The final bell rings and it's finally time to leave school. A time that feels like I've been waiting forever for. I meet Lloyd at his locker as I did yesterday and he's still packing things into his backpack and shoving things back into his locker.

"Hey, Lloyd." I greet. "Hey," he acknowledges. "You ready to go get lunch?" He asks as he closes his locker and swings his bag over his back. "Yeah, where do you wanna go?" I ask. "I dunno, but I was thinking we could go eat someplace inside the mall. That way we could hit the arcade in there afterward, or we could just eat the food they have in the arcade. It's your choice," he tells me as we begin to walk toward the exit. "Doesn't matter," I say. Lloyd pulls out his phone as we're still walking and opens his contacts. "Okay, I just gotta text my mom and tell her we won't be home until later," he says. I just nod.

I stare down at my feet as we walk, as I normally do, until I hear a thud and the sound of two bodies hit the floor. I look over to see Lloyd on the floor, as well as Nya Smith; head of the girls' basketball team and Kai's sister.

"S-sorry- I wasn't looking, I'm sorry!" Lloyd tries to apologize as he picks up a couple of her books, but she rips them from his hands without even saying thanks. "Whatever, just watch where you're going next time, Garmadon," she said with a rude tone as she got up and walked past the both of us. I glare at the back of her head as she walks past us. I know she can't see the anger in my eyes, but I was a bit pissed. I reach my hand down to help Lloyd up. He takes my hand and I pull him to his feet.

"You alright?" I ask. "Yeah... Yeah I'm fine," he dusts himself off and looks back at the direction that Nya went with a look of sadness in his eyes. It killed me to see him so upset like that. "Hey, don't pay attention to her. I guarantee you'll never have to run into her again. Don't let one bad experience ruin your whole day, okay?" I look into his eyes. "Yeah... Okay," he responds, still with that sad look in his eyes.

"Today's going to be a good day, because you're going to make it a good day," I tell him in attempts to raise his confidence, at least just a little bit, and it seems to have worked. Lloyd's face turns from a look of sadness to a look of determination. "Yeah, today's a good day," he smiles. "Good," I reply as we begin to walk toward the exit again.

I wish someone was there to give me that kind of boost in confidence.

When Lloyd and I leave the building, we walk down the sidewalk in the direction of the mall. I've only been to this mall a few times. I never really left the house much.

It takes us little to no time to get to the mall. Ninjago City may have a lot in it, but it wasn't that big, so there wasn't too long of a walk from the school to the mall, especially considering the school was right in the middle of the city, so it's not like we had to walk clear across the entire island of Ninjago. We walk through the main entrance of the mall, and there really weren't that many people. Malls were kind of a dying concept. Everybody either buys things online or finds entertainment elsewhere. It was kind of nice. It was almost like we had the whole place to ourselves... almost. There were a few people here and there, but definitely not enough people to cause us any trouble.

We make our way to the arcade in the back of the mall. There were only a few other people in there. One side of the arcade had all of the games, along with a prize counter, and the other side had a food bar and seating areas.

"You wanna eat first?" Lloyd asked.

"Sounds good to me," I reply.

"Alright. All they really serve here is pizza, so I can order and you can pick a seat," he tells me. "Alright." I start to walk off to find a good place to sit. "Oh yeah, and could you get me a cola, too?" I shout from a few feet away. "Yup!" He yells back.

I look around for a good seat and eventually, I come across a booth seat. I take my bag off of my back and throw it down onto the seat and I sit down next to it. I look up and scan my surrounding. I've been in this mall before, but I've never been in this arcade. It's actually quite large for being an arcade in a mall. I look around at the games, and not many of them are occupied, but I do see two people who catch my eye.

They were dressed quite odd. One of them had brown, fluffy hair with a blue jacket and a puffy orange scarf, which I thought was weird, considering how hot it is outside. And the other had white hair that was shaved on the sides and stuck straight up. He was wearing a sweater vest with little designs embroidered into it. I don't think I've ever seen someone my age voluntarily wear a sweater vest.

