Are the events in this manga panel happening simultaneously?


I know manga is usually read right to left, top to bottom, but this panel
confuses me a bit.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VuMUe.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VuMUe.jpg)

The guy on the right looks all annoyed and "!" first, and then we have the
blonde sliding in like 'are you guys on a date too?', but chronologically
isn't this a contradiction? Shouldn't we have seen the main character ask his
question first and then spiky guy's reaction?

Or is this panel showing things simultaneously?

If someone could show me in what direction/chronology I'm supposed to
read/understand this, it'd really help.




This would be a personal answer based on my own experiences: in cases like
these I interpret the height of the speech bubble as order. The left bubble is
higher up than the right one, so that happens first. There's nothing stopping
the right one to be placed higher up, as it wouldn't hide any important
details or anything in the art. Therefore I would read the bubbles in this
panel left to right.

The following image is from <http://shadow.randomfandom.com/gh/styles.htm> and
shows reading order. Look at number 4 and 5, that's how I interpret the two
speech bubbles in your example.

[![Reading order of Manga panels and speech
bubbles](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GtUsy.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GtUsy.jpg)

