Chapter 4
It was not long after two there as well, the other way around — early afternoon, the hour her Thursday class let out. She had told me when it let out.
She told me everything: which professors talked too long, which assignments she had left to the last night, which building had the bad chairs.
She never let a message sit unanswered.
I could send her a single period — nothing else, meaning I had nothing to say — and she would send back a sticker of some small round animal with enormous eyes, as though to hold the silence open a little longer. I would look at it, and almost smile, and then put the phone away without answering.
So she was choosing not to answer.
I locked the screen. Fine.
Felix was where he said he would be, and considerably further along than two minutes accounted for. One hand at the woman's waist, his head bent toward something she was saying against his ear. I crossed the floor and took him by the back of the collar.
"Whoa — hello —" Her glass tilted. "Is this a friend of yours?"
"The best one," Felix said. "Unfortunately."
"Is he taking you somewhere?"
"He is not." Felix twisted in my grip, laughing. "Silas. Silas, I'm having a conversation."
"You're having it in the car."
"You said two minutes four songs ago."
"I said one."
"Give me one more. One." He turned back to her, hand flat on her forearm. "I'm sorry. He isn't usually like this. Actually, he is always like this, but normally I have more time to prepare people for it."
"I'm standing right here," I said.
"That's what makes it difficult."
He leaned in and said something I did not catch, and she laughed, and then she reached into her purse for a pen and wrote her number on the back of his hand, taking her time about it. He watched her do it with the open delight of a man being publicly chosen.
"Call me at a civil hour," she told him.
"I'll call you at a shameful one."
"Even better."
He let go of her slowly, then all at once, and walked backwards three steps before he turned. She lifted her fingers in a small wave over the crowd, and Felix sighed the way a man sighs when he is leaving something on a battlefield.
Outside, the air was thick and warm and smelled of rain that had not fallen yet. He pulled free of my hand and straightened his jacket.
"What is wrong with you? It's not even three."
"I'm tired."
"You're tired." He stepped closer and peered at me, eyebrows up. "You're the one who dragged me out three nights running. I was going to stay home. I had a plan. The plan was a bath."
"I'm tired. I'm allowed."
"Allowed." He said it in the tone of a man who had found a hole in an argument. "You haven't been to bed before four in a week. You sit up with that phone like it owes you money —"
"It's a time difference."
"It's a girl."
I kicked him. Not hard. Enough. He hopped on one leg and rubbed the back of his thigh with the flat of his hand.
"Ow. All right. We'll go." He was grinning again, which had been the problem with Felix since he was nine. "I have class in the morning anyway. Some of us attend."
"Get in the car."
He already had a hand on the roof when I said it. "Wait."
He turned. "What."
"Take a picture of me."
For a moment he did not move at all. That was rare enough that I noticed it — the exact number of seconds it took Felix Dunn to lose the ability to speak.
"A picture. Of you."
I turned my face away, leaned back against the car, and held out the phone. "Just take it."
"Like, of your face? Your actual face?"
"Felix."
"Because you don't do photos. I've known you eleven years and I own three photographs of you, and one of them is your elbow —"
"Take the picture."
He took the phone with the expression of a man being handed something expensive and breakable.
Then, because he was in the end exactly what he appeared to be, he was over it in three seconds and threw himself into the work — dropping into a crouch, holding the phone up, telling me to angle my chin, to look at the camera, then to stop looking at the camera, then to try to look like I was not being photographed at all.
"Give me something. Any expression. One expression," he said, and the shutter went eleven times in under a minute while he muttered at the streetlight and then thanked it.
I took the phone back and went through them. The seventh was the one. My face in it properly, whole and forward, the jaw lit and the eyes not quite willing to hold the lens; the dark car at my shoulder, the ring catching the light, the city blurred behind me.
I posted it to my page without a caption and put the phone in my pocket.
Beside me Felix had come up on the balls of his feet, head thrust forward like a bird that had found something in the grass.
"Something's going on."
"Get in."
"Your Facebook. I've seen your Facebook," he said, grinning now, delighted with himself. "It's work. It's old friends. It's professors and employees and a dozen people who only talk to you about quarterly reports. And in all of it, exactly one young woman." He let that sit. "Camilla. And tonight you post a photo with your face in it."
I opened the door.
"Hell's frozen over," he said, and got his hand on the frame before I could shut it. "I never thought I'd live to see the day. Two months of you telling me she's a nuisance with a face and a family name, and now you're standing under a streetlight taking selfies for her."
I looked at him. "I don't like her."
"Sure."
"You think I'd want her?" I said. "You think my standards are that low?"
"That isn't an answer. That's a door."
I pulled the door shut. It missed his head by less than the width of his hand.
He laughed all the way around the other side of the car.