The both of them were playing some first person shooter game. The one in the sweater vest was doing great at the game. It's like he knew what was coming before it was even there, but the guy with brown hair... not so much. He seemed to be falling behind in the game a little bit, but it was amusing to watch them play, not to mention the things they were saying to each other were pretty funny as well.

"Zane, wait! You're going to have to come back for me, I'm stuck!" The brunette yelled. "Just hit the red button, Jay!" The one who I can only assume is named Zane yells back. The brunnete which Zane refers to as Jay begins to frantically spam the red button on the console. I can't help but laugh a little, but my laughter is interrupted by the sound of Lloyd sitting down on the leather booth seat in front of me.

"Whatcha laughing at?" He asks. "These two guys playing that shooter game. It's funny to watch," I chuckle as I point back at them. Jay is still smashing on that red button. Lloyd shifts his attention to the pair playing the game. He laughs a little. "Hey. Don't they go to our school?" He asks. "Maybe. But if they do, I don't have any classes with them," I tell him. "Yeah. I think I have my second period with the both of them," He says. "Nice," I respond.

It seems like in no time, an employee comes out with our pizza and drinks. It probably didn't take very long because there's barely anyone else here. She just sits it down on the table and leaves. She didn't even give us enough time to say thank you. The pizza did look pretty good. At least, good for being arcade pizza. I take a sip from my cola and then pick up a piece. Lloyd does the same and we both take a bite out of our slices of pizza. It was good. Not the best pizza I've ever had, but it was definitely good.

"Do you like it?" Lloyd asks. "Yeah, it's good," I respond. "Good," He smiles back at me.

We continue to eat slices of our pizza while still making conversation. "So, when we're done eating, what game did you want to hit first?" Lloyd asks. "I dunno, maybe Guitar Hero, or that other shooter game those other guys were playing. It seems fun," I say, then take another bite of pizza.

"I was thinking we could do the ski ball. It gets the most tickets," he says. "Do you really think you can win anything? Prize booths at arcades are always ridiculous. You need to get at least two thousand tickets to win something decent," I tell him. "This arcade isn't too bad with the tickets. Hopefully we can win something," he says. I just laugh. I know we probably won't get anything too great, but we're just here to have fun, not win prizes.

We finish up the last of our pizza and we stand up and make our way over to the games. "Can we do ski ball first?" He asks with excitement. "Sure," I chuckle at how excited he is just to play an arcade game.

Lloyd rushes over to the token machine. Tokens actually weren't that badly priced. One dollar could get you quite a bit of tokens, and of course, he sticks a twenty in there. He's actually getting twenty dollars worth of coins. I can tell we're going to be here a while.

Lloyd holds his hand under the dispenser and I just watch the tokens fall out. His hands become full and tokens are still falling out of the machine. Both of us start to laugh. "Help. I need help," he says through a giggle. I hold out the bottom of my hoodie like a basket and let the tokens gather in the makeshift net I have created. Once the tokens have stopped coming out, Lloyd starts to take them from my hoodie and starts stuffing them in his pockets so I don't have to keep carrying them around like this. Both of us are still laughing at how ridiculous the situation is, but finally, Lloyd has taken all of the tokens and I'm able to walk freely without having to hold my hoodie out into a makeshift basket.

"Now we can play ski ball," I laugh.

Lloyd runs to the the ski ball games and I can hear the coins rattle in his pocket. I follow after him and I stand in front of the ski ball machine. Lloyd hands me two of the tokens, as it takes two to play. "Whoever gets the most tickets wins," he says with a determined look on his face.

"Wait, we're competing?" I ask. I didn't know we were turning this into a competition. "Yup," Lloyd nods and turns his attention to the game.

"Ready, set, go!" He exclaims way too quickly. He shoves his tokens into the game and throws the first ball without even giving me a chance to insert my tokens. "Hey, wait a minute!" I laugh as I put my tokens into the game.

