BAD OMENS ✬ luke hemmings

6.4 | study group

For the past hour, Luke has been anxiously checking his phone every five minutes, hoping for a text from the girl who has been deadset on leaving him on delivered for hours on end since Friday. He doesn't know what's going on with Aria, but Luke hasn't been asking, so she hasn't answered all the questions that flurry in his mind.

He impatiently taps his pencil against the book on his lap—which he uses as a stable surface for the heavy pile of physics past papers—for nearly half an hour. The boy has been staring blankly at the page, the eight-mark question he can quickly answer if his focus isn't elsewhere.

Why isn't Aria here? The question plagues his thoughts, considering everyone else is currently sitting in Calum's living room, laptops open, surrounded by screens, loose papers and practice tests. Calum and Jonah are, for some reason, looking over past paper two prompts for English and talking them through. Sade passively works on a study guide while watching carpet cleaning videos.

Luke is left restless and too preoccupied with thoughts of Aria even to consider getting any work done. He's been at Calum's for two hours, and neither Aria nor Michael have made their overly dramatic presence known. Did something happen?

Sure, Aria and Michael have always been a package deal – in all the worst ways possible, considering their relationship has never benefitted anyone other than themselves – and they could easily be fashionably late. However, Aria is usually one to be on time, never two hours late.

And she is usually fast at replying to Luke's texts – she's always on her phone, especially when she's home. So, Luke can assume that something significant happened between her and Michael drastically enough that she's ignoring him and everyone else in the room, who has no idea whether the two will even show up.

Speaking of! No one has bothered to discuss or acknowledge the gaps in the overall dynamic. Without Aria, there's no one to distract and constantly derail productivity; without Michael, there is no one around to complain about how stupid studying is, meaning that the living room is eerily quiet – aside from the fan of Calum's laptop sounding like a plane ready to take off.

Glancing at his phone last time, Luke sighs, throwing his head back to rest against the couch cushions. Looking up from his laptop with a billion open tabs of previous compare and contrast essays, Calum directs his gaze to his friend, "What's up with you?" He asks.

"Where are Aria and Michael?" Luke asks, both avoiding Calum's question yet answering it all at once. He could've asked the question two hours ago, but his blind faith and hope that she'll magically show up has finally expired. "I thought they were coming."

"They got in a fight. Neither of them is coming." Sade replies bluntly, not looking up from her screen where she scribbles down an answer to a lengthy nine-mark word problem.

Luke, quite offended and frustrated that she has kept this information to herself for the past two hours looks at the girl with a look that only Aria and Michael have witnessed. How could Sade, knowing what she knows about his and Aria's relationship, keep this from him?

Sure, the blond isn't entitled to know everything, but when it's pretty apparent his restlessness is due to her avoidance in the past three days, the least Sade could do was tell him – or at least announce it to the group the second she walked into the house.

"Really?" Calum hums, finding an excuse to ditch reading previous responses to awfully phrased questions, shutting his laptop. "About what?" He asks, feeding into the temporary break, distraction, and gossip.

"About Luke," Sade answers, grabbing her calculator and punching in numbers. In her defence, Sade completely forgot about the drama – it slipped her mind the second she pulled out the compilation of carpet cleaning and the study guide. She meant to tell everyone, but she figured they already knew.