A/N: So it appears that the average word count for every chapter of this book is actually 5-6k and I'm cOnfUSeD how it got to this point. Also, I might not be updating next week because I mmiiiight be focusing on a new chapter for FS instead! I'll see how it goes and update you guys on Instagram. 

Enjoy freshly-brewed sexual tension! jkjkjkjk

____________________

"So. He hates cooking for everyone, but he's voluntarily cooked for you. Twice," Si Yin summed up with a look, chin raised and eyes narrowed. "I'm betting on Naruto-Einstein. He clearly wants you to have his babies."

"That, is not," was all I managed to piece together before being confused myself. I had to take a second to recover before diverting Si Yin's attention to our homeroom teacher who'd entered the class with a stack of papers. This got her scrambling back to her seat (which was really only two desks down) and straightening out her uniform before anyone could call her out.

Chef Palmer got to distributing the papers at once, sending them down the rows before picking up a piece of chalk from the teacher's desk and scribbling several pointers on the board. I was, however, unfortunately distracted by the student seated in front of me who'd passed down a square of paper along with the additional sheets of what appeared to be parental consent forms for the orientation camp.

"Make sure you get these scanned and uploaded onto the school portal before midnight tomorrow, including a photograph of your passports and the digital certificate of travel declaration you'll find on the same page," Chef Palmer announced after pointing us towards the first of her pointers. "No consent, no flight ticket, no camp."

Question: are you gay, said the square of paper that was thankfully folded and clearly written by a certain someone two seats down who was, very apparently, glancing over her shoulder far too often for comfort.

"Temporary itineraries will be given out on your flight as per usual. Destinations remain a surprise until the morning of your flight but both the reporting venue and time are stated clearly on the..."

That is not a question you should be asking on passed notes, Si Yin! I wrote initially but soon decided not to send the square of paper back in her direction for safety purposes. Admittedly, the question was one of the many I'd been asking myself as of late and reading up about; which wasn't something to be embarrassed about, really. My godfather and his husband are one of the happiest married couples I'd ever met and with a pair of adopted children, they were nothing less than a family.

The notion itself—family—was another concept that I had yet to grasp despite the countless books and journals I've gone through since the age of four. And very much like the idea of flesh and blood, sexuality, too, seemed all-too-complex to be understood through written words. This, I was experiencing first-hand.

No, not the sexuality part. Just the complexity of understanding it.

"Remember. The packing list is a guide and not some holy bible. Do not ask stupid questions like whether or not you have to bring asthmatic medication if you aren't asthmatic or sanitary pads if you're male. Besides that, bring as many knives as you like, as many log books or cameras or spices or whatever it is you can fit into your bags. But do not pack knives into your carry-ons or you'd be handing those thousand-dollar blades over to security before you know it."

Already, our classmates were shifting chairs and exchanging whispers about what I assumed were location rumours since, as the packing list stated, sleeping bags were one of the many mandatory items. Something else that caught my eye was mosquito repellent. And ponchos instead of umbrellas.

While the school could have very well had these included in the packing list to throw their students off track, I was inclined to think that they had better things to do. Emily's predictions (in which Keith had told her to put up online) consisted of places like Paris, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea, et cetra et cetra—a somewhat reasonably levelled projection from last year's location. It was Italy, by the way.

Over the course of the four-day-camp, students from all four years were brought around the country and exposed to various learning activities and culinary experiences. That aside, small-scale tournaments were held at different times of the day for an added competitive boost, which, according to research I'd done online about high school and college orientation camps, was a twist on the supposed houses or classes that would have originally made up the competitive element and fun in such activities.

Since our school was unevenly split into majors instead of coloured houses, I figured that we would be competing across the batch according to our classes.

"Hey," Si Yin appeared by my shoulder all of a sudden, pulling up a chair before joining the whispers by initiating a conversation with myself. I gave the teacher's table a glance and saw that Chef Palmer had returned to her seat and didn't seem to mind us chatting away. "Wanna ask your sophomore friend where they went last year so that we can at least be prepared? Like, I honestly thought this was going to be some resort-fun thing, you know. High school orientation camps were supposed to be the dream. Star-gazing. Fireworks. Cool shit."

