6
John does Wordle.
John does Wordle.
John does Wordle .
Nope. No matter how many ways I think it, it still sounds strange. I can’t reconcile this new information with reality.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t think John is smart, it’s just... well, look at him! He and Liam have been staring
at Liam’s tow truck with their arms crossed for, like, ten minutes now, talking about its towing capacity like it’s the most
interesting topic in the entire world. John actually kneels down on the ground to inspect—I don’t know, that metal thing that
connects the truck bit to the towing bit—and stands up again with his hands dirty and an impressed look on his face. You’re
telling me that same man goes home and curls up with a cup of tea to do his daily Wordle?
No. I just can’t believe it.
I hover awkwardly to one side as the two of them load my car onto Liam’s truck, then John says, “Thanks, man” to Liam and
heads back toward his own car. I start to follow him, but he frowns at me like I’m being odd and says, “Liam will take you.”
Then he gets in his own car and drives away without another word.
Seriously, you’re telling me that guy does Wordle?
I walk back to Liam’s truck, acutely uncomfortable, but it turns out he’s actually a really nice guy. Unlike John, Liam’s capable of talking about more than cars, and he tells me about his wife and kids as we drive. He drops me off at my house and says he’ll take my car to the shop. I thank him profusely, but he waves me off.
“Don’t worry about it. I love an excuse to drive this thing.”
I glance dubiously at the truck, a thousand tons of ugly, rattly, metal, but Liam really sounds like he means it. No wonder
he and John get along.
I thank him again and head inside, fighting a yawn. I don’t have the energy to do anything but change into sweats and crawl
into bed. I stare up at the ceiling with a faint buzzing in my head, like the ringing you get in your ears after you’ve been
to a loud concert. It’s been a very long, very weird day. My date was disappointing, my car is broken and will cost god knows
how much to fix, and I scraped through my three hundred and third Wordle day by the skin of my teeth. Really, nothing has
improved from this morning. If anything, things are even worse.
And yet...
“Scarf,” I whisper into the darkness, then squish down into my pillow with a small smile on my face.
I don’t have time to do Wordle the next morning. My parents call from New Zealand at 4:30 a.m. (my dad makes a lot of jokes
about calling from the future, since it’s already tomorrow there, which I would appreciate a lot more if it wasn’t 4:30 in the morning ), then Mrs. Finnamore waves me down for a chat while I’m waiting for the local taxi to pick me up to take me to work.
When I get to the shop, I’m immediately accosted by a man who has been waiting in his car for the shop to open. He’s jittery and strange, talking rapidly about a receipt he needs to “prove how bad his accident was” and lifting his hands over his head to show me how limited his range of motion is. It doesn’t look limited at all to me, though I’m not about to say that to him. I get him a copy of his receipt and then turn pointedly to my computer, but he lingers for several minutes, leaning all over the desk and reading the receipt out loud to me.
“Four-inch scratch on driver’s-side door—see?” He pushes the receipt toward me. “ Driver’s-side door , that’s where the impact was, that’s what threw my shoulder out of alignment.”
John walks in halfway through the guy’s lengthy monologue about how he’s going to sue the person who hit him, the police officer
who refused to arrest them on the spot, and the doctor who told him there was nothing wrong with his shoulder on his MRI scan.
For once, I’m deeply grateful for John’s rudeness, because he cuts right across the guy’s speech to ask me when his first
appointment is and then leans against the desk with his back to the guy, totally blocking me from his view. The guy scowls
at his back for a minute but then finally leaves the shop.
I let out a sigh of relief. “That guy was weird.”
John makes a vague “mm” of agreement, his typical nonanswer. But then he surprises me by adding, “Some people spend their
whole lives looking for something to blame their problems on.”
I blink. “Yeah, exactly.”
He pushes himself off the desk. “Liam get you home all right?”
“Er—yeah, thanks,” I say. “He’s a really nice guy.”
John nods in his signature slow, absent way and then wanders off to the garage. I swear he has some sort of word limit for
conversations, or something.
Still, his comment about that customer sticks with me the rest of the morning. I can’t help but wonder if I’m one of those people, trying to blame all my problems and inadequacies on the world. I don’t think I’m quite as bad as that guy—I would never try to claim that a four-inch scratch on my car caused “catastrophic damage” to my body—but maybe I have been feeling a bit too sorry for myself these past few years. I think back on all the job rejections I’ve collected, and I’m embarrassed to admit that beneath the disappointment and self-loathing I always felt when I got them, there was also a vein of defiance. Like, how can they not see that I’m worth hiring? How can they not see that I’m special?
But it isn’t the world’s job to tell me that I’m special. It’s my job to work hard enough to make it true.
Gripped with a sudden surge of determination, I sit up straighter in my chair and take out my phone. Over the rest of the
morning, I make out a new, stricter budget for myself so I can pay off my student loan a bit faster (goodbye name-brand Mini
Wheats, hello generic “wheatie squares”) and cross about twenty jobs off my “Potential Careers List.” I need to get this thing
down and start taking decisive action in my life.
Gallerist—gone. Just because I like wandering around art galleries doesn’t mean that I’d actually like working in one. Plus,
I think I’d feel really bad trying to pretend it’s okay to charge fifty thousand dollars for a piece of canvas with two blobs
of paint on it.
Photographer—gone. I like the idea of being a photographer, but if I’m honest, thinking about all those complicated buttons and settings on fancy cameras makes
my head hurt.
