Ah, middle school age. The old Sorting Hat. These plots are fun.
For review, you are a little, black dragon about the size of a collie, formerly an eleven year old boy. When you transformed, your parents tried to shoot you dead not just once but twice, which was traumatic for you, but you have been adopted by a nice witch, who is actually turning out to be a better parent than the ones you left behind. She gave you a few options as to how to pursue your relationship with her, and while she has not actually suggested it outright, you are shaping up to be, effectively, her pet.
Because eleven years of age is really a part of infancy for a dragon that is likely to live for at least one thousand years, you are quite embarrassingly cute. You wear a blue and yellow scarf around your neck, not wearing anything else because, after all, you are a dragon. Last time I checked, it's perfectly alright for four-legged beasties, including ones that talk, to go around au naturale, but let me know if that custom has changed.
You do have human thoughts and the resulting self-consciousness, though, and you have felt a lot better about embracing this idea of galloping about naked since you have had something, namely a scarf, wrapped around your neck as a sort of symbolic gesture of decency, which is really surprisingly effective. By the way, that scarf is authentic--and therefore expensive--alpaca, so don't you even dare drag it in the mud. I am warning you, kid.
There ends our review.
Now, let us get a grip on our setting, which is a perfectly ordinary middle school. The setting is only so very typical because there are only a handful of ways you can run a school system, with any sense at all that one lives in a civilization, on the sort of shoe-string budget that superintendents must follow when they are under intense pressure from taxpayers that expect them to work miracles without it actually costing much of anything to do so. Consequentially, these places are neither terrible nor heartwarming. They just are.
You would probably feel that this is not the most ideal place for someone in your situation to be. With or without the magical normalization charm, it does not help a middle school boy's ego very much to go from being a fey youth to being a baby dragon. In fact, it might have been better if your transformation had been a headline-grabbing sensation. "Boy Becomes Dragon!" "Magic Is Real!" Interviews on talk shows, a life in the limelight, notoriety, fame, and maybe even a successful GoFundMe. Denied. The localized normalization charm passes people's thought processes right over the big sensation of seeing a real magical creature in their midst, making room for the other sorts of emotions endemic to middle school students that have someone in their number that has an unusual, awkward condition.
Anyhow, you are in your second-period geography class, so queue Mz. Korzybski's entry into the classroom. She is neither a good teacher nor a bad teacher, but she is just one of the many teachers that bear themselves with the distinct mannerisms of someone who is working at a job in order to continue receiving her salary, competently yet unimaginatively applying the basic theories of effective instruction and finding any deviancy from expected conduct to be a source of immense aggravation. If there is not a clear policy for dealing with something, then she avoids dealing with it at all.
"Turn your books to chapter five. Cell phones off. CELL PHONES OFF. Hand it over. Thank you. And Mz. Pope, do I really see you chewing gum?"
"It's a cough drop. I have a cold."
"Use a spray in the future."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Emily, I realize that you are in remission from your leukemia, and I am so very happy for your miracle. We don't allow hoodies in class. Your beanie is what constitutes appropriate head-gear in your situation...thank you. Everyone else, please, let us act a LITTLE BIT like adults."
After having called the classroom to order, she tries again to start her lesson, but before the words are out of her mouth, they transform suddenly into a shouted "Good God!" She walks directly over to you, and she pulls experimentally at the nylon dog muzzle that is strapped over your face. Not knowing how to go about removing it, she throws her hands up in frustration. "What...what...who?" She sputters.
There is laughter around the classroom, more over her reaction than over your own situation, and you just lower your head to try to avoid drawing more attention to yourself. "Please, just leave it," you whisper, knowing that removing the muzzle would just invite some other, possibly worse stunt later. You had learned this truth before you had even become a dragon.
At that, she just rolls her eyes. "I can't deal with this," she says tartly. "I have to teach." As she walks away with more giggles trailing in her wake, she starts reading mechanically from the chapter, leaving you to try to figure out how to scrawl out notes while only being able to open your jaws by an inch. Usually, you can see what you are writing if you hold your pencil in the side of your jaw and write with your head tilted to the side, and while it looks awkward, your penmanship ends up being perfectly formed Palmer method. Holding the pencil in your front teeth forces you to move a lot more slowly at first, and you feel you are certainly missing a lot more material than could be good for your test grades. After a little bit of practice, though, you start getting better at it, and by the end of the lecture, you feel confident that you have managed to catch all of the important concluding remarks on the chapter, which you have found tends to be where those ever-annoying fill-in-the-blank questions come from. Formula teaching at least has the benefit of being predictable, so an A is all in knowing the structure of the lesson.
