12:30 AM — Kingsley-George Physics Building
"Hear ye, hear ye!" announced Alexander, his very much short person bouncing from atop one of the wobbly folding tables in the study room. He shuffled his set of notecards. "All in favor of beginning this study session by going over the Section 2.1 PowerPoint for POSC 4958 say 'aye!'"
As expected, no one did say "aye," and the group let out a collective groan instead.
"Boo!" jeered Lafayette as Aaron rolled his eyes and said, "That's an advanced course and no one here takes it besides you."
Alexander hopped off the table with an absolutely shit-eating grin. "I know."
"All in favor of having Alexander sit this one out say 'aye," suggested Thomas.
This did pronounce a resounding 'yes' from everyone but Eliza and John, who knew that their boyfriend and friend, respectively, would get into much less trouble surrounded by his classmates than wandering the hallways this late at night.
Angelica, their study group queen, tapped the table. "It's unanimous-ish. Alex, go in the corner for fifteen minutes."
Alexander sulked and faced his humiliation. while Thomas complained very loudly that a time-out wasn't what everyone had voted for, when he was suddenly allayed by James pulling something out from his backpack.
"The good boys from down South have brought study snacks," James said, pulling out an entire casserole dish filled with cheese grits and pot of gumbo.
Thomas brightened instantly. "Oh yeah, that's right." He, too, yanked out an enormous dish. "I brought y'all some traditional French tarte flambeé! Eat up, boys—and Angelica." He accidentally forgot that Eliza was present and to include her, for she wasn't the Schuyler sister that was glaring daggers at him for the gender-noninclusive term.
Upon hearing the term tarte flambeé, Lafayette, the French exchange student, piped up, "Ah, mon chéri, that lovely tarte hails not from France, but Germany."
Thomas, who prided himself to be the group's resident Francophile and keeper of French history (for no other reason than the fact that he was obsessed with the country), scowled and said, "I've traveled abroad to France before, 'mon amy—'" everyone who was not Thomas saw Lafayette swallow a laugh at the horrible pronunciation— "so I think I would know if tarte flambeés were made in France or not!"
"Monsieur Jefferson, I think the only way to make your dish—how you say—more, French, you would have to pour Monsieur Madison's gombo atop it, for that is at least French Cajun!"
And so, without breaking eye contact with Lafayette, Thomas testily grabbed a ladleful of James' gumbo and dribbled it onto his own tarte. "There you fucking go! Is that French enough now for you, Monsieur Baguette?"
"It is now. Merci and va te faire foutre, sir."
After retrieving Alexander from the hallway, everyone else squabbled over Thomas' and James' dishes and deemed them either "godlike" or "so bad I probably wouldn't wish this on the Cheeto."
Meanwhile, Eliza and Hamilton slouched deep into the seat of the couch they now shared. Seeing as John, who sat beside him, was furiously writing a regular essay of a comment as to why Black lives mattered on Instagram to some racist bigot that had tagged him for no other reason than to incite drama, Alexander turned to Eliza to continue a conversation that they had been having in her dorm earlier in the day. He intertwined his fingers with hers. "A scholarship's all I've got to my name, you know."
"No, it's not. You've got passion, and drive, and a heart filled with so much ambition that you can't help but succeed."
"Congrats, I'm plucky! Eliza, you've probably realized by now that you can't survive on that alone, considering I'm so broke that I'm literally just a hole for cheap ramen and coffee and probably'll black out sometime in the next five minutes."
"Is that what you've been eating? That's it, I'm bringing you along to Compton tomorrow."
"Bleh, pass. Compton's food is crap."
"Well, it's the only dining hall in my dorm so it's where I'm going and you're coming." She punctuated the sentence with a determined stare that made her appear more like an unholy demonic entity than a stressed college sophomore.
"Damn. Wifey is scary."
"What did I do?!"
He laughed and slouched even lower in his seat, dragging her hand to plop it over his eyes. He relaxed his sore legs. "Everything."
"Huh?"
"Sorry, no, you're everything." When she started blushing like fury, Alexander chuckled again. "Here I am, brooding over our penniless future when in the end, I guess all I really need is you." He pulled her hand down to his lips and kissed it gently. "I love you, Eliza, I really do."
Her eyes softened. "I love you too, Alex."
It was a moving confession, to be sure, and probably would've been very happy for all parties involved, if John hadn't paused to think of good insult in the middle of his online retort and heard every single one of those last words.
John swallowed hard, his eyes unmoving from his cellphone screen. Although he appeared to be motionless as a corpse, every atom of him vibrated vibrated vibrated until he felt like he was nothing more than an incorporeal streak of air, floating above the couch, floating above the world, floating above these feelings.
Oh, God, he felt hot. His skin didn't redden, but he burned with such covetousness of Alexander that he could feel it bubble up and was sure that the result would either be extreme nausea or some kind of mortifying verbal confession and neither! Of! Those! Were! Good!
He tried to focus all this nervous energy into finishing his withering comment on Instagram, before shutting off his phone, and before he could offer to top up anybody's water bottle (this was not an excuse to get away from Alexander, no siree), Eliza announced, "Okay, everyone! We've all been studying hard—" to which Aaron snorted because, at the moment, he was watching Hercules and Lafayette glue macaroni noodles onto a sheet of paper—"so Angelica and I have decided to buy everyone Insomnia Cookies!"
As went hand-in-hand with college students and free food, there was a deafening cheer.
"You will buy several of the Yankee Doodle ones, yes?" asked Lafayette, who needed confirmation before he could add to the revelry.
"Pretty sure it's snickerdoodle, Baguette," corrected Thomas, who had not forgiven the exchange student for his previous affront.