Web designer—gone. I don’t want to sit at a computer all day.
Makeup artist.
Makeup artist ? Was I high when I put this on the list? I can’t even do my own makeup, for goodness’ sake. Gone.
At noon, I head into the break room, where John is sitting at the lunch table eating a sandwich and staring at his phone.
I clear my throat. “Hey.”
He glances up briefly and then looks back down at his phone. “Hey.”
I feel a teensy spark of curiosity. Could he be doing Wordle right now? I surreptitiously peek over his shoulder as I walk
to the fridge to grab my yogurt.
Nope. He’s just scrolling through Kijiji, shopping for some sort of car part.
“I’ll fix your car later,” he says. “I took a look at it this morning, it’s your alternator that’s shot.”
“Oh, no rush,” I say automatically.
He frowns. “Don’t you need it to get to work?”
“Er—well, yeah. But I can take taxis, if you’re too busy with other stuff today.”
“I’m not. It won’t take long.”
“Oh. Well... okay. I’ll pay you, obviously,” I add.
He shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I will. Just let me know how much I owe you.”
He takes another bite of his sandwich. “It’s no big deal. It’s going to take, like, ten minutes, and there’s an alternator
in the back from Dave’s old Corolla.”
I know I should argue more, but then I think of my bank balance and decide to bite my tongue.
“Thanks,” I say awkwardly.
“No worries.”
A silence falls. I don’t know why, but I feel sort of disappointed. Which is stupid because what did I expect? The slightly interesting fact that John does Wordle doesn’t change the millions of un interesting things about him. Just because we have this one tiny thing in common doesn’t mean we could ever be friends.
I sit down with a sigh and pull the lid off my yogurt. Out of the corner of my eye, I see John glance up from his phone.
“Did you do Wordle today?” he asks.
My spoon of yogurt freezes halfway to my mouth.
Did he just initiate a conversation?
I force myself to act casual, swallowing my bite of yogurt and reaching for a napkin with deliberate ease. This sort of feels
like when someone’s standoffish cat suddenly hops onto your lap. If you pay them any attention, they’re going to give you
a withering look and leap away.
“Not yet,” I say. “I was going to do it now.”
“Cool,” he says. “I’ll do it too.”
I take out my phone and open Wordle. “Don’t tell me any hints,” I say quickly. “That’s cheating.”
He nods, chewing a bite of sandwich. He swipes Wordle open on his phone and then frowns at it, a pensive little crease appearing
between his brows. Which is... kind of cute. Objectively speaking, I mean.
I shake my head and turn my attention to my phone. I start with a banker word, OUIJA. When I was first doing Wordle, I read
online about good words to start with, and I use this one occasionally. It’s nice because it knocks out a bunch of vowels
right from the start.
Like today—the O, U, and A are right. They’re all in the wrong place, but that’s still better than nothing.
O, U, A.
A, O, U.
I bite my lip, running through all the unused letters.
ABOUT!
I type it in eagerly, sneaking a little glance at John as I do. He’s still chewing thoughtfully. There’s a smudge of black
grease on his cheek.
Hmm. ABOUT is wrong, but the B is yellow. I bite my lip.
B, O, U, A.
B, A, O, U.
Something lights up in the back of my brain. There’s a word that I know... it’s hovering at the edges of my mind...
it’s got something to do with—with crocodiles, I think, and swamps...
BAYOU.
It hits me in a sudden flash of inspiration. I type it in, and voilà! Three hundred and four days! I do a little dance in
my chair.
“You got it?” John asks.
I grin. “Got it.”
“That’s, what—three hundred and four days?”
I blink at him, strangely touched that he remembered. “Yep.”
“That’s cool,” he says. He doesn’t put any inflection into the words, but it still feels kind of nice to hear.
“Do you have a streak going?” I ask.
“Nah, I can’t remember to do it every day. Is there a G in it?” he adds, turning his phone toward me. I peer at his screen
curiously. He started with MOTOR—classic John—then tried DONUT.
“No G,” I say. “Why don’t you put something like PLAID to get rid of a bunch of the other letters?”
“I’ve got it on hard mode,” he says. “Have to use the O and the U in the next guess.”
I stare at him again, my brain glitching like it did last night. Not only does John do Wordle, he does it on hard mode ?
Nope. Does not compute.
I watch as he starts typing and then snort in surprise. “OPIUM?”
“It’s a word.”
“I know that,” I say. “It’s just a bit random.”
He raises an eyebrow. “How do you choose words, then?”
“Just... randomly,” I say. “Oh, shut up,” I add tartly, as his mouth curves up in amusement. “You’ve still only got O and
U. Want a hint?”
“No. Just tell me if there’s a double letter.”
“That would be a hint,” I point out. “And no.”
“Okay.” He frowns again, then types ABOUT.
“I used that one too!” I say brightly. “It’s still pretty hard to guess—” I start, but he’s already typing in BAYOU.
“Cool,” he says, as the letters turn green.
Damn. How did he figure it out so quickly?
“How’d you get that so fast?” I ask.
He shrugs. “There’s a guy at the track from Louisiana. His team’s called Bayou Racing.” He swallows the last bite of his sandwich
and stands. “Later.”
He heads out of the room without another word, leaving me staring at the empty doorway, feeling off-balance and oddly giddy.
Weird, I think, as I take another bite of my yogurt. That was very, very weird.