"It was Italy. I was going through the archives at the library the other day for story ideas, so... although I have to add that I'm not entirely sure whether your image of high school orientation camps should be applied to ours."

Si Yin had her lips shaped into a curious 'o' and I waited, assuming that she would've liked to share further thoughts on camp locations when she decided to make a huge detour and direct us back to the square of paper she'd passed down earlier.

"Yeah but the fireworks and rainbows and speaking of rainbows, are you gay?" She scooted a little closer with a devious smile on her lips. "Does the sight of men or high school boys make your heart go wew or send your mind into the dirty abyss of darkness?"

I backed up, holding out my folder of administrative papers. "I... that does not help my understanding of your question. Just so you know, I don't have a clear answer to it but I can, if you wish, answer simpler questions without the use of weighted terms."

"Okay okay," she held up a finger and closed her eyes in concentration. "Didn't know 'gay' was a weighted term but how about this: do you. Like. Boobs." Her facial expression was akin to that of 'nailing it,' and I was far too concerned not to give her a well-established response.

Needless to say, I failed.

"That is a very vague question and I don't quite understand what it means," I resorted to running around in circles and being the worst friend ever, oddly finding every one of these questions—however inexcusably simple—awfully difficult to answer. "I've never really thought about attraction in general, let alone towards a specific part of the female body. It wasn't important and I didn't need that knowledge to, well, feel accomplished at school. That said, it was never my wish to know more about sexual attraction. If that's what you're referring to."

Thankfully, Si Yin was the kind of person who could remain unfazed in the light of vague answers. This time, she came up with a different form of approach.

"Yes—but so, you've never had a crush on anyone?"

Watching her eyes narrow in disbelief had me constantly checking my choice of words. "No, but... yes, well... no. I haven't. And it isn't uncommon, just so you know. Research shows that first crushes can develop as late as thirty years old."

This got her laughing. "You researched that?"

I stammered out a reiteration of whatever I'd said before, trying to justify my reading of 'The Science of Love,' whilst keeping up with the conversation. Si Yin, however, waved my excuses aside and proceeded to seize me by the shoulders.

"It's okay Vanilla, we're at the age," she said, alternating reassuring pats on both sides of my shoulders before going off topic for the third time. "Fifteen is where everyone's busy finding themselves and hopefully getting their shit together. Wait. You're fifteen, right?"

I paused to register the sudden change. "Next month, yes..."

"Okay great. Yeah. Like I said. We're at the age and there's nothing you should be embarrassed about 'cuz," she gave her surroundings a quick check before leaning closer and lowering her voice. "Remember that guy we met on the first day, senior-guy who took us around I don't remember his name but, yeah, you remember him? I saw him kissing some other guy but he has a girlfriend apparently and I don't know how I know all this stuff."

Getting used to Si Yin's pattern of speech wasn't entirely out of the question at our current stage of friendship, or so I'd thought mere seconds ago until this very quick escalation of matters. This was not only new information but information that I found rather hard to digest in a single mouthful and instead of spending some time taking it apart bit by bit, I decided to go along the lines of her example but towards a more specific issue at hand.

"That is, well, interesting and actually um highly relevant to what I may be confused and embarrassed about. You see, I'm afraid I'm beginning to realize that sexual attraction might be different from one's sexuality. For example, my godfather may be gay, which is his sexuality, but that doesn't mean he's sexually attracted to every other guy on the street—you know what I mean?"

She squinted in response. "Uh... huh. I kiinda get what you're saying," she was, by now, using my pen to doodle hearts all over my packing list. "So you might be gay but not really because the only dick you're attracted to belongs—"

"I don't find men very interesting, is all I'm trying to say," I interjected calmly, slipping the paper out of her reach and replacing it with a notepad. "Also, I don't know what you're talking about because Leroy is a friend. Whom I treasured very much when I was younger and that is all there is to it."

