Bashe lay stretched out on the living room floor, surrounded by stacks of papers.

A pair of converse came to stand in front of her. “What are you doing?” asked their owner, shuffling them from side to side. “You look busy.”

“I am busy, Seth.” Bashe heaved a sigh and rolled onto her back to look at him. “I love physics but there are so many numbers.” She ground her teeth together. “You're welcome to try and help me.”

Seth sat down on the floor next to her. “What do I have to do?” He picked up one of the sheets she had been working on it and stared at the calculations blankly. “This is physics? This looks like Greek.”

“Having taken Greek, I'm kind of inclined to agree.” She grinned at him. “Here, this is my formula sheet. Just start solving them, okay? All this paperwork is mostly just for show. So just try your best.”

“It's is immoral,” Seth mumbled. “And cruel. Oh, the things that I do for you.” He put his head down and began to scribble down the formulas on the page. The numbers and letters swam in front of him, but after he'd gotten the rhythm of calculations, he found it was easier to figure out the answer.

“You're the best brother ever.” Bashe grinned at him, wriggling gleefully. “I should have done this ages ago, but everything caught up with me so quickly and all of a sudden all my assignments were due. And, as you can see, I kind of didn't do them. So thanks.”

He shrugged at her. “It's no problem,” he mumbled, jotting down the values of a few of the variables in his current equation. D was 14. Vi was 0. Vf was 49.

Bashe pushed some of her long, black hair out of her face and tucked it behind one of her ears. She stared intently down at the page, her dark eyes enthralled by the gibberish written there. Her lip ring glittered in the new, dim light of the morning.

“What are you doing awake so early anyway?” she asked, without looking up at him.

Seth chewed his lower lip. “I just wanted to grab some breakfast and get an early start on school,” he replied. His knuckles turned white around the pencil.

“You are a bad liar,” said Bashe without looking up. “What are you really doing up this early?”

With a sigh, Seth shut his eyes. He set down the pencil and rested his forehead on his folded hands. “A lot of things are on my mind,” he told her. “And so I got up early to sit outside and think.”

“I should let you go then.”

He shook his head. “It's okay. I like talking to you.” He offered her a detached, nervous smile. “And I like helping you. So it's not problem. But that's why I'm up at this ungodly hour.”

She reached over to run her hands through his bright red hair. “Thank you for donating your morning contemplating to the promotion of procrastination.”

He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

Fatima leaned on the back two legs of her chair. “I love lunch time,” she said. “I don't love very many things.”

Nehemiah and Ariel stared at each other from across the green café table.

“Me too,” Ariel agreed finally. His gaze didn't waver for a second, remaining entirely glued on Nehemiah's eyes, meeting the other boy's death glare full on.

Nehemiah's nails dug into his palms, leaving little half-moons of red in the pale skin there. “Any time that's not school is good time as far as I'm concerned.”

He had a salad. It was small, with marinated chicken and peeled tangerine sections. He took an absent bite of it and chewed slowly. The lettuce crunched between his teeth. He was dissatisfied.

“Good man.” Fatima had her sketchbook balanced across her knees and she was scribbling frantically over the white space. Nehemiah leaned over to try and look at her work, but the girl snatched it away before he had a chance to make anything out of the chaos. “No peeking.”

Nehemiah stabbed a tangerine slice. It oozed transparent, orange juice.

They fell into an uncomfortable silence that was broken only by the sound of waiters and clinking cups and Fatima's insistent pencil.

“You're boring,” she said finally. “Not separately, but together you guys keep staring at each other. It's like you're waiting for the other one to viciously attack someone, and you've got to be first on the scene just to have proof that you were right, they were a murderer all along.”

Her chair legs dropped to the floor.

“I'm not doing that,” Ariel snapped, defensive. “I'm trying to figure out why we all went to lunch here.”

“Because this place has the best lunch in town. Duh.” Fatima flipped some of her long hair behind her shoulder and shook it out.

“I meant together,” Ariel corrected, glowering.

“Oh. Because you guys are both my friends. Simple as that.” She shrugged and went back to drawing.

Nehemiah blinked at her. Friends? She hadn't said anything about being friends when she had invited him, just that he should come for lunch with her and Ariel.

Now she was saying they were friends.

He smiled politely across the table. His hands twisted into his shirt beneath it. His toes curled up on themselves and his boots ground into the painted cement of the café.

“It's very nice of you to invite me to lunch, Fatima, but I don't think I can stay. I've got this test that I need to start on but—”

“Hush,” Fatima scolded. “We'll return you in due time, don't worry about it.” She grinned at him through a curtain of long, black hair. “So. What is it that you do for fun?”

“Fun?” Nehemiah echoed, sounding as if he'd never heard of the concept before. He had, of course. He'd just never been asked what he did for fun. “I listen to music, I guess.”

“You guess? Are you unsure.”

He glowered at her. “I listen to music.” He crossed his arms. She was difficult to talk to, sometimes, Fatima. He didn't mind it too much, but sitting next to Ariel made it very difficult to talk to anyone.

