Five minutes earlier, Tyler had taken the Literature Club report out of Eris's hands.
She'd objected. He'd ignored her, the way he ignored most things that weren't actually threats, with the calm certainty of someone who'd already decided how this would end.
Now she sat beside him with her lunch box open and her fork forgotten, watching him fill in the blank sections as though he'd personally appointed himself her rescue from three weeks of unfinished paperwork.
She picked up the fork. Put it down again.
Something about his handwriting had snagged her attention, and once she noticed it, she couldn't stop noticing it.
Eris leaned closer.
"You don't have to do that," she said.
His pen didn't stop moving. "Do what?"
"That." She tapped the page.
Tyler followed her finger and stared at the report for a second.
"I still don't know what you're talking about."
"Tyler."
"What?"
"You're copying my handwriting."
He looked at the page again.
"No, I'm not."
"You are."
"I'm writing."
"In my style."
"That's not possible."
Eris pointed at one of the letters.
"You normally write that differently."
"So?"
"And this one."
She tapped another word.
"You make the line longer."
Tyler didn't answer.
Eris looked at him.
"Tyler."
He studied the page like it had personally betrayed him, then gave up trying to deny it and settled for deflection instead. "The important thing is that I'm finishing your work."
"That's not the point."
"Then what is?"
"You tried." She sat back, delighted. "You actually sat here and tried to make it look like I wrote this."
Tyler dismissed the accusation with a shrug.
"Your handwriting is annoying to replicate," he muttered, and immediately looked like he regretted saying it out loud.
"You just admitted it."
"I admitted nothing."
"You said the words. With your mouth."
He didn't answer that, just bent back over the report with the particular focus of a man trying to outrun a conversation. Eris let him have it, mostly because the smile had already found her face and she didn't feel like fighting it. She rested her chin on one hand and watched him work.
This idiot.
For three weeks she'd been buried in club records, member lists, transfer forms, everything the handover to Mika required, and he'd simply reached across the desk one afternoon and taken half of it without making a single speech about it. Even the handwriting. He'd thought about what it would look like after, whether someone flipping through it later would be able to tell where her hand ended and his began.
A small smile returned to her face.
Then his pen stopped.
"Something's wrong here."
She leaned in. "What?"
"The date's right. What's under it isn't." He tapped the entry.
"It is. I checked it."
"You mixed the second-term budget into the third-term entry."
"Tyler, I wrote that..." She followed his finger, frowning, flipping back a page, then forward again. Her frown deepened by degrees until it collapsed entirely. "...Okay. You're right."
"I know."
"Don't say it like you're proud of yourself."
"I am proud of myself."
She sighed, long and put-upon, though there wasn't much heat behind it. "How do you even catch that? You weren't even in charge of the budget."
"Do you think I just sit in the corner of that club doing nothing?"
"Honestly? Yes. Everyone thinks that."
"Even you?"
"Especially me."
He gave her a look of deep betrayal and went back to writing.
It wasn't the first time.
History facts he had no business knowing, references to books he'd never checked out, little observations that landed too precisely to be guesses.
Tyler had a way of knowing things that made no sense next to how little time he spent studying them.
When she asked, he dodged, or handed her some answer so absurd it wasn't worth arguing with.
She'd mostly stopped asking.
Mostly.
While his pen kept moving, his eyes kept drifting toward Chris, Noah, and Kai, huddled two desks up in a conversation none of them seemed to realize carried this far.
Eris couldn't hear a word of it.
Tyler clearly could.
She let it go and looked instead at his lunch box, still sealed shut beside the report. He'd all this and forced her to eat and he hadn't touched a bite of his own.
An idea formed, small and a little mischievous. She speared a piece of food on her fork and lifted it toward him, testing.
Maybe I should feed him.
She could already picture it: the annoyed glance up from the page, the complaint that she was breaking his concentration, and then, after a few seconds of muttering, him eating it anyway because refusing food from her hand had never once worked in his favor.
She held the fork a little higher.
Come on. Look over here.
Nothing.
His attention had drifted to the three boys again. She raised it another inch, right into his eyeline.
Still nothing.
Seriously?
"My hands are busy," Tyler said, without looking up. "My ears aren't."
Eris froze with the fork in midair.
So did Chris, a desks ahead, whose sentence died in his throat.
She swiftly pulled the fork toward herself, the metal catching a faint glimmer in the dim light.
Chris slowly turned around.
Noah stared.
Kai rubbed his forehead.
"You three aren't exactly whispering."
"We were whispering," Noah said, wounded.
"You were not," Chris told him.
"I was."
Kai sighed.
Kai pinched the bridge of his nose like a man aging in real time.
Tyler set the pen down at last and looked at them properly. "Come here."
They dragged their chairs over in a loose half-circle.
Eris lowered her fork and watched them approach.
"What's going on?"
Tyler glanced at her.
"Apparently, they have a problem."
Then he looked at the three boys.
"All right. Tell me."
His eyes briefly shifted toward Oliver.
Then toward Danny's group.
Then back to them.
"What kind of mess did you idiots get yourselves into this time?"
"It's not our mess," Chris said.
"That's usually what people say right before it becomes theirs."
Noah exhaled through his nose. "Are you going to help or not?"
"Depends how interesting the secret is."
"This is going to be a long lunch," Kai muttered, and pulled his chair in closer anyway.
Eris looked down at the food still waiting on her fork.
Her expression fell slightly.
She brought it back to herself and ate it.
Then she looked directly at Chris.
He noticed immediately.
"What?"
"Nothing."
Eris took another bite.
Chris turned toward Noah.
Noah shrugged.
Kai looked between them.
Tyler picked up his pen again.
Chris turned his chair back toward Tyler, then caught Eris watching him.
"What?"