At this, Si Yin snickered without restraint and launched into an aggressive performance of eyebrow-wriggling that stunned even the best of eyebrow-wrigglers. "No one said it was him I was talking about."

================

"So, um, maybe you could talk about yourself for a second," I began amidst the lunchtime chatter—not exactly the best sort of background noise you'd want during an interview but it was at the guest's request either way, so.

Not the noise; just the venue. We were seated in the middle of the student commons at the peak of lunch period, right between the exact moment nutritionists and bakers were leaving to make way for the red and blues. Since Leroy and I belonged to the second batch of students and happened to share lunch period, he'd requested the interview to be held in that time slot due to his busy schedule.

This meant that I had to snag a photographer with their afternoon free (our photojournalists just all happened to be nutritionists) within hours and fortunately enough, I did. Less fortunately, however, it wasn't myself who'd sourced for such arrangements but our vice-president Keith Tang; which hence precipitated his tagging along and eavesdropping a table away.

"You know most of it." Leroy had a carton of fruits milk on his tray and was removing the bendy straw attached to the side of it whilst talking to me. It didn't feel very much like an interview. "We're not strangers."

"Yes, but... well, that's not quite how an interview works," I reasoned, feeling obliged to open my chilled bottle of green tea. "You have to pretend you're speaking to a random member of the student body. Someone else who's reading this article or a man walking down the street. If that was the case, how would you sum up yourself in, say, fifteen words." I gave in to the pressure and couldn't stand doing nothing with my hands while Leroy was busy destroying his carton of fruits milk within seconds. I'd also noted it down as one of the opening details in my nutgraf since I could see it being worthy of attention.

After all, who would've expected someone as intimidating and effortlessly brilliant to be drinking a child's favourite? Well, certainly not me.

"I don't count to fifteen," he had a smirk on the edge of his lips and that was how I knew he was teasing me and the photographer, Jael, who'd circled around the back of Leroy's head for a different angle, paused and alternated his gaze. Trust everyone else not to take me seriously at such a serious point in time.

"Okay, so. Poor... at... math," I pretended to scribble on my notebook which was previously blank, giving him the benefit of doubt so that he would actually start talking. "Next question. What inspires—or motivates, just in case you're also poor at English—your drive in doing well at school? Or in improving your culinary skills in general? And might this be your secret to great cooking?" Boy was I wrong.

Leroy paused at my (or rather, Keith's) questions that I'd stayed up all night to rephrase. He seemed to have finished his carton of milk right then and as though this was a casual lunch, moved on to the bowl of green curry and jasmine rice he was having. Not wanting to pressurize the interviewee into rushed or unnatural answers, I went along with his flow and stabbed my fork into a cherry tomato.

"Try this," he said all of a sudden, holding out his fork with a cube of chicken at the end of it over our trays of food.

Needless to say, I was stunned. We were in the middle of broad daylight, at the peak of lunch hour in the busiest part of school and seated in the most conspicuous spot alone (except for an additional photographer), exhibiting odd behaviour unbefitting of interviewer-interviewee relationship. To think he had the gall to feed me, his interviewer, a portion of his food using a fork he'd already used! It was downright scandalous beyond belief.

I weighed my options against the current outlook, thinking of ways I could somehow make this even. "Only if you answer my questions with the appropriate sincerity," was what all this came down to. I held his gaze as he snorted, seemingly amused by my attempt at negotiation.

"Fine."

And with that, the deal was sealed and I was unfortunately left wondering about the things journalists would do for a good story, feeling as though I'd barely crossed the line. Naturally, I was embarrassed. But that didn't stop me from trying to hide it because if this was a challenge to see how far I would go for the journalism of truth, I wasn't going to back down.

Leaning over, I bit into the cube of chicken and detached it from his fork as fast as I could—careful not to touch the utensil itself. I chewed on it; or at least tried to. "Tastes and feels like rubber."

