When we walked onto the courtyard in between the school buildings, we could already see the food truck set up in the distance. But to our surprise, when we got closer, there were not that many students waiting in line. We did, however, recognize two familiar faces.

“Hey there, citizens!” Kay greeted us with a smile. Alisa and her were standing in the back of the line, so we joined them.

“Citizens?” I tilted my head a little with a confused look on my face.

Alisa sighed. “It’s because of this movie she watched. Ever since she’s seen it she’s been calling everyone ‘citizen’ and the amount of strange looks we’ve been getting has been… innumerable…”

“Hey, that’s not true! I just think it’s funny.” Kay protested with quite a bit of gesticulation.

Alise rolled her eyes.

I chuckled. “Anyway, I heard that this food truck is a collaboration with your school as well?”

“It is!” Kay went on. “Our school back home is getting one with general European cuisine in return.”

“That’s a bit broad, isn’t it?” Emma asked.

“Well, we don’t have the place for five different restaurants.”

“Touché.” Em nodded, which made Kay smile a bit more.

It didn’t take too long before it was our group’s turn to order, but to keep it simple we just decided to let our American friends decide on what we should eat. In the end, they went with the Classic Double Cheeseburger.

Our order arrived swiftly with a relatively well-sized portion of fries.

“Have a nice meal.” Alisa and Kay said before they started digging into their burgers.

“Bon appetit.” I looked at my burger for a bit longer before starting. These were definitely not your run-of-the-mill fast food cheeseburgers, but were way closer to the quality you’d expect from really fancy burger houses. At least, from what I could tell.

“Your school wanted to keep it a little bit more classy compared to the original preposition.” Kay said, she'd guessed what I’d been thinking. “Still tastes incredible, though.”

“They even made the hotdogs fancy as hell.” Alisa nodded. “So we took the least special option for y’all.”

“Thanks, that’s probably for the better.” I said, just as Ria was putting her pickles in my hamburger box. It made me smile. She never liked those. Even after I had taken her to a burger joint relatively often, she still had those sensitive ‘sheltered-rich-girl’ taste-buds from back when we first went. That… or it had just become a habit for her to give the pickles to me because I quite enjoyed them. So I put the more-fancy-than-usual pickles in my mouth and just like that they were gone.

“Hey, are you guys gonna do some chess after dinner?” Kay asked after taking a big bite from her burger. “I’m itching for a rematch!”

“If you want to, sure.” I nodded. “Pres, Ria?”

Pres nodded. “I will defend my title!”

“Me too!” Ria happily nodded along.

“And we will be there too.” Claire smiled along with Emma and Karin.

And so it was agreed. After we all finished our burgers and the accompanying fries, we went to the recreational room to have our little chess tournament. Although, Em and I didn’t really assume we had any chance of getting through to the final rounds of the tournament.

As if it were fate, Em and I did get knocked out together in the first round, again. This time by our American friends.

“Shit, I’d really have loved to have been able to at least reach round two.” Em looked a tiny bit frustrated.

“Hey, at least you didn’t get checkmated in literally four moves.” I comforted her.

“Hmmm… that’s not really helping, Auro.”

“Well, next time, let’s just invite them to something we are good at.”

“Like what?”

“Ping-pong?”

Em rubbed her chin and slowly started nodding. “That’s not a bad plan.”

“See, sometimes I have good plans.” I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

Soon we were joined by Karin and Claire, who’d gotten knocked out by Pres and Ria.

“Hello, fellow round one losers.” Claire said with a smile on her face.

“Heya.” I smiled back. “Do you also want to join our table-tennis confederation?”

“Oh? Sounds interesting.” Claire smirked. “I’d love to get a first place one of these days.”

“You’ll have to fight me and Em for it, though, and Karin too.” Karin was actually surprisingly good at table tennis for not being into sports. She had amazing reflexes, and her normal drowsy nature sometimes made you underestimate her quite a bit.

“That won’t be an issue, with my lightning fast reflexes. When the seasons shift so fast, one can’t see the leaves drop from the trees.”

“...What?” Claire’s weird sentence had me thrown off so much I’d almost not noticed the extreme chess battle that started to unfold in front of us. Rock-paper-scissors had decided that our two champions from last tournament, Ria and Pres, had come out against each other in the second round. Neither of them were holding any punches. They were placing chess pieces so fast it became very hard to follow. It almost looked like one of those super hype anime sports scenes… which is a weird thing to say about chess.

So instead of paying any further attention to Claire’s strange poetry, everyone had their eyes fixed on their battle. Even Alisa and Kay, who were having a match of their own to decide who went on to the final round, stopped the clock to watch what was going on.

With one lightning fast move, Pres moved her knight. “Bet you didn’t see that one coming.” And she punched the clock.

“You’ve just checkmated yourself, dear president of ours.” An evil smirk appeared on Ria’s face.

Pres froze. “Oh no….”

“Yes. You’ve fallen into my trap! I specifically let that gap open for you to exploit!” It honestly looked like the Claire microbe had caught on to Ria as she stood up from her seat and basked in her victory. She then moved her knight up and that was that. “Check mate.” Game over for Pres.

“Well played, Corelia, well played.” Press bowed her head and then took her cup of tea and slowly sipped from it.

“Thank you, Pres!” And in an instant, Ria was back to her usual giddy self. Although she was a bit blushy, probably because she’d realized she’d been getting just a little bit too enthused by their game.

“Wow, that was intense.” Em shook her head real fast to regain her composure.

“Ultra chess extreme edition.” I joked. “And this wasn’t even the finalé yet.”

“Who won that game anyway?” Claire asked as we all started to look in the direction of Kay and Alisa.

“Oh right! We still had a game to play.” Kay scratched the back of her head as she noticed us looking. “Don’t worry, I will have finished this game in three turns or so.”

“That’s a bit cocky of you, Kay.” Alisa looked not amused.

They continued to play their game, and in fact, three turns later, Alisa had lost.

“Fuck!” Alisa called out. “How?”

“Pure skill, my dearest second in command.” Kay grinned.

Alisa sighed. “Yeah, right…. Well, good luck in your game against her.” Alisa nodded over to Ria.

“I’ll need it. That game was intimidating as all hells.”

Kay tried to put up a fight against Ria but quite quickly it became apparent that she stood little to no chance against our little cute chess juggernaut.

“It looks like we’ll have to train even more to be able to match you, Corelia.” Kay said with a friendly smile as she shook my girlfriend’s hand. “You are a formidable opponent.”

“Thank you.” Ria smiled back and then came running over to me and Em for a good old victory hug and kiss.

“Good job, Ria.” Em kissed her on the cheek and gave her a headpat.

“Amazingly done.” I did the same thing.

Ria was basking in the attention she was getting.

“While those three are getting cozy, how long will your exchange last, if I might ask?” Claire stood up to talk with Alisa and Kay.

“The rest of the school year.” Kay gave her a nod.

“Oh, nice. Then you’ll have plenty of time to challenge our chess duo.”

“I’m counting on it.” Kay smiled once more.

“Kay, we still need to go by the student administration’s office.” Alisa pulled her friend’s sleeve.

“Right, I guess we should go then.” Kay saluted us with two fingers. “See ya around?”

“See you!” Ria called after them, the rest of us just waved them off.

“What are we going to do now? We don’t have that much of a midday break left.” Em asked.

“Might as well go back to the classroom and just chill there a bit.” I shrugged. “Is everyone okay with that?”

Karin, Pres and Claire nodded.

“As long as I can get a lap pillow, I’m fine with everything.” Ria smiled.

“Who would’ve seen that one coming?” I chuckled and gave her another kiss.