Chapter Six
Six
She expected him to start the car the second he’d performed a series of what looked like rituals to some unnamed road god.
He adjusted his mirrors, even though none needed adjusting.
Then he adjusted his seat, despite the fact that it was just as unnecessary.
And finally he secured his seat belt not once, but twice.
As if the first time hadn’t been satisfactory.
Right, now off we go, she thought at him.
But even after all that he still didn’t start the engine.
He gripped the steering wheel, and stared grimly out of the window. Like he was contemplating all the ways this was a terrible, terrible idea, and every way he could get out of it. And even after he did finally set off, he didn’t seem comfortable.
Every time she moved, he glanced at her.
Then seemed to glance at whatever he thought she was moving toward.
The satchel at her feet, the dashboard, the radio.
Like he suspected she was a sort of invasive species, about to spread her terrible spores all over his safe and well-kept space.
Soon, the strangely familiar cedar smell in the cab would be replaced by her soft perfume.
Her black hairs would be everywhere. And her sticky fingerprints?
All over.
It made her want to eat one of the chocolate bars in her bag just to live up to his low expectations. Smear it on the windows, see if he shuddered. He had shuddered in college, after all. When she’d licked her finger, and accidentally touched the table in front of him and left a little something.
She’d caught him after class—when she’d had to turn back to get the book she had left—frantically rubbing at that mark with his thumb.
As if it felt so irritating to him that he hadn’t even been able to wait to grab a cloth or use a corner of his shirt.
Just skin straight to it, over and over until it was gone.
She had turned away before he finished the job.
Most likely by burning his own fucking thumb off.
And now here he was, doing the same sorts of things again.
Only this time there was no escape. She just had to sit through three hours of the initial stretch of this journey, from the outskirts of Bangor toward the first stop in Salem, New Hampshire, the tension forever building and building, every inch of her always waiting for him to actually say something she could fight, some objection to his behavior she could hate, before he finally broke.
Like the way he broke a second later.
“All right, so I have some ground rules in my truck,” he said, and yeah, it was better than she had imagined. But not exactly comforting, given that she hadn’t actually done anything at all. She hadn’t even made a sound. Not even a giggle over his behavior.
Though of course she knew how he felt about that, too. “Oh god, of course you do. Lemme guess, I’m not allowed to laugh,” she said, as amused as she could manage when the stinging memory was already resurfacing.
The hallway that led to the cafeteria.
Him barging between her and some semi-friends.
Those scathing words he’d spoken, cutting her giggling down to size. Though of course he had to try to weasel out of it. “You are never gonna let that go, are you. I never meant that you shouldn’t laugh.”
“No, just that I should be less loud when I do.”
“I didn’t say that it was loud. I said it was horrible.”
She made a sound of frustration. “And that’s better, somehow?”
“It is when it wasn’t about the way you do it. There’s nothing wrong with the way you do it. You do it fine, like a happy person who enjoys things. Which wasn’t why I was mad, no matter how weird you think I am about enjoyment.”
“So why were you then?”
“Nothing. No reason. End of discussion.”
He made a slicing motion through the air. Though it wasn’t this that made her stop asking. It was how weird things suddenly felt. How much she was sweating, suddenly, as if they’d been talking about something deadly and desperate.
Instead of just a laugh.
Just a tiny wound inflicted because of it.
She didn’t even know why it still bothered her.
Why it continued to bother her a little, as the drive to the border of the state rolled on.
Really, she should have been more interested in the sights out the window.
America going by in stripes of gold and red and green.
Road signs like brilliantly colored giants, the rope of the road endless, the occasional desolate barn on some lonely hill, like something she imagined only existed in movies.
And all of it something she’d never experienced before.
At Nordbrook she’d been too nervous to go far beyond the walls, every bit of her still stuck in small-town-in-the-UK mode.
Never sure how she had managed to get the scholarship to a whole US university that she had, after spending the years after high school and college being afraid to even apply to ones closer to her.
Always listening to her family about how excessive she was, how big her expectations were.
And feeling sure that if they thought so, what were cool Americans going to think of her?
It really wasn’t until she’d learnt what being useful did that she’d had an easier time. She could be someone else, indispensable Daisy, and avoid feeling like an intruder. Avoid feeling so unusual, like she didn’t belong. Avoid all that, she thought, and then suddenly there it was.
The reason why the laugh business was still bothering her an hour later.
Why it stuck like a splinter in her mind. It wasn’t about the way you laughed. It was about why you laughed, she informed herself. And once she had, it felt so astonishingly right that she blurted out words without even stopping to consider what they were.
“Oh my god. You thought we were laughing about you,” she said.
Then turned to him as if he was going to applaud her eureka moment.
Instead of what he actually and very obviously was always going to do:
Panic.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t care about things like that.
I’ve never cared about things like that.
I mean it, Emmett, don’t you start thinking I care about things like that,” he said, all in a big weird rush.