"Exactly." Leroy snorted, returning to the rest of his lunch as though nothing had happened. "Waste of ingredients I could have used."

Relieved but also oddly puzzled that he didn't make a big deal out of it, I, too, pretended to brush the matter aside. As long as he presented another interesting piece of information that I could use to draw my readers in, well, anything goes really.

"I see you look rather upset with the person who made this," pointing out the details could potentially make way for further revelations. "Do you like green curry?"

"I like the heat," he shrugged, looking up from his plate with an arch smile. Roguish and playful.

Disregarding the irrelevant details of his unfairly attractive face, I penned down the information on the next line of my notebook. "Likes... spicy... food," I wrote. But you know that already, said me to me, awfully annoying today. "So. Is spicy food your current interest or...? And I'm assuming it has something to do with what has been motivating you all this while?"

He paused and seemed to think for a moment, staring at my bottle of green tea as though he was examining the nutrition chart for details. I waited patiently, purposefully reaching for my drink and taking a sip out of it in hopes of snapping him out of his reverie. His eyes followed.

"I guess," he said after a while, leaning against the back of his chair. "My mom used to add Cayenne to everything."

This was only the second time I'd ever heard Leroy speak about his mother and naturally, it caught me off-guard. While I was desperate to steer away from the dangerous topic as Vanilla Julian White, I had to admit that it wasn't something any other journalist would have done. In fact, it was a prime element of good stories—the human interest factor. Ah but what a terrible time it was to be talking about sensitive things; especially not when we haven't in the time we'd spent together in private and not when words held the weight of commercial value like the present time.

"It's not that hard," he laughed shortly all of a sudden, presumably after catching the look of perplexity written all over my face. "I don't look very far for motivation. Just in front."

A-an opening quote! Stunned, I scrambled to write this down before the exact words slipped out of my memory. And he chose to steer his answer away from his family. Could he have caught on...?

I wanted to know. Yet, I was clearly conflicted between choosing to further the conversation as Vanilla White and doing so as a journalist. A glimpse at the list of questions I had in store decided on the latter since I'd barely even made it through two whole questions and the table behind Leroy's seat was now filled with four other members of the Culinary Chronicle. Including Keith.

As though sensing we were being observed and somewhat supervised, Leroy sensibly left out the teasing and round-about, vague answers in the remaining half of the interview. He gave straight, to-the-point answers and cut to the chase in every anecdote I'd prompted him to tell. Most of them were slightly unexpected (which was, ironically, what I had expected from him aka being unexpected) and veered away from textbook, politically correct answers that filled the archives in the library.

And after finally wrapping up the interview by asking him for a piece of advice to every aspiring chef in the school, I let Keith and the rest slip away to the marketplace while Jael hung around to request for a portrait of our interviewee. To which he rejected.

My photographer had glanced at me then, as though pleading for me to make the request again but I was drained and done with making requests so he backed up and said he'd be right back after getting a drink. Meanwhile, Leroy and I were left to enjoy our dessert in peace. Him, a mango pudding, and me, a slice of blueberry cheesecake.

"So. Have you, perhaps, changed your mind about interviews?" I said after my first forkful of creamy goodness. "That was easy, wasn't it?"

Seated across me, he laughed low. "Hn. Maybe."

"Also, um. Just out of curiosity," was what I had been dying to ask since days ago when we first had our profiles assigned to us over the club meeting. "You rejected every other request. They were very appealing, if I do say so myself, I mean... anyone else would have agreed to having their utilities paid for fifteen minutes of their time and yet, you turned them down and... I want to know why all I had to do was, well..." I paused. "Ask."

The expectation was for him to be stunned into silence; realizing that he'd been biased and unfair towards the rest of my club when they really meant him no harm and perhaps maybe even deliberate the chances of changing his opinion about them. Leroy gave no pause.

"Because you tell the truth," he seemed to muse. Quietly.

