Page 43 of Given Our History

I shoot him an exasperated look before taking another, more experimental sip. It’s a bit strong, sure, but this time I’m expecting it, and he’s also not wrong. I probably do need it.

“You look nice,” he says. “The…” He waves his hand around his own face. “Makeup, I mean. And the hair.”

“High praise,” I mumble, though I can’t help feeling mollified that he noticed. I asked Reagan if I could borrow some of her makeup, because I figured if I’m once again going to find myself in a bar on a Friday evening, I might as well look the part.

Teddy looks like he might say something else, but he’s distracted by a guy with a neat, square beard standing on a stool in front of the bar so that he towers over the throng. He flips on a cheap karaoke microphone and it squeals from the proximity to the speakers. Some people cover their ears. Teddy doesn’t react, save a slight lilt of his dark brows.

“All right,” our host says after stepping down from the stool and dragging it between bargoers to put sufficient space between himself and the nearest speaker. He pops up again like a meerkat. “Welcome to The Falconer Quiz Night. Before we begin, let’s lay down a couple ground rules.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, turning to Teddy, “did he just say ‘quiz night’?”

“First Friday of every month,” Teddy confirms, raising the remainder of his gin and tonic to his lips and downing it. He lowers the glass, frowning at my expression. “Don’t look so scared. It’s team based.”

“I’m not worried about beating you,” I say sharply. He did beat me at trivia on that rainy day in the cafeteria the summer we first met, but he hasn’t beaten me since, and he knows it. “I guess I’m just—we’re supposed to be having a meeting here. Maybe we should go somewhere else. My car or—”

Wait, scratch that. My car, alone with Teddy, is an obviously bad idea.

“Clara. Look at me.” His deep voice is so authoritative that I listen almost instinctively, turning and blinking at him across the table. “Everything for the gala is on schedule,” he says firmly. “Better than on schedule. You’ve gone above and beyond to make this thing work. I think you can afford to take the night off.”

“I really shouldn’t.”

“Please.” His brown eyes soften, pleading, maple syrup running over pancakes. “For old times’ sake, if nothing else.”

I blow out a breath. For old times’ sake. Practically the magic words, though I’m not sure he knows it. Everything about him is always so nostalgic and sticky-sweet, and that’s exactly why rekindling our friendship is a bad idea.

One of the pub employees passes out handheld whiteboards with markers. They’re blank, wiped clean of most of the evidence of last month’s quiz night. “It’s been a while since I’ve played trivia. And I still suck at sports questions.”

The employee fills in a series of team names on a chalkboard behind the bar, like QUIZ ON MY FACE and THE CUNNING LINGUISTS, because this isn’t sleepaway camp anymore. When the host adds I AM SMARTACUS to the board, I suck a surprised breath and my head whips back to Teddy.

“I’ll handle the sports questions,” he says, eroding my resolve. “But I’m pretty sure you’ll nail the rest.”

The quiz kicks off with science questions. The host reads from a sheet of paper and everyone scribbles their answers on the whiteboard, holding them up when the timer goes off. The blackboard behind the bar tracks the scores, with bartenders pausing in the middle of pouring beer from the tap or shaking cocktail shakers to add chalky tally lines next to each of the team names. We make it through a question about Nikola Tesla without argument, but then the host asks, “Which planet in our solar system has the most moons?”

I lean into the table so that Teddy can hear me beneath all the noise. “Saturn,” I say, thinking back to that night sixteen summers ago, cross-legged in the damp grass and staring up at the sky with a chart splayed on my lap. “I think.”

“Not Jupiter?” he asks uncertainly. “Ganymede, Io, Europa, what’s the other one, Calypso?”

“Callisto,” I correct him. “And anyway, just because you can name more of Jupiter’s moons doesn’t mean it has more. Look at the size of Saturn’s rings.”

After a hushed debate, we agree to write Saturn, and I scrawl it across our board just as the timer goes off. Around the room, teams are holding up their respective answers. Most of them say Saturn, though a couple say Jupiter.

“The correct answer is Saturn,” the host confirms, and I lower the board back to the table.

“Told you,” I say, wiping the board clean.

We work our way through the questions. Despite my initial reluctance, I’ve always been a little bit competitive about trivia, and that familiar rush pushes past any lingering reservations. I want to get the answers right, bickering with Teddy over Jane Austen characters and the invention of penicillin. He nails a question about Game of Thrones, which I’ve never actually watched, and in our excitement, we exchange a high five across the table. Another team—Dazed and Confused—has taken the lead, but we’re not that far behind, and between the two of us, I’m pretty sure we can catch up. After struggling through a couple questions and breezing through others, we finally reach the history section.

“What year did Martin Luther nail his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg?”

“That would be, what, sometime in the sixteenth century? You ought to know this,” Teddy says.

“I mean, I specialize more in early Tudor history than continental stuff,” I say, which is mostly true. But I also wrote a paper about the formation of the Church of England for undergrad, and I’m sure I mentioned Martin Luther somewhere in there. It’s been so long, my honors thesis is little more than a vague and foggy memory, buried somewhere on the hard drive of my old MacBook. What about more recently? I had an article published in Renaissance Quarterly a couple years ago, analyzing the tone of a letter written by Anne of Cleves in response to Henry VIII’s request for annulment. Anne was born in Germany around the time the reformation started, and her family had some involvement in it. What involvement? I should know this. But that doesn’t mean I do. Not when I’m put on the spot with Teddy deferring to me. “Anne of Cleves was born in 1515. And I think … I think maybe it was a couple years after that. 1517.”

“How certain are you?” he asks.

“Not a hundred percent,” I admit. “Call it an educated guess. Unless you know the answer?”

He doesn’t, and he writes the year down in sloppy, square numbers. His handwriting has grown careless over the years, like he doesn’t have time to ensure it’s neat and legible anymore. We wait for the timer to go off.