A Reason to Sit

I had to keep my tray level through the cafeteria doors, which meant I had no spare hand to check whether Oren was still at the table he’d pointed out the day before.

I could see him anyway. He sat near the windows, where the tables were spaced far enough apart to make accidental intimacy an unlikely excuse. One empty chair waited across from him. A ceiling camera watched the aisle between us with its small black eye.

The lunch line had taken long enough that I’d started to wonder if he would decide I’d changed my mind. I hadn’t. I had only been doing the arithmetic of walking across a room while carrying soup.

Oren looked up as I approached. He moved his notebook to one side, clearing space for my tray.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” I set the tray down and sat. There was a chair’s width and the table between us. Sensible. We could both breathe without the system taking an interest in our pulse.

For a few seconds, we dealt with lunch. The room filled with the rustle of wrappers and the scrape of forks. Voices stayed low, broken into brief exchanges. At the tables nearest the staff station, students spoke with the measured care of people who knew the school listened.

Oren glanced toward the clock above the serving counter, then back to me. “I said I’d explain why I asked you here.”

“You did.”

“I was going to say it yesterday. Then the corridor announcement happened.”

The names from the heartbeat alert had carried across the hall, clear enough that everyone heard them. I had spent the last stretch of the walk to lunch trying not to picture the two students’ faces when the broadcast cut through their conversation.

Oren watched me without holding my eyes for long. “You looked at them afterward.”

I paused with my spoon halfway to my mouth. “So did you.”

“Eventually.” He pressed one thumb against the edge of his notebook. “Most people looked down. You looked to see whether they were all right.”

I remembered turning toward the pair. One of them had been staring at the floor; the other had gathered their things with quick, tidy movements. I hadn’t gone over. There had been nothing useful I could say that wouldn’t have made the moment louder.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“You noticed.”

The sentence sat between us, plain and difficult to put away. I moved my spoon through the soup, although it didn’t need stirring.

Oren went on. “I wanted to ask if you’d have lunch with me because you seemed to understand that the alert was embarrassing for actual people. I didn’t want to spend the whole time talking about the rules. I just thought you might be someone I could sit with.”