Sitting next to the Israeli boy made his entire body feel tight and frightened. He was a deer in the headlights and it made him nervous to think about.

“Oh. We're art geeks. Can you do art?” Fatima lips flared a little. It reminded Nehemiah of a rabbit. Rabbits and teenage girls with bad tempers made him nervous too, so he looked down at his salad because there was nothing about that salad that made him want to run away.

He shrugged. “I can sculpt a little,” he said.

Nehemiah was a terrible sculptor. His foster mother had told him he hadn't been able to capture the face of their saviour in quite the right light and there was no point to making art besides that. He was a terrible sculptor. It wasn't even worth mentioning.

He had a feeling that wasn't the art Fatima and Ariel used their hands to make though, and that calmed him just a little.

“Sculpting is neat,” Fatima said, smiling at him. “Isn't that right, Ariel?”

Ariel peered into Nehemiah's face before finally nodding. “Yeah,” he said. “Sculpting is neat.”

They ate.

“It's only a weekend,” Ava was saying. “We can watch one more teenager for a weekend. It's not difficult at all.”

Ariel heard his stepfather sigh in the other room. “But I don't want to watch another teenager for a weekend. Especially one that is capable of turning out entire house into a war zone.”

Ava patted him on the back. “I have faith in our children. They're generally very good at keeping level heads.” A pause between them. “What am I saying? No they aren't. We'll just threaten the hell out of them.” She grinned and padded into the living room. “I assume you heard all of that.”

Ariel nodded.

“Yes. Nehemiah is spending the weekend with us. Please don't drive him to suicide or lock him in the pantry or abuse him or anything. Think...frightened dog?”

Ariel snorted. “Fatima made us have lunch together. I think I can handle two days of sharing a bathroom, okay?” He peered up at her through a curtain of black hair. “And 'think' is the operative word, by the way.”

Absently, Ava patted his head. “Then you won't mind sharing a room with him, will you darling?”

Ariel's eyes widened. “What?”

His mother swished from the room. “Just kidding!” she shouted back. “I'm putting him up in the den, a whole floor away from my delicate son.” Then she slammed the back door and was out in the garden before he could reply.

Mumbling to himself, Ariel climbed to his feet and shuffled up the stairs. He was not looking forward to spending a weekend with his nemesis. First Fatima, now his mother. It felt like a conspiracy to get them to converse, even in the tensest capacity.

He had a feeling he was reading too far into it.

“What's up with you?” Seth asked when they ran into each other on the stairs. “You look totally blitzed.”

“Nehemiah is staying with us for the weekend.”

Seth wrinkled his nose. “Ew.” Then he shuffled past Ariel and down into the bathroom without saying anything else.

Ariel sat on his bed, stretched out with his computer. Fatima was logged into her facebook, with a status that read 'has blue teeth.' Deciding it innocuous enough, he sent her message.

“Greetings,” she replied, in her usual standard of typing. “How goes it to you today, my friend?”

Ariel blinked at the words on his screen. “Fine. With you?”

His cell phone began to ring, and he picked it up without glancing at the caller ID.

“Everything is fine,” said Fatima's voice. She logged out of her facebook quickly, leaving him staring at her offline status. “Sorry. I'm avoiding someone.”

“You? Avoid someone? God forbid.” He laughed a little at himself. “You'd be so proud of me, I'm going to be spending the weekend with Nehemiah. In my house. It's great, right?”

On the other end of the line, Fatima was laughing. “You're kidding, right? Ha. The universe hates your slimy guts. Anything else I should know about, or can I return to my usual internet lurking?” He could hear her reshuffling papers on the other side of the line.

Unusual. Usually her desk was immaculate.

“Well I have a date.”

A low whistle from Fatima's side. “Oh really? With whom?”

“My brother's friend's brother.” Ariel fiddled with the loose strands of his duvet. The strings tangled into each other. “He's pretty cute. We're going out for dinner.”

“Hm.”

That was all.

“Just 'hm'? No judgement? No words of advice?”

Fatima snorted. “No. You're a big boy now.” He heard her moving, shuffling something else that sounded like sheets. “I don't really have anything to say, except that I totally want in on dinner this weekend so I can observe the rise and decline of the Cohen empire.”

Ariel snorted. “Rise and decline indeed. Catch you later, Fatima.”

Fatima laughed and hung up.

Ariel lay stretched out on his bed, eyes shut, listening to the sound of Bashe's music permeating through the walls. The words were slurred together, loud and brash and angry at everything. It wasn't complicated Hebrew, he understood most of it, but parts of the sentences escaped him.

Only because it was so loud, he told himself. That's the only reason you can't understand that.

Um. Angst?
There is nothing not-angst about this chapter.

I see you, lurking readers. I see you! YOU ARE LURKING.
Are hundreds of you actually too polite to leave me a review saying 'this is bad'? o_o
Back in my day, people were a lot ruder. We like, pushed each other off swings.