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Quill triple-checked that there was no one around, then walked into the staffroom. It wasn’t that she thought anything she was about to do was wrong—despite the increasingly bizarre notes associated with it—it was just that she didn’t want to actually deal with talking to any humans.
Inside, the staffroom was blissfully empty, except for one human hiding in a corner behind a chair.
Well, that was weird. But if he was going to pretend he wasn’t there, then she was happy with pretending he wasn’t there.
Except he was watching her, really intently, and it was annoying in a way that risked spoiling her lunch.
How annoying. Maybe she could try to scare him off.
“Why are you hiding?” Quill asked, not bothering to turn around, even as she opened the staff fridge, eyes scanning the shelves until she spotted what she was looking for. That red Tupperware container.
Quill peeled off and pocketed the post-it note (reading, this time: Alex Trenton’s Lunch!!! ALEX TRENTON’S PASTA SALAD!!! PLZ do NOT take. THANK YOU!), wondering, not for the first time, if the Alex was short for anything.
Alexander. Alexandra. Alexis. Alexei. Humans seemed to have an awful lot of Alex-based names. And then, of course, Alex could not stand for anything other than Alex.
Maybe she’d Google more information about Alex-based names later.
Probably not, though.
“How did you know I was here?” the human sputtered, standing up from where he had been crouched behind the chair. “A half-dozen staff-members have come in and out of here without spotting me.”
“Oh, well. If a half-dozen humans haven’t managed to spot you, then truly you are the greatest hider on the planet,” Quill said, tone mocking as she popped off the lid of the container, tilting her head back and feeding a few strands of rotini into her mouth, one-by-one, with her fingers.
“You!” the human shouted, and when Quill lowered her head to look at the man, he’d gone red-faced and was pointing at her, muscles gone so tense his whole arm was shaking. “You’re the thief I’ve been waiting for!”
“Thief?” Quill frowned. Then realization dawned on her. “Oh, are you Alex Trenton? Is the Alex short for anything?”
“You’ve been stealing my lunch for over a week, and you have the audacity to ask me if the Alex is short for anything?”
Quill shoveled some more rotini into her mouth. “It is a communal refrigerator.”
“It—it’s a refrigerator all the staff can use. It doesn’t mean that the food inside is communal.”
“Well, if you didn’t want someone else to eat it, why didn’t you eat it first?”
“I eat it,” Alex Trenton said, gritting his teeth, “during the designated lunch time. Unlike you.”
Quill, who left the class she taught the period before lunch 20 minutes early (“Stay or don’t; I don’t care”), was unimpressed. “Why aren’t you eating it now, then?”
“Because,” Alex began, growing increasingly red and increasingly breathless with anger with every passing second, “I’ve been hiding in here to see who’s been nicking my lunch!”
“Why aren’t you in class?” Quill asked.
“Why aren’t you in class?”
“Because if I don’t get here early, there’s no food left,” Quill explained, her tone implying that Alex Trenton was very stupid for not grasping this basic fact.
“That’s because all of the other staff have eaten it. Eaten the lunches that they’ve brought.”
“Exactly,” Quill replied with a nod.
They were both silent for a long minute, the silence only broken by the noise of Quill eating Alex Trenton’s pasta salad.
“This is absurd!” Alex spat, finally. “So you don’t deny that you’ve been stealing my lunch?”
“I’m eating it, aren’t I?”
“Yes. Yes, you are, and I’m still shocked you don’t have the common human decency to stop eating it while we’re having this conversation!”
Quill completely lacked human decency, and tended to run-short on Quill-decency as well, at the best of times.
This was not the best of times. “I’m hungry.”
Alex Trenton pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why do you keep stealing my food? Can’t you just buy your own?”
“Theoretically. But why would I when there’s all this food here that people just leave lying about, unguarded. If I don’t eat it, who will?”
“Me!” Alex Trenton shouted. He was growing very loud. It was annoying. “I’m going to eat it. Because it’s mine!”
“See, we’re back to my original point again. If you wanted to eat the food so badly, why would you leave it, unguarded, in a communal refrigerator, and not prioritize eating it above all else?”
“Because,” Alex Trenton began, “because that’s just not how these things work. Besides, it needs to be refrigerated!”
“Yes. I like how it’s cold,” Quill said around a full mouth, nodding approvingly.
Alex Trenton opened and closed his mouth a few times, decided that whatever he was going to say was pointless, and instead, started on a different tactic. “Do you nick food from the shops?”
Truthfully, sometimes, but only the really fancy ones with the complicated displays. She knew that Tesco’s, for example, would not miss those three bars of chocolate and that trade paperback, but Mr. Patel at the off-license might miss that bottle of vodka.
Still, why did humans just leave food laying around so much? Even the Rhodians hadn’t done that.
