“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’sbetter, 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 itcontinuedto bother her a little, as the drive to the border of the state rolled on. Really, she should have been moreinterested 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 thewayyou laughed. It was aboutwhyyou 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 aboutyou,” 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 sayingyouwere 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 whowantedus 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.”