Eventually, the quarter ends, and the bell rings for the lunch hour. You load your textbook and notes into the modified dog-harness you use for a knapsack, and you follow the rest of the school in going to the lockers to put them away for the duration of lunch.
Being an obligate carnivore, though, means you have to bring your own lunch, so you go directly out to the courtyard to try to find a relatively safe place to eat.
Yet we are at a crossroads, here. You could not be blamed for wanting to fight your own battles and depend on your own resources, but you have had others try to talk to you and befriend you, even since your change. The ones that have spoken with you are an eccentric bunch, though.
Sitting at the tables is Ronnie, a goth-looking guy that might or might not be a vampire. He has a genuinely sinister look about him, and he seems to be bitter and dark. However, the very lack of him embracing the norms and values of those around him makes him curiously approachable, somehow. He might be bad news to get mixed-up with, though. Yes, being seen with this guy would mean that you were cool in a disagreeable and bitter kind of way, but in spite of the progressive bent of his personality, there is a sort of harshness in this person, too. Ronnie is not picked on by anybody, but the reason why is that he is actually feared. You have seen how he operates: anyone that slights him always ends up with injuries or getting into trouble (one student is in juvie for being found in possession of crack cocaine), and nobody can ever clearly point to Ronnie as being to blame except based on motivation. He is one of those "sigma males."
Leaning up against the wall is Mark, who is an open furry that even comes to school with a tail attached to the outside of his trousers. The tail still bears the singe-marks from the last time someone tried to set it on fire. He is...oddly happy, all of the time. However, you used to be with those that saw him as a creepy and strange person that was best avoided, and you might remain in that camp. Self-acceptance is all well and good, but you don't know if you have the temperament to happily embrace being constantly a victim of vicious pranks and constantly avoided by people that run screaming (and for some reason also giggling) anytime you come near as if you were carrying a plague that you might contaminate them with (but only if they are seen as coming in contact with you voluntarily). Then again, Mark wouldn't avoid you.
There is Becky, an extroverted girl who stands and talks with several friends and would probably pressure you into befriending all of her friends, and all of her friends are those annoying types of girls that insist on treating you like a baby and dressing you up in silly costumes, which even babies feel emasculated by (I remember that stage of life pretty clearly, and yeah, that stuff seriously annoys toddlers a lot if they're not feeling it at the time). On one level, you would be accepted and loved, but on a different level, this would mean giving up on ever being taken seriously again in middle school.
Then again, there is an LGBTQIA group on campus, and you see them sitting around seriously as they talk with each other. Being activists, they have this serious look to them, and they are clearly using an organized sort of procedure in their discussions. On one hand, you still have no idea what your sexuality is, and when you were a human, the world of sexuality was a sort of weird, crass, and toxic sort of place. On the other hand, as a person that is outcast from mainstream society for observably dumb, even demented reasons, you are a natural ally, regardless of which way you swing. Is it really your thing, though, to hang out with people that want to have a stuffy and overly serious board room meeting about what special snowflake pronoun you want to be called by? Do you even like parliamentary procedure?
Finally, you have the option of eating alone and avoiding contact with anybody. Like every other set of choices, this has risks that are associated with it. As a lonely and silent beast that lies at the periphery, avoiding eye-contact with anybody, others might fear you sufficiently to eventually realize that they would rather not step on a land-mine on purpose. However, being feared has the drawback of also being loathed, and being on the outside of what others are saying to each other means that, in interactions with teachers and others in authority, it will always be your word against that of the crowd, which always means your behavior record being tainted with a litany of offenses that never actually occurred. On paper, you would absolutely look like a future prison inmate, with the people in authority always having the air of someone that longs to have a taser or cattle prod handy while dealing with you. It could lead to living as a hermit, or it could lead to being taken in by someone as a stray a little bit later in life. There is a certain liberty in the lonely life of a true outcast, but it does mean not having a single friend.