“Yeah. Thank you.”
God, he sounded so relieved. Though for the next minute his face stayed the color of ripe tomatoes. And he didn’t write anything or read anything, either. She heard no scratch of a pen on paper. No whisper of pages being turned. Only silence.
Then finally, a far-too-mournful-sounding observation.
“I guess we can’t just expect to shift from enemies to friends without it being occasionally uncomfortable and sometimes full of inappropriate hand gestures.”
“Is that how you saw me? As your enemy?”
He didn’t look up at her when she said it.
Or when he answered, in the lowest possible tone.
“No. I was…I was just mostly talking from your perspective.”
“And what was yours? How did you think of the shit between us?”
“I don’t know. I think you want me to say a game, but that wasn’t true. It never felt like a game to me. It felt like I was trapped behind glass watching a really shitty version of myself operating my body.”
Now he looked up at her—right when she needed his eyes to stay down.
She knew she appeared too shaken by what he’d just said. She knew that he would see.
And he did. He just took it a different way from the one she’d expected.
“Though that’s not to absolve myself of responsibility. I don’t want to do that. I just…I don’t know how else to explain what it was like. I would go home and just be my ordinary self and wonder what the fuck happened. I still don’t know what the fuck happened.”
There were words she wanted to say here, but none of them came out.
Nothing came out. She felt suddenly frozen over—much to his consternation.
“Letty, are you still breathing?”
“Yeah. I just forgot how for a second.”
“Because you hate what I said?”
“Because you keep saying amazing things,” she said, part of her already wanting to take it back. It revealed too much and seemed too grateful. Her voice trembled in the middle. You could hear the tears in it.
But then he dipped his head to hide his smile, and she just couldn’t.
She had to make it a subject change instead.
“Now, can we actually do some work? I think we’ve written about three relevant words.”
“Well in fairness to us, it’s kind of hard to write relevant words about movies in a library.”
“We can do plenty. This is the part where we get a ton of quotes down so we can jam them into our presentations and essays to make us look super smart.”
“You do that? You, Juliet Judith Carmichael, take shortcuts to look super smart?”
She wanted to hate him for the raised eyebrow, and for using her full name.
But she couldn’t. The most she could manage was suppressing the laugh.
“I’m going to act like you didn’t say that dreaded thing and just skip straight to the question.”
“You really hate it that much, because I th—”
“I said, I’m skipping to the question.”
“Okay, cool, cool. What was the question again?”
“Do I take shortcuts to make me look smart? And the answer is yes. Yes I absolutely do all the time. I did it in school, I do it now, I will do it forever.”
“But you are super smart. Why do you need to pretend?”
“Everybody pretends, Tate. Even actually clever people.”
“You’re shitting me. Are you…are you shitting me?”
“No. Who really wants to read the whole of…” She searched for and held up the book she was most dreading. “Theoretical Dynamics in Cinematic Interpretation?”
It didn’t calm him down, however. If anything, it made him more animated.
And animated Tate was a ridiculously funny and marvelous sight to behold. He waved his arms. He somehow made a shrug seem sarcastic. He feigned sadness and outrage in the most delightful of ways, with every inch of his eyebrows and the most beautiful downturned mouth—and all while he said things that were more than enough on their own.
“You mean to tell me I just sat here and read about the alien in Aliens representing my anus for nothing? I can never now undo that mental image, Letty. You have forever tainted a major part of Jim Cameron’s filmography for me. All I wanted to do was have fun watching movies when I took this elective, and instead I now know way too much about buttholes and how obsessed every director seemingly is with them,” he said, and now she couldn’t suppress the laugh if she tried. It wriggled out the second he stopped speaking, and it shot right through the middle of her next words.
“Hey, I didn’t order you to read an essay called ‘James Cameron’s Butthole’!”
“I know, I get that, but I thought it would impress you. I’m trying to pull my weight here only to discover that you don’t give a hot fuck about any of this stuff at all. This whole time we could have been baking on the couch in front of Dirty Dancing, goddamn it.”
Now it was her turn to be animated.
She practically fist pumped. Her grin was unstoppable.