The street sense was kicking in: Richard was instinctively surveying the appearance,  body posture, and the possible threats that his new 'companions' posed - all without actively looking in their direction. Back in Islington, you needed to know whether that chav on the other side of the street was ready to shank you, but look too long and too hard and you'd do yourself the favor.

He first noticed the only other male in the group. He was confident and well-dressed, though Richard doubted that brats like him could have survived ten minutes in this part of London. 

There was a small, petite girl, who seemed to be obsessing over her fingers. Not much use in a fight.

There was also another girl, who looked rather... dull. Perhaps she was an addict. Richard had seen plenty of her kind stumbling through Islington at night, with glazed-over eyes and trembling hands. 

In short, he wasn't very convinced. 

The matter returned to himself. He suddenly noticed a bulge in the male's leg. Fuck. It was probably a knife. He should have brought one. He suddenly realized the rising pressure in his chest that he had suppressed for the last half hour. What the hell was he doing? Why was he not at home? Why hadn't he called the cops? Why hadn't he slept? [i]Why hadn't he told mum[/i]?

Then his thoughts drifted back to his mother. The last he saw of her was a pale, bleary-eyed, frizzy-haired mess at their apartment door. Her salaries weren't cutting it, and it was either stay this way until Richard graduated or remarry. The latter was out of the question for Richard. He had seen his mum's boyfriends, all despicable good-for-nothings with leery smiles and perpetually grasping either cigarettes or bottles of beer. It was either he get himself to graduation day fast, or he let one of those cockshites earn his mother's living. But the way it was going, he wasn't going to graduate from college, let alone live in the next couple hours.

He felt his phone ring, and saw the text. One forced, stilted step at the time, he trudged his way up to the man in the center of the station. He looked confident, like the well-dressed bloke, but he also looked pretty alert - probably an ex-policeman or ex-military. He grimaced, and pushed the words out of his mouth.

"Richard Dohammond. Twenty. BS Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science."