The ski balls fall down from the top of the game and I pick one up and position myself, aiming for the 1,000 point slot. I roll the ball up the track, but my aim was pretty off. I only managed to get into the 10 point slot. I try again a few more times, still failing to get anything higher then 10 or 20 points. I look over to Lloyd, who is scoring 100 points, and 1,000 points with ease. He's definitely done this more than I have, but I still keep trying. I roll one more ball and manage to get 50 points this time, but it still can't compare to Lloyd's score. The game eventually comes to an end, and it spits out our tickets. I get a little strip of tickets, but when I look over to Lloyd, the machine is still dispensing an entire stack of tickets. It's obvious he's won.

"How did you do?" He asks me. I hold out my small strip of tickets, as Lloyd tears his giant mess of tickets from the machine. There had to be anywhere from 50 to 60 tickets there. But I had 7.

"Oh, I guess I've had a little more practice at this game than you have," he chuckles a little bit. I laugh as well, but it's a little more of a nervous laughter. He was able to tell that I really didn't enjoy the ski ball game.

"Hmm... are there any other games here that you've played before?" He asked. I shook my head no. "Are there any that you think look fun?" He asks again. "Maybe some of the shooter games. I used to play a lot of those types of games as a kid on some of my old game consoles," I tell him. "Cool. Maybe we can play one of those," he smiles.

His smile was so heartwarming. He didn't really smile unless he was talking to me or his mom, so I really enjoyed to see his smile.

We head over to where we saw Jay and Zane playing that shooter game because we figured there would be more over there, and there were. And not to mention, they were still playing that same game. It was probably their favorite. There was one game right next to it that sparked my interest. Instead of having button controls, it had four big, plastic guns that you could pick up and aim and interact with the game that way.

"What about this one?" I point to it. "That one looks fun!"

Lloyd just nods and smiles in response. It takes two tokens per player, so he puts four tokens into the machine, but the game didn't play. I took a closer look at the screen. It read '3-4 players,' meaning we had to have one more.

"Aw, look. It takes at least three players. Guess we can't to this one," I point out to Lloyd. His smile fades to a slight frown. "Aw, man. That means it just ate our tokens." He adds, but before I get the chance to say anything else, the sound of a soft, accented voice comes from behind me.

"We'll play with you... if- if you want, anyway."

I turn around to see Jay and Zane smiling softly at us. Jay being the one who spoke. I was kind of shocked that someone actually wanted to play with us because we have that 'weird kid' reputation, but I just turned to Lloyd who had an equally as shocked look on his face. I turn back to Zane and Jay and change my expression to that of a less threatened one. "Sure, you can play."

"Cool," Zane says has he approaches the machine and puts four more tokens in. Two for the both of them. We all pick up the clunky plastic guns and prepare ourselves for the game. There was no intro to the game, it just shoved you right into gameplay. You had to shoot the red targets and avoid the blue ones. We were all having fun playing. Lloyd and I were average at the game for being beginners, but Jay wasn't doing as good as us. On the other hand, Zane was hitting targets left and right. I don't think he missed a single one, and he hit the center of the target with one hundred percent accuracy. It was insane to watch him play.

When the game ended, it gave us our tickets. I grab mine from the dispenser at the bottom on the machine and look back up to Jay and Zane.

"That was amazing! Have you played this game before?" I ask Zane.

"Nope," he gives me an innocent little smile as he gathers his huge pile of tickets. A lot more than mine.

"Oh, well you did pretty good for someone who's never played before. I'm (Y/N), by the way. And this is Lloyd," I motion my hand to Lloyd.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Jay and this is Zane. I've seen Lloyd around school before, but I don't think either of us have seen you before. Do you go to Ninjago High?" Jay asks. I know he probably knows about Lloyd because of all of the gossip, but I'm not too surprised that he doesn't know who I am.

"Yeah, I do. I just don't think we have any classes together." I explain.

"Ah," Jay acknowledged.

"This game is fun. We should play again!" Lloyd exclaims.

I look over to Zane and Jay. "You guys up for another round?"

"Yes!" Zane smiles, and Jay nods in agreement.

We all take out more tokens and shove them in the machine. We play another round. And another... And another... It was hard to keep track, but we played until we were almost out of tokens. Time seemed to be passing rather quickly. What seemed like just minutes, turned into hours. After what seemed to be our 100th round of the game, Lloyd pulls out his phone and checks the time.

