Chapter Text
It wasn’t often one got the chance to start over, but James Kirk now found himself with exactly that opportunity. No one at New Anchorage Academy knew him, or even thought they knew him. And once his time here was up, he’d never see any of them again. He didn’t have to be the Jimmy everyone knew back home; he could be whoever the fuck he wanted to be. Getting himself sent to what was essentially space juvie may have been the best decision of his life.
He opened the door to his dorm room to see his roommate—according to the papers he had received, one Thomas Leighton—hastily cleaning up the left side of the room.
“Shit, sorry, didn’t think you would get here so soon. I mean, that’s a lie, they told me you’d get here today, but I miscalculated how long it would take me to move everything. I’ll be out of your way in just a moment, I swear.”
“Eh, don’t worry about it. Don’t have that much with me anyways. Name’s…” he paused a bit, hopefully not noticeably. “JT.”
It wasn’t a lie; JT really didn’t bring much to New Anchorage. He had two weeks' worth of clothes, toiletries, and school supplies, but not much else. He didn't want to be materialistic. That was a trait belonging to Jimmy, not JT. And anyways, any items he cared about would be safer back on Earth. If his uncle was going to ship him off-planet so he could go back to Idaho as soon as possible, he wasn’t going to waste time rifling through a twelve-year-old’s room.
“JT? Hi, I’m Tom.”
“Nice to meet you Tommy.” Tom, too meek to say anything about the nickname, hurriedly finished moving the last of his stuff, leaving JT with a lofted twin-sized bed, a desk underneath the bed, and a drawer underneath the desk. He rolled his suitcase under the desk and dropped his backpack on top of it. Unpacking could wait for later. For now, he wanted to figure out as much as he could about the life he’d be living for the next year, so he started flipping through the folder he’d been given that morning.
New Anchorage didn’t have the school year typically found on Earth. It alternated between one month spent working hard in school, studying just two classes in-depth, then another month in the fields helping out families that needed labor. It meant smaller class sizes, since the school only had to deal with half of the youth population at a time, and JT liked the concept of learning more practical skills in addition to academics. Usually new students were added to the cohort in the fields, but they were only a couple of days into the month and the cohort currently in school was a bit smaller. Given JT’s academic history, the academy figured he’d be able to catch up. That month, he was assigned to calculus and special relativity. They were subjects he had tried teaching himself back on Earth, but the education offered at New Anchorage was bound to be much better than piecing together an understanding from what he could find in Iowa.
Yeah, JT thought to himself, Tarsus was going to be a good spot for him.