“…Ah, no. Um…” She thinks about it for a moment, brow furrowed as she continues to pull food out of the bag. And then she pulls a stack of papers out of the bag. “Check if I missed anything? I think you implied you do Chinese.”

"I do, yes." She compares pamphlets.

There are a few places where she didn’t use the most direct or idiomatic possible translation, but it’s fine.

“I can design new things, but I have to do all my own detail work—but then, you read the description.”

And since people are going to want paper, and Kareen isn’t especially interested in wasting opportunities, she pulls out a stack of glittery purple notebooks as well.

"Good enough," she pronounces the pamphlet translation.

The Chinese version can go on the other side of the sparkly notebook stack from the English version, then.

Bella tears a corner out of her own sparkly purple notebook's first page and writes FREE BLANK NOTEBOOKS in English and presumably the same in Chinese and props this up on top of the stack. Kids take them along with their lunches, sometimes two or three at a time.

That’s fine! She can pull out more! She also pulls out a cup labeled FREE PENS and filled with spooky eye ballpoints.

Bella checks the translation of FREE PENS but otherwise resumes her duty of confirming to people that this is what it looks like and if they don't believe her they can check with her senior or with the Manchester kids.

“I fell out of the void ceiling in the library,” she adds helpfully at one point.

This doesn't make her much more believable - anyone could say that - but she sure seems to have infinite cheeseburgers. A Chinese junior asks tentatively for youtiao.

“I’m very sorry, but I can’t make foods I’m unfamiliar with, and I’ve never had that.”

Aww. "It is a fried dough thing, can you make some kind of fried dough thing?"

“I can absolutely do that!” She pulls several varieties of fried dough things out of the bag, they can take their pick.

The Chinese kids load up on donuts.

"There is no chance," says a non-Chinese kid, "that you've already ever had specifically my grandma's aloo gobhi, but do I hope too much that you've had decent homemade -"

“You do not hope too much.” She produces the requested dish. “My great-grandma’s and not your grandma’s, sorry, but she did teach Papa to cook before she passed.”

"I will sing your praises eternally, you don't seem like you need anything but if ever you do..." And then her face is full of cauliflower omnomnomnom.

“I’m Kareen, what’s your name?”

"Aadhya Iyer," she says around some potato.

“I’ll remember that.”

Aadhya salutes and moves the line along. There seems to be a tacit pecking order; the kids coming through after her are maybe none of them enclavers, if you can judge by some ineffable quality gradient in the universally scruffy and ill-groomed presentations of the students.

This girl is pretty close to the end of the pack of juniors, though the school itself is enforcing enough of a stagger between years that she is ahead of the sophomores who didn't have enough clout to cut in line explicitly ahead of older kids. (Some of the enclaver sophomores are getting their seniors to pick up extra food for them, but that's perhaps not the same.)

"Cheers."

“Cheers! Sorry about the shitty caf food, I wouldn’t have expected that real food was the thing people were going to jump on using my making-stuff power for.”

"What've you got to be sorry for, you didn't invent the sludge." She loads up on cheese pizza.

“Oh, well, if I were only sorry about things I were personally responsible for, that’d be much easier, honestly.”

"You said it." That's enough small talk for the week. Pizzaaaaaaa.