*

While I was left pondering over the remnants of my godfather's husband's old advice regarding the dangers of truth and honesty, Leroy had left for class and I, running late, had given Jael the photographer five calls to inform him that he'd left his camera and lenses at the table. He'd been missing for nearly fifteen minutes and the last I recalled him saying was that he had gone to get a drink.

"Hey, sorry to keep you waiting," a voice sounded from behind me and I was relieved to hand Jael his heavy bag of lenses. "I was looking through the photos on my phone—Bluetooth function—and accidentally joined the wrong queue. You wanna take a look?"

We headed for the exit and made our way to the main building where his and my next class were located. Jael was, like Leroy, a sophomore culinary student whose hobby involved food and portraiture photography. I figured that going through his shots real quick wouldn't harm since we were heading the same way, so. I agreed.

Lo and behold, they were nightmarish. "Why does it all look like screenshots from some romantic comedy?" I said, appalled. In a single sitting of nearly thirty minutes, there was not one shot that did not consist of the oddly strange atmosphere surrounding Leroy and myself. The pictures depicted either myself looking oddly invested in the conversation or my interviewee with the very same fire in his eyes and the rest were burst shots of Leroy feeding me that chicken cube or him stealing food from my tray.

The photographer gave me a look. "Like it's my fault?"

"Okay, I understand," was all I managed to say calmly. "But this cannot be how it looks like on the article."

Jael rolled his eyes. "Fine, fine, I'll send you the ones that are less scandalous and racy—I mean, do you see the way he looks at you? Impossible—but who cares because the dude basically proved his point by doing this in front of the whole school instead of some other private café he probably has access to." We arrived at the plaza and headed for Roth Hall.

Then, as though it couldn't get any worse, he added: "you know that people were sneaking photos of you guys from The Line, right?"

==================

Because every member of the student body had their schedules packed till the very morning of the orientation camp, Si Yin and I were unable to spend another afternoon at the ice cream parlour and neither were Leroy and I able to arrange another tutoring session to save his falling AB grades. Though he did send me a grading of his report the other day and it was a miraculous B+ without much of my intervention; which was saying something since all he got was a D for the previous assignment. And all that was left was to prepare him for his test a couple of weeks later.

With the start of orientation camp drawing near, Emily and I had much to do with the hype revolving around this year's location and theme. Having spent afternoons leading up to the day in the library browsing through archives, travel books and supposed insider information we had to sift true from false, we churned out teaser after teaser of possibilities on the Chron's Instagram feed. That, and putting together our profile features before the Saturday morning deadline made the rest of the week particularly hectic.

Had I thought Leroy was a tough nut to crack, I clearly hadn't tried to interview Birchwood. Emily—however underhanded her means were at approaching her interviewees—deserved the respect for her perseverance and undying will. She was determined, to say the least. A better word for stubborn.

That aside, we spent a fair amount of time searching for contacts to support each of our field articles about the orientation camp. While our angles were long fixed and ideas long drafted, insightful opinions from a range of contacts that would suit our angle was key. Most importantly, they had to agree beforehand. Conducting long and detailed interviews without an idea about who was open to one on the day of the camp was far too risky. Timeliness was key.

And so goes my explanation of our current schedule: stressful, packed, filled with protracted days and little to no interaction with the people I wanted to be interacting with.

In fact, Si Yin had gotten so tired of me typing away at my phone and getting distracted in the middle of our conversations that she resorted to downloading the entire season of this Korean drama she was currently obsessed about and watching it on our bus ride to the airport. Emily, a member of class 1A (also the class we happened to be sharing the huge tour bus with), was seated in front of us with her laptop whilst craning her neck around to run me through the names of the profiles we somehow managed to snag.

