“Nah, I keep them in my dorm. I don’t want to lose one or have something happen to it.”
“You’ll have to show me sometime. That’s really cool, actually.”
He really sounds interested, which is kind of sweet considering we’re practically enemies. His sincerity actually makes me a little uncomfortable. I don’t know what to do with it. I shift in my seat and clear my throat. Sarcasm is a much safer territory.
“Yeah, well, thank you for your stamp of approval. Are you, like, the ‘fun police’?”
“I am,” he says. “It’s my duty to protect and serve and make sure people have appropriate amounts of fun in their life.”
I make a noncommittal noise and roll my eyes. This time when there’s an extended silence, it’s not uncomfortable.
“So you never really answered… What are you into?” he asks, breaking the silence again.
“I did. I said my fountain pens.”
“That can’t be all you do for fun, is it? Write with fancy pens?”
His question rubs me the wrong way, and I bristle. Is it the way he mocks me? “Fancy pens”? It was friendly and fun a minute ago, but now I’m wondering if he was making fun of me. And why does he care what I do with my free time? Is he trying to figure out how much time I spend doing stuff besides studying so he can brag?
“I spend most of my free time studying.” I keep my tone clipped and try to ignore the knot forming in my stomach.
“I study a lot too,” Mac says.
I roll my eyes at the brag. I knew it. I knew this was why he started this conversation.
“But I do other stuff sometimes too,” he says, “like I—”
“Some of us can’t afford to be here unless we keep our grades up,” I interrupt, but I cringe inwardly, all my insides shrinking. I’ve been snippy with him before, but I don’t think I’ve ever been rude.
Too ashamed to check the look on Mac’s face, I go back to pretending like the experiment is the most interesting thing I’ve ever watched.
All the students have handed their quizzes back to Professor Campbell, who hands them another blank sheet of paper and asks them to draw another self-portrait, after which she’ll hand out another quiz, but this time she’ll let them all know it is a really hard test and most students really struggle with it, so to be patient with themselves.
Mac leaves to collect the papers from Professor Campbell and brings them back to the observation room. He sets them aside as we can’t do anything with them quite yet, but I wish we could. I need to do something with my hands besides just play with the ends of my hair.
My knee bounces up and down as I replay our conversation in my head, realizing Mac was actually nice for most of it, and I was a bit of a jerk.
“Jessie, I’m sorry if I—”
“It’s fine,” I say, my voice way too high-pitched. I need to apologize, but the words feel stuck in my throat. I try. I form the words in my head and open my mouth, but when I try to say them everything inside me coils up with resistance, like a cat being put in a bathtub full of water. My throat gets thick and all my muscles tense up as if I’m about to be pushed off a cliff. I don’t have a history of being good at apologies.
The air between us is thick like cotton candy, the silence acrid and unpleasant.
“I bake,” Mac says.
“What?”
“I bake. That’s what I do for fun.”
“You bake?” I shift in my chair, angling my body toward him.Is this an olive branch from him? Even though I should be the one apologizing?
“Yep. I’ve got a sourdough starter named Frodo that I’ve had since freshman year. I make a loaf pretty much every weekend.”
I let that information simmer between us for a moment. His sincerity makes me wobbly, like one of those punching bags that bounces back to you after you hit it.
“I…likeLord of the Rings.” My brain has short-circuited and come up with the stupidest sentence known to man. “And bread. I like bread too,” I say.
Actually, THAT was the stupidest sentence.
