Criminal

Chapter 1

Lance bounced around on the Greyhound bus he'd been thrown on, looking for someone to sit next to. He didn't have many options: there were only three other people on the bus, not including the bus driver. A big boy with dark skin and dark hair held out of his face with a headband, a short girl with short, brown hair, and another boy with violet eyes and dark hair in—was that a mullet?

Lance tried the mullet-boy first, since he was the closest to the door. "Hey, is anyone—"

Mullet-boy swung his feet up onto the open seat next to him. "This spot's taken."

Lance put his hands on his hips, immediately rankled by this kid. "Yeah? By who?"

"My feet. Go away." Mullet-head put in earbuds and started to pointedly ignore him, looking out the window.

Lance pulled a grotesque face. "This spot's tAkeN," he muttered in a bad imitation of mullet-head.

The bigger boy waved to him. "Don't take it personally! He did the same to me!"

Lance plopped down in the seat next to the big boy. "Hi! I'm Lance."

"Hunk," the other boy said, and pointed to the girl, who was typing away on a laptop. "That's Katie, but she prefers Pidge."

The girl gave him a friendly nod, and went back to her computer.

"As far as I can tell, the surly kid's name is Keith. Mostly from the person at his bus stop yelling at him to 'behave and don't get kicked out, for the stars sake, because they didn't want him back'."

"Yikes."

"Yep. Keith flipped him off, though, so I think the feeling is mutual."

"Yikes."

Hunk smiled warmly. "Enough about him. How come you're getting shipped off?"

"Class clown. A few counts of minor theft. But mostly for doing dumb, against-the-rules stuff."

"Such as?"

"Taking the principal's car for a joyride," Lance said with a grin, "But to be fair, I was double-dog dared, and a friend had money on me that I would."

"Understandable."

"The principal didn't seem to think so. What are you doing here?"

Hunk shrugged his massive shoulders passively. "I broke into the school kitchen one too many times, I guess."

"Nice. But I didn't think that school food was good enough to break into the kitchen to steal."

"It's not, and I wasn't. I was trying to cook a decent lunch for the school."

Lance held a hand up. "Double points for that."

Hunk obligingly high-fived him, and Lance turned his head towards Pidge.

"Internet fraud," she said before he could ask, "Hacking, stealing people's internet identities, messing with the school mainframe and setting up a few internet scams." She looked up at him. "I thought I'd tell you before you had to ask."

"Yikes. So you're like an actual criminal!"

"Yeah. And Hunk actually got sent off because he burned the chemistry lab to the ground."

Hunk grinned sheepishly as Lance's head whipped around to face him. "That was an accident. At least breaking into the kitchens was on purpose."

"What about Keith?" Lance asked.

"A long history of violence towards people who ask nosy questions," Keith responded, now laying across the seat with his legs up against the wall of the bus and his head poking out briefly to glare at Lance. The earbuds were dangling.