BAD OMENS ✬ luke hemmings

3.7 | conference room

Friday afternoon, Aria and Luke are sitting in that same conference room, except today they're allowed to have their belongings with them, including their phones and laptops. The office must've connected some sort of dots and figured that if the two wouldn't talk to each other if they're distracted.

It's been a solid thirty-minutes spent in silence.

Though to be fair, Luke's been focused on the past papers posted trying to juggle both physics and chemistry at the same time. He's got grades to keep up and universities to prove to, and if he's motivated enough to get the grades now, when it comes to mocks, or even the real exams he'll have nothing to worry about.

It's about establishing good habits.

So, he sits at the long desk, notebook wide open with a pen in hand as he works through the answers of that 2019 past paper for physics. He's got a packet of chips, loudly crunching on those Doritos.

Aria, despite having her headphones on, can hear the chewing. And it's fucking annoying. The rustling of a packet on top of the unnecessarily loud chewing in a quiet room has volume.

"Chew louder, will ya?" She comments, diverting her gaze away from her laptop. She's trying to take notes on the assigned history readings, it's something about 'the new Cold War' and the weakening of detente.

After spending the last two weeks covering higher level content, like the decolonization in Africa, she's back to studying the overdue, long 45-year period of hostile and passive aggressive tension based on ideological beliefs.

Luke glances at the girl, reaches into the bag, grabbing the last big handful and makes sure to chew even louder. Somehow managing to have each crunch to be louder than the last. The leftover dust on his fingers is worth it based on the look the girl is giving him.

She glares at him, rolls her eyes and turns up the volume in her ears. The window on her laptop is on a split screen as she types out notes, scanned from a textbook. Her note taking method has no direction, she just types down everything and adds in some color for things that sound important.

The sound of her typing is aggravating. How can a person possibly type that rough and still have all their keys. Does she know that all it takes is a little pressure to get the letters appearing on screen?

"Bro, why the fuck are you fucking punching your keyboard?" He remarks, gripping his pen due to the constant, unsatisfying, typing that echoes throughout the conference room. "I'm trying to work here, and unlike you, I don't got fucking, hundred dollar noise cancelling headphones."

"Dude, I'm working too, and what are you even doing?" She questions, "Scribbling in your notebook shouldn't count as working."

"For you information genius, I'm doing physics." He replies, "You know, something that takes real critical thinking and not just plain memorization."

"Woah, woah, woah, you try writing a history essay." Aria says, "With these grade boundaries, you'll be lucky to get a four. Come on Luke, get your head out of your ass."

"Okay, fine then, Miss Applications and Interpretations, please tell me how hard history is compared to math based subjects." He says, taking a little jab at the math course Aria takes. All the people as high and mighty as him are doing the harder class that doesn't revolve around pretty word problems or statistics, but instead real math like calculus.

"For starters, the workload, then actually having to know how to write a good essay in thirty-minutes for the paper one." She rants, "Did I mention that I have to write three essays in two hours? Or two essays in an hour and fifteen?"