"Third-year baker Chen En for a comparison between last year and this year's cross-year, plus opinion on current predictions and him not being on the list... Fourth-year Layla Tenner for the same things but also because she's held the number one spot for three whole semesters but unlike Chen, she's on the list of predictions—oh and," she looked at me pointedly. "Leroy Cox for his opinion on first year predictions... yeah that's your article, right, so. He hasn't responded to my text but I'm sure he'll come 'round. I mean... he apparently loves looking at you, so."

Indignant and embarrassed, I was left a stuttering mess before finally demanding an explanation. Emily didn't say a word; she slipped her phone out of her pocket and scrolled through her contacts before arriving at a specific chat that somehow had photos of myself and Leroy splayed all over it. Including a very blur, low-quality, unglamorous picture of me leaning being fed a cube of chicken. I was about to delete them all before the bus screeched to a stop and my head smacked into the seat in front, successfully squishing my glasses into my face. This gave Emily the opening to retrieve her phone and I was hence left in a very compromising situation.

"Wake up kids," Chef Palmer went down the rows in what looked like a leather jacket—something I didn't quite expect her to be wearing—and stopping occasionally to tap several students on their shoulders. "We're getting off."

"That was fast," Si Yin had to say, unplugging her earphones and stowing them away in a bag that was not hers. I had to point it out.

By the time we alighted the bus and shuffled around with our heavy bags and travel suitcases, we'd noticed that we were one of the last few groups of students to arrive at the airport. Past the doors and into where the check-in counters were, the place was filled with uniformed teenagers interrupting the peaceful lives of other travellers.

"I know it makes it easy to tell us apart at a glance but like, don't you think people are gonna be mad that we're, you know, taking up so much space?" Si Yin glanced around, as though anticipating some complaint from every random stranger.

"I'm sure they've worked something out. Apparently, both the airport and the airline we're taking are partners with the school, so... that's how we were able to book four full planes."

Together with the rest of the class, we made a beeline to the end of a very long check-in line that extended past the check-in counters of nearby airlines, causing quite the commotion. The tour buses that had arrived ahead of time however, made it so that several students got to check in early. Final year students in their tracksuits (gym attire underneath because the school was kind enough to understand that flying in formal school uniforms wasn't the best idea) passed us with their boarding passes in hand and carry-on baggage in another, presumably waiting to enter the departure gate.

"...sleeping in five-star hotels. More like five-star snakes." "Looks like they were serious about the budget cuts." "I've never slept in a tent before." "They can't be expecting us to build our own, right?"

I turned to Si Yin with a curious look. She didn't seem to have heard them as they passed, so I feigned ignorance as well, returning to the screen of my phone which was currently filled with comments on the Chron Instagram posts about how wrong our predictions were. Surprisingly enough, I was able to keep up a face of indifference until Emily, behind, had herself a friend whose voice could travel miles.

"They're expecting me to roll the wheels of a Gucci suitcase in mud—and it's brand new."

I couldn't help the urge to turn and at once met the eyes of Violet Birchwood, who'd apparently broken her rule of not talking to first-year students like herself by seeming so attached to Emily. Enough to voice her complaints, I guess.

"There are little to no hotels or resorts there. It's a disaster and I haven't even gotten on the plane yet," she groaned, standing somewhat out of the line. "Father never said a thing about our budget being cut to this extent. How could we possibly go from Italy to... to a freaking rainforest."

I paused, glancing down the line and then at the passport in my hands. Judging from the approximate number of people in front of me, I would be held in nearly thirty minutes of suspense before actually knowing the exact name of the country we were flying to—the one that was making everyone go bonkers. It was as though they were heading to some island in the sky that had the most awful hierarchy imposed on every inhabitant.

"Sir. What's happening?" The girl standing before me in line posed to a passing officer, who only just came from the front of the counter. "Why's the line splitting?"

"There's been complaints about you guys blocking the entrance. We converted three of the check-in counters from other airlines to yours so just make your way to those at the end and cut the wait."

This, I had to admit, was a somewhat pleasant surprise; cutting our waiting time by nearly twenty minutes was more than welcome. I picked up the ugliest outdoor camping bag previously owned by my godfather's husband and now filled with my belongings, making my way to the shorter queue ahead.

