Page 73 of Derivation

“Wait. Now, I’m your babysitter? I didn’t sign up for that.”

The car arrived and pulled up in front of the house.

“I can shove you in a car, too. Happy to help,” Arlowe said and walked toward the waiting car.

CHAPTER 20

Sarai Kaplan: Hey, where are you?

Arlowe Romano: Out with Gabi. Why?

Sarai Kaplan: You went out with Gabi?

Arlowe Romano: Yeah. Why?

Sarai Kaplan: No reason. I just didn’t hear any noise in this house, which is kind of scary considering it’s generally pretty noisy around here. Enya must be asleep or something. I thought you and Gabi would still be working in the garage.

Arlowe Romano: Nope. I’ll see you later, or maybe tomorrow. I don’t know when we’ll be back.

Sarai looked around the empty kitchen. Then, she walked to the front of the house and noticed that Enya’s car wasn’t there, so she pulled out her phone again.

Sarai Kaplan: Hey, did you go out? Your car’s not here.

Enya Callaghan: I went to that seminar on how people talk when they don’t speak the same language.

Sarai Kaplan: It’s after eleven.

Enya Callaghan: I met up with the lecturer after. We’re out with a couple of grad students right now. I’m thinking of asking them for their help with the hardware.

Sarai Kaplan: Okay. Have fun, I guess.

Sarai put her phone into the pocket of her sweatpants, looked down at herself, and wondered what she was doing. She’d spent most of the week in her bedroom whenever she wasn’t working, and she’d been surprised that her friends had allowed that to happen. Usually, when she went into one of her solo modes where she didn’t want to talk to anyone for a few days, they still bothered her for one thing or another, but this time, they’d actually allowed her to just be on her own, contemplating her life outside of work for the first time in a while and trying not to think about how Arlowe and Gabi had been getting along so well the previous weekend. She would hear them laughing as they’d walked by her room on the way to their own, and while she knew what Arlowe had told her about not wanting anything with Gabi, she also knew Arlowe, and she wasn’t so sure about Gabi’s intentions.

Gabi might not have been interested in Arlowe in the beginning, but she could be now. They’d been really getting along, and now, they were out together somewhere, too, just the two of them. It was after eleven, and it was entirely possible that they were on a date. Arlowe hadn’t exactly said that in her texts, but she hadn’t told her anything to the contrary, either. Sarai pulled her phone back out before she sat on the sofa and opened her texts with Arlowe, intent on asking that very question.

Sarai Kaplan: Are you and Gabi on a date?

She leaned back against the sofa and deleted the message. If they were on a date, she had no right to know unless they wanted her to. She also had no right to be upset about Gabi and Arlowe liking each other. Seeing Gabi just fit right in with her friends and their work the previous weekend had been great in a lot of ways because she knew that Gabi had been hoping to make new friends and fit in with her roommates, but it had also brought out Sarai’s pretty intense jealousy.

She tossed her phone onto the sofa and picked up the remote control. Having put something on TV that she didn’t care about, she just sat there, acting like a mom whose teenager was on their first date, and she needed to make sure that they didn’t spend an hour making out in the car after curfew. She wasn’t proud of herself, but she also hadn’t gotten up and gone to her bedroom to get some sleep, either. It was around midnight when she heard a car pull into the driveway, and it took everything in her not to get up to see if it was them.

“Oh, hey. You’re still up?” Enya said when she walked in the door.

“Yeah. Just watching some TV. How was your seminar?”

“Good. Nothing new in the concepts or anything, but I had great conversations after that with everyone. I forgot how nice it can be, talking to academics about languages.”

“You’re not going to leave us for that fancy university, are you?”

“What? No way. We’re finally making real progress. I’m not going anywhere. It’s just nice. I’ve spoken in, like, five languages tonight. You know how important it is for me to practice.”

“Gabi speaks French fluently. You could probably practice that one with her.”

“I could, yeah. I always forget that she lived there for so long. She said she speaks Spanish, too, right?”

“I think she understands that one more than she speaks it, but I did hear her say a curse word in French the other day when she couldn’t open a jar. It was pretty hilarious.”

Sarai smiled at the memory.