We look at each other.
She hums, and I feel like I’ve passed some sort of test. “So you do food science stuff.”
“Yep.” In more ways than one.
She hums again.
“Have I done the impossible?” I ask her. “Impressed the permanently unimpressed Annie Li?”
“With five minutes of Googling? Nah.”
“Six or seven years of research and experiments, but sure.”And one very successful adult content page.
“So can you explain the flavor ‘blue’?”
I got real obsessed with figuring out the answer to this after the beach this past weekend. I try to keep myself inNakedReactionsmode. “It’s blue because of the artificial fooddye. It’s called Blue Number One. That’s the stuff that stays on your tongue,” I tell her, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice, lest Annie massacre me about being a nerd. “The flavor is created through a combination of artificial flavoring chemicals that contribute to a fruity profile. Pineapple, banana, and cherry are in there,” I tell her. “Along with childhood nostalgia,” I add.
“Among other things,” she murmurs.
We’re silent for a few beats.
“Lightning trapped in a summer night,” she says after a while.
I smile, because this is the part of Annie Li I didn’t actively dislike in high school.“Pretty.”
She grunts. It’s almost comical.
Pretty soon I see the city getting smaller and smaller in my rearview, and thus begins the desolate wasteland of I-95.
“So what’s the great Annie Li up to now? Pulitzer Prize winner? University professor? Both?”
She cuts her eyes to me. Her shoulders tighten. Her chin goes up in something that looks like defiance. “I’m a writer.”
“That’s what you wanted to do in high school, right?”
Annie shrugs.
“Explains the books, too,” I say, nodding towards the small hill of them over her feet.
She relaxes, but only by a hair. “Yep.”
“You were always walking around with a library’s worth of books.” I chuckle thinking of little Annie and the giant backpack she toted around. “In your arms or your backpack. You definitely threw some at my head a few times.”
Annie sniffs. “I would never desecrate a book in such a manner.” Her shoulders move away from her ears a little more.
“You’re also bossy as hell, so Annie Li making people read her writing makes sense. Forcing it into their hands, daring them to feel something. Probably yelling about metaphors untilthey cry.” I pause. “I don’t know what kind of stuff you write, but you definitely give off chaotic free verse energy.”
I think I get a small smile from this one. For some reason, like it did on the beach, it makes me feel like I climbed to the top of Mount Olympus and met Zeus, who handed me a leather-bound book whose table of contents listed I. The Cure for Cancer and II. World Peace Action Items.
“What are you writing right now?” I ask.
However, with this question, Annie closes up again, like steel reinforcements slamming down on her windows like in the movies. She picks up one of the books at her feet.
“Do you have a book?” she asks, and with that, she decides my question is irrelevant and that train of our conversation is finished, and I can’t decide if all this whiplash is making me irritated or hard. Or both. Both, probably.
“What do you mean?”
“You could probably write a cool book about your research.”