Being up front somehow amplified the moaning and groaning that everyone was reduced to as an apparent result of the camp's location, which could have been exacerbated by Emily and my 'predictions' of luxurious resorts accompanied by famous star chefs at a poolside kitchen.

"Next."

I tottered over to the check-in counter, dropping my hideous camping bag on the scale after removing my laptop just in case I could get some work done on the flight. That, and several books I'd brought along to read on long rides. Moments later, I left the counter with a boarding pass in hand, glancing over my shoulder to see that Si Yin had only just been allocated to a counter.

Deciding to wait for her so that we could enter the departure gate together, I shuffled to the side away from the queue and gave my boarding pass a quick scan. Flight, boarding gate, boarding time... about an hour till then. I wonder how we're seated. Alphabetical order? If so, Si Yin should be nearby... and are we even on the same plane? Do they separate us by level? It can't be by our majors since it would be so uneven.

Entertaining the guilty wandering thought of a certain someone being on the same plane was almost a sin. I pushed it aside and was about to check on Si Yin when a voice sounded from behind—right beside my ear.

"Different plane."

I nearly dropped the laptop in my arms, spinning around to take in an oddly disappointed-looking Leroy Cox who had his eyes fixed on my boarding pass over my shoulder.

"You do not come up to me unannounced!" I hissed, still in shock and waiting for my right ear to recover from strange tingles. Several feet behind him, a group of friends I recognized were his lodge mates were heading towards us. Presumably, he'd been walking with them, too, until... well. He spotted me.

Leroy held up his boarding pass. I read the flight number printed on the second line and felt something sink at once. Naturally, I wasn't going to say this aloud. Either way, I noticed something different about his boarding pass that was of a unique shade and had some gold letterings printed at the top.

A first-class seat.

"That's nice. A comfortable time in the clouds without worrying if the person, or people, sitting beside you hogs the arm rest or, you know, if their feet smell." Good god, way to go Vanilla. Very conversational. Very sexy. The best way to get your sentiments across without—hold on. When did 'sexy' turn into a conversational necessity? Clearly, something's wrong with me.

This, fortunately, seemed to amuse my companion. "Let's swap. I'll trade a bunch of pretentious for the feet."

"Your friends on the board can't be that bad," I laughed a little, watching him shrug and glance over his shoulder towards another group of students headed towards us. They looked fairly unfamiliar; and within seconds of their arrival, Leroy seemed to prove his point without uttering a single word.

"Hello? Your little lodge buddies said you were here and we've been waiting for, like five minutes." Among the students were a mix of seniors and juniors in tracksuits of different colour (again, coded by our majors). "Hurry up! Welcome refreshments at the lounge close in ten minutes." "Pina colada. I love that stuff." "Can we check out the pool first? And the sky bar? Also, the napping lounge." "Yeah but you can sleep on the plane, right? The seats transform into beds, I heard."

Leroy was not looking at his, um, fellow members of the student union while they were speaking to him. Admittedly, it was rude behaviour that a sophomore like himself (the youngest among the group) should not be exhibiting. Yet, because he continued to look my way with a pointed look and a knowing smirk, I sort of got the message.

"See you there." He said, joining the group who probably had their names somewhere on the ranking board in Roth Hall. "Don't miss me too much."

I caught a glimpse of the look in his eyes—awful. Bad. Teasing. Bad. Bad enough to mess with my extensive vocabulary. Just, bad.

Si Yin herself was having a hard time processing my lack of proficiency in the language on our entire flight and resorted to shoving her Korean drama downloads onto my deprived mind. It did well to distract me from the very blank word document I had on my laptop that remained in that very state for a very long time. Half the flight.

And by the time we landed in the São Gabriel da Cachoeira airport, I was somehow invested in knowing who the main character ended up with—the young, aggressive, loving childhood friend or the cold, stoic, dominant CEO of the this had to be a Wattpad story.