"Oh no, we've been here for hours. My mom is gonna kill me..." he runs his hands through his own hair.

"What time did you tell her we would be home?" I ask.

"An hour and a half ago..."

"Oh..."

Lloyd picks his backpack up that he had put on the floor and he swings it around his shoulder and puts both arms through the straps. "Jay, Zane. We had fun, but we gotta go. Maybe we can hang out again sometime?" Lloyd says as he looks to the two of them.

"Sounds great!" Jay smiles and Zane nods in agreement.

"Cool. We should get going now, (Y/N)," Lloyd returns his focus to me.

"Alright. See ya, guys," I give one last good bye to Zane and Jay as we head toward the exit of the arcade. It was nice to see people not immediately think we're bad kids or something.

"Hey... before we leave, do you wanna stop by the prize counter and see what we can get with these tickets? I'm already out an hour and a half past the time I was supposed to be home, so a few extra minutes shouldn't hurt..." he smiles at me.

"Sure," I respond.

We head over to the prize counter and look out over the back wall of prizes. Most of them are within the thousands, and we're not really sure how many tickets we have.

"We can count those tickets for you," One of the employees behind the counter says, as she holds out her hand to take our tickets. We silently agree as we hand them to her.

She runs the tickets through a ticket counter and we watch our total add up on the screen. We managed to rack up 938 tickets. I was impressed. Of course there were very few things that could actually be bought with this amount, though. We could get anything under the glass counter, you know, stuff like candy, army men, bracelets. That sort of thing. Or we could get something bigger from the bottom shelf on the back wall. That stuff was around 400 to 500 tickets.

"What do you want to get?" Lloyd asks me.

"Uhh, can I get two of the rope bracelets? One green, one purple," I ask the employee, as well as answering Lloyd's question. She hands me the bracelets, which only cost 10 tickets for the both of them.

I put the green one around my wrist and hand Lloyd the purple one. "There. Now we have matching bracelets."

Lloyd gives a wide smile as he puts the purple bracelet around his wrist. His long green sleeve covered it, but at least we both knew it was there. "Thanks," He smiles again.

Lloyd then looks at the bottom shelf on the back wall, looking at the prizes we can afford with our remaining tickets.

"Can I get that stuffed dog back there?" He points to a small plush dog. It was small and it looked to be cheaply made. It looks like something you would win at a carnival, or from a crane machine.

The employee nods and hands him the dog. The dog cost 500 points, which I thought to be rather much for a stuffed animal, but when it comes to prizes from an arcade, it's not really about the quality of the prize, but more of the joy you get of being reminded that you earned it with your own tickets.

Lloyd smiles and hands me the dog. "Here you go!"

"You're giving it to me?" I ask.

"Yup. He's yours."

I take the plush dog from Lloyd's hands. "How thoughtful," I joke. The both of us laugh. We then unanimously decide that it's time to leave. We head out the door and toward the exit of the mall. After we push through the big glass doors, we begin our walk home.

The walk was silent for the first few minutes, but then I take a closer look at the plush dog that I have in my grip. I look at it for a short while until I hear Lloyd's voice interrupt my thoughts.

"What are you gonna name it?" He asks, still keeping his eyes on the sidewalk.

"Huh?" Even though I heard what he said, it's like it didn't process for some reason.

"The dog. What are you gonna name the dog?" He asks again.

"Oh... uhh... I'm not sure yet," I tell him.

"Maybe name it something cute... Like (Y/N)," he tells me.

"My name? How would naming the dog after myself be a 'cute' name?" I ask.

"I-I don't know... It's... It's a nice name..." he looks away.

Lloyd thinks my name is 'cute.'

Huh...

-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Woop woop woop. 4th chapter done. I do have the entire story for this book planned out, but if any of you guys have any suggestions for maybe some fun inbetween chapters, let me know! You could tell me an idea you have for an entire chapter, or a small piece of dialogue you'd like for Lloyd and (Y/N) to share. I'll pretty much add whatever you guys want. Even if it's a lemon chapter in the future. I don't really care.