Oh My God, They Were Roommates

19 | Carry On My Wayward Son

Leo groaned as Ray smiled, propped his chin on his hand, and said, "It's pretty early. You guys don't have to come—the café's kinda puny anyway. And it's in the Design District, too."

Leo shook his head, completely resolute. "Nope. Not too early for me! I'll be there—and you can count on it." No one had been this dedicated to Ray since his Aunt Natalia and Grandma made a point to fly out to Ray's middle school summer camp in Wyoming for some theater performance. It made him flustered beyond belief, and it was all he could do to keep from blushing, batting a hand at Leo, and saying, "Golly, you don't have to do that for little ol' me," in a thick southern drawl.

Instead, Ray ducked his head and said, bashfully, "Thanks, Leo," and giggled when Leo gave him a shove on the shoulder.

Their professor walked in, but his entrance was immediately overshadowed by Sora walking in, unperturbed by the attention he drew from all corners of the room. Ray rolled his eyes as Leo and Huey sighed dramatically and hopelessly. He scowled at his notebook as Sora passed them on his way to the back of the classroom.

Sora had woken up that morning to Ray already gone. He had left behind a container of food on Sora's shelf and stuck a post-it to it with Sora's name on it. Sora always had home-cooked meals back at his parents' place (in-house chefs were brilliant, in his opinion), but when he moved to Erin's place, both Erin and Robin were often too busy to cook. They rotated the responsibility, though Sora had an uncanny habit of burning things.

When he moved out at the age of seventeen, that all vanished. He hadn't had a home-cooked meal prepared for him in over a year.

It was... nice.

"It's only until you're feeling better!" the post-it note said, and he could read it in Ray's intentionally snobby voice, nose in the air, hands on his hips.

Sora had scoffed at it and stuck it back onto the container top. It was there when Sora extracted it from his bag as class started, and he could eat in peace at the very back of the classroom.

Their professor was an ancient geezer who refused to go by the formal "Professor Whitaker" that many professors ordered from their students. Instead, he went by Isaac and emphasized this on the first day of class and every day after when some poor soul tried to pull a "Professor Whitaker" on him. Perhaps it was because they all knew he was the programs director, but whatever the case, he didn't tend to act like an actual professor, anyway.

"Now I want all you kids to get out a sheet of paper—" Immediately students were asking one another if they had a piece of notebook paper to spare. "—and you're gonna write your name on it and pass it to the front."

Oh God, Sora groaned internally, reaching for a pen. He clicked it open on his shoulder and scribbled his name down. That bitch Alice was coming up to his row, acting like the teacher's pet she was by collecting the rows' stacks of name tags.

Sora held the slip out to her. She took it with a quick thanks, all while eyeing Sora's lunch. It was hard to miss the neon-green post-it note on the front. Not only that, but the guy was eating what appeared to be perfectly partitioned sections of food: seasoned brown rice, a salad, and homemade hummus.

I knew the guy was a hipster, but who the hell packs a salad for lunch? she thought, tapping the stack of names on her palm as she pranced down to the front of the classroom. She passed them to Isaac, who slapped them into an upside-down baseball cap and shook them about.

Alice went back to her seat and wondered, If he's not living in the dorms anymore, maybe that note was from a roommate? But roommates don't make food for each other—maybe a girlfriend?