“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 onhard 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.
7
The sun emerges from the clouds just after lunch, and the rest of the day is bright and warm. All the day’s clients are nice, and I spend a few fun hours researching degrees in paleontology, which is one of the careers that survived my “Potential Careers List” pruning earlier. I can totally see myself working at some beautiful, remote site, digging up dinosaur bones and brushing them off with those tiny little brushes. (It’s always seemed to me like it would go faster if they used larger brushes, but maybe they get paid by the hour or something.) I think it would be so cool to hold something in your hand that’smillionsof years old. And who knows, maybe I could discover a brand-new type of dinosaur, and they’d name it after me! The Emilyosaurus.
Actually, no. That’s stupid.
They shouldn’t name it that.
