"I guess getting to try again is a perk of going to a different school from Byron now."

She does not like her cousin at all.

"I'm glad you're trying."

She smiles slightly back at Elemi. "Yeah."

How's the cafeteria setup looking?

Now that it's opened it looks like there's trays and a few different stations. There's some hand fruit, a couple prepared salads, a selection of pre-made sandwiches and a buffet section which today has mac & cheese, some kind of breaded chicken, roasted vegetables, and tomato soup. Everything seems to be self-serve though there are cafeteria workers standing behind the stations.

All this and it's free???

This maybe solves her food problems.

"Okay the cafeteria looks seriously promising."

The school is very well funded. The cafeteria is also open for breakfast.

It's nothing fancy but that's honestly part of the charm. Not everything need to be perfectly nutritionally balanced. Elemi takes a little of everything.

"Yeah it looks well made. Hopefully it tastes good too."

She laughs as she loads up a tray with a bigger helping of everything. She's going to try everything, and get herself well and truly full for once in her life.

"This much free food for lunch and breakfast makes my life a lot easier," she murmurs as she grabs food.

Elemi carefully balances her tray as they leave the serving area. "So, outside then?" There are some picnic tables outside a nearby door along with various places they could sit on the ground or on stone walls. In theory they could also go back to the main outdoor area but that would require going past more people in a rapidly filling cafeteria.

She nods, still smiling at the thought of getting to eat well on the regular. "Yeah, outside." She leads the way toward the nearest door, carefully dodging anyone they pass close to, and looks for the least-exposed option she can manage. If there isn't a table that looks particularly good, she'll try for a particularly comfy wall to sit on or against.

That probably rules out the proper tables they're all placed with plenty of space on all sides. They could sit on the top of a small wall on the elevated patio that extends from the building, next to a small tree or at the bottom of one of the patio walls where it's at ground level.

Perched on a wall? She likes perching. To the wall.

She hops up lightly and settles atop it.

Elemi balances her tray on the wall and sits facing Hailey. She starts to eat her food. No need to talk right away.

She starts with a sandwich, digging into it with the ferocity of long food insecurity. She's not going to say much until she's asked a question, probably. Food is the priority.

Om nom sandwich.

Then they can eat in companionable silence for a while. Elemi has only had a few sandwiches before now so it's a relatively novel experience. The salad is well made if not quite as good as she's used to. The fruit tastes about the same maybe not quite as perfectly ripe. Everything else is fairly novel and she savors the novelty more than the quality.

She does also notice Hailey's eating. It's at least mild evidence in favor of food deprivation being another element of her abuse. She really didn't expect to be using what her mother taught her about identifying signs of abuse this soon. She suppressed a grimaces at her mother's reasons for teaching her those.

The sandwich doesn't last long, nor does the chicken, nor do the roasted vegetables. She finally starts slowing down a little by the time she gets to the salad, and patiently works through that and the mac. 

It looks like she's not going to leave any crumbs.

At some point along the way, she mumbles, "Better'n anything I've eaten that I didn't make."

"I'm glad you liked it. The food here is good. Much better than TV says school food is supposed to be." She supresses another frown at this additional clue. Hailey apparently cooks a lot but also seems like she's not getting enough food at home. That's a weird combination.

"Oh," nom nomf, "do TV schools usually have shitty food? Food at my last school costs money, so I never tried it."

Om nom macaroni.

"They do... it's a joke sometimes. Food being completely inedible. I assume that it doesn't actually get that bad even at schools that aren't as well funded as Galileo."

She shrugs and keeps eating. "Wouldn't know. Avoided the cafeteria. Ate on the roof when I had something."

"I'm assuming that you're saying that because you trust me but just in case if you're trying to hide the fact that you're being abused saying you sometimes didn't have lunch is probably something you shouldn't share."

She smiles thinly, wryly, and humorlessly. "You know enough to wreck me, no harm in telling you more. Either telling you was safe or I'm already fucked."

"I just wanted to make sure." It's not the best basis for trust but everything has to start somewhere. "Any particular highlights in your cooking journey? I haven't really cooked myself." It's possible this is another bad thing to ask about but Hailey did describe her food as well made so it seems worth the risk.

"Think I might like it if it was for people I didn't hate," she replies with a shrug. "Pretty good at roasts, fuckers like those a lot."

She nods at that. "Those can be good." She would mention letting Hailey cook at her house but she's not sure the staff would be okay with that and it would mean revealing the secret that she has staff at home. That's not a family secret but it would change things.

Having Hailey over would also tempt her into trying to help Hailey in ways that would absolutely reveal family secrets.

TV shows and books make it seem a lot easier to sustain conversation than she's finding it.