I let him talk until he’s physically forced to take a breath. “Be nice to her,” I warn him, jabbing my chopsticks in his direction like they’re a weapon. It’s hard not to feel a little protective of my new roommate, who’s currently waiting in line for the congee. Every time someone shows up, she steps aside and smiles to let them go first. I think she’s been in the same spot for the past ten minutes; she might have actually moved farther back in the line.

Oliver follows my gaze and snorts. “Well, she’s definitely nice. A bit too nice, I would even say—a problem that my roommate doesn’t have.”

I bite carefully into the top of my soup dumpling, sipping the hot, savory juice until only the minced meat filling is left. “How’s that going, by the way?”

“Amazing. Spectacular,” Oliver replies, flicking his dark brown hair out of his eyes. “He told me his whole life story and we cried over a movie about a dog together and woke up early to watch the sunrise. We’re practically best friends now.”

“Please don’t spread such appalling lies.”

We both glance up to see Cyrus standing there, brows faintly furrowed, a glass of water in one hand, his plate in the other. His breakfast is as healthy as I would’ve expected: fresh fruit, shredded lettuce, whole wheat bread, sliced chicken and ham in perfect proportions. It could literally be used as a model of the food pyramid.

“Ah. There he is,” Oliver says with a wide, exaggerated grin, and yanks back the chair next to him. “My best friend. Please, come join us.”

Cyrus eyes the chair warily, like he thinks it might be pulled out from under him at any second, but then he catches me staring and sits, rolling up the long sleeves of his white hoodie. “Good morning,” he tells me, his voice quiet and still slightly thick with sleep.

Oliver’s eyebrows shoot up. “He didn’t say good morning to me, and I greeted him, like, twenty times.”

“You woke me up by jumping on my bed like it was a trampoline,” Cyrus says without looking at him. He spears his fork through a single piece of spinach. “That immediately disqualified the morning from being a good one.”

“Okay, bro, in my defense, you were completely still. Like, I’ve never seen someone sleep in such an uncomfortable position before without moving an inch. I was starting to think you were dead.”

“In the event that I do die in the middle of the night, I beg of you to not react by jumping up and down around my corpse,” Cyrus says flatly.