Angelica grinned. "We were just going to order the twelve-count box and have it delivered, but I'm sure it includes snickerdoodles. Wait—let me look it up."
As she pulled out her phone, Hercules booed and complained, "You're gonna buy just a twelve-pack?"
"Well, there are only nine of us here," said Angelica, raising an eyebrow.
Hercules chuckled. "The only one here that'd eat just one cookie is Aaron," to which he, John, Alexander, and Lafayette sang, "'Cause he's a cop~!"
"Fine, fine, God," acquiesced Angelica, "we'll order two dozen."
"Boo!"
"Fifty?" offered Eliza.
"Boo!"
"I'm not buying one hundred cookies." Angelica's eyebrow only went higher. "Not for you people, anyway."
"Aw, come on, now, be a good sport, Angie," wheedled Alexander, plopping himself down by Angelica in a way that made John's knees buckle. "Buy a hundred cookies for us poor souls. You've got the money." He gestured to Thomas, with who he never failed to start an argument. "Look at Jefferson, he's wasting his life—" He coughed violently at the last words before correcting, "I meant—wasting away because of lack of cookies."
"What the—" began Thomas, his eyes widening furiously. Before he could say any more, he held up his hands. "You know what, in honor of Angelica and Eliza buying us cookies, I'm gonna ignore that and be the bigger man." He snickered when he looked down at Alexander, whose unamused expression showed that he knew what was coming. "Not like it's hard, considering the fact that I'm taller—"
Alexander waved him off with, "Yes, yes, you're taller than me. Tell me, then, does your brain get enough oxygen from all the way up there?"
"It gets just as much oxygen as yours does while it sits way down in the Mariana Trenc—Baguette, I better not be seeing you mouthing 'kiss, kiss, kiss' from over there."
"I am not mouthing 'kiss,' I am mouthing 'kill' as I pray that the gods allow Monsieur Hamilton to onnihilate you from the face of this earth!"
"Laurens, get over here," said Alexander, rolling up his sleeves, and his eyes widened when he saw the speed at which John was at his side. "Someone's got the zoomies," was all he commented, though, as he glared at Thomas. "On the count of three, I need you to hurl me at him."
John nodded. "No thoughts, only yeet." He put his hand on Alexander's back—trying very hard to will away the blood that rushed to his face and to other places—and another on his chest. "The throwing will commence after we count to ten!"
"The fuck? I said 'three!'"
Someone—definitely Aaron, who liked to observe the chaos and never partake in it—began the chant with "One!"
Before they could get to two, Eliza waved her hands violently and gestured to Angelica, who was on the phone with Insomnia Cookies. "Shh!"
At this, all parties immediately stood down and reconciled themselves to angelic faces because who the fuck wanted to be the reason that the Insomnia Cookies person misheard Angelica's order and didn't send them their delectables?
After a moment, Angelica hung up the phone and said, "Bad news, everyone: they said that they couldn't make one hundred cookies now, so they're only sending us two-dozen." She winked at Eliza, who knew that she had actually ordered only twenty-four because who was going to eat a hundred cookies at 2:15 AM (to be honest, nine college students could easily demolish that many)?
Alexander shrugged. "I guess that's fine. That's twenty-three for me and one for all of you to share."
"What about Eliza?" asked Hercules. "You're going to make her share our one depraved cookie?"
"Oh, shit, no, goddess Eliza will not be sharing any cookies with you degenerates." He turned to Eliza and in a magnanimous voice, said, "You may have one of my cookies all to yourself."
She curtsied. "You are too generous, kind sir."
"I'm not sharing a cookie with Angelica," protested Thomas, finding that the crowning issue and not the proclamation that Alexander would be taking all the cookies for himself. He shuddered. "She'll get her demon germs all over it."
Aaron raised an eyebrow. "You sound like a fourth-grader."
"Don't react," James advised Thomas, patting down the taller man's wild hair, which always poofed up in times of great emotion.
"Oh, I almost forgot." Alexander poked Thomas' hair, as well—with an exasperating air—before turning to John. He bowed deeply and said, "Will you, dear John, do me the honor of becoming my lawfully wedded—"
"Yes," was the instant reply.
"—Cookie co-owner?"
"Still yes," insisted John, whose face had gone inferno at both the statements.
A few minutes passed, in which Alexander, John, and Eliza picked out their schedules for next semester (trying in vain to align them so they'd all be at the same time), Angelica scrolled through her phone, Aaron actually studied, and Lafayette and Thomas took digs at each other in turn, while Hercules and James watched.
"They're here," announced Angelica, who had gotten a notification on her phone. "I'll go get them."
While they waited, Lafayette began to sing, "Snickerdoodle went to town a'riding on—"
"—Hercules' mistress," cut in Alexander cheekily.
"Stuck a feather in his hat and called it—" continued Eliza, singing blithely.
"—God's gift to this goddamn green earth," finished Thomas, who very much publicly believed macaroni to be the one thing in life that never failed him.
"That doesn't rhyme, you heathens," complained Aaron, as Angelica walked back into the room.
Even Eliza looked shocked at what her sister held in her hand: one, tiny bag of two cookies, as well as a mite of a carton of milk.
"Did—did you actually just buy enough cookies for yourself?" asked Eliza, frowning.
Angelica smiled sheepishly. "I was gonna give you one of them."
The room was quiet for a minute.
And then two.
Then Alexander turned to the rest of the study group. "Boys? And Eliza? Let's fucking go."
And so the eight hungry college students chased Angelica around the entire Kingsley-George Physics Building until the offending party finally gave up her cookies.