"I already said its Nothing."
"You looked at me like I did something."
"I didn't."
"You definitely did."
Eris glanced toward his untouched lunch.
"Eat and tell Tyler whatever you came here to tell him."
Chris looked from her to Tyler.
Tyler was already writing again, apparently more interested in the report than the conversation.
Chris knew better.
The man could somehow listen to several conversations while pretending he wasn't listening to any of them.
Next to Chris's seat, Luna's ears all but visibly perked up. "Oho."
"What," Chris said, without turning.
"Nothing. I'm an innocent bystander enjoying my lunch." A beat. "Please, continue."
"Nothing." She copied Eris's tone perfectly. "Please continue. I'm just an innocent bystander enjoying my lunch."
"You were literally reading a romance novel a while ago."
"And?"
"You accidentally told Tyler and Clara to kiss."
Luna's face went blank.
Aria immediately covered her mouth.
Luna slowly turned toward Chris.
"I thought we agreed never to mention that again."
"We didn't."
"Then we should have."
Tyler smiled faintly at his report and said nothing, which was somehow worse than if he'd laughed outright. Luna narrowed her eyes at the side of his head.
"Can we focus," Kai said.
"Yes," Chris said, leaning forward. "Because we actually have a problem."
The joking faded.
Tyler kept writing.
Eris lowered her fork.
Aria rested an elbow on the desk while Luna folded her hands, suddenly interested in something other than her novel.
"All right," Tyler said. "Start from the beginning."
Chris glanced at Noah, who glanced at Kai, and it was Chris who finally started.
"Two days ago...."
Tyler's pen paused briefly.
"That narrows it down."
Noah frowned.
"Do you want to hear it or not?"
"Continue."
Chris took over.
"We were at the playground after school. Me, Noah, Amaya, and Kai."
Tyler looked up.
"Where's Amaya today?"
"Farewell meeting for the geek club. Last-minute stuff."
"Ohh. Good for him."
"Can we get back to it?"
Tyler waved a hand, conceding.
Chris sighed.
"So we were at the playground after school."
"We were playing," Noah added.
Chris glanced at him.
"Yes. We were playing."
Noah looked satisfied.
Kai rubbed his forehead.
Chris continued.
"Oliver was there too," Chris said, and something in the way he said it made Tyler's eyes flick, briefly, involuntarily, toward the back of the room, where Oliver sat with his head down and his shoulders folded in like he was trying to take up less space than his body allowed.
"Something fell out of his pocket," Chris went on. "Noah picked it up."
"It wasn't anything bad," Noah said quickly, and Kai's look was sharp enough that Noah backtracked before anyone could ask. "Not like... I mean it wasn't bad, it just... it was Oliver's."
"something hmmmm," Luna tease.
Chris closed his eyes.
"Why did we bring her into this conversation?"
"I was already here."
"That's the problem."
Luna gasped.
Aria laughed quietly.
Tyler didn't look up.
"Can someone explain before Luna starts inventing theories?"
Luna looked offended.
"I don't make theories."
Everyone looked at her.
She lowered her eyes.
"Fine. I make excellent theories."
Chris sighed.
"Anyway. Noah picked up... that thing."
"That thing?"
"Yes."
"What thing?"
"That thing."
"What kind of thing?"
Kai answered before Chris lost patience.
"Something that belongs to Oliver."
Luna stared at him.
"That tells me absolutely nothing."
"Good," said Kai, and returned to his lunch.
Chris pushed on before Luna could recover. "Noah made a joke about it. Not even a bad one..."
"It wasn't," Noah confirmed.
"...but Oliver got embarrassed. Laughed it off, though. He was fine. Taking it normally."
"So far," Tyler said, "this sounds like an ordinary afternoon."
"Then Danny showed up." Chris's voice flattened.
Tyler's pen, which had drifted back to the page out of habit, went still.
"Ah," Luna said softly. "There it is."
"What?"
"That face. You already know where this is going."
"I don't know anything."
"You made the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You do," Eris said, not even looking up from her food.
Tyler turned toward her, betrayed for the second time in ten minutes. She kept eating.
Chris cleared his throat to reclaim the room. "Lucas took the thing from Noah. Miles started making jokes about it. Then Evans and Lucas joined in, and it was fine, it was just teasing, until it wasn't."
The table had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with waiting for punchlines anymore.
"Danny took it from Miles," Noah said. "Started looking at it. Like... really looking."
"Looking how?" Luna asked, leaning in despite herself.
"Luna," Kai warned.
"I'm just asking..."
"It's not our secret to tell," Kai said, flat enough that even Luna, for once, let it drop. She sat back with her arms crossed, unsatisfied but silenced.
Tyler glanced at Kai with something close to respect. "You've kept these two quiet for almost a full minute. Impressive."
"We can keep secrets," Chris said, offended.
Kai said nothing at all, which undercut the claim more effectively than any argument could have.
Chris pressed on, quieter now. "Danny kept making jokes. Bad ones. Oliver told them to stop, more than once, and none of them cared, and then...."
Eris had stopped eating entirely.
Tyler's pen moved steadily across the page.
She glanced down.
"Tyler."
"What?"
"You skipped a line."
He looked down.
She was right.
Chris stopped speaking.
Tyler stared at the page for a second.
Then sighed.
"Continue."
Eris raised an eyebrow.
"You missed it."
"I can see that."
"Then fix it."
"I was going to."
"You're welcome."
Tyler looked at her.
She smiled innocently.
Chris looked between them.
"Are we interrupting something?"
Both answered at once.
"Yes."
They looked at each other.
Tyler frowned.
Eris smiled.
Chris slowly turned toward Noah.
"What is wrong with these people?"
Noah shrugged.
"Too much friendship."
"That's not a thing."
"It is for them."