can't blame a girl for trying | a rini au

4. (It's Just a School) - REWRITTEN

Having someone to sit with at lunch again is nice, that's for sure, and Ricky's not planning on squandering the opportunity. Wasting time missing his old friends wasn't going to get him to a happier place at his new school. And Ricky Bowen desperately needs to find his happy place here. No one can survive long without some sort of peace.

But for now, he and his new friend Big Red are in the quad sitting under a tree with their food on the slate grey blocks of cement that most students have turned into some combination of a bench and a table. It's not even like it's a planter that's being repurposed as a seat, it's truly just cement blocks inlaid with some sort of metal, spread out across the outlines of the open courtyard type area in which they found themselves.

Sure, there are a few actual tables scattered, but there were far more students than there was room at those tables. So Big Red taking him here made a great deal more sense than trying to squeeze into a pre-set table.

It's definitely sort of weird not being in an actual cafeteria, with the four walls and those standard long grey mottled tables with the attached benches where you just about always wound up bumping someone's hip when you stood up... But weird or not, he finds he sort of likes it. He just has to wonder what happens when it snows... But it's not snowing now, the weather is actually pretty nice at summer's end. He supposes that'll be one of those issues he learns to deal with when the darker colder days of winter properly arrive.

As to why it's called a quad- that is something he's also incredibly unsure about. There's not really anything that stands out related to the number four going on. Maybe it's just another unanswerable question. He'll find himself with a great deal more of these as time goes on. Unanswerable or at the very least, unanswered.

The pair are just chattering away while they eat, and Red occasionally mentions that friend of his named EJ from earlier. Ricky thinks he recalls seeing him in one of his earlier classes, but honestly they're two days in and he's not quite mastered the layout of the campus, so the names of all his classmates are definitely not his priority at the moment. Plus he hasn't actually been introduced to the guy Big Red calls EJ and describes as having 'perfect hair and striking green eyes'.

Things don't stay simple though. It's not long into their lunch break that a pretty blonde girl approaches the pair of boys. A few onlookers (presumably her friends) are standing probably five, ten feet away. Her eyes are dark but far from cold, not unlike his own, as she gazes at what he assumes in his direction.

"You're the new kid right?"

Ricky looks up quickly at the question, a bit surprised to be addressed this way, how does she know who he is?

Well to be fair it's more than likely just an assumption based on the process of elimination, but still. It feels weird to be approached and identified this way off the bat. "Yeah..." His voice is hesitant as he's still processing her approach, but her smile is definitely disarming.

The perfectly straight white teeth she has feel so celebrity compared to so many of his friends from home. Sure he'd done the braces and so had many of his friends, but when a retainer got lost back home most families wouldn't pay to replace it. It's not off putting, not in the least, just intriguing in a certain way. His lack of verbosity around her doesn't seem to bother the girl in the slightest, she's all sunshine and exuberance.

"Cool! Sutton told me we had a newbie in the senior class. I just had to come meet you." A brunette waves from behind at what he suspects is hearing her own name, but his attention is quickly back on the blonde girl. "It's just so exciting to have new blood. It gets kind of boring with the same old people for 13 years..." Her voice trails off and he offers her a small smile of his own, even as his mind is going a mile a minute trying to take her in.