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She sits up straight, moving toward the edge of her chair, then leans in toward the table, picks up her fork, and starts moving the half-eaten chicken dish around the plate without eating anything.
“But ... before I wipe it from my brain,” I say. “Those were some commendable acting skills yesterday, with Evie. Very impressive.”
She snickers. “I was pretty impressed with myself, honestly. I’m not the best actress.”
“You could have fooled me,” I say, leaning against the chair’s backrest and placing my hands in my lap.
“What about you?” she says, her eyes approving. “You fell right into step, patting me on the back, going right along with it.”
I nod. “It was easy to follow your lead. You should have seen Evie’s face. She had no idea what to do with you.”
“Evie,” she says, and her name sounds like a cuss word on Lucy’s lips. “That icing-less cupcake.”
“Good one,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says. “She’s an icing-less cupcake who’s not good with handling ... feelings. Like, at all. I knew that, which is why I went with that angle.”
“She really is bad at that,” I say, recalling last month when she had to walk out of a patient room because the woman was crying from the abdominal pain she was in, and Evie didn’t know what to do.
“The worst.”
“Well, your thinking-on-your-toes skills are admirable.”
She smiles at me, and I smile back. It’s a good feeling, sitting here talking with Lucy. A great feeling, actually. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a conversation with someone of the opposite sex this long where we just ... talked. I like it.
“Okay,” I make an act of pretending to zip my lips. “We’ll never speak of it again.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“So this list—”
“No,” she says, loudly, cutting me off, holding a palm out toward me, the universal sign for stop.
“Wait—that’s part of the deal too? We can’t talk about it?”
“Yes, you must pretend like you know none of it.”
“I’m curious, though. I want to know what else is on it.”
Lucy scrunches her face. “You do?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What else is your friend challenging you to do? Unless it’s too personal?”
“Nothing too personal,” she says. “At least not the examples she shared when tricking me into this whole thing.”
“So today’s was ... what? Eat some kind of foreign food?”
“Close,” she says, looking at me. “Today was try a different kind of food.”
“Why that one? Do you eat the same things all the time?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Not really. Honestly, I’m wondering if she got some of this list from Google.”
“What’s tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. I won’t find out until the morning. That is, if I keep doing it.”
“You should,” I say.
