Kaleva is sitting at the lunch table, alone, reading a book! (Li Chen has tourney practice.) 

If it were possible to join a gang without talking to anyone he would totally do that but unfortunately it is not. 

He sits down at the same table, not directly across from Kaleba(?) but in the seat next to the one across from him, with his food. "Hello." 

Kaleva puts down his book.

"Hello?" His tone is polite but fundamentally confused that anyone would want to talk to him. 

Sasha's pretty sure they don't just come right out and say "I'd like to join your gang" here, so he casts around for a more delicate way to phrase it. 

"My name is Sasha," he says, mostly to stall for time, and then lands on "I've noticed that you and Li Chen spend a lot of time together." 

"I'm Kaleva Weselton." (He pronounces it 'Wesselton.') "Chen's my roommate."

Is it an exclusive gang? He can deal with that if it comes up. Sasha isn't really sure how joining a gang works here but Kaleva didn't deny it and that's a plausible first step. 

"Nice to meet you, Kaleva," how to put this so nobody gets hit, because if he gets in a fight then he's going to lose. "It seems like having him around makes everyone safer." It's a little tentative but this way if they turn out not to want him he can have plausible deniability about whether he was asking at all. 

"Oh, you're one of the new villain kids, aren't you? --Yeah, people are assholes, but Chen doesn't like bullies. I can tell him to keep an eye out for you?"

Oh! That was easier than it could have been. 

"Thank you! 

Do you guys have somewhere in particular you meet up?" 

"We... do homework together? You can come if you want."

Sasha seems lonely. Very lonely, if he's willingly talking to Kaleva. Chen would approve of inviting him. 

"Sounds good — where and when?"

It might be a little awkward to explain to the other villain kids but it's not like he's part of their gang, and he can always just not explain it if it's too fraught. 

"Nobody's really done homework with us before, so it's just in our room. Chen usually gets done with practice at 4:30."

It's not like he was expecting there to not be favors involved but if he's going to be in their room it's a sure thing now. "I'll see you then!" he says, needlessly cheerful like everyone at this school always is, and smiles at Kaleva and starts eating instead of talking. 

Kaleva waits briefly to see if any more conversation will happen, then returns to his book. (It's a history of King Beast's unification of Auradon.) 

He eats about half of the (slightly ridiculous) amount of food he'd taken and wraps up the rest and keeps it. 

He finds Chen and Kaleva's room by 4:26 and reads in the closest nearby public space until 4:38 to give Chen time to get back and Kaleva time to talk to him, and then goes and knocks on their door. 

"You're here!"

The table is spread with textbooks and papers, almost as if Chen and Kaleva are actually doing homework.

"Hello! I'm Chen — sorry, we're kinda spread out but there should be enough room —" He clears some of the papers. 

Huh. 

Well, he did bring a textbook — more for plausible deniability if he was stopped by a teacher than for anything else, but still. 

"Nice to meet you, I'm Sasha." He sits down and opens the book to the page with their problem set, which he's been working on but he suspects his methods and the ones they're supposed to be using have very little to do with one another. 

Kaleva glances at the textbook. "If you need help, I'm in Calc BC, I can probably explain what's going on."

Are. 

Are they actually going to do math. 

Are people at Auradon okay. 

What is happening. 

"I'll probably need the help," he says instead of any of that, "they seem to think I've been taught a lot more than I have in fact been taught." 

"Here, I can walk you through the first problem."

After some minutes of this, Kaleva says, "do... do you actually know how to solve an equation?"

"My way works," which is true at least half the time. "But they didn't really focus on math at villain school and at a certain point if it wasn't getting me food I had more important things to do." 

"Yeah, you have really good mathematical intuition. I guess not having that drained out of you is one advantage of educational neglect. It's just-- how do they expect you to pass algebra II if you don't know any algebra?! Don't they have placement tests?"

He's assuming a placement test is a test you take so they can figure out where to place you. "If they have any, they didn't have us take them." 

Seriously why are they still doing math. 

"They don't have placement tests. Usually they look at the classes you took and the grades you got in whatever school you went to before but I think for villain kids they just guess."