“You’re a tautology.” His knees dipped a bit as she added a large melon to the bin. “Do you actually want all this fruit, or is this another joke at my expense?”
“Are you sure it’s a fruit?” Caroline asked. She’d heard about melons that were more like vegetables. There was no objective truth outside of Templeton.
“You don’t know what it is?”
“No, I’m just buying whatever looks good.” Her scruples wouldn’t let her impulse-buy very many things. Her grandmother hadn’t left her the money just to buy things. But she really did enjoy buying whatever food she wanted without looking at the price first.
“What are you going to do with it, then?” Adrian asked, looking at the big green gourd suspiciously.
“Well, I’ll look it up when I get home. If it’s a fruit, it’ll go into the smoothie rotation. If it’s a vegetable, I’ll cook it with butter. Turns out I like all vegetables as long as they’re cooked with butter.”
“A very French philosophy.”
“That’s where I learned it. I bought a French cookbook a few months ago. I’ve been working my way through it in the evenings.”
“As a hobby?”
“Well, I’m being rigorous about it. I’m cooking every recipe in the book, like the lady did in the movie. Some are not fun. Do you know how hard it is to get the backbone out of a duck? And duck isn’t even that great, or maybe I’m not that good a chef yet.”
It had looked less like a roast duck than a murdered duck when she was done with it. She’d imagined duck detectives coming around to her kitchen to shake their beaks and speculate that only love or money could drive someone tothis.
“You spatchcocked a duck—for yourself?”
Caroline laughed. “I don’t think you really understand how much free time I had on my hands until I took up with you.” How much time shestillhad, because she only saw him three evenings and one day a week. The good news was that rehearsals were coming up soon; she hopedRima would ask her to help wrangle the props during the show and not just before it.
Adrian’s expression changed to one she didn’t enjoy seeing on his face: a mix of pity and confusion.
“You’ll make friends at Boston College,” he said slowly. “Just give it time.”
Caroline shrugged. “Either way, it’s just another year and a half.” She was keeping her gaze fixed on what happened after graduation, when she’d have a job and a real life instead of just a class schedule and a fitness routine. She’d be caught up on everything by then.
“You must have had friends back in Templeton.” Adrian trailed after her as she moved on to a cheese stand.
Cheese was another area that bore investigation. Goat cheese, she’d discovered, was good on just about anything. On the other hand, she could not fool her brain into accepting anything with visible blue mold on it as edible.
“No, not really,” she belatedly replied.
“I find that hard to believe.”
Caroline dutifully tugged up one corner of her mouth in a partial smile. “Thanks.”
She shoved a log of goat cheese wrapped in grape leaves at Adrian, hoping it would distract him from the inquiry at hand. He kept his head tilted at her.
She sighed dramatically. “I didn’t,” she explained. “Have friends. Or hobbies. Or anything. I lived at home. Played a lot of tennis.”
“But why?”
Caroline didn’t precisely know that herself. She was sure her dad would have said it was primarily for her athletic scholarship. But she’d always intended to study business. Would it have been so bad to get loans and grantsand academic scholarships like anyone else? She would have been okay, even without any of her grandmother’s money.
“I was real good at tennis,” she said sourly. Nothing else, not yet. “It was basically the only thing I could do without someone yelling at me that I was doing it wrong.”
They’d made almost a complete circuit of the market. Now they were near the flower stands, which Caroline had been saving for last.
“But you must have had teammates in Templeton, at least,” Adrian said, unwilling to just let things go despite Caroline’s curtness on the subject.
“It turns out that being good at tennis is not enough of a common ground to be my friend,” Caroline said, because nobody had called after she quit the team. Possibly they were angry at her for quitting in the middle of the season, but if they’d actually cared, wouldn’t they have called to at least ask her why?
Adrian’s face subtly changed as they reached the florists’ stalls, softening as he took in the displays. Even this late in the season, they had a big selection, some of them maybe from greenhouses, others interesting for their spiky seedpods or fall-hued foliage.