Alex Trenton did not need to be privy to such information, however. Although, he appeared to need a basic refresher on how his country’s economy worked. “Shops aren’t communal. And many people make money through them, which, in turn, pays for them to buy food. So that they’re not hungry.”
“Yes, I know that!” Alex Trenton snapped. “But did you ever think that I used my money to buy the food that you’re eating now?”
“Then why don’t you expend more effort in protecting it?”
“I shouldn’t need to!”
“But you do,” Quill explained. “Yet you have made no effort to.”
“I put the post-it notes,” Alex Trenton protested.
“Oh, yes. That obviously stopped me,” Quill said, fishing a handful of the post-it notes from her blazer pocket and dropping them in front of Alex Trenton. “I suggest a different approach.”
“This is my different approach!”
“It’s not working,” Quill said, wiping her fingers on the inside of her blazer pocket, before snapping the now-empty Tupperware container close, then replacing it in the refrigerator.
Alex Trenton clenched and unclenched his fists, and for a moment Quill thought he might hit her. That would have been interesting, to say the least. Then, he closed his eyes, took in a deep, shaky breath, and began again. “Why keep stealing my lunch, then?”
“It’s good,” Quill shrugged.
“How do you know if you haven’t stolen anyone else’s lunches?”
“But I have,” Quill said.
“Oh,” Alex Trenton said. Yes, that did make sense. He vaguely recalled hearing some of the other teachers grumbling about a lunch thief earlier in the year. And that talk had stopped as soon as his lunches started being stolen with regularity.
The pair stared at each other for another prolonged period of silence before Quill moved to leave the staffroom.
Alex Trenton reached out to stop Quill, flinching rather badly at the look Quill gave him in response, but standing his ground nonetheless. "Hey. We're not done with this conversation."
"Well, I'm done," Quill said, tone icy.
"Well, too bad," Alex Trenton replied, crossing his arms and putting on a brave face. "I demand that you stop stealing my lunch. And if you don't, I'll-I'll tell the head."
Quill, who had been reliably informed by the Doctor that she couldn't be fired from her post, at least until Charlie had finished his A-levels, smirked at that. That said, however, Alex Trenton talking to the headmaster would mean that she would have to talk to the headmaster and that was always annoying and tedious. Quill pursed her lips together and tried to decide what to do. "Look, you're not starving."
"How do you know?" Alex Trenton blustered.
"Well, if you were starving, then you'd protect your food more carefully, wouldn't you?"
"But you're not starving either.” Alex Trenton blinked, and lost a little of his aggressively faked confidence. “Are you?"
"Not at the moment," Quill admitted, although in her experience, that could change rather quickly. "It's more a preventative measure."
"Okay, if you're not starving, but I paid for the food you're eating, then technically, regardless of the ease of access, that food is still mine. And you don’t actually need the food."
This was true, although, without the arn, she could probably have fought him for it. “This is true.”
“So,” Alex Trenton said, trying to think quickly, “so, how about this. If you ever are starving, then just tell me, and I’ll let you eat my lunch. Actually, I’ll even make another one especially for you. But, until then, until then, you bring your own lunch. Because these lunches are actually everyone else’s lunches, and they are protecting them as best as they can, within the limits of-of-of of bloody lunch law!”
Quill was unfamiliar with this ‘lunch law’ and was going to have to look it up later. However, there were more important issues immediately to hand.
Quill narrowed her eyes at Alex Trenton, weighing the issue in her head. On the one hand, the man clearly wasn’t going to do anything to stop her from stealing his lunch, except, maybe telling Armitage or whining some more. But on the other hand, perhaps this was the man’s way of defending his food, and since she wasn’t exactly short on food at the moment herself, then stealing this man’s food wasn’t a necessity so much as it was a delicious fit of pique.
“On one condition,” Quill said finally.
“Ye-es?” Alex Trenton asked, hesitant, the tone the same one someone would use if they were trying to convince a rather bite-y dog to not bite them.
“I want the recipe.”
Alex Trenton let out an hysterical bark of a laugh. “Am I going mad?”
“Probably,” Quill said. “Not my problem. Am I getting the recipe?”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever,” Alex Trenton said. He continued chuckling in an unsettling way. “Yeah, good. That’s, yeah. I’ll give it to you tomorrow. At lunch. Proper lunch. Not 20 minutes ahead of time lunch. You should probably bring your own. Lunch that is. For tomorrow. Or I shan’t give you the recipe if you’ve nicked someone else’s.”
“That’s acceptable,” Quill shrugged. Then the bell rang, and Quill froze. “Shit, I’m getting out of here before all the idiots come rushing in. I’ll see you tomorrow, Alex Trenton.”
“Yeah,” Alex Trenton squeaked, shoulders sagging as the adrenaline of the confrontation left him. “Yeah, sure.”
What a strange woman, Alex Trenton thought. And then he amended this thought a little. What a bitch.