Ethan was saying something about lunch.
Alice was in the middle of zipping his bag when he caught the general shape of it, a question, probably something along the lines of do you want to grab food, and he was already opening his mouth to say something short and final about it when the classroom door swung open and Lucy appeared in it like a force of nature in a school uniform.
She found him in approximately half a second.
"Alice." She pointed at him. "Let's go."
Alice stood up, slung his bag over his shoulder, and looked at Ethan once. "Later."
Ethan blinked. "Oh. Yeah, sure, see you after—" but Lucy had already grabbed Alice's wrist and was pulling him toward the door with the kind of momentum that didn't leave room for negotiation.
They were in the hallway before Ethan finished his sentence.
"Where are we going," Alice said. Not a question, really. More of a formality.
"You'll see." Lucy turned a corner, then another one, navigating the hallways with the confidence of someone who had clearly spent time on this. She was also holding a small container of food in her free hand, which meant she had planned this well in advance, which meant Bryan was already wherever they were going.
Alice let himself be dragged. He was used to this.
They ended up in front of a door on the far side of the building, down a hallway that was noticeably quieter than the rest. Lucy pushed it open. It was a room that had clearly been used for something at some point and then just quietly forgotten about. A few old chairs stacked in the corner, a table that had seen better years, two windows with decent light coming through them. Bryan was already sitting at the table with his own lunch in front of him, looking completely unsurprised to see them.
Alice looked around. "How did you find this."
"I explored," Lucy said, setting her food down.
"During class?"
"During the break between orientation and first period." She sat down.
Alice looked at Bryan.
Bryan shrugged. "She texted me the location. I got here early."
"See," Lucy said. "I'm three steps ahead."
Alice sat down, pulled out his own lunch, and decided that this was exactly the kind of thing he should have expected from Lucy and let it go.
The three of them ate. It was quiet in the good way, just the sound of them eating and the occasional comment about morning classes, Bryan's statistics lecture that had started five minutes late, Lucy's professor who had spent most of the period talking about himself. Alice offered that his English lit class had been fine, which by Alice's standards meant it had been genuinely decent. The room was warm and the light came in at a good angle and nobody else was there.
This was, Alice thought, a good lunch spot. Hats off to Lucy for finding this place.
* * *
Then the door opened.
Lucy startled, her chopsticks clattering against her container since she's eating some sushi. Bryan's eyes went to the door immediately, already steady, already reading the situation. Alice looked up from his food and kept eating.
It was a guy. Older, probably a second or third year, with the look of someone who had been moving fast and was trying very hard to appear like he hadn't been. He had a black eye that was fresh enough to still be swelling, and he was breathing just a little too quickly. He pushed the door, mostly shut behind him and leaned against it.
The three of them looked at him.
He looked back.
A beat of very strange silence passed.
Then knocking came from the other side of the door, sharp and deliberate, and the guy's whole body went tense. He pressed his back harder against it, hands gripping the frame, eyes darting around the room like he was looking for a second exit that wasn't there.
Lucy, Bryan, and Alice watched this with the calm attention of an audience that had just gotten comfortable.
Alice took a bite out of his banana.
Bryan raised an eyebrow.
The knocking came again, and then the door moved, and the upperclassman made a sound of genuine distress as he tried to hold it. It held for about three seconds. Then it didn't.
The door swung open. The upperclassman stumbled sideways. And the person who stepped through had cold eyes and an expression like he had been mildly annoyed since birth and had simply made peace with it.
He was tall. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of face that would have been good-looking if it wasn't currently doing that thing it always did, which was look at everything like it was a minor inconvenience. His gaze swept the room, landed on the upperclassman, and then moved to the three people sitting at the table eating lunch.
It stopped on Alice.
Something shifted in the expression. Not much. Just enough. The cold didn't go away but it moved slightly to the side, and what replaced it was something that was almost, if you were being generous, warmth.
"Oh," he said. "Hey, Alice."
Alice raised his hand in a small wave and went back to eating.