Yesss. She was in. Or was it more accurate in English to say that he was in? As if by her agreement she had somehow pulled him into this interaction, instead of him having invited her? Ruben wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t important right now, so he mentally filed it away under a subsection of his New Things tally. Over the past week in America, he had accumulated a small but steadily-growing pile of minor questions about the language. Some of them he might be able to find answers to, if he could find the patience to sift through library books, but some of them were more contextual. He suspected he would have to ask a Real Person about those.

That, however, required first befriending a Real Person whom he wasn’t potentially interested in and wouldn’t care about their opinion of him after he started running through a list of questions. He hadn’t put much effort into interacting with other students outside of the classroom yet, but maybe he should start.

When she stood up, the long-haired boy got to his feet as well. “It might be hard to believe, but I did not look really far past the tuna,” he responded casually. “But I would be surprised if they had only fish.” Although he wouldn’t have been opposed to it either, obviously. Ruben was tall enough that he had to put hardly any conscious effort in for his strides to overtake hers, and he reached the door first, pulling the door open with his free hand and tipping his head. “After you.”

Once inside, the first thing he did was unzip his jacket. It was strange how she commented on it being freezing; that wouldn’t have been how he described it. Must be because of the sun. Sun on the face always felt warm to him, and sunlight of that intensity on a clear winter day had probably confused his body or brain or something. Carefully juggling his cone from one hand to the other, he managed to wiggle his arms free of the jacket, showing off a black shirt whose entire front was covered in a spiraling, barely-legible font citing Heartless Nebula. Slinging the jacket over his shoulder, he turned his attention back to her and the long counter display. “Are you seeing anything interesting?”