesson.

Val watched the previous events unfold in the cafeteria.

Also in the back of the cafeteria, but from the other side, another senior took a bite from an apple. While her teeth crunched into its flesh, some of her pink lipstick rubbed off onto the apple’s red exterior. Green eyes stared across the aisle at Val’s table and pinched up in a sly way. Those eyes belonged to none other than Gina.

After that long, thoughtful crunch from her apple, she looked down to the fruit in her hand. The apple bobbled in her palm for a moment, as if she needed to assess her projectile’s mass before throwing it. Then, Gina lobbed the apple across the room. Outside of her own body, Val watched the apple sail by her past self’s face. The apple bounced on the table right in front of her, just as she had seen it happen from her own perspective in real time.

Armed with the information that she needed, Val ceased her connection to the past. The vision vanished to the nothingness at the backs of her eyelids.

Having lost but a second in the real timeline, she reopened her eyes, fiery in the confirmation of her suspicion. Not just conjecture, Val knew for sure that Gina had thrown that apple at her.

With great composure, Val returned any uneaten food to her lunch box. After that, she stood upright rigidly to retrieve the thrown apple. Val walked it to the garbage can and turned to stare in Gina’s direction. She locked eyes with her as she opened her hand. The apple thunked into the pile of trash at the bottom of the garbage can.

Gina’s lips parted open a little. Her gaze quickly diverted away, back to her food with the muscles in her face drawn taught.

An unamused expression stayed across Val’s face, though she had to fight to keep a smile from pressing onto her lips. In a small way, Val had just put Gina back in her place. She had not let her get away with her petty antics, completely innocent. Gina knew what she had done, and Val had let her know that she knew it, too.

Val gathered her backpack back at the table and headed out of the cafeteria. As she passed, she could not help but catch the nature of conversation at Gina’s table.

“I thought for sure that she had been looking the other way,” Melaney whispered to Gina.

“She is just a freak,” Gina muttered. “Enough people in this school hate her to do that. She had absolutely no reason to try blaming it on me, like that.”

Naturally, Gina would try to rationalize Val’s accusation as a wild guess—the product of a victim complex that only she could have given her. That made Gina even more in the wrong from Val’s perspective, but this was just an example of how the justification for improper behavior was always built atop shaky ground.

By her own knowledge, Val knew that she had made no such guess. Likewise, Gina knew that she herself had been the one to throw the apple. This much of a reprimand satisfied Val, so she left the matter at that.

Past the cafeteria, Val found herself to be one of the only students in the hallway during the lunch break. Her feet desired to carry her past the school doors and leave the petty antics and useless knowledge in this place. The fresh, outdoor air called to her.

What with the open campus for the lunch break, Val could go anywhere that she wanted for the time being. The moment that she set foot outside the school building, however, she knew that she would never want to come back in.

Just yesterday, Val had made a promise to her mother—a promise that she intended to keep. With her new resolve to attend school, she headed to her next class early.