AARON
“…so no one can really agree on what New York is supposed to look like,” complained Erica, hands outstretched on the table. She looked at me and grimaced. “We wouldn’t be in this situation if you were on the committee.”
I stick out my tongue. It’s probably decorated in bits of chewed-up apple. “Should’ve blackmailed me better.”
“Does this mean I have permission to blackmail you?” she asks, leaning forward.
“Why’re you blackmailing him again?” asks Louis. He sits down with a tray of two baskets of fries, a pasta bowl, and a lemonade ice tea drink thing. He looks my way. “What is with her and blackmailing?”
I shake my head. “She has shit on everyone.”
“Including you,” she says.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Erica smiles.
“No, she’s not trying to blackmail me right now,” I tell him.
Erica sighs and frowns. “The whole fucking process would be so much smoother if – ” She receives a text which stops her from talking. She exhales and stands up, tossing me her unopened fruit salad. “I have to take this. Sorry to leave you guys.” She brings the phone up to her ear as she turns away, and I hear her say, “You told me it was a done deal, Carmichael. Now what?”
I’m left alone with Louis. I shift in my chair because 1. It’s insanely awkward to me, and 2. I literally know more about him than he knows.
“You tend to forget that she’s, like, a mafia boss,” I hear him say.
I look up and he’s smiling at me. I know he’s just trying to encourage conversation, but I don’t know what to add to the discussion he’s trying to create.
“How’re you?” I ask, merely as a courtesy.
He opens the pasta bowl and shrugs. “It’s a Tuesday. It feels like a Tuesday.” Louis drops his gaze, and I keep wondering if we were like this when we first started hanging out. I mean in the dream.
This explanation’s going to get so confusing.
When Louis looks back up at me, he chuckles. “You look like you gotta shit.”
My features relax, and I look away. “Sorry,” I spit, grabbing Erica’s cast-off fruit cup. “I’m not used to being left alone around people I don’t really know.” That’s a lie, but who’s going to call me out on it? No one.
“That’s okay.” He smiles.
And there’s a pause. I eat some of my food, but I can’t help feeling that it’s still really awkward.
The pause is only really broken when I ask, “Is theater what you’re thinking of majoring in?”
“Hm?” he asks, strands of spaghetti hanging out of his mouth. He begins swinging his head around, turning the floppy noodles into overcooked, olive-oil-drenched tendrils of lunchroom mediocrity.
I’m glaring, but I think this is so stupid and I love it.
He swallows his noodles and asks again, “What?”
I lean forward. “You’re, like, a half a year from graduating, right?” Louis nods. “Are you excited for college?”
He leans back. “Kinda,” he admits. “I’m not really all that interested in doing theater, though. Like…like I think it’s really cool ‘n all, but I like psychology more.”
My eyes widen. “Really?”
Louis nods. He must be able to tell that I’m engaged in the topic because he lets out this wry smile and continues, “It’s like…the evolution of it is really cool to me. The development and stuff. It’s neat.” He shrugs. “But right now, they’re trying to convince me that the architecture in the show can apply to that, but I call bullshit on it.”
“I can get that.” 1900’s New York City doesn’t really lend itself to ‘comfortable and relaxing.’ It’s more like ‘palatial and messy’.
He inhales, and leans back again. “Now you’re just making fun of me.”
My eyes narrow in irritation. “Try me, Louis.”
He slurps up more noodles and glares at me. “Okay, Aaron.” He bobs his head and asks, “How can you show psychology of the past through architecture?”
“It’s not the past you’re thinking of; it’s the effect it gives off.” I go into my backpack and pull out a book on architecture. It was one from three weeks ago, but I just haven’t taken it out yet. I open to a page on the Flatiron Building. “It was all about the impression it gave off – this sort of palatial, elegant capital city that’s trying to rival everything.” I flip to another page, all about Art Nouveau. “Look at this. Despite the graceful, sophisticated buildings that look like they’re trying to merge ancient Greece and height, this was all about natural forms, curved lines, and nature. That sort of stuff.” I look at him, and his grey eyes are all over the place. He’s trying to absorb everything.
Louis glances at me for a moment. "So I assume this is what you wanna do in college?"
I snort. "Hell no. Architecture's a mess as it is. History's my game."
He pushes back his glasses and sighs. “Erica should’ve blackmailed you better. You’d be so helpful with the set design.”
“Yeah, but I have better things to do.”
He smirks. “Can I borrow this? I wanna make photocopies for reference.”
I shrug. “Sure, just as long as I can get it back.”
Louis puts my book with his stuff. “Never pegged you for being an architecture nerd.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” I say, and then suddenly realize that I’ve probably just sounded like I was flirting with him. I don’t address it because I don’t want to make it weird. So I begin digging into the fruit salad cup thing.
“Maybe I want to.”
I choke on a grape, and it flies out of my mouth onto the table. “Don’t – ” My voice is hoarse and raspy. “What?”
Louis is laughing. Not chuckling, but, like, laughing. Like he’d just seen the funniest thing on the planet. He just heard the best joke. His friend just did something so insanely stupid that you’re now incapable of breathing.
And he laughs like that for a good two minutes.
Part of me is embarrassed at the people watching and wondering why this semi-popular guy is basically sitting with a nobody like me, but another part is all too pleased by his reaction, because I made him laugh like that.
He catches his breath and wipes his eyes. “Oooooh, God,” he sighs, putting his arms on the table like he’s about to fall over. “I’m sorry. I-I am.”
I push my finger into my temple. “…are you, though?”
Louis looks up at me a cracks a big, toothy grin. “No,” he whispers under his breath. After a minute, Louis leans back and inhales slowly.
“…are you done?”
“Maybe.” He’s lying. I can tell because he has his big, shit-eating grin on his face and I want to punch him.
Erica comes back a minute later, and the conversation’s divulged into my spoken manifesto on why hate all modern design.
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