The figure turned out to be Janson, which didn't surprise you considering that your watch read 6:30pm and he said dinner was in half an hour.
He called your group to follow him for dinner, so you all got up and followed him out the door.
He leads us through many halls until we meet an opening which reveals a large cafeteria with about 200 kids sitting at tables and wandering around.
Minho and a few others rush into the cafeteria instead of waiting for further instruction.
Janson doesn't do or say anything though, he just turns to the rest of us and says that we'll be eating with the rest of the kids from now on.
You walk into the cafeteria, feeling a bit self conscious, but you calm down a bit when you notice most people are too busy eating or talking to notice you.
You do notice out of the corner of your eye, there's a boy in a grey hoodie staring directly at you. You make eye contact, and he breaks away blushing.
You see the other gladers at a table in the center of the cafeteria. Minho spots you and calls you over.
You walk over and take a seat next to Thomas and Minho, with Newt, Frypan, and Winston sitting across from you.
You see Teresa approach the table and sit at the end, making small talk with some glader you didn't know the name of.
You were gonna go grab some food but couldn't find a food line. It turns out that the guards deliver the food directly to you.
There were a few other boys sitting at you table that you didn't know, and you were gonna ask who the were when Minho interrupts you. "Can you believe it Y/N? Turns out we weren't the only maze" he says.
Your eyes widen, "Really?" you ask, completely shocked, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense.
"Yup." Says one of the boys you didn't know. He was the one sitting right across from you.
He was an African American boy, who had curly brown hair cut low. He looked to be about the age of everyone else here.
The boy tells you and the gladers about his experience in his maze, and it matches up to pretty much everything you and the gladers went through.
Thomas asks him how long he's been here for and he says two days, but he jabs him thumb behind him, pointing to a boy sitting by himself and says, "That kid, he's been here the longest, almost a week."
You feel heat rising to you head. That was the boy staring at you earlier.
Everyone turns and looks at the boy. He isn't too far away, his table is about a few in front of yours and a bit to the left.
He looks lonely, and you feel bad. He's all by himself at the end of the table, with a hood covering most of his face.
You keep watching, and you're shocked when the boy takes off his grey hood to reveal the most handsome face you've ever seen.
His eyes were a brilliant shade of blue, and his light brown hair was cut in bangs a little above his eyes. His expression was stone solid as his eyes darted from person to person.
The conversation around you continued and you heard the boy across from you talk more about this lone kid. "Yeah, his maze was nothing but girls."
"Really?" says Minho in shock and disbelief.
"Some guys have all the luck." agrees the boy across from you.
You find yourself connected to the boy, even though you don't even know him. You craved his bright blue eyes, which contrasted from his smug expression.
You look over at him, his eyes still darting around. Suddenly, they land on you. He looks at you for what seemed like a minute, then quickly looks away, a pink blush showing on his cheeks.
You couldn't help but blush too, you felt it creeping up the back of your neck.
You want to go over to the boy and maybe talk to him, at least get his name.
You excuse yourself from the table and luckily nobody there seems to notice or care.
You walk towards the table the boy is sitting at, the stupidity of this idea suddenly hitting you.
What if the boy ignored you, or didn't what to talk? Heck, with his good looks he could already have a girlfriend and want nothing to do with you.
But the closer to you get to him, the lonelier he looks, and you realize as you approach the table, there's no going back now.
You take the seat directly across from him, a bold move, which startles him. He looks up from the cornbread he was inspecting.
"Hey." you say to him, gently as if he's a fragile object that would break at any moment.
"Uh, hey." he says, his cute little blush returning on his cheeks.
"What's your name?" you ask him, feeling rather awkward.
He puts down his cornbread and responds, "I'm Aris, what about you?"
"Oh, I'm Y/N." you tell him.
He mumbles something under his breath that you can't quite catch. "What?" you ask him.
He turns bright red, "Oh... uh, I said you have a beautiful name." he said, his face growing brighter by second.
"Thanks." you say, smiling at him.
He returns the smile, or a quick flash of one. You notice that he has a slight gap between his two front teeth, which only adds to the cuteness of his face.
After a while of chatting with Aris, you find out a little bit more about him, and how his maze trials went down.
He turns out be the equivalent of Teresa in his group, meaning he was the only boy in a group of girls.
He asks if you were the only girl in a group of boys and you tell him the whole weird story of how you were the first female sent up in the glade but also how Teresa came up years later as the trigger.
You even rant a little, saying how if you wonder if you were a mistake, like you were never meant to be here in the first place.
He comforts you, although still a little timid. Then he starts a little rant of his own.
He tells you he has a bad feeling about this place, and how he feels so lonely because the only friends he had in the maze were gone. He was separated from the others. He says anytime he saw the other girls, they ignored him.
You feel sympathetic for Aris, and your "crush" on him deepens as does the conversation.
He's still shy, and blushes when he talks to you. You find yourself hoping he likes you, even thought it was probably unlikely.
Aris gets up to throw away his foam plate and while he does, Janson arrives at the front of the room, a microphone in his hand.
Aris returns, but this time he sits next to you, making you both blush. On the outside you're calm, but in the inside you're freaking out and blushing like mad, butterflies starting to tingle in your stomach.
Janson stands in front of the room for a few moments, then starts speaking directly into the mic, "ladies and gentlemen, I have an important announcement to make..."