Then just as she was thinking, Wow, that is the most telling denial I’ve ever heard in my life, he added some more.
“Hey—I can see you thinking I care about things like that.”
“I’m not thinking you do. I’m thinking about how to explain that we weren’t talking about you. We weren’t saying you were old and weird. You just happened to walk down the hall as we said Professor Walliman was. Because he was about a thousand years old.”
“You’re just telling me this because we’re stuck in a car together now.”
“But you’re the one who wanted us to be stuck in a car together, Miller. You chose a car over a plane. You chose this thing, instead of getting separate vehicles or having me fly and you with a driver or even just having a front seat I could escape to.”
He shook his head. “That’s not the point. The fact that you’re lying to me is.”
“But I’m not. I never thought that about you. You weren’t even ancient.”
If he is then I am, too, she had remembered thinking at the time. Because he had come late to university, just like she had. Thirty-two to her twenty-five, and wholly understandable to someone who had easily been able to see herself waiting even longer.
“Felt like it. Felt like I was a million years old,” he said, then very visibly seemed to regret it.
His hands twisted on the steering wheel; he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
And she caught the expression on his face when he glanced at her.
That hint of searching her for the truth. Or contempt for his reaction to it.
Though of course he didn’t appear to like that she had.
His face hardened, and he turned back to the road.
“Anyway, just shut up about it, all right,” he snapped, in a way that would have made her heart rate jump in years gone by.
But oh, it was hard to have that happen, when so many things about this suggested the opposite of anger.
The opposite of everything she had thought, really.
He hadn’t shoved past them all, he had wanted to get away.
He hadn’t hated her laugh, he had hated being laughed at.
And this reaction wasn’t intended to hurt.
It was intended to cover up his own.
He hadn’t had feelings then, he didn’t have them here.
Only he had, and did, and all that just made her heart beat slower, if anything. It made everything inside her go soft, and quiet, as this new angle to something sank through her.
But what to say?
Sorry, the way she always wanted to if she’d hurt someone?
She wasn’t even sure if he’d understand that. She barely understood the urge herself. He’s your enemy, she told herself. He’s your enemy who doesn’t want to hear it anyway. And then it struck her. How to go about it, without really going about it.
“Got it. No addressing the devastating emotional impact of being on the outside looking in. Thinking people are laughing at you, and then getting what seems like confirmation that they are. Even though I promise, they really weren’t.
Not about that. Never about that. Your terrible opinions about zombie movies, sure.
Your deep love for dry toast, absolutely.
Starting university late for probably terrible reasons I don’t even want to guess at?
I’d sooner run into barbed wire,” she said, and now her heart was racing in a way that made her wonder.
Was it really fear of him that had ever made it happen in the past?
Or was it something else?
Something that was in his eyes, when she turned in time to catch him looking at her.
Gaze raw with confusion and maybe even relief, just for a moment.
As if he were like her, always waiting for a terrible memory to turn out to be a simple misunderstanding.
Before he very clearly forced that down, and replaced it with something a little more him.
“You realize this is all just you talking about it, right,” he said.
But it was rueful, alongside the withering.
“Yeah, but you don’t seem that mad about hearing it.”
“Well. I am. I’m furious. Not grateful at all for one word of it.”
“Good, you shouldn’t be. I was just being awful somehow, anyway.”
That’s it, she told herself, give him the amusing out.
This is all just a big casual nothing, one enemy saying sorry without really saying it, the other accepting it without really acting like it means anything.
And apparently, he agreed. Because after a moment of strange silence, he started speaking. Haltingly, carefully.
As if he were treading on an emotional glass floor above a great drop.
“Just like I am when I tell you … there’s nothing wrong with the way you laugh, nothing at all. Because now you’re gonna do it all the time, and probably make a real fool out of yourself,” he said, and god, when he was done.
She had to look away.
She couldn’t let him see her expression after something like that.
Because she knew, for the first time, that he didn’t mean fool.
He meant You aren’t. He meant I don’t mean it.
He meant Please do it more. And she didn’t know how to feel in the face of such a sentiment.
It made her think of every single person who’d sneered at her cackle, told her to be more silent, crushed her joy for being too joyful until she had made herself this organized and carefully curated thing.
And not one had ever been sorry.
Not even just sorry. He had apparently never been saying that at all.
He simply wasn’t good at explaining or expressing what he did mean, it seemed, and she was too used to things being clear to her keen eye, or too cruel for her to easily imagine anything else, and so here they were. Him silent, her face wet suddenly.
Just versions of the same thing the other person was feeling, she thought.
Then even more frightening: Maybe we are that in other ways, in every way.
And she didn’t know what to do with herself then. It sort of felt as if she might have a nervous breakdown if she carried on, so really it was a relief when he abruptly spoke into the fraught silence.
“We should go back to the ground rules,” he said. Because that? That was the Miller she knew. That was more familiar ground, and therefore easier to navigate. She even laughed to hear it.
Then wondered why her